Evangelistic blogs

Today I have been thinking about the concept of ‘evangelistic blogs’. I have not been thinking about this all day obviously – I did one and a half loads of washing as well.

Yesterday the people from the Christian Blogging Awards said that my blog might fit into the ‘evangelistic blog’ category. This surprised me somewhat, as I do not really set out to write and draw in an evangelistic manner. By evangelism I am meaning telling or otherwise communicating with other people about ones faith.

The thing about evangelism is this: People can spot it a mile off and they run a mile (so they generally end up two miles from it, depending upon the relative speeds of the evangelism and their running). I have found that evangelism is probably the least effective form of evangelism. If you want to communicate your faith to someone else the best way to do it is not to try.

This means that it is quite hard to spot an evangelistic blog. The fact that someone does not evangelise on their blog could mean that they are not really interested in evangelising, or it could mean that they are evangelising using a non-evangelising method.

One thing that I have noticed is that many Christians write blogs that are, by their subject matter, only going to be of interest to other Christians. There is a place for this in some cases, but it seems to me that if Christians are only ever expecting other Christians to read their writings then something is a bit wrong. I have to say that even some of the trendy ’emerging church’ type blogs can be particularly bad at this. This is sort of what the cartoon above is about – the fact that there is a ‘Christian internet’ that is only of interest to other Christian types.

It is my aim on this web blog to be of interest to people of whatever faith and none, though I’m sure I fail regularly especially when I start to go on about Anglican goings-on for about ten days on the trot, as happens sometimes. Recently I have not been going on about Anglican goings-on that much, as I find them baffling. Instead I have been advancing the Tour de France as a very good thing that everyone should watch (This I suppose is evangelism in its own way). It is my aim that even when pontificating on religious news stories I do so in such a way that anyone could make some sense of it, but I fear that often I end up baffling people who do not have a keen interest in such matters.

If you have been converted to Christianity by this post please say so in the comments.