Ed Stetzer

Once again, Gallup has examined who Americans regard as the most honest and ethical person in their lives—and found that the answer is not their pastor, but their nurse or pharmacist.

In fact, recorded public trust in clergy has now reached an all-time low, with only 47 percent of Americans rating clergy highly on honesty and ethics (compared to 82 percent saying the same about nurses). The previous low since Gallup began asking the question in 1977: 50 percent in 2009.

However, clergy still ranked No. 7 out of the 22 professions studied. And confidence in the overall church as an institution improved over the past year.

CT reported the results of last year's survey, when 52 percent rated clergy highly on honesty and ethics. This still placed clergy within the top half of all rated professions in 2012 (No. 8 out of 22). Confidence in clergy has stayed relatively stable over time: ranging from 61 percent in 1977 to a high of 67 percent in 1985, but has been consistently in the low 50s in recent years.

Next week, Facts & Trends will release our 30 Blogs We're Reading in 2014. In preparation for that, we spoke with three of the bloggers who made the list – Trevin Wax, Aaron Armstrong andSteve McCoy – to find out some about their blogging history and what drives them today.

Facts & Trends: How did you get started?

Trevin (Kingdom People): I started blogging at Kingdom People seven years ago. I've always loved to write, so it seemed like a natural fit to start putting thoughts on the internet.

Aaron (Blogging Theologically): I started blogging for two reasons. The first is simple: pure desperation. I found myself in a writing job with no experience and needed to figure out how to write. Blogging allowed me to do that, albeit in a public fashion.

The second is that at the time (Feb. 2009), I had no outlet to express what I was reading in my Bible and in the many books I read. Blogging gave me a space to work out what God was teaching me in the Scriptures (again, kind of publicly)—and then something surprising happened: people started reading it!

Steve (Reformissionary): A little over a decade ago I started messing around with blogging as an outlet for thinking, a thinking out loud kind of thing. After coming to my current church in 2004, I started blogging for the sake of my church but discovered no one here really read that sort of thing. So I pressed into building connections with other bloggers and thinkers and pastors and thought of my blog as a place to engage with others on things I felt were important.