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Today, tomorrow and Saturday most of OurChurch.Com’s staff is participating in the Willow Creek Association Leadership Summit.  (Don’t worry, we still have support staff available.)  I’m going to be blogging live from the Summit on my personal blog.  Whether you’re participating in the summit or not, you’re welcome to read notes, post comments, and join in the discussion about leadership issues at:

 http://www.LiveIntentionally.org

 

Sunday, April 29th is Internet Evangelism Day (IED).  If you’re not familiar with IED, it is a day to bring focus and attention to the vast opportunities to share the good news of Jesus Christ online.  It’s also a day for Christians to educate themselves and strategize within their organizations about how they can better share their faith online throughout the year.

You don’t have to be an Internet guru, a Bible scholar, or an evangelist to point people to Christ online.  Anyone can do it.  That means you.  It also means that if you are a leader in a church, youth ministry, Bible college, or other Christian organization, everyone in your organization can point people to Christ online.  All they need is a little encouragement and instruction, which you can provide.

Today I want to take just a moment to point you towards some suggested things you can do and tell you what I’ll be doing for IED.
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We’re wrapping up blogs month at OurChurch.Com, so what better way to end it than with a list of blogging tips.  Sure, there are lots of blogging tips articles out there already.  I even found an entire series of 30 articles each on a different tip for bloggers.  What I want to do, though, is boil it down to the best, most important, absolutely essential blogging tips.  So, here are my top 12. 
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February is Blogs Month at OurChurch.Com.  A blog is one of the best ways to attract new visitors and links to your website. So, all this month we’re focusing on helping businesses, ministries, and individuals develop, improve, and promote blogs.  We’ll be blogging about bloging and doing some extra things here on the Christian Web Trends blog including the celebration of its first birthday.  In this article…

• Christian Web Trends survey
• Blogs discussion
• Do you blog?
• Christian Web Trends Award

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Last week I wrote a bit about what it means to inform people on their terms.  In this day and age, we simply can’t assume and expect people to be always looking for or listening to our communications.  People are constantly being bombarded with messages and have a natural tendency to skim and filter, sometimes missing important messages.  They also have so many different choices in the ways, tools, or modes to use to communicate that it’s impossible to get a message to everyone using the same mode.

“The big challenge, however, is deciding which modes of communication to use.   Does a small church in a rural farm town need a website, an e-newsletter, and a blog complete with RSS feeds?  Should a multi-national ministry mail out monthly newsletters to all its supporters?  Does a business need to be able to text message their clients when they have a sale to remain competitive?�

Let’s take a look… (more…)

In our last blog article I posted some 2007 predictions, focusing on trends in communication technology and their impact on Christian ministry.  The prediction that sparked the most comments and the one I’ve been thinking most about recently is, “Organizations will have to inform people on their terms.�

What are “their terms?â€�  How does an organization, whether it’s a church, a ministry, a school, a business, or some other type of organization, determine the best way to communicate with its audience (congregation, clients, parents, students, etc)?  What do you do if your audience is so diverse that includes some people who don’t even use computers and others for whom their computer is practically an appendage? (more…)

Happy New Year everyone!  I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas with family, friends, and most importantly, Jesus.  I love this time of year because it’s a time of optimism and fresh starts.  More than any other time of year, in January we believe in the possibility of what could be.

Now I’m sure you’ve noticed in the last couple of weeks there has been no shortage of articles, blogs, and TV shows containing 2007 predictions.  They range from the dire like Pat Robertson’s prediction of a terrorist attack to the wacky (the Spice Girls will reunite.)  I promise not to scare you with doomsday forecasts, and while it’s tempting I’ll resist the urge to humor you with outrageous possibilities.

In fact, I’m kind of cool to the whole prediction thing, but I believe that success often comes from anticipating a trend and putting yourself in a position to ride the wave.  My hope is that by talking about some of the current trends related to Christianity and the Internet that you can position yourself to ride one or more of these waves in 2007.  So, here are 5 predictions for 2007 and their implications for Christian ministry. (more…)

In the last blog article we discussed techniques on how to shot video in and out of your church. In this article we will be discussing what to do with that video, including video editing, video editing software, video formats, and embeding video into your web pages. So, get comfortable because we’ve got a lot of ground to cover.   (more…)

You may have noticed a growing trend in churches to use video as a tool, to not only help their audiences receive their message, but to also put video on other mediums such as DVDs and the web. In this blog I am going to go through the steps on using your video system to its full potential. (more…)

Just a few years ago, there was very little video on the web.  The majority of Internet users still used slow dial-up connections which made it painfully slow to download video.  Most web hosting accounts included so little disk space that a couple minute video would fill up the entire account.  It was just impractical to put video on a website.  But all that has changed.

More than 70% of people in first-world countries have broadband Internet access.  Disk space allocations in web hosting accounts have expanded from megs to gigs.  With the explosion of video-sharing sites like YouTube, online video has gone from the techno-geek fringes to the mainstream.

We now live in a very video-oriented, media world.  If a picture is worth a thousand words, a video is worth a million.  Online video helps to engage and connect with visitors on a personal level.  And yet very few churches have added any video at all to their websites.  That’s why we’re doing Video Month at OurChurch.Com, and why I want to talk about three videos every church website should have. (more…)