I grew up in the Nazarene church and come from a fairly long line of Nazarene pastors in my family (dad, grandfather, great-greatfather and both brothers). I guess I was somewhat of the black-sheep in that I knew I had no desire whatsoever to become a pastor, becoming a missionary was a possibility at one time though. Still active in the church though, so I’m thankful for my spiritual heritage.
Instead I’m active on the Internet and trying to keep a pulse on what’s happening online and with social media. It made me happy to hear that Bryon McLaughlin has setup NazareneBlogs.org to give a place for Nazarenes all over the world to have a blog of their own in a community of fairly like-minded people.
I think this is a great idea, and the thought then crossed my mind to go purchase lots of other domains like baptistblogs.org, catholicblogs.org, etc., etc.
I’m still reading a bit about what they’re doing and how they are going to accomplish things. I’m hoping they handle it a bit like a network and feature blogs in their community somehow, perhaps even a combined RSS feed would be nice.
For individuals just getting started into blogging and don’t want to worry about setting up the technical requirements and managing all the behind the scenes stuff, blogging on sites like this makes it super-easy for them. If anyone then wants to move on to their own completely managed blog, because they’re using WordPress, they can easily export and restore all their content onto their own domain at some point in the future.
For pastors and church leaders that are looking for an easy way to setup a website for their church, they should look into using the WordPress platform as a CMS (Content Management System) as well. If you’re reading this and interested, just let me know. I have quite a bit of experience setting up websites for churches and ministry organizations and now host about 30+ websites and blogs on the WordPress platform.