As you may have noticed, several of the Shepherd Project staff have started blogs and you might wonder why. The answer is a little complicated as it varies a bit from person to person, but we thought we’d let you in on some of the thinking behind it. There are basically three reasons:
- 1. Blogs allow us to more quickly weigh in on time-sensitive faith and culture issues. During a typical week of reading books, answering emails, talking to people and just going about the business of living, we frequently encounter multiple intersections of faith and culture that we would like to address. But where to do this? The articles and resources that we post at shepherdproject.com are typically more developed pieces and we’ve been reluctant to dilute this with a barrage of off-the-cuff stuff. Blogging allows us to take make brief comments that we think our readers might find encouraging or enlightening without changing the development standards for the pieces we post at our main resource outlet.
- 2. Blogs allow us to diversify the issues we address. Sometimes we find ourselves wanting to tackle an issue that isn’t quite within the scope of the Shepherd Project mission statement or just doesn’t quite fit in a posted article. For instance, we might want to comment on a quote from a movie like Lincoln or rant just a little about how out of touch some national leaders are or just say a little something about joy.
- Blogs allow us to be a little more personal. We want the articles we post at shepherdproject.com to be enduring and wide-reaching. That means fact-checking, editing, citations and a writing style that is necessarily a bit impersonal. But sometimes we want to say things that simply emerge from who we are and what we think as men and women seeking to run hard after Jesus in the modern world. Blogs are a better format for that kind of thing.
Nothing will change at www.shepherdproject.com. We’ll keep producing all the great articles, book/movie summaries, videos, podcasts and more that so many people around the world use every day. But if you’d like to connect with our staff via their blogs, please check them out here.
