I've just finished reading The Blogging Church, by Brian Bailey.  As someone heavily invested in helping UU congregations get online and social, I'm very interested in what congregations are doing with websites, blogs, and other forms of social media, and this book is right up that alley.

While the book is ostensibly about why churches should use blogs to tell their story, it has broader applicability to the web and social media in general. It is written with good humor and has lots of good suggestions for how churches should use blogs, and how they shouldn't; what kind of content they should post; the different sorts of voices they can employ in blogging (the senior pastor's, another staff member, a supervised volunteer, etc.)  Bailey lists a very helpful list of ten suggested blogging topics for senior pastors; I'll give you the first five:

1. What is this weekend's sermon about?
2. What is your favorite restaurant?
3. What part of the Bible are you reading, and what is it saying to you?
4. Which staff member or volunteer constantly challenges and inspires you?
5. When did you know you were called to ministry?

As you might imagine, this is just the tip of a very useful iceberg.  Also included are interviews with blogging pastors, podcasting tips, suggested policies for employee blogs, and plenty more.

You also may have picked up that this book - like many others written about church growth and online ministry - is written from a Christian point of view.  All the same, it is still largely applicable to Unitarian Universalists, and quite a helpful guide for anyone wishing to build a beloved spiritual community.

The book is showing its age somewhat; it was written in the dark ages (2007), before blogging lost a bit of its shine and social media presences for congregations became more or less mainstream.  Moreover, some of its suggestions about what to blog belong, in my view, in a better-structured website - for example, upcoming events should be saved in a format that facilitates sorting by event date.  (Wizard users will have picked up on this belief by now, as the software package is fairly riddled with structured content types for everything from sermons to RE classes and beyond.)  Nevertheless, the book's suggestions about what types of content belong online, and how a congregation should approach telling its story online, are solid and still very relevant.

Whether you are just getting started with your congregation's web presence, or are an old dog looking for new tricks, I highly recommend The Blogging Church.