Post #1000 on Reading Acts

This month Reading Acts celebrated its fifth anniversary. When I started, I was averaging about 4 hits a day for the first few months. This blog now gets about 500 hits a day and it is fast approaching 500,000 hits since 2008. On September 1, 2008 Reading Acts published its first post, “Why Acts?” I originally set up this blog as a supplement to my preaching through the Book of Acts at Rush Creek Bible Church. My plan was to offer a few thoughts before and after I preached on a particular text in Acts. After the series concluded, I kept the blog going, expanding to Pauline Theology and other New Testament topics.

Book reviews have become a major part of the life of Reading Acts. I enjoy reading and need to stay current in the literature of Biblical studies, so I relish the opportunity to review books regularly for the blog. I have also started posted some of my book reviews to Academia.edu.

But this post represents another milestone as well – this is post #1000. For some bloggers, a thousand posts is a couple of months of work, but for me, this is a big deal. Bloggers seem to use 1000 posts as an indication of some level of success. After a thousand posts, most of which are substantial attempts at writing on the New Testament, I think that I can call Reading Acts a “success.”  Well, it survived into a fifth year, and that alone is special in the blogging world.

I want to use post #1000 to comment on blogging in general, and more specifically Biblio-blogging.  I agree with Michael Hyatt’s observation that blogging helps clarify one’s thinking. It is harder to writer 500 words on a topic that 5000.  Most of my posts are 500 to 750 words, so that represents quite a bit of work (even though I have re-posted a few times!) But most of what I have done on this blog has helped me to express a thought or idea better in a lecture for class or in a Bible study or sermon at my church. Some bloggers write therapeutically, but I can’t do that.

For me, this blog is something of a scratch pad for ideas that might develop into a longer article or book at some point in the future. While I understand a blog as “published,” it is still (in my mind) less substantial than a book. IO have had students ask me how to cite my blog in their paper. That is a bit intimidating since I am not sure I want to stand behind my research on a blog post the same as I might a full length book. And I am fully aware of the many students use this site for their homework since I see Google searches that are obviously cut and pasted from assignments! I hope that what is offered here is a first step in research and encourages readers to dig a little deeper (and I do not mean wikipedia!)

I am looking forward to another great year on Reading Acts, thanks to everyone who regularly reads the blog.  I do appreciate your interest and comments. And now for the next 1000 posts…