Pastoral Blogging

Link:
Reformed Thoughts and Gary’s Desk

My wife and I visited her parents in California last weekend. As we were sitting in church waiting for the service to start, I noticed that my father-in-law, the pastor, had noted his blog in the church bulletin. I had not seen this done before; my home church has been pushing its website recently, with some success, but I hadn't seen a Presbyterian pastor recommending his blog to his congregation.

As I began to consider this novelty, it seemed an exceptionally wise way of using currently popular technology for pastoral ends. Even in a small congregation, such as my father-in-law's, it is very difficult for the minister to both hear and say everything that needs to be heard and said. Maintaining a specifically pastoral blog would appear to be one way to facilitate communication with the congregation on topics that one is not able to address in sermons, lectures, and conversations (vocal or electronic). One can easily link articles, audio files, and websites that one considers possibly helpful to the congregation. Also, a blog provides a convenient format for transmitting prayer requests and updates on church members, as well as publishing insights and admonitions.

There are obvious difficulties with a specifically pastoral blog, one being that blog posts are susceptible to all the ambiguities of tone and intention that email has become famous for. Another is that one could endorse a particular article by a particular author and thereby be construed as endorsing other things of which one does not approve, or does not wish one's session or congregation to be perceived as approving, such as other opinions of the author, the idiosyncracies of the host website, etc. Of course, the format of a personal blog brings with it the danger that one will foist one's own preferences and opinions on the congregation in a way that exceeds the legitimate boundaries of pastoral office, whether intentionally or not. To me, the most serious difficulty appears to be that the local session (or presbytery) is not likely to review such a blog, so that the pastoral blog is likely to be free from the automatic examination that accompanies, say, a Sunday School lecture.

In spite of these misgivings, the pastoral blog seems to be a promising tool for ministerial work in the first decade of the 21st century. Maybe it can partially compensate for the fragmentation of the local parish by uniting electronically those congregants who are separated by geography and schedules. Maybe it can partially fill the gap left when pastors stopped making regular house calls. With this hope, I'll keep checking bulletins to find what electronic means pastors are using to shepherd the flock of God.