Vantage point

Blog it

It has been less than a year since I entered the blogosphere. I dabbled in a personal blog, saw how easy it was, liked it, then became involved in several others.

The first lesson I had to learn was, just what does “blog” mean?

“Blog” is short for “Weblog,” an Internet form of communication that at first mimicked chronological public journal entries and added components from there. The growth of the Internet and blogs as the foremost means of reading for younger individuals and an important one for others meant the Evangel needed to provide God’s message in this medium to be the most effective broadcasters of the gospel we could be.

In July 2007, we launched our first modest Today’s Pentecostal Evangel blog (todayspentecostalevangel.blogspot.com). Later that month we launched our TPExtra podcast (tpe.podbean.com) — basically an on-demand Internet radio show — first just to share additional insights from our stories, but later adding interviews with interesting individuals.

In September, our Assemblies of God blog service began, and we launched our Answers blog (answers.agblogger.org).

In 2008 we have launched our current family of blogs, one for each of our writers, and a new TPE blog (tpe.agblogger.org) serving as our Internet portal and offering clips of all posts on other blogs, as well as links.

What began small has blossomed into a network of free online offerings that greatly augments the weekly issues of Today’s Pentecostal Evangel.

Add to this our main Web site, which averages 600,000 hits per month, and the Internet becomes an important part of this ministry.

Every day we receive hits from all over the world on our hundreds of articles, photo essays, podcasts and videos. We hope you will join that audience.

In our writers’ blogs, you will find news analysis and opinion on a more personal level than in the magazine. And you have the opportunity to respond in a public forum. So even you can … blog it.

Ken Horn

E-mail your comments to tpe@ag.org.