United Church of Christ buys blogads

The United Church of Christ placed a nice block of blogads today. You can read about the reasoning behind the order here.

Though we work with a growing list of religious blogs, both Christian and Jewish, this is, as far as I know, the first time a church has bought blogads. (This is also the first time I’ve seen a blog post written about a major blogad buy by the buyer.)

The blogads are part of the church’s attempt to end-run the TV networks who have rejected the church’s ad. As the UCC ad buyer put it:

In the tradition of this nation’s earliest pamphleteers, bloggers are sharing news and information as a mark of a truly free society, not as something that can be controlled and manipulated by multi-national corporations.

As well as being on the cutting edge of the evolution of media, there’s a certain historical symmetry in the church’s blogad order. The United Church of Christ represents America’s Congregationalist churches, which are the theological descendents of the Puritans. The Puritans came to America to speak their own minds and escape England’s rigid and heirarchical religious orthodoxy. And there’s more than a hint of the emphasis on personal autonomy and bottom-up truth-seeking in the blogging community.

This ad had a personal impact on me. When I mentioned my experience to the UCC’s ad buyer, he asked me to post to the UCC’s blog. You can read that post here.