… say a lot about us, and how frequently we use some words is even more revealing: it shows what we talk about, what we are passionate about.
And I became curious a little while ago. I don’t have one of those word balloons on my blog that shows – graphically, at least – how often top phrases are used relative to each other. What does my blog talk about? What am I passionate about?
Then I began to wonder what other online sources would look like.
So I Googled, using advanced Google search, to find the incidences of some key words I came up with, out of my own head, as found on the sites Seek The Old Paths, back issues of Gospel Guardian, the NIV New Testament (using Bible Gateway’s internal search engine), New Wineskins and this blog. (I think I got the left-to-right-leaning order backwards.)
And this is what resulted:
| Keyword | STOP | GG | NIV | NW | Blog |
| grace | 302 | 514 | 116 | 112 | 440 |
| obey | 86 | 604 | 57 | 97 | 108 |
| obedience | 224 | 48 | 12 | 144 | 71 |
| baptism | 101 | 1,110 | 22 | 327 | 318 |
| baptize | 64 | 208 | 50 | 51 | 37 |
| confess | 151 | 309 | 20 | 163 | 101 |
| condemnation | 88 | 216 | 6 | 37 | 54 |
| condemned | 147 | 493 | 28 | 72 | 60 |
| salvation | 121 | 1,070 | 40 | 417 | 346 |
| cross | 210 | 552 | 42 | 628 | 205 |
| distinctive | 48 | 61 | 0 | 60 | 7 |
| distinctiveness | 13 | 41 | 0 | 6 | 8 |
| doctrine | 348 | 1,190 | 7 | 207 | 156 |
| faith | 160 | 107 | 286 | 246 | 405 |
| sin | 96 | 1,020 | 436 | 520 | 279 |
| music | 250 | 664 | 3 | 828 | 119 |
| sing | 170 | 163 | 9 | 303 | 159 |
| heresy | 52 | 117 | 0 | 41 | 38 |
| spirit | 125 | 100 | 368 | 127 | 106 |
| Christ | 230 | 150 | 531 | 297 | 114 |
| Jesus | 210 | 99 | 1,276 | 260 | 133 |
| God | 266 | 164 | 1,287 | 398 | 131 |
I realize this is only a measure of how many times, not how, these words were used, and I hope you do, too. I thought about using an equalizing factor and percentages, but the total number of words in the different columns looked close enough to being in the same range that it seemed superfluous.
I leave you to draw your own conclusions.
I’m sure my blog isn’t typical. But I will say that as far as emphasizing what scripture emphasizes in our online conversation, we all have a long journey ahead of us.
Blog In My Own Eye 
I know we cannot draw any hard inferences from this research data. However there was something that struck me as I glanced at the numbers. We often have the tendency to look at what makes one journal or institution different from the other. While I know there are differences between STOP, GA, and NW, they also are born out of the same church herritage and therefore it is not as surprising to see that the word “baptism” received a higher volume of use by all three of these journals. I just thought that was interesting.
Grace and peace,
Rex
It’s the last few rows that really trouble me, Rex.
I’ve been convicted how little I use Jesus. My tag cloud highlights that. Working on it…
It might be nice if we could somehow graph the emphasis of our words. This might bring a bigger surprise.
My top tags are “Christ”, “Jesus”, and “salvation”. Sometimes I think reading my blog is like listening to a broken record, same stuff over and over…
Royce
Royce, I keep saying it: People who don’t know Jesus need to, and the rest of us never tire of hearing about Him!