Baptist & Blogger Part I

Gil Gulick, a third year student at Wake Forest Divinity School is doing research on Baptist bloggers and the role of the blog in 21st century Baptist life. He solicited my help. I thought I would share my answers to his questions here with you. I think something profound is happening with blogs and I would be interested to read what Gil arrives at.

I'll do this in a series of installments.

1. When did you start blogging and why?

I began blogging in 2005 right when reallivepreacher was being unmasked. I read his blog a lot and found the level of candor and depth with which he was writing to be really inspiring. I had graduated from divinity school a year before and was serving as a youth minister at a small Baptist church. The conversations I was having with my youth group were good, but I was longing for more. Plus, I had always enjoyed the heck out of writing and was looking for a forum to get some of my thoughts out into the public space. The religious writing world has high walls you have to scale - like pastoring a church of some significant size or name. Blogging was my way of sneaking through the backdoor. That may sound arrogant or pretentious - I have something to say that people ought to hear - but I don't think so. God created me to tell stories. I wouldn't be happy doing anything else.