LifeChurch.tv does it again! Facebook style!

LifeChurch.tv is now reaching into the world of Facebook with Facebook Church. It’s a great idea and even has a Facebook Church application. For those not familiar with Facebook, an application is an add-on you can put on your personal page. This should be very good and I’m interested to see how far it will go. Here’s where you can find more info.

Church Law

Congressmen are up to it again. Seen the news lately. A New York state senator is about to introduce legislation to ban you from using cell phones, blackberries, and anything digital while you are crossing the street. Not a bad idea from the safety point of view. He’s citing the death of a 23 year old last month. Read the full article here.

Here’s my slant. When do the laws, state or federal go too far? How long before legislation is introduced to tell you how many songs you can sing in church? What about who you can or can’t support for a political office? Any church in America that is tax exempt knows about that, or they should. Think it’s crazy? Maybe, but I’ve seen worse.

Until next time.

Importance of “The Blog”

Want to know the importance of the blog? Check out this article from the Des Moines Business Record. Bloggers can be great sources information, but also a great source of knowing your customer service to the community. Good or bad. Have you ever felt like Tom? I have. Did you notice his change after some great customer service. Oh how a song can change.

Two important points here. One, blog. It’s a great way to get some attention, but also some needed traffic to your website. Two, have GREAT customer service. Great customer service brings referrals, but can also bring a firestorm of negative advertising.

Bottom line. In today’s market, no matter what the business type, the internet and blog are vital. Find a way to use it to your advantage.

Until next time.

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The Geek Shall Inherit the Church

Okay, so I wanted to give this to you in sections and expound on each a little, but I can’t wait. Here’s the article from Ministry Today Magazine showing about just some of the ways to embrace technology to reach the world and your community. I don’t know how long this page stays up, I actually read the article originally from the print version. So read it before it goes away.

It talks about e-mail, new ministry positions available, and even examines the ‘dark’ side of it all. Great job of covering alot of different aspects of technology ministry. Good news: alot of this you can incorporate into a smaller church too! You just have to scale it down a little. I’m already examining different ways to assimilate it into my church. Have fun with this one, let your imagination go wild.

Until next time.

How Cyber is Your Church?

Okay. So I know technology changes faster than we realize. I understand the church sometimes lags behind in the technology race. I understand that sometimes it’s okay to. But when I ran into this article, I couldn’t believe how far behind we are, as the church. The article was from June of 2006, yes, six months ago. For those of you who will not read the article, it speaks of how good PowerPoint can be to enhance a service, how cell phones can be distracting in a service. PowerPoint. Was the article talking about how helpful PowerPoint can be? Powerpoint 2 came out in 1987. Stop….let it sink in. Yep, that’s almost 20 years ago. Granted, you can do alot more with PowerPoint today with adding sound, tables, and much more complex variables. Cell phones being intrusive to a service? Of course, but who doesn’t know how to put the phone on vibrate or leave it off completely. That’s not the technology’s fault. It’s the old “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” argument. Phones going off during service don’t irritate me, the person who doesn’t turn it on vibrate or off, irritates me.

I liked that the article brought out the point of PDA’s. I enjoy having SmartBible on my Treo, in 2 different versions(NASB & KJV(for the ‘I hate anything new’ crowd)). I have a copy of God’s Word anywhere I am. Anywhere. I don’t enjoy the stares I get while in church, following scripture with the pastor, on my cell phone. I guess people don’t get it sometimes. Technology can be good! Christians can use all different types of technology to not only enchance their personal walks, but also to spread the gospel.

When reading the Rev. Goodier’s remarks about accessing the Bible on a PDA, did you catch the almost dare I say, arrogance? “It can be a convenience.” Of course he still carries around his pocket sized copy of the Bible. So what’s the problem? Is it because it’s not on paper, or because it’s on a cell phone? Am I reading it wrong? Then he’s back to the PowerPoint. Geez, give me a break. He’s acting like he’s using a technology no one’s ever heard of. Point of Interest: my eight year old nephew can put together a PowerPoint presentation. I’m scared to imagine what the good Rev. might say if he came into one of my church services, powered with MediaShout and it’s use of moving backgrounds and animated words. I would guess it might be a while before he explores the amazing world of DigitalJuice.com.

It’s my same old complaint. The church will stumble on to some form of technology that helps their spreading of the gospel, only to find out that the business world has been using it successfully for years, sometimes decades. It’s like thirdfloorthoughts commented on 12/14/06, we need to be operating ahead of the curve, not behind it. It’s time to put away our petty preconceived notions about different technologies and use what we can to reach this world. Believe me, someone is going to reach every person in this world. The question remains, will it be us or the world? The world’s got a pretty good head start on us. It’s time to stop arguing about issues that we are scared of and start using technology to get things done. Sounds pretty simple to me.

Until next time.

Pursuing…Perfection? Where’s the Honesty?

Gallup took another poll, big surprise. No, not really. The real suprise is where clergy ended up in the 2006 Most Honest and Ethical Professions poll. Have you checked the link yet? Clergy ranked 8th. 8th! Well 8th is better than 23rd. Clergy still ranked higher than car salesmen and congressmen. Well, that’s a relief….or is it? The top five were in the medical profession one way or another. Even engineers and college teachers ranked higher in people’s eyes than clergy. College teachers? That’s a whole other blog in itself. The days of Jim and Tammy Faye are long gone, even Jimmy S. is back with a television ministry. I’ve watched it a couple times, it wasn’t bad.

Of course, for those defending the clergy #8 ranking, you can say the poll was just taken at a bad time for christians in America. The fall of Ted Haggard still fresh in the minds of Americans. And that may be true, but you can’t put the blame for this, all at the feet of one man. Maybe the Catholic Church and all it’s priests problems. Maybe, but I think you have to dig deeper. Little deeper. Just a little deeper….do you see it? Maybe the glow of it coming into focus? Maybe it’s something on more of a grassroots level. Maybe it’s just clergy in general, and people looking for perfection where perfection cannot and will not be found. I don’t think you can blame bad timing. Trust me on this one. I’m a pastor’s son and have been a pastor. Perfection you will not find, but you can find the pursuit for perfection. With the assumption that perfection is to be Christ-like, of course.

So, why the low ranking? Granted, 8 out of 23 isn’t terrible. Here’s my guess. Maybe the reason is transparence, or the lack of it. Perhaps we as pastors(clergy), board members, sunday school teachers, lay people, christians just need to be more transparent with people. Let people know that we aren’t perfect, but we are trying. With the transparence comes honesty. And of course, with honesty comes the ethics and people’s perception of you and your honesty.

Let me encourage you to be more transparent today. Let people get to know the real you. Not the ‘Perfect Paul and Polly Christian’ fascade that we put on. Let me know what you think.

Until next time.

Church Google

Seems like everybody is using Google nowadays. When the CIA wouldn’t give up Iranian sanctions targets to the state dept, the state dept started a search of it’s own, on Google. The three lucky Iranians with the most Google hits became the target of “international rebuke.” Seems like there’s a reason for everything to use Google.

Of course, this got me thinking. Everybody’s using Google to find something. What about the Church? What does the Church use Google for? Or, more importantly, when a seeker is looking for a church home, what do they find? When they go to Google and type in ‘mytown, local churches’, what do they find? What they should find is your church. Do they?

Is your church ready when the unbeliever comes looking? Try it. Search your town and local churches. What comes up? If your church didn’t come up, there may be some issues that need exploring. It is no longer good enough to just advertise in the local paper or have your church listed in the local business/church directory. When the seeker is searching, they want answers now, not after they look in the phone book. Are we truly doing everything that we can to reach the lost seeker?

When seekers start googling your church, what do they find?

Until next time.

Oh yeah, need a quality website that won’t leave you dipping into the sunday school fund for extra money? Check here.

E-Mail (my domain vs. MSN or Yahoo!)

I’ve had a pastor or two or three or four ask me about the whole e-mail thing. Why’s it so important to have an e-mail address with their church’s domain name ending in the address. The first answer is name(brand) recognition. Everytime you send someone an e-mail or they send you one, they put your web address in the ‘To’ line. That helps them remember it. Then when they try to tell their friends to visit your website, they remember it.

Besides the obvious evangelism reason, there’s also the credibility reason. Most people give more credibility to a website with it’s e-mail address ending in the church’s domain name. Think about the last time you went to a business website. When you went to the contact page it probably had an e-mail address that ended in the business’ domain name, Info@churchforward.com, etc.

Way back in the day, when I was a manager at FedExKinos, I remember people coming in to get their business cards made. Some looked very good. Then you got a little closer look and OOPS, there it was. myname@gmail.com or myname@yahoo.com. Very unprofessional. Then I started wondering about their “business”. Credibility, it goes a long way in business and in the unbeliever’s world. Let’s face it, the church today needs all the credibility it can get. With 63% of seekers checking their next church out online first, every little bit helps.

I realize that this is a small point, but every little bit helps!

Until next time.

Oh yeah, one more thing. ThrivingDomains.com does give you free e-mail with whatever domain name you purchase. You don’t need a website to get a good .com e-mail address. You can also get a free blog account too. All for under $10! Seems like a good idea to me!

Top Ten Blogging Mistakes

According to Jakob Nielsen, these are the the 10 biggest mistakes by bloggers. Find them in greater detail here.

No Author Biographies
No Author Photo
Nondescript Posting Titles
Links Don’t Say Where They Go
Classic Hits are Buried
The Calendar is the Only Navigation
Irregular Publishing Frequency
Mixing Topics
Forgetting That You Write for Your Future Boss
Having a Domain Name Owned by a Weblog Service

What do you think, right or wrong? Are you a gulity of one of the above? Let me know, hopefully this will help improve your blog. Need to buy a quality blog, instead of just getting a free limited blog. Check out this site!

Until next time.

Why Blog?

Why Blog?

That seems to be the question now a days. As the world becomes more and more technological, and as the church strives to be more technological, one wonders how to keep up with everything. The need for some things becomes easier to understand, a website for instance. As you read some reports saying that as many as 45 to upwards of 65% of people will find the church they attend by looking on the internet. The need for some form of internet marketing to world becomes more viable. The idea though of a church having a website needs to be more than an bus-stop on the information superhighway. The website needs to transform itself into a vital part of the unsaved seekers web experience, a minisry of sorts. Thus the idea of a blog comes into play.

Blogging should not be some mystical thing to the church. It should be, and will become a vital part of ministry by the local church. Blogging in it’s simplest definition, is a journal, a web journal. Simply one’s thoughts about a subject, any subject. If the church, in it’s never-ending attempt to stay current, wants to keep on the cutting edge, it needs to find better ways to connect with people, primarily through the internet. Blogging is probably the simplest way to do that. I have seen many different blogs from the church, mainly pastors. Some good, some not so good. Some are simply an informative blog, while others go deep into theology. What do you think is the best? Let me know, I’ll talk to you later.