So you may have noticed, but in mid-December, we launched this blog you’re looking at. We thought it’d be good to share just a little about the vision for the blog and why we started it. So here’s some reasons we did it:
- Vision. We are consistently trying to make sure our whole church understands the vision we have for the church God wants us to be. Before the blog, the best place for us to do that was Sunday night announcements (which is limited to a few minutes), and Twitter/Facebook (limited to 140-ish characters). So we wanted another medium through which we can communicate who we want to be as a church and how we’re getting there.
- Transparency. We are big fans of open communication at Midtown. We try to be as open as possible with our communication and decision-making as a church, because 1) we don’t have anything to hide, and 2) because we think being transparent is a big part of being trusted. From Family Meetings (where we let members in on what’s coming, let them ask questions, and give feedback), to posting our budgets online for anyone and everyone to see, we want to err on the side of over-communication. This blog is one more attempt to do that.
- Question Answering. Often we have people ask us things like “why do we do this?” or “how does this work?”, or “why didn’t we do this?” Before the blog, there wasn’t really a great avenue for having those questions answered. We think the blog will be a great way to do that. While we can’t answer every question that everyone ever asks, we hope to answer some of the more prevalent questions here on the blog. If you have a particular question about how Midtown works or why we do certain things, you can submit it here or by using the Contact link at the top left of the page. If there’s enough requests for it or we think it's a question that a lot of people would benefit from hearing the answer to, we’ll write something up and post it.
- Resourcing. As we grow larger as a church, we sometimes have other church leaders and church planters ask us how we go about things and how we make decisions. We hope this blog can be an easily-accessible resource for people outside of our church to find out about how we do things. We’re not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but by God’s grace we’ve gotten some things right and would love to serve others with that information in any way we can.
How can you help with the blog? Since one of the goals with the blog is to get everybody on the same page about why we do what we do, the more people that see it, the better. Every time we publish a post here, we’ll tweet about it or post it to Facebook. Feel free to re-tweet, re-post, or link to the post yourself to help us spread the word. The blog is RSS-enabled so feel free to subscribe to it as well. We are currently working at incorporating the blog into www.midtowncolumbia.com, so that it can be a one-stop shop for all things concerning our church.