Church Marketing Sucks on Blogging Church

Today I appeared on the Blogging Church podcast along with Brad Abare as we talked about blogs and Church Marketing Sucks with Terry Storch, who is working on a book about church blogging. It’s kind of peculiar to go back and listen to an interview like that.

The more I do interviews the more I learn that preparation is very important. Now I know why folks like Bono and Franklin Graham have the same stories they tell all the time. You come up with a good line and you use it. Being a writer I know what it’s like when someone doesn’t say anything worth quoting. You make the writer’s job a whole lot easier when you say something quotable. And usually that means coming up with good lines ahead of time.


I tried to jot down some ideas ahead of time. I don’t know if I said anything quotable or not, I’ll let someone else decide, but I did feel a little more confident. Except for the first question when Terry asked me to talk about myself. That one threw me a bit, especially since I didn’t know where to start. Add to that the stress of knowing that the conversation would probably be used as is with little editing and I stammered and paused longer than I’d like.

I’ve talked about how I dislike podcasts before, and I think my criticism still stands. The audio quality is probably the biggest problem. When you first start listening to the Blogging Church podcast it sounds pretty bad, though if you stick with it you adapt and get used to it. It doesn’t help that we were conferencing in from St. Paul and San Diego to Texas. If you try listening in the car it can be really difficult, especially if you compare it to the professionalism of NPR.

I guess it’s similar to the difference between blogging and journalism. Though it is a very cool way for someone like Terry to do research for his book and share that research with his potential audience for the book. I doubt much of our conversation will actually make it into the book, but he’s making the most of that conversation, both for his research purposes and for building an audience. That’s when the Internet does some pretty cool stuff.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *