Family ministry has been a priority for churches since the 80’s but in the past 15 years there has been a new push for youth and kids ministries to be working together in sync with each other in a way that produces a cohesive strategy to equip and empower families like never before. When I started blogging 7 years ago there were only a handful of children’s pastors blogging. There were also a few youth pastor blogs as well. The desire I had for my blog at the beginning was to be to someone else what I wish I had when I started.
In the past 5 years there has been a huge shift toward staffing family ministry positions. That title means something different for each person using it for us here it refers to a single staff member responsible for all programing from birth through college. While there are not a ton of family ministry specific blogs out there yet, I thought it would be helpful to highlight some of the best of both the youth and children’s ministry blogosphere.
What I have done is compile a list of the Top 50 Family Ministry Blogs. While they may not all be written by someone in a family ministry position seeing a list of some of the best Kids and Youth ministry blogs out there will help anyone in the position of leading both ministries. This list is by no means comprehensive I realize that in the hours I took to create this list I may have missed a blog. Please forgive me and please let everyone know in the comment section.
I judged each blog by the following:
1. Alexia Rank – I found this through alexia’s site.
2. Social Media Shares of the Home page – With the demise of Google reader we lost the loyalty metric that the Google readership subscription provided. There is no much out there to duplicate that. In my research I found the site http://linktally.com/ which give the amount of shares via social media a particular page has received. As a way of trying to gauge loyalty I used the home page of everyone’s blog.
3. Open Site Explorer Homepage Root Domain Links and Open Site Explorer Total incoming Links help show how far of a reach a blog has. How many people look to a particular blog as having authority on any given subject. The more links back to the blog the more people are referring to the content within the blog. http://www.opensiteexplorer.org
Rank | Name of Blogger | Alexa Rank | Domain Authority | Total incoming Links | Social Media Shares |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
1 | Tony Kumer | 85221 | 47 | 8893 | 6561 |
2 | Fuller Youth Institute | 942655 | 45 | 4951 | 1824 |
3 | Adam Mclane | 547177 | 40 | 3571 | 851 |
4 | Walt Mueller | 2387590 | 56 | 3573 | 502 |
5 | Mary Kassian | 1430581 | 38 | 3031 | 2049 |
6 | Christianity Cove | 246879 | 36 | 2728 | 268 |
7 | Joseph LaLonde | 355260 | 39 | 12358 | 117 |
8 | Doug Fields | 1562747 | 38 | 4227 | 1099 |
9 | Lindsey Whitney | 175906 | 36 | 5742 | 124 |
10 | Mark Oestreicher | 2645821 | 39 | 6049 | 299 |
11 | Yancy | 2616530 | 36 | 1379 | 1112 |
12 | Adam Walker Cleaveland | 2125037 | 51 | 2660 | 86 |
13 | Life in Student Minsitry | 1822896 | 37 | 3917 | 385 |
14 | Kenny Conley | 899643 | 39 | 3171 | 79 |
15 | Greg Stier | 2786558 | 34 | 1593 | 1108 |
16 | Dave Miers | 530045 | 32 | 1862 | 184 |
17 | Youth Specialties | 546269 | 59 | 3105 | 73 |
18 | Jonathan McKee | 3178063 | 33 | 6688 | 634 |
19 | Greg Baird | 2783132 | 34 | 1748 | 179 |
20 | Youth Ministry 360 | 768169 | 37 | 980 | 79 |
21 | Orange Leaders | 1212928 | 38 | 1195 | 62 |
22 | Terrace Crawford | 8068766 | 31 | 421 | 412 |
23 | Josh Griffin | 167547 | 37 | 706 | 65 |
24 | Jim Wideman | NA | 92 | 286 | 663 |
25 | Jonathan Cliff | 4791436 | 34 | 3677 | 163 |
26 | Benjamin Kerns | 2561917 | 36 | 2101 | 67 |
27 | Jeffrey Reed | 35124 | 76 | 5 | 41 |
28 | Wendy Douglas | 9629717 | 92 | 488 | 38 |
29 | Keith Tusing | 4279761 | 33 | 835 | 440 |
30 | Dale Hudson | 1063570 | 30 | 1012 | 158 |
31 | Matt McKee | 4106167 | 39 | 1358 | 56 |
32 | Christine Yount Jones | 477357 | 47 | 761 | 12 |
33 | Rethinking Youth Ministry | 3867302 | 34 | 1662 | 40 |
34 | Karl Bastian | NA | 33 | 5005 | 157 |
35 | Jeremy Zach | 8365435 | 31 | 2483 | 94 |
36 | Amy Dolan | NA | 33 | 1091 | 134 |
37 | Kurt Johnston | 402775 | 53 | 3982 | 1 |
38 | Brian Dollar | 4942909 | 25 | 454 | 391 |
39 | Kenda Creasy Dean | NA | 30 | 417 | 123 |
40 | JC Thompson | 1746356 | 31 | 516 | 20 |
41 | Jake Bouma | NA | 29 | 1764 | 69 |
42 | Youth Blog | 4006688 | 34 | 1456 | 14 |
43 | Wayne Stocks | 2560288 | 28 | 1211 | 14 |
44 | Dave Wakerley | 3641976 | 31 | 1722 | 33 |
45 | The Youth Cartel | 1722835 | 36 | 557 | 7 |
46 | Lynda Freeman | 4140936 | 24 | 916 | 81 |
47 | Elle Campbell | 3797472 | 24 | 397 | 58 |
48 | Michael Bayne | NA | 26 | 403 | 47 |
49 | Gina McClain | NA | 30 | 1018 | 47 |
50 | Heidi Hensley | 13081863 | 19 | 320 | 94 |
AndrewScottLinder.com
Thoughts @ Kids. Family. Ministry
I like The Youth Culture Report. http://theyouthculturereport.com/