Ep. 317: MinistryWatch’s Top 10 Stories of the Year

On today’s program, we take a look at the top 10 stories of the year from MinistryWatch.

This list is based purely the number of page views, so in a very real sense, you could say that our readers compiled this list.

However, for purposes of this podcast, I’m going to tweak with the list a bit. If you look strictly at the page views of individual stories, you get an interesting picture, but not a complete picture.

For example, our #1 story of the year is an article I wrote about Lonnie Frisbee. That story got more than 100,000 page views this year. But it was not really a breaking news story. It was a story that I wrote years ago, but which people who saw the movie “Jesus Revolution” found when they went searching for Lonnie Frisbee’s name. He played a prominent role in that story.

But if you look at #2, you’ll see the story of former Hillsong pastor Carl Lentz, who had a very public scandal two years ago, but is now on staff in a church in Oklahoma. And if you keep scrolling down the list, to #18, you will find another Hillsong story, the story of Hillsong founder Brian Houston’s daughter and son-in-law resigning from the ministry in protest.

And MinistryWatch did a total of more than two dozen stories about Hillsong in 2023. Only two of these stories made the top 25, but most of them were in the top 100 stories of the year.  To my way of thinking that makes Hillsong the number one MinistryWatch story of 2023.

So while Lonnie Frisbee’s story came out to be #1 in page views, you’re naming the ongoing scandal at Hillsong the #1 story of the year.

And it also means that while the list we publish on our website has 25 individual articles, today we’re going to do a list of the top 10 stories of the year, some of which we covered with multiple articles.

FINAL THOUGHTS

If you’d like to help us reach our year-end goal, just go to MinistryWatch.com and hit the donate button at the top of the page. But whether you give to us or not, we hope you will use our database to help you make giving decisions. And that you will give wisely and generously during this season.

The producers for today’s program are Rich Roszel and Jeff McIntosh.  We get database and other technical support from Stephen DuBarry, Rod Pitzer, and Casey Sudduth. I’d like to acknowledge all the writers who had stories in the Top 25 list this year.  They include Bob Smietana, Steve Rabey, Kim Roberts, Phil Cooke, you, Warren.

Until next time, may God bless you.