There are over 350 million blogs on Tumblr alone, and almost 70 million new posts being published every month on WordPress.

The average new blog never finds an audience and dies after only 100 days.

With all these encouraging stats out there, why on earth would anyone bother starting a blog, just to throw their voice out into such a vast ocean of almost certain “failure”?

Hi, I’m Dan and this is my first blog post. I can’t tell you why you should start a blog, or what all the benefits will be, but I can tell you why I’m here.  If you’re thinking about starting a blog, or have just begun, and want to hear from someone who is in the beginning trenches with you, read on.

While the reasons are many, here are my top 6:

1. I’m here to learn

Next to a hipster-ishly (new word; get into it) good cup of coffee, nothing motivates and stimulates me quite as much as learning something new.  Give me a Chemex and a good book and it’s going to be a good morning.

Reading isn’t enough, though. We haven’t really grasped a concept until we can communicate it intelligibly to someone else.  Not only does this serve to cement the concept in your mind, but it also quickly exposes any faulty ideas you might have about it.  It’s easy to deceive yourself into thinking that you know a good deal about a subject, when you may have only scratched the surface.

The fact that a live audience may read what I publish definitely causes me to research more thoroughly and test out ideas more meticulously.

2. I’m here to find clarity

I strive to be an organized person in my work; my desk is clean, my bookshelf is carefully curated, and my computer files are obsessively categorized into the appropriate folders.  This is not true, however, of my home office space.

There lives, in the corner of my basement, a unit of furniture that is desperately trying to be mistaken for a filing cabinet, filled with all sorts of product manuals, tax papers, and receipts, as well as extra vacuum bags, stroller accessories, and hair clippers. We’ve treated this poor thing like it’s a run-of-the-mill storage bin. Over the last year, I didn’t even treat it with enough dignity to open it up to add new paperwork, but have instead created a loose system of piles on top of it and on the floor around it.  It’s embarrassing.

I feel, at times, that one’s mind can begin to look a lot like this filing cabinet.  Between books, podcasts, blogs, and speakers streaming their content online, filling our minds with information is not hard.  Organizing it and making sense of it is.

These uncategorized thoughts; these unrefined, untested, and underdeveloped ideas are begging to be explored further.  Rather than reading new books and listening to more podcasts to add more raw material to our minds, sometimes we need to work with what is already inside of us and learn to go deeper with it.

I don’t want to go through life being the guy that has a few opinions about everything but a depth of knowledge about nothing.

I am trying to get as many ideas and concepts out of my head and into this blog as possible, where I can identify them, wrestle with them, apply them, and hopefully even have them refined by others.

3. I’m here to benefit others

I have believed for quite some time that I have something to learn from every person I meet.

If this is true, that means that I am one of those people as well and there are lessons learned in my life that others can learn from.  As I research and learn for the sake of this blog, my assumption is that if I feel a need to learn a particular thing, then there are plenty of others out there who also feel that need.

While this will not be an ultra-niche blog (e.g. All the Ways you can use Duct Tape more Effectively in Youth Ministry), it will not be all over the map either.  We’ll focus content on personal leadership and leadership within the Church, with a few articles on parenting and marriage thrown in. Check out my “About Me” section to learn more about where we’re headed here.

My context is a mid-sized church (500-600 attendance) in a small city in the prairies of Canada. I hope to offer a unique perspective on what church leadership looks like from this vantage point, rather than the more common context of a large American urban centre.

It’s difficult to find a rural Canadian perspective on church leadership, which means we’re often struggling with how to translate ministry strategy and advice from books and conferences into our own setting.  As I share about how we’ve done that, I’m hoping it will help others do the same.

4. I’m here to overcome fear

Of all the reasons I haven’t started a blog until now, the most powerful one is definitely fear.

One of the reasons that leadership in any setting is hard is because it forces you to be vulnerable and exposes you to the views and critiques of others.

Church leadership is particularly challenging in this regard; if you make a mistake in business, you may be labeled as an unsavvy entrepreneur or a bad boss, but if you make a mistake as a church leader, you could be called anything from a heretic to an antichrist (take it easy, all we did was try a new brand of communion grape juice).

Over the last 12 years, I’ve developed a thicker skin for this aspect of leadership, but the thought of casting my voice out into a wider audience by starting a blog is still quite unnerving.

As I talk to the more ambitious and entrepreneurial people in my life, it turns out this experience of fear is not at all uncommon when starting something new.  It’s why author Jon Acuff wrote a book called Start with the tagline, “Punch Fear in the Face.”

If fear keeps us from starting things, now that I have started, the fear should take a hike, right?  Nope.

Turns out fear will not only keep you from starting, it also wants to keep you from finishing. I suppose this is why Acuff wrote a follow-up book called Finish and says that he, “fought the wrong ghost,” the first time (alright, pause; I think I need to go order one of this guy’s books).

So stick around, you’ve got a front row seat to watch me punch fear in the face every week.

5. I’m here to sharpen myself as a communicator

Simply put, I would like to become a better writer and one of the key components to that is to write more often.

I’ve spent a great deal of time on stage and working hard to become a better public speaker, but prepping a talk is different than writing an article.  When I occasionally write articles for various publications, my process is rusty and slow.  This post, for instance, has been far more laborious than it should have been.

I enjoy writing and am using this blog as a way to hone my ability to create content that is clear and helpful for others.

6. I’m here to meet new people

Every new venture creates new opportunities and new relationships that you couldn’t necessarily foresee.  I’m excited to see who I’ll end up crossing paths with as a result of this new project in my life.

A blog, done well, has the potential to bring people together and form valuable circles of like-minded individuals.  A “tribe” even.  I would be thrilled if this space could help leaders form some much-needed networks of support in their life.

Even if nobody ever reads this blog, simply by creating it and regularly contributing to it, I will have achieved 4 out of 6 of my goals.  Not bad.

What reasons would you add to the list?

If you’re thinking of starting a blog as well, I’d love to hear from you. What’s motivating you?  What’s holding you back?

If you are someone who has started a blog already, please leave a comment and let us know why you began, as well as any tips you might have for all of us!