The 9th edition of the biannual Top 200 Ministry Blogs is out!

We’ve received great feedback on how to improve the list, and we’ve made a few tweaks to improve the quality and reduce confusion.

• We changed the name from “church blogs” to “ministry blogs” for clarification.
• We more clearly defined what a ministry blog is: “A ministry blog nurtures or challenges the way ministers think about the gospel, the Great commission, ministry methodology, and the cultures they are called to reach. It is a bit more than just a faith blog or one that explores how to live a good Christian life.”
• We added the following criteria: “To qualify, each ministry blog must also have published sometime within the last 3 months, be considered a blog, have an Alexa rank of <5,000,000, and be classified as Protestant, Anglican, Roman Catholic, or Orthodox.”
• We weeded out the blogs previously ranked that do not meet the above criteria.
• We switched to a weighted scale for Google Pagerank. A weighted value of 15 is given to each blog as their rank (i.e., PR7 = 0, PR6 = 15, PR5 = 30, PR4 = 45, etc.). This approach gives more stable and consistent rankings, since most blogs have a pagerank of 3 or 4 now do to 2012?s Google Penguin reducing the number of blogs with pagerank of 5 or better and due to the growth of this list naturally weeding out most blogs with pagerank of 2 or less.
• We switched to sequential rankings (e.g., rank = 1, 2, 3, 3, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7) rather than true rankings (e.g., rank = 1, 2, 3, 3, 3, 6, 7, 8, 9) for Alexa Rank and Compete Visitors whenever multiple blogs are hosted on the same domain. This approach is used due to the increasing number of blogs being hosted on sites like Patheos and The Gospel Coalition, which Alexa and Compete measure as the value for the entire site rather than the blog’s url. While this approach doesn’t prevent blogs hosted on larger sites from having favorably skewed results, it does dramatically reduce these blogs from unfavorably skewing the results of other blogs (i.e., Patheos occupies only 1 rank value rather than 27 rank values).

View the Top 200 Ministry Blogs.

Studying best practices from other church websites can give you ideas that can improve online communication, avoid costly mistakes, and even yield greater spiritual fruit for the Kingdom. There’s certainly a place for such pragmatism, but only if it goes hand-in-hand with listening to and obeying God. To help give you ideas and inspiration, we’ve compiled a list of 40 Great Church Websites.

View the List Now >>

Are there any that we didn’t list that you think should be included?

Church Relevance has compiled a list of 493 churches to watch in 2013. It is by no means a comprehensive list, but it is great place to start for ideas, inspiration, and studying ministry techniques.

And if that’s too overwhelming, we’ve also curated several much shorter lists featuring the churches best known for size, growth, influence, innovation, and church planting.

Church Relevance’s average visitor reads 24 books each year, but the United States publishes 899 new books each day.

To help you sift through the clutter, we’re putting together a list of the Top Books for Church Leaders. We’re starting off with 14 works by early church fathers and we will be growing the list with more recent titles in the months to come.

Happy reading!

It’s that time of year again! The fall edition of the top 200 ministry blogs comes with some notable changes.

• 20 blogs made the list for the first time.
• 5 of those first-time blogs are one-author blogs written by women.
• 7 blogs from spring 2012′s list discontinued or stopped updating including #3 USA Today’s Faith & Reason blog (discontinued), #28 LifeChurch.tv’s Swerve blog (no updates since January), and #36 Steven Furtick’s blog (discontinued).
• We replaced the metric of total inlinks with homepage authority and root domain links. Root domains give us a snapshot of the scope of buzz a blog receives from other websites. Where homepage authority shows us the buzz intensity by measuring total inlinks, root domains, Facebook likes & shares, tweets, and Google +1s.
• In other words, for everyone who has pleaded for social media stats, you now have that included in the homepage authority metric.
• Patheos.com has 21 blogs, TheGospelCoalition.org has 8 blogs, ChristianPost.com has 6 blogs, and Beliefnet.com has 1 blog included in the list. These 36 blogs have an unfair advantage because they receive the Alexa rank for the entire site and Compete rank for the entire site or at least the entire subdomain used for blogs.
• An honorable mention goes to Ev’ry Day I’m Pastorin’ which didn’t rank but earns my seal of approval.

Visit the top 200 ministry blogs list to learn more and to discover some new gems worth adding to your daily reads.