Board Thread:Community Engagement/@comment-5175866-20160709183418

Seeing there has been several new members on the Bible Wiki site the past few days I wanted to take the time to express my appreciation and how a community is important and necessary for Bible Wiki to suceede.

It has been said by viewers, users, people in real life, and many times by Wikia Staff across the board that this site has a large potential. This site does have a huge potential for both comprehensive amounts of content and an excellent community. What this wiki has the potential to do the other wikis do not, is to share the Gospel and grow people in their faith- something that goes far beyond "Fandom" of the Bible, but makes a life impact.

It will take a long time to achieve this goal of large amounts of content, regardless we do not have to have a huge content base to make an impact on people's lifes and their eternity. The biggest obstacle we have faced in creating this content and growing believers in their faith (through content and fellowship) is lack of a community. It seems within this past week (more specifically past 2-3 days) we have all of a sudden gained a small community. I wanted to give my appreciation to not all the community, but to God for blessing us with this small community- one that I hope plans to stick around for years to come.

I firmly believe that in order to obtain the community necessary to build the content for this wiki it requires conviction of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit must give understanding of His Scripture to those who read it, and this in turn allows them to write. A common issue is there are many Bible-reading Christians on Wikia, who are too busy with wikis concerned with wordly things, and so cannot dedicate their time to a wiki concerned with an eternal impact, thus it is God's conviction that leads people to joining the community.

In the past few days the engagement of the community seems to meet the expectations of what we have figured theroetically (SouthWriter and I). We have a weekly Admin meeting and lately have been using an Online Community Management training course to develop a theory on how to attract community members. The user  must be engaged multiple times (which I have done with most of you through chat and forums) after they make their first edit or comment on this site. After being engaged and having the mission explained users will be encouraged to make more edits, putting trust in the Admins and the intentions of the website. Some users will feel confident in writing right away, while others prefer to do maitenance tasks. After doing maitenance tasks for a while many users will become comfortable in writing.

I continue to pray and hope for this ministry and the community. I hope all of you can become active and recurring members of the community, help us grow our content and grow in your own faith.

In Christ,

Superdadsuper, Bible Wiki Administrator & Bureaucrat  