It’s the time of year for blogs and other sites to provide their annual round-up of the year’s most popular articles. I don’t know why we do this, but it seems to be a tradition. On that basis, let me tell you who visited and what they read in 2017.
The site served up well over 17,000,000 pageviews this year from somewhere around 5,000,000 people. These people visited from 233 different countries with 74% of them representing the United States. The top 5 countries were the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, and South Africa. Following those nations were Philippines, India, Singapore, Nigeria, and New Zealand. Pushed off last year’s top-10 was Kenya. As it happens, I’ll be visiting eight of those countries this year! Facebook was the largest source of visitors, followed by Google and Twitter. Visitors clicked a little over 12,000,000 links to visit articles listed in A La Carte. Beyond all of that, the site generated around 7,000,000 emails to the people who choose to receive the articles that way. This year I added some video to the site and those videos accumulated about a million views on Facebook and YouTube.
The top search terms that led people here were various spellings and misspellings of my name followed by “benny hinn,” “jesus calling,” “sexual immorality,” “sarah young,” “creflo dollar,” and “norman vincent peale.”
Outside the blog I was able to travel to a number of conferences, and also to begin my EPIC church history project which took me to Italy, Germany, and Switzerland (with a very brief excursion across the border to France).
Here are the top articles, listed from the tenth most popular all the way down to the first.
- The Hottest Things at Church Today. A new study shows that we may be way off when it comes to trying to create an appealing church.
- 8 Sins You Commit Whenever You Look at Porn. I will not quit addressing this issue until porn quits being a problem.
- Why Papa of The Shack is Not Aslan of Narnia. These two figures are often compared, yet they couldn’t be more different.
- 10 Serious Problems with Jesus Calling. Just like the title says, I addressed a number of serious concerns with the publishing phenomenon Jesus Calling.
- The Worst Consequence of Skipping Church. We tend to think about these things in a very selfish and individualistic way. I tried to address that here.
- 7 False Teachers in the Church Today. This was part of a series I wrote about false teachers and deadly doctrine.
- What Does The Shack Really Teach? “Lies We Believe About God” Tells Us. Paul Young, author of The Shack, released a book that describes what he really believes about a selection of important subject. Conclusion: He’s a heretic.
- What We Lost When We Lost Our Hymnals. This article and the next prove that Christians think a lot about music and still disagree a lot over what and how we should sing in church.
- Why I Didn’t Sing When I Visited Your Church. This was an attempt to tell why it can be difficult to sing along to music when visiting new churches.
- Why I Won’t Be Seeing or Reviewing The Shack. With the movie releasing I explained why I would not be seeing it.
Before I wrap up, let me express my gratitude to you for reading the site today and through the year. It is a joy for me to do the writing and an encouragement to me that you take the time to read it. See you in 2018!
