Er...do blogs have saddles?
Anyway, I've decided to get back into personal blogging again. For awhile, the only blogging I've done has been sermons and sermon summaries, with an occasional theological paper. My focus has been more on audio podcasting of sermons, and all that action has been going on over at my other blog (TheoBlog.com) and at my local church's website (PittsburghNewChurch.org).
But I want to get back into "real" blogging again. Why? Partly because I think it's good for me. Partly becuase I think it'd be good for my church. Partly because I think somebody out there might enjoy having me back on line again.
It'll be different, though. Before, I was focused almost exclusively on politics and policy. Sure, it was fun getting linked to from time to time by Best of the Web, being contacted by inner-circle types in Washington D.C., doing web radio interviews with pro-democracy anti-Iranian theocracy groups, participating in blog bursts and all that. It was useful, fun, exhilerating, and a boost to the ego.
But I'm a minister, now, and I worry about my political opinionating getting in the way of my spiritual calling. First of all, I don't want people to feel like they can't approach me because of my politics. I love everybody, and I try to love everybody else. (Heh.) My religion informs my opinions on government and society, not the other way around. In this hotly divided political era, in which people scream hatred at one another over ridiculous things, like who is in the White House, I worry that even tacitly connecting my political opinions to my name will cut off 50% of the world from being able to approach me on a spirtual, pastoral level.
Also, I want to be very careful to not let anyone make the mistake of thinking my personal opinions are also the opinions of the General Church of the New Jerusalem, the Pittsburgh New Church, or, for that matter, of God Himself. I'm not making that claim. My opinions are my own, and are guaranteed only to have error and uncertainty mixed in with them and to sincerely be my own.
There's also the time thing. The height of my blogging came during my semi-retirement between leaving active work at my company (Refinery, Inc.) and my beginning training for the priesthood of the New Church. I had more time on my hands, then, and if I'm going to pick it up again now, it will have to be in a way that serves—rather than competes with—my ministry.
Also, I worry about my role as confidant. What I would really like to do is offer a totally candid, sincere, unguarded, open, transparent accounting of my thoughts, feelings and actions. (Or at least of the interesting ones.) But I absolutely cannot have people always wondering when they talk with me, "Is he blogging this?" So at least some level of guarded abstraction seems unavoidable.
I'm also looking for general guidance from others on how to live out loud online while faithfully doing my job as a minister. I'm looking for advice from you, if you've got it. Those that know me can email me. Strangers are welcome to post comments below.
A related puzzle is what to do with my two seperate blogs, TheoBlog.com and GlennFrazier.com. How do they relate? My current whim is to keep GlennFrazier.com as is and use it as my "main" blog, and to rebrand TheoBlog as something else, rolling it into a larger web project I have in mind, and using it solely for "official" communications, like formal articles, sermons, podcast sermons and shows, and the like. But then again, maybe it's weird and confusing to have two blogs going at the same time. I don't know.
What do you think?