Is anyone paying attention to a growing corps of evangelical female Christian bloggers out there?

Earlier this week, Religion News Service profiled four such bloggers with a headline saying they had spawned a “crisis of authority.” While I don’t believe they’ve begun any such thing, these women -- and the underlying frustrations causing them to write what they do -- deserve a closer look.

The piece begins with a vignette about blogger Sarah Bessey (pictured in this piece), who’s been plying her wares on the Internet for some 12 years.

In many places, blogging seems to have become all about personal branding. At the same time, Bessey’s blog has brought her speaking engagements and inspired two books -- “Jesus Feminist: An Invitation to Revisit the Bible’s View of Women” and “Out of Sorts: Making Peace with an Evolving Faith” -- with a third in the works. Bessey now has nearly 43,000 followers on Twitter and about 38,000 on Facebook.

“The internet gave women like me -- women who are outside of the usual power and leadership narratives and structures -- a voice and a community,” Bessey told RNS by email. “We began to write and we began to find each other, we began to learn and be challenged, we began to realize we weren’t as alone as we thought we were. Blogging gave us a way past the gatekeepers of evangelicalism.”

For many Christian women, including racial minorities, and others whose voices traditionally have not been heard by or represented in institutional churches, the internet has created new platforms to teach, preach and connect.

That includes countless personal blogs and social media accounts like Bessey’s. It also includes online ministries that have grown to include offline events like Propel Women, (in)courage, The Influence Network and IF:Gathering, and Bible study communities like She Reads Truth, which started as a hashtag by several online strangers to share what they were reading in the Bible and has grown to a website, app, book and specialty Bible that counted 500,000 active users last fall.