Christian blogs, and Catholic Christian blogs in particular, cover a lot of topics. They are also quite popular. Since 2006 Church Relevance has been dedicated to “Creating relevant, effective ministries.” I had never heard of it’s founder Ken Shaffer before today. But I like how he (and collaborator Craig Van Lorlaar) define their mission: “True relevance is understanding culture andresponding to hurts and needs with the gospel, sacrifical love, and selfless ministering.”

Now, having set the stage, someone from Catholic Patheosi (a group of 46 Catholic Christian bloggers on Patheos, a gigantic web portal that hosts many blogs on religion including mine) reposted on Facebook today: Top 300 Christian Blogs for Ministry: 11th Edition that Church Relevance had posted first.If you scroll to the bottom of the list you can see how the criteria for collecting data – content + traffic – was established. But the source of the information is actually  from Fellowship One, a company dedicated to Church Management software – and this has many dimensions. I admit I had never heard of this company until today, either.

The long and short of it, dear readers, is that this humble Catholic Christian blog about the movies is ranked at #126 out of 300 and I cannot tell you how surprised – and pleased, of course – I am! It made my day.

I started blogging in 2004 on AOL. When they stopped hosting blogs I migrated to Blogspot for a while then to WordPress. Patheos, a web portal dedicated to “hosting the conversation on faith” invited me to migrate to their neighborhood about four years ago (they were founded five years ago in May) but decided not to, but they were persistent so in 2012 I migrated my blog to Sister Rose at the Movies (they did all the techie work). My first blog entry was a review of Restless Heart: The Confessions of St. Augustine in August, 2012.

Fellow bloggers: blog on! Because we, and the blogs we write and communicate through, are relevant, increasingly so because people are reading them. Well, at least, they are stopping to look around and may read something!

This relevance status can always change because technology is dynamic and always developing. But the Internet today is the vast neighborhood with micro communities where people go for information, inspiration and entertainment. It’s the hub of connectivity.

But then, if the Zombies are right (as my sister thinks they are) the grid is about to go down and all our blogs will ever have done, hopefully, is inspire people to be disciples of Jesus, to be the change they want to see in the world – and tell great stories around the campfires.