It's Nice to Be Back!

The month of July was, for me, a month away from the ordinary.  For the first two weeks my family and I were on vacation.  (A friend of mine likes to note that there's a difference between a "a family trip" and "a vacation."  To be honest, this was a bit of both.

The rest of the month my time was split between moving -- a local move to a great house closer-in to town -- and what is usually called "study time."  The first half of that split I would wish on no one.  Because it was a local move we decided to move everything we could by ourselves, and to do it a bit at a time.  That means that literally every day of the last two-and-a-half weeks of July was spent packing up boxes at one house, loading them into the car, driving to the other house, and unloading them into the new house's garage.  Heft, sweat, repeat.  I wouldn't wish that on anyone.

That second half, though -- the study time -- now that was wonderful.  I read a number of really exciting books and really good some much needed stimulation of the grey cells.  I will, over the next few days, write a bit about each of them, but I thought I'd start with the most recent.  In fact, I'm currently only about halfway through it:

The Blogging Church:  sharing the story of your church through blogs, by Brian Bailey and Terry Storch.  I have to say, I'm really enjoying it.  It is written by a couple of guys who are unabashedly evangelistic about both the church and the technology of blogging.  I've gotten a lot of ideas not only for improving A Minister's Musings, but also for possibly introducing blogging as a response (only one response, to be sure) to the perennial problem of communicating within and beyond the congregation.

Might this provide a way to make communicating not only the factoidal information that we seem always to need to broadcast, but also the ideas and even the "feel" of the community?  Would this provide a platform for two-way, conversational communication rather than the more traditional one-way delivery?  And would this be more compelling for people?  (In other words, might this to at least some extent address the problem of folks feeling overwhelmed by information in their in-boxes -- offering a new and more engaging way to keep connected?)

The authors not only share their own quite obvious enthusiasm and experience, but that of other folks who've been involved in the blogosphere for some time.  I think that there's a lot to learn here, and as I learn I am becoming increasingly intrigued by the possibilities being presented.  Oh, it's nice to be back in the saddle again.

Pax tecum,

RevWik

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