Tuesday, May 01, 2018

Recommend-a-blog (27)

The internet is a big place, and it’s easy to overlook efforts that are very profitable indeed. In fact, given the lame ways some Christians self-promote, you might never hear about most of us.

This is certainly a problem we’ve run into here at ComingUntrue. I’ve always had an aversion to Facebook and Twitter, the two easiest ways to draw attention to what you are doing online. But while they certainly enable a new initiative to reach out to the largest possible audience, they also data mine you to death and routinely suppress conservative news and expressions of opinion. Thus we have never bothered to set up ComingUntrue Facebook or Twitter accounts. Over the years, I’m sure we’ve lost tens of thousands of pageviews because of it.

Too bad. Oh well. Not a policy I’m likely to consider changing anytime soon.

But my point is that it’s possible to be out there on the Web seven days a week, multiple hours a day, as I am, and never come across what like-minded fellow Christians are doing unless, for one reason or another, you end up wandering down some odd little rabbit trail.

Down one such rabbit trail I happened to find Cornerstone.

Cornerstone is both a printed magazine (a guaranteed money pit) and an internet presence dedicated to the exposition of the Bible, its teachings and the spread of the gospel of Christ. It looks like the site has been around since mid-2016, despite my complete and utter ignorance of its existence. Its primary appeal is probably to fundamentalist evangelical Christians of the Plymouth Brethren sort, but there is no overt denomination-style push. A noticeable attempt is made across the board to use easy-to-understand modern language rather than church-speak or seminary jargon.

For example, one 2017 article asks the very practical question Does All Scripture Apply to Us Today? Occasional ComingUntrue commenter Shawn Abigail’s answer is essentially “Er, no, but …” He goes on to say (as we also attempted to demonstrate here recently), “All Scripture is profitable for us, but not all Scripture applies to us.” It’s solid, careful Bible exposition concentrating on the practical.

Because Cornerstone is also published physically, don’t expect daily blogging. All the articles for a given month tend to be published on the same day, which can be useful if you don’t have time to pop by daily. Sidebars link to popular articles from earlier editions, a useful feature.

On first pass, Cornerstone Magazine appears both diligent and orthodox. Given some of the ill-thought-out gobbledygook currently passing for Bible discussion on the internet, this is a refreshing and positive addition to the Christian blogosphere.

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