Bob Carlton is collecting people’s “Top 5” posts from 2005, and upon request, I attempted to compile a top 5 list… which I had trouble keeping below ten. The first criteria was hits, which selects against more recent posts, but for the most part I’ve attempted to compile the list based on external opinions of what my better posts of the year have been. Here’s what I came up with:

1. The companion posts Wanted: Emerging/Missional Chick Bloggers and Located: Emerging/Missional Chick Bloggers were very popular subject matter.
2. In July I seemed to hit a nerve with Starbucks, Snobbery, and Church Vocabulary
3. Trying to define the church that is emerging is a popular pastime, and one popular post was my attempt to answer the question as of June 2005 was Dear Dignan: an Answer on the Emerging Church.
4. Reaching back to February, perhaps my first post to get major attention was To clarify this ‘journey’… which was republished at EmergingChurch.info, who have also put it in their “Beginner’s Guide.” I never really liked the post title; if I’d known how much it would resonate, I probably would have tried to give it a better title.
5. Church Size: Tall, Venti, or Grande talks about the optimal church size, what is too big and what is too small.

— Okay, that’s five… now for the bonus round:

6. With Rick Warren and the PDL Cathedral of Comparisons I drag out The Cathedral and the Bazaar to use in a comparison of old church / new church. The whole thing was fairly “off-the-cuff” though.
7. I have a series of other posts defining or describing the church that is emerging, but I’m omitting them here and hope to do a roundup of those soon as a snapshot of what this emerging looked like in 2005. (The basic fodder is [ 1 ] [ 2 ] [ 3 ] [ 4 ] [ 5 ] plus a few others, including some already mentioned.) In large part, this will be a consideration of Sauls Armour: 2005, The Year of the Emergent Movement (which rates listing on its own) to ask whether or not I was right, and make some observations and prognostications for 2006.
8. I had fun with You might be Missional… which I’d like to include here just for that reason
9. I received mentions in Scot McKnight’s “Blogs of the Week” several times (I’m honoured!) but my 3 favorite mentions are December’s Mixing metaphors, and Kicking your way to the Light, October’s On Christian Community and September’s Mightier than the Sword.
10. Two posts that feature more creative writing are noteworthy just becase they’re special to me; these are An Open Letter to Stuart McLean and We All Heard It.