For the past few years I have been contributing to an online community for worship leaders called, Worship The Rock (WTR). WTR is a unique online resource that ”connects worship leaders and musicians throughout the world.” In some ways WTR is kind of like Facebook for worship leaders. There are a number of benefits to participating in the WTR community. Let me highlight a few…
- Blog: WTR provides a Members Blog which you can contribute to. The greatest benefit of posting here is that people will actually read what you write. You get an instant following without having to build up a platform. If you’re smart about it you can actually increase traffic on your own site. I cross post my articles to both places… I post the full article on my website and half the article on WTR. I link the WTR post back to my website where the reader can finish reading the article. I’ve seen a dramatic increase in my web traffic since I started doing this. I use WP Jetpack to track my traffic. Many of my hits come from WTR and often those hits lead to multiple other hits on my website.
- Forum: The Forum is probably the most commonly used feature on WTR. You can post about anything from music to theology and people will gladly interact with you about it. If I am working through an issue related to worship I will post a relevant question to the WTR forum. The ensuing discussion is often helpful in leading me to a conclusion. Let me warn you though… People on WTR are not supper theologically minded. Most of the contributors are lay people in the church concerned primarily with practical issues related to their weekly ministries. Just something to keep in mind.
- Community: I use the word community loosely… Its pretty much impossible to have relationships with people you have never met. With that said, its kind of nice to have a place you can go to find encouragement from people who understand the unique challenges you face in ministry.
- Networking: An obvious outcome of the above mentioned features is networking. WTR can be a great place to make connections with other worship leaders that could lead to other potential outcomes. Although for me it has yet to do that… But the potential is there.
