Top of the blogs

All bloggers like a little bit of recognition. We all did our best to appear terribly humble when talking about the Christian Blog Awards, but secretly we all think that it would be nice to have a few more readers and a few more links and that sort of thing.

This week two ‘top of the blogs’ lists were published in the religion sphere. The 30 Most influential religion blogs by Libby Purves of the Times and the Top 100 Christian blogs by Joe Carter of the Evangelical Outpost. Obviously I have no interest in being included in such lists, but I did have a look – you know – just in case. It would be rude not to notice had one been included, which of course, one wasn’t.

Having established that I wasn’t on the list I became free to decide that these lists are a load of nonsense anyway. The Times one consists mainly of fairly dull ‘religion and politics mixed together’ blogs, whereas Joe’s (as he says himself) consists mainly of those from ‘the conservative wing of evangelicalism and Catholicism’ (and Richard).

Fortunately one of the teachings of the Bible is that ‘the last will be first and the first will be last’. This means that those who have received great acclaim for their blogging on this earth will have a really rubbish place on the blogger’s table at the heavenly banquet – behind a pillar and next to the person who sniffs every eight seconds. Meanwhile those whose names are included in the ‘100 worst Christian bloggers’ list will receive the places of honour.

There may be a prize for the person who posts the most convincing ‘I really don’t care about top blog lists and awards anyway, so there‘ post in the comments.

By the way, the Christian Blog Awards people are now offering a £1000 prize for the best church website. There’s also an award for the best 16-25 year old blogger. I’m still going to suggest they move the emphasis away from self-nomination though.