John Saddington, former Web Creative Director at North Point Community church, and blogger at ChurchCrunch and other 8Bit properties has just become a full-time professional blogger. What does it mean to be a pro blogger? It means you do it full-time and you derive your income from it.

He’s starting a new blog to catalogue his journey of digital “tent-making” called Tentblogger.com. If you’re at all interested and involved in blogging I suggest you subscribe to his new blog, and if you’re on Twitter, follow him there at @tentblogger. One thing I know is that you will learn a lot.

From all of us at Modern Ekklesia, we’re really happy for you, John, and wish you the best!

Have you ever wondered what WordPress is really about? I’ll admit it can be a ‘tad confusing at first glance. There’s WordPress.com and WordPress.org. And by the way, if you’re curious, we’re using WordPress.org here at Modern Ekklesia. Well, below is a great (and huge) infographic that really breaks down what the differences are.

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I’m reading a book called “Introducing the Missional Church” written by Alan Roxburgh and M. Scott Boren. Scott Boren, of course, is the author of many books on the subject of cell and small groups including “Making Cell Groups Work” and “How Do We Get There From Here?”

On p. 80 they begin to share some assumptions that most modern churches have regarding strategies to “do church,” which I thought was worth sharing.

We assume that…

1. If you build it they will come. This is the belief that if you simply create a program, people will fill it. And so these kinds of churches will start “men’s ministry” programs or whatever program is recommended by their denomination. These churches become like franchises, all looking the same, and assuming that one size will fit everyone.

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In the past two years I’ve helped about a dozen friends get started blogging. I’m no expert, but you learn a few things in that time period, so I thought I’d write down some of the steps to get you up and into the blogging world in no time.

But first I want to address two questions you might be asking:

1. “If you’re not an expert, why would you write a post on helping people start blogging?” I would say two things to this. For one, though I’m not an expert, I have learned a lot through my own experience in blogging. I started off in the Blogger (Google) world, but eventually transferred over to a self-hosted WordPress blog that i’m currently using for Modern Ekklesia. That process on its own earns you a few stripes, because it’s not the easiest thing in the world to do. (I wrote a little about the process here.) And I enjoy reading about technology, so I’ve become decently knowledgeable in the arena. People like Darren Rowse of Problogger.net and John Saddington of ChurchCrunch.com, and countless other people have helped my learning.

Secondly, I know it would be easier to simply write a twitter post and link to a post someone else has already done on how to start. But I know for some of you, that would not encourage you to start because you don’t know them. A lot of life is based on trust relationships. In one form or another, I think we’ve built a level of trust relationship (hopefully) around this blog. And so some of you would be willing to start because you trust and know me. Hopefully that will be enough to nudge you to jump in.

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Would you like to start a self-hosted blog, but are afraid that it costs too much? That’s what kept me away as well, to be honest. Several months ago, I decided to make the leap from a free Blogger (Google) hosted blog to a self-hosted WordPress blog. I was able to use a discount code that made it quite cheap to get started.

So I’d like to do the same thing for you so you can get started with minimal expenses!

I created the promo code “modernekklesia” that you can use when signing up for a year of hosting with Dreamhost that will come out to less than $2.00 a month ($1.86 to be exact). Yup. It’s true. You can prepay for the whole year and it’s $22.40 for a whole year of hosting. This includes a free domain when you register and unlimited data so you don’t have to worry about a thing.

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Recently, one of our readers asked the following question:

“I want to incorporate more illustrations in my sermons (i.e., more stories), i admire people who can dig out of their rich experience, but my experience is a bit limited, so where would you suggest i go for relevant, truthful stories illustrating how the gospel can impact our lives?”

I have my own ideas, but I’d like to open it up to the community here. So this is your time.

How do you find illustrations for different messages that you give and present? Please click here to leave a comment.

[image by helloromeo]

Oops! I just realized that I forgot to post the most popular post of August.

So here it is. The top post for the month of August was: “Learning From the Leadership Style of Steve Jobs.”

Enjoy!