5 Blogging Questions with ProBlogger Darren Rowse

As part of the “Blogging 101 for Pastors” series [click here to see all the posts], I’ve been asking several proflic blogging pastors or believers to answer five basic questions about blogging.

I am extremely delighted to post these answers to the 5 Blogging Questions series from ProBlogger Darren Rowse.

Darren’s work on professional blogging has been an inspiration for this blog and this blogger. In fact, reading his blog for the past six months, I’ve gotten up the nerve (and confidence) to venture into this whole blogging deal.

SO … I was delighted to read one day scanning his blog that he is a Christ-follower and a church planter as well. He’s a pioneer in the field and has shown the world that, yes, indeed, you can actually make a VERY good living blogging for a living!

Without further ado, I give you Darren’s answers:

1. Why (or how) did you start blogging?

A friend of mine sent me to Andrew Jones blog [read Andrew’s 5 questions responses] when we were in the process of planting LivingRoom and thinking about emerging church. I was hooked in very quickly to the conversation that was happening there between Andrew and people around the world thinking through things that were very similar to what I was thinking through. I was also fascinated with the idea of keeping a record of the story of our new church and thought that people (friends, family and LivingRoom members) might be interested in reading what we were learning.

In the end the blog wasn’t read much by people I knew but others around the world thinking through issues of culture, spirituality and emerging church.

2. What subject do you post most about?

I don’t post a lot on my LivingRoom blog these days – for a number of reasons:

1. I ran out of things to say – the first couple of years of starting a church was full of discoveries but after a while I felt like I’d said most of what I’d needed to say.

2. I got a bit frustrated with ‘Christian Blogging’ - I became increasingly aware that the Christian blogging scene was quite insular and that there was a much bigger scene surrounding it. There are 50 million blogs being tracked these days and a tiny percentage of them are ‘Christian’ ones. I began to wonder what might emerge if I started interacting with bloggers outside the Christian scene.

3. I started blogging as a job – I guess I also started blogging as a job a year or two back as the grant that we received to start LivingRoom ran out and we wanted to move to a tentmaker model of funding ourselves. I now volunteer my time in leading LivingRoom and blog full time on other blogs (about blogging ProBlogger.net and Digital Photography to name two). I also am the co-owner of a blog network called b5media.com which has 150 blogs and which increasingly is taking up a lot of my time.

3. What are your favorite blog tools?

Bloglines – feed reader
Ecto (for mac) – a blog publishing tool
103bees – stats tool
sitemeter – stats tool
WordPress – blog platform

There are lots more but these are the things I use most I guess.

4. How often do you post?

Not as often as I used to. At one point I was posting a minimum of 20 times per day but these days I probably average about 5-10 (unless there’s a digital camera trade show happening).

Now that I’m putting more time into b5media I’m blogging less and managing bloggers more.

5. What one piece of advice would you give for prospective blogging pastors?

I’ll give two:

1. Be yourself – my favorite blogs are by bloggers who write in a way that is just a natural extension of who they.

2. Think about boundaries – I’ve seen a number of pastors get into trouble for talking about their ministry and churches in ways that didn’t respect their church members privacy or that said too much about the inner workings of their church and leadership. I don’t use the names of members of Livingroom in my posts and rarely post photos of them.

[[ THANKS, DARREN, FOR BEING A PIONEER AND GIVING US SUCH AN EXCELLENT EXAMPLE TO FOLLOW! ]]

[ Read all the previous posts in the “I Help Pastors Blog” seres here. ]

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October 13, 2006 · Filed Under Church Marketing

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