The Blogroll Cruise: 1/18/05

First, I noticed that Evangelical Outpost was doing something called Outtakes -- Joe is basically going through his blogroll and commenting on noteworthy posts -- with links, of course.

Next, I saw that Rusty at New Covenant is doing something called Rusty Nails, where he goes through his blogroll and comments on noteworthy posts -- with links.

And now, I see that David at Jollyblogger has started his Jolly Digest, where he goes through his blogroll and ... well, you get the idea.

Far be it from me to ignore such a great idea, especially when it's being done by so many bloggers who I read and respect. So I would like to introduce the Blogroll Cruise, where I go through my blogroll and comment on noteworthy posts -- with links and trackbacks, of course. The idea is to do it daily, but I'm not going to promise that -- I will most likely miss Fridays and possibly Wednesdays. And I'll try to feature blogs that the others don't cover, especially blogs that I think are not getting the attention they deserve.

This first edition will be brief, but here goes:

• 21st Century Reformation has an inteesting piece about blogs and churches as "Power Networks" vs. "ghettos." There has been a lot of discussion about this throughout the evangelical blogs that I read (Razorskiss, Evangelical Outpost, for example). I've been doing some thinking about it as well. Our churches tend to minister to the same group of people, and when we get a couple new members, we are "really starting to grow!" We should be trying to broaden our influence. As bloggers, we get a LOT of inbound links, but they're from people within our community. All of my inbound links are from people who are Christians, and who consider themselves to be, at least part of the time, evangelical bloggers. I have linked back to the people who link to me, which perpetuates the "ghetto" that we blog in. I get hits from people outside the ghetto, but most are from Blog Explosion (and how many stay and read anything beyond the 30 second requirement, much less come back?) or from people hitting the "Next Blog" button in the Blogger bar at the top of the page. I get some interaction with people (though I'm waiting for one in particular to react to the Church/State post I made), but most of the interaction is from within the evangelical ghetto. We should strive to interact with people outside the community -- and there are bloggers who are doing a better job of that than I am right now.
• Speaking of Razor'sKiss (and you REALLY need to check this blog out, it is outstanding!), there's a great post about a potential solution to the problem of the evangelical ghetto, and it sounds to mme like it bears more than a passing resemblance to the idea of the "Body of Christ" analogy in Scripture. Evangelical bloggers have different strengths, and different roles to play. By banding together in a community, we can use our individual strengths more effectively, and make our message clearer to the general population. All of us together can be more effective than each of us separately.
• Blogcorner Preacher talks about the value of salt. Sometimes we forget how apt an anaolgy this really is for our role as Christians, and I can even relate it to the previous two posts! Salt is useless when it's still in the salt shaker, after all -- it has to be poured out onto something with no salt for it to be really noticed and appreciated.
• Sarcasmagorical posts a prayer request -- another use for this community of bloggers. The best thing that we can do for each other is to uphold one another in prayer.