Ian Paisley, the First of Minister of Northern Ireland, had suddenly decided to step down as moderator of 12,000-strong Protestant congregation in January, after almost 57 years in charge. Retirement shouldn’t be far from Mr Paisley’s mind at the age of 81, but the circumstances indicated he may be jumping before being pushed by an unprecedented revolt among his most ardent followers.
Many small churches are starting to see the benefit of having a website. Today it is easier than ever to get a sharp-looking website up with little effort, little to no knowledge of code (like HTML or PHP), and little impact on your bank account.
Here are some very basic suggestions and resources that you might find helpful as you get started.
I posted this on my personal blog last night and thought it was too good not to repost here.
Reclaiming the Mind Ministries has just announced the launching of their online Theological Library, which contains hundreds of ETS papers from the last five years. The papers are (1) free, (2) fully searchable with selectable text for copying and pasting (most of them),1 and (3) available for viewing online2 or downloading and viewing as PDFs. There’s a wealth of helpful material there that I’m sure you’ll want to take advantage of!
Many of you may know that sharing your email address on your church website or blog is a surefire way to increase the amount of SPAM you get. Spambots are continually crawling the web and stealing email addresses whether they are visible on the page (e.g., john@church.com) or merely in the code (e.g., email me).
Yet many churches share the email addresses of their pastors and staff in such a way that they are prime targets for SPAM. Even a larger church like First Baptist of Taylors, SC does this (e.g., pastors and staff).
I came across two new online tools that allow you to see visually some helpful data from Scripture.
Bible Word Locator
The first is called the Bible Word Locator, and it comes from OpenBible.info. (These are the same folks who brought us the Bible Geocoding, which we blogged about back in March.) It’s helpful tool that allows you to see in a snapshot where a word occurs throughout the entire Bible. Once you visualize your search, it’s fun to try to figure out the context of the occurrences. Give it a try!
Haven’t you always wanted to be able to pick up the phone and call Jesus and hear His voice audibly? Haven’t you wished that He would speak to you in clear, unmistakable words—like a real person? Well, the days of wishing are gone. It’s finally here—unfortunately.
This has to be one of the weirdest and saddest uses of technology that I’ve ever seen. There’s a new website called TalkToJesus.com. It’s a service that allows anyone to call Virtual Jesus—toll free, of course—and talk to him about the struggles, confession their sins, get advice and guidance, and more.
Here’s the site’s description of what it’s all about:
That’s what Rev. Jim Hanson is doing. He pastors a very small Christian and Missionary Alliance church in Dunedin, FL, and has just started using YouTube as a means to broaden his influence. He’s already reaching nearly twice as many people at his “internet church.”
Here are some snippets from the story:
Even when the pews are empty, Rev. Jim Hanson is still preaching.
Tim Wallargues that pastors should be blogging and that they should be blogging on their church websites.
The absolute best scenario for your ministry blogs is to build them right into your primary website. That way, your website benefits from all of the traffic and content added to the blogs.
To do this, you could build your entire website on a blogging platform like Wordpress, or you could use a website CMS that supports integrated blogging. Cory Miller right here at ChurchCommunicationsPro is an expert on the former. For the latter, I’ll give another shameless plug for my company’s content management system, Sky. It has blogging built right in so you can easily add unlimited blogs to any page in your site (and it also has friendly URLs. Hooray!). There are others out there too. Just look for the ability to integrate blogs with your main site.
Many pastors are blogging, but most are using a hosted platform like Google’s Blogger or WordPress.com (not to be confused with the WordPress software that can be installed and run from your own server with your own domain name). In our previous post, Christian Bloggers Survey, we noted that
most Christian bloggers are senior pastor men in their thirties who in the last year started blogging with Google’s Blogger and post about once per week.
But Tim argues that the ideal situation is for pastors to blog on their own church websites. As he points out, one way to do that is to use a platform like WordPress or Joomla! for your website so that blogging is built right in to the structure of your site. Both platforms are free, but my personal preference as far as ease of use is concerned is WordPress.
Another option would be to install WordPress in a subfolder on your preexisting site. If your current website is www.gracechurch.com, your blog would be www.gracechurch.com/blog/. The two sites could be integrated, but not quite as seamlessly as the former method.
Forget about the mystique and start blogging not because it’s trendy, but because it is communication. Share everything about your church through your blog and use other means of communication to point back to the blog. Educate your church members on how to use and subscribe to your blog. In short, make the blog the center of your church communication. It will benefit your church and also give you a better church website than all the flash animation in the world could provide.
The Gospel Coalition website has launched and has numerous helpful resources: articles, audio, and video from men like Bruce A. Ware, C. J. Mahaney, D. A. Carson, Thabiti Anyabwile, and Tim Keller.
The Gospel Coalition is a response to the tragic neglect of the gospel—the very heart of Scripture and the Christian faith—in so much of modern-day evangelicalism.
ChurchMarketingSucks.com polled 275 of their readers on the question of how they would find a new church. Here are the results:
35%—Check the web sites of local churches
24%—Visit churches your other friends go to
18%—Just start visiting churches
10%—I’m so over that. I’ll start my own.
9%—Why would I ever want a new church?
4%—Recommendations of staff or members from your previous church
Does your church have a website? If not, why not? It’s easier than ever to build a great website very inexpensively (solid webhosting is as low as $5 per month) and with little to no coding skills using free software like WordPress or Joomla.
Here are today’s bullet points:
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I 
Many of you may know that sharing your email address on your church website or blog is a surefire way to increase the amount of SPAM you get. 
Haven’t you always wanted to be able to pick up the phone and call Jesus and hear His voice audibly? Haven’t you wished that He would speak to you in clear, unmistakable words—like a real person? Well, the days of wishing are gone. It’s finally here—unfortunately.
The Gospel Coalition website
