My friend, Dave Williams, has written a post answering this question. As you can imagine, given he is writing it in a blog post, he doesn’t think writing a blog is necessarily a problem if you’re a pastor. You can read what he has to say here.

The reason for his particular post was because of some comments made by Sinclair Ferguson here:

Convicted? Should be. pic.twitter.com/t9DaKN9MUk

— 𝙹𝚞𝚕𝚎𝚜 ☕️ 𝙳𝚒𝚗𝚎𝚛© (@JulesDiner) December 16, 2023

Obviously, as a pastor who writes a blog, I have skin in this particular game. But I wanted to address these particular comments directly.

For a start, I must admit I found them irritating. Ferguson said ‘there is a certain righteousness in me’ that led him to these comments, but I am afraid they sounded self-righteous to me. Whilst they sound reasonable and earnest, they are the comments that seem to have no thought for what pastoring in a community like mine is like.

I began blogging before I was a pastor, so it was already a medium I used. But I blogged sporadically about things I found interesting. When I became the pastor at Oldham Bethel Church I began blogging more regularly and frequently. I make no bones about the fact that I blogged far more as a pastor than before. The reason was quite simple: our church needed support and it was a way of getting our ministry and work a platform that might lead to support. To be clear about the situation, our church had a huge annual deficit, the majority of which was the result of stepping out in faith to take me on as pastor. Our membership was largely made up of asylum seekers, pensioners and others on benefits and we had few significant givers within the congregation. If we didn’t do something about that, there would be no church left to reach this needy area of town.

Of course, in order to gain support from like-minded churches and other potential supporters one has to do several things at once. You have to first make people aware that you exist. You have to make clear that you are on the same theological page and – even where you may differ and have views that do not align – your beliefs are within the bounds of acceptability. You have to make the specific work you are doing known and show people the specific needs and challenges that make your situation what it is. You have to make clear that you need support and what the kind of support you need actually looks like. None of this can be done in a single post nor in a prayer letter. One way for us to achieve these things was to write a blog that outlines our theological views, our ministry, our needs and all manner of things over the course of time in order to reach people who we don’t yet know. On top of all that, for people to actually find these things out and decide whether to support you they must follow you for some time (they won’t discover it all in a single post). That inevitably means you have to be reasonably interesting too.

Ferguson’s comments about blogging sound like the words of man who simply hasn’t been in this position. It is easy to talk self-righteously about the time saved not writing blogs and visiting elderly people when your church has no deficit simply because you dare to appoint a pastor nor will your church disappear within a couple of years without help and the people you are reaching are monied and can help prop up a church in your community. They sound like the comments of a man who has not had to rely on the wider church, without denominational structures (and associated money) behind him, nor been reaching a deprived community that – even should you see hundreds saved and mini-revival break out – may still not be in a position to support a church and its pastor adequately. I don’t want to assume Sinclair Ferguson has never been in that position – I frankly don’t know – but the comments sounded like those of a man who never has been.

I was a little put out by the apparent hypocrisy on display at any rate. For all the self-righteousness about the old lady we aren’t visiting because we wrote a blog, I note that he made these comments in a forum that was not a local church setting during a visit to an old lady! It seems hard to maintain that supposedly righteous view of blogs and the time they take and yet have a ministry, as he does, writing books, standing on conference platforms, speaking on podcasts and even making these particular comments in an online forum. Why are blogs uniquely taking people away from visits but all these other things he does are not doing the same? Even in a non-pastoral role, couldn’t somebody equally suggest every podcast he does and conference platform he stands on take him away from some pastoral care of students and research work he could be doing? It just feels a bit pot and kettle.

Then, of course, there is the reality of the matter. The argument is similar to the one that insists we aren’t doing enough prayer or evangelism. How much, exactly, is enough? We could argue every blog is one prayer not prayed, or soul not evangelised, or sermon not written, or, or, or, or. It is a false dichotomy. If no amount of prayer, evangelism or pastoral visits is enough, we could do nothing but those things. The moment you suggest that, or actually do it, it becomes apparent there are lots of other things you are neglecting too. To say every blog post is one elderly person not visited assumes that you would have been able to visit an elderly person in the same time. It assumes that there are not other things we are to do other than simply visiting people. We could say every prayer prayed, every soul reached with the gospel, every sermon written (all things we are to do) is an elderly person not visited. It is to totalise pastoral visits in an unwarranted way.

More to the point, it rather unfairly assumes that pastors who blog are not visiting people. It assumes they are neglecting their pastoral duty. But it seems to me more charitable to assume that they are doing these things and blogging. Perhaps the half hour they spent writing a blog post was not enough time, from door to door and back again, to have a meaningful visit with someone and they are making best use of their time. I, for example, started writing this one in the morning after I took the kids to school but, because I had a particular visit scheduled, broke off to do the visit and then came back to it later. I managed to blog and visit in the same day (imagine that!) I spent more time at the visit too. Not only that, and this will knock your socks off, I did a whole bunch of other things in my day as well! I just think it is a deeply uncharitable assumption that pastors who write blogs are probably shirking some responsibility somewhere or doing less than others. I just don’t think it is always or necessarily so.

We should note that the Bible doesn’t prohibit pastors writing blogs. Nor does the Bible say that we must write one. It’s fine to write them and it’s fine not to write them. Whether you want to write one is going to depend on a host of things. There may be contextual reasons to write one and contextual reasons not to. There may be personal issues of sin that well up in you writing one and, similarly, sin reasons why you might not. There may be personality and skill reasons to write one and similar personality and skill reasons not to write. As with any extra-biblical, neither prescribed nor prohibited thing you care to mention, we have freedom to do or not do and God may use our choice in either direction for his glory. As righteous as it may seem for those who don’t blog (perfectly legitimately) to laud their quiet service of pastoral visits, it does stick in the craw a little when that comment is made on a similarly extra-biblical podcast by someone who is known for reasons beyond heroically quiet pastoral visitation.

So, should pastors blog? I suppose there is a coming together of things to answer that. Is it causing him to sin in some way? Is he neglecting his pastoral duties in favour of it? Has his local church asked him to stop? Is he just not very good at it? If you answer ‘yes’ to any of those questions, then your pastor probably should not have a blog. If none of those answers are ‘yes’, then your pastor may well decide to have a blog. There are all sorts of ways you might assess how valuable his having a blog is. But I can say, in our case, if this particular pastor didn’t have one the chances are that our church currently wouldn’t have a pastor, we would not be able to do many of the things we are currently doing, the work of ministry would almost certainly be smaller and less fruitful with fewer people doing it. I am happy to talk offline about exactly how and why those things are the case and how a pokey little pastor’s blog has helped significantly with those things.

But should pastors have a blog? The Bible doesn’t say directly, which rather suggests we should be a little cautious before insisting one way or the other. It is interesting how often our shoulds and oughts do not show up in the scriptures. But wherever you land on the question, it is for the local church to determine whether their pastor should have a blog. If it is affecting his ministry, the local church should be the ones to say so – they are the ones who know – not a bloke in an ivory tower doing a podcast. There are those of us who, if we heard this as a mini-mandate, could find our churches unviable and our pastorates non-existent. We must be so careful before making pronouncements that Jesus hasn’t because the effects of such things may be wider reaching than we think. That isn’t to say Jesus needs your pastor to have a blog, but it is to say he may well have used a blog for his glory and the good of the church and to shut it down because of a distant voice with no feet on the ground in your context seems foolhardy in the face of no biblical prescription to do so.