This is a guest post from Ashley Alley

When I started my blog in 2006, I was planning on blogging 4-6 times a month. Unfortunately, over the last two years, I’ve been largely dormant on the blogging front. I won’t bore you with what’s taken precedence, but I’ve decided that in 2013, it’s time to fire up my blog and get it started again. I hope that there might be some things of interest to readers of Faith ON Campus.

In the coming year, here’s what you can expect to see:

• Periodic articles delving into an aspect of ministry with emerging adults
• Some brief posts with suggestions of resources in the areas of campus ministry and ministry with young adults, leadership, and Christian living
• Personal musings from life in ministry at a small college in Kansas
• Occasional snippets from sermons or devotions that I’ve written
• Re-posting some articles that I’ve written for another blog but never published here

As I’m getting my mind around blogging again, I’m reminded how much social media has changed the practice of blogging since blogging first appeared in the early 2000’s. When I started this blog in 2006, I just wanted to share a few thoughts about ministry and practice my writing skills. I expected few readers and even fewer comments from friends. However, as time went on, I found that readers that I didn’t know were finding my blog from various United Methodist blog lists or other random avenues. It was a paradigm shift for me to think that anyone, anywhere could read my blog (duh…it is the worldwide web, after all). Now, I didn’t really have that many page views, but I knew that I could and that affected the frequency with which I wrote.

Then came Twitter. Twitter was a gamechanger for blogging in a couple of ways. First of all, it was originally touted as “microblogging.” This is to say that it allowed people to write in miniature what they had previously said in a whole blog post. Thus, where I would have previously written a post about a conference, I could now “live tweet” the conference, sharing thoughts throughout, or, summarize it at the end. A whole article on my blog could be summed up on Twitter like this:

#Conference was great! @famouspastor inspired, amazing worship, great colleagues, #city was beautiful!  See you next year! #lovemyjob

But, if I did write that extended summary as a blog post, I could now tweet the link to my expanded reflection and send people to my blog. Add linking on Twitter to sharing on Facebook or Google+ and you’ve got blogging reaching more and more demographics.

So, while there are many incredible voices out there on the interwebs, I’m going to be more intentional about adding my own. Blogging as a discipline helps me to be more reflective, more honest, and more disciplined as I consider the work to which I feel called. If anyone wants to read and join in the conversation, please do!  Find me at ashleealley.wordpress.com.