One In Jesus Ranked in Top 200 Church Blogs

Kent Schaffer periodically posts a list of the top 200 church blogs — of all denominations — at Church Relevance, a blog I’ve followed for years and highly recommend. Three sites I recognize as having Church of Christ authors made the list — One In Jesus, Jim Martin’s A Place for the God Hungry, and Matt Dabbs’ Kingdom Living. Congratulations to Jim and Matt!

Thanks to Kent for his hard work and valuable service to the Christian Internet community. His list is a great place to search out excellent reading material. I subscribe to several of the blogs listed there. Poke around. Explore. There are some truly marvelous blogs there.

Warning: The following is technical and may involve mathematics:

I have a few reservations about bragging about this, mainly because Matt and I have done our own rankings within the Churches of Christ the last few years, and we’ve pretty conclusively shown that the publicly available data, such as Alexa scores, aren’t reliable measures. For example, publicly available data can’t take into account email or Facebook subscribers, who might be a huge part of a blog’s readership.

And some of these measures may not directly measure to what you want to measure. Alexa measures visitors, not page views, and so ignores the fact that a visitor may read 2 or 3 posts per visit. And it’s prone to having some aberrant results for reasons not easily explained. Google measures links, which is a great indicator of influence, but a very old site may score very well even though few people are visiting it currently. A new, popular site may have a very poor Google rank.

Shaffer’s list is limited to true blogs and therefore doesn’t count Edward Fudge or Al Maxey, who have massive email lists but don’t run blogging software. For the same reason, Wayne Jackson’s Christian Courier site isn’t counted.

None of this is a criticism of what Kent has put together. He’s done the best that can be done with the publicly available data — and I know from my own work that it’s a HUGE amount of work to score so many sites.

So my bragging rights are a bit suspect. And yet I’m bragging. But with reservations.

Finally, with literally millions of blogs on the internet, some popular blogs may have been overlooked. If your blog enjoys scores similar to those in the Top 200, you should let Kent know so he can score your blog the next time he puts the list together.