Categories: uncategorized
Date: 28 August 2008 09:34:12
Monday afternoon was mainly spent in the CMS Blah tent having decided that, whilst it was a close call, listening to Andrew Jones (aka Tall Skinny Kiwi) talk on being missional via the internet and Jenny McIntosh talk on Spirited Exchanges was going to be slightly more useful to me than doing my annual pilgrimage to the Martyn Joseph slot.
Andrew Jones's talk was interesting because in some ways it was a complete turn around on what he said in 2005 when I heard him talk on the spirituality of blogging. Then he was talking about not worrying about stats and keeping links to people you might actually know. This year he was talking about optimising your stats and using relevant links to help you to do this. It would have been really interesting then to hear him discuss the journey he has taken to get him back onto caring about the stats, and their use in being missional. However, it was a v. practical session containing a reasonable bit of technical language (not all of which I understood). The focus was on using life streaming to help people see what's going on in your life.
I found it useful in terms of helping me see the importance of clearer titles to my posts but for me it didn't really touch on why I blog / facebook and how that can be used to be missional. In part this was because Jones is reaching much bigger audiences, but also because he is a "professional" using lifestreaming as tool, and it's partly because of where / how he chooses to blog. I want to be missional with my blogging if I can - if that means sharing my journey honestly so people might be able to see God reflected thorough the good and the bad. However, for me blogging is also about community building. I blog on this site because it provides community aswell as enabling me to "contribute to the conversation".
I began this blog when I was on the edges and kind of falling off the edge of church,(failing miserably to manage to physically leave although at that point I was an internal leaver). For me, at the beginning, this site gave me the opportunity to fellowship with people who were in a similar headspace. Over what is nearly four years this site has at times given me the chance to think out loud about the difficult questions and sometimes tense relationship I have with institutional religion, but it has also enabled to reflect on the positive contribution church has made to my faith aswell. It has been a space where I have been allowed to change my mind and have been allowed to be wrong. It has been a space where I have been supported through bereavement, coming out, changing jobs, embarking on the mad adventure to go study up north and being a lone parent. It has been a site where I have also been able to support others on their journeys as they have examined their questions and be with them in celebration and sorrow. It is a site where in several cases networked connections have become deep friendships.
So it was that whilst I was sitting in the Spirited Exchanges workshop I realised that what blogging is for me is not so much about what Andrew Jones was talking about but rather what Spirited Exchanges are about. The Wibsite and a whole bunch of people on it have been the people accompanying me on the journey giving me the space to ask the questions and have the discussion. Geographically I have spent the last 8 years living in no-where-ville-on-sea being a lone parent who couldn't get out too much in the evenings for that reason. Thus even if there had been a local group to network into it may have been difficult to physically get to anyway, yet in many ways the Wibsite has provided a similar service,(along with the Ship of Fools).
Using lifestreaming in that way actually means that sometimes good stats were not what I needed. Indeed it has been the smaller readership of my blog which at times has enabled me to do the necessary thinking out loud. I have been aware that anybody could read it and may find individual entries through a search engine and so have blogged responsibly, but equally the knowledge it has only tended to be a small bunch of people bothering to do so has given me a sense of freedom to explore some questions. That is not to say there aren't times when I haven't wished particular posts could be picked up on - this Evangelical Alliance one yesterday being an example - because I want to contribute to the conversations which seem to be dominated by "the professionals". For those posts I will take on board what Andrew said in his seminar.