RSS

,

Technology and the Church (part 2)

,

I said that today's post would discuss some specific ways you or your church can use technology to enhance your ministry.  But since I have already written about RSS and Twitter, you can just go back and read those posts.  I will focus today on your church website. So here's the question - Is your church website important?

The answer is yes and no.

Yes it is important, because it demonstrates to both your church members and prospective members that you are not complete luddites.  Why on earth would people assume that the church is made up of luddites?  Let's have a look at David Kinnaman's unChristian: What a New Generation Really Thinks about Christianity... and Why It Matters.  This book is written around a survey of the unchurched and their views of the church.

Number 6 on the list is that the church is out of touch with reality. Now, we know this not to be true, every member of every church lives in the real world.  We have the same struggles and difficulties as everyone else.  We just have our faith to carry us through these difficulties.   But the fact is, everything has a website.  Every book, movie, elementary school, hospital and teenager has a website.  If a church does not have one, they are somehow disconnected from the reality of the world.

Number 4 on the list is that the church is old-fashioned.  Read the previous paragraph.  What better way to prove the old-fashionedness of your church than to be stuck in an era before the internet.

I said that the answer to this question was yes and no, so let's briefly deal with the no.  In reality, no website is going to bring hordes of people to your church.  The lack of a website will certainly turn people off, but even the greatest church website ever will not bring people to your church.

Interested people will visit your website and they will want to learn as much about you as possible.  I personally believe that they would rather visit your website and learn about you anonymously than to be visited on Tuesday night as part of church visitation.

Here you can see the most popular pages for Lagrangeparkbc.org

So what must any good church website include?

Who we are What we believe Info on Church programs Directions Staff information Current Information

By far, the most important of these is current info. Having a badly out of date church website may be worse than not having a church website.

Feel free to tell me in the comments how wrong I am. That your church is awesome without a website, or that the church website is directly responsible for doubling your church size.

,

Using twitter for church

,

Monday I am speaking to the NSRBA minster's meeting.  I have been attending those meetings for 4 years, but usually keep my mouth shut.  I finally feel like I have something to contribute so I asked to speak.  I am speaking about technology and how churches can use the internet, and other technology to enhance and simplify their ministries.   One of the technologies I plan to speak about is Twitter.  I know that some of my readers are tired of hearing me talk about it, but I want to run my thoughts by my blog before I talk about it at the minster's meting.  I would appreciate your feedback. This is a wordle of 200 recent tweets

It is my belief that for most people in a church, the pastor is a bit of an unknown.  This phenomenon has two causes.  One is that people view the pastor as some sort of superman, not at all like them, with the same struggles and sins.  The other is that in many churches the pastor changes so often that the people don't get a chance to know him.  This goes both ways, because many pastors change churches often enough that they don't develop deep friendships within the church body.

What does this have to do with Twitter?  I believe that Twitter is a great tool for fellowship  (or community, if you prefer cool-church language;.)  Why is Twitter great for fellowship?  Because it allows people to see into your life, combine it with a camera phone and it enhances this.

One of the great things about Twtter is that you can keep up with a multitude of people at once and it takes almost no effort on your part.  For example, I have a  friend whom I haven't seen in almost 3 years, that I follow on twitter and I feel like I know as much about what goes on with him now as I did when we were riding to school together once a week.

If you are on Facebook you understand the power of the status update to keep you informed about people.  Twitter is like the status report on steroids.

I follow about 50 people and I have absolutely no trouble keeping up with that number.  I'm sure that somewhere around 200 people the ability to feel like you have a grip on everybody fails, but with some sort of client and just reading regularly it is easy to keep up with many people.

Recently, our church has even created a Twitter page.  It contains announcements, web links and prayer requests.  A very different use than a personal feed but still valid.

If you just want to test out Twitter and are not sure you are ready to commit and begin doing so yourself, you can simply subscribe to the RSS feed of any account.

Do you find Twitter to be a useful tool for fellowship?

,

RS Wha...?

,

This is day 2 and post 2 But if I am realistic, I know that if I manage to keep a regular blog, it won’t be daily. So how are you, my reader to know that I have a new post up? You could visit every single day. That would look good on my stat counter, and would probably be good for my ego. But the much better answer is - via RSS.

If you don’t know what RSS is or if you do but aren’t using it you are missing out on half of the internet. RSS is what allows podcasts to work and it the quickest way to view a plethora of sites every day. (I read 30, not counting my podcasts) RSS stands for really simple syndication and it basically lets you know when blogs, podcasts, and websites are updated. It allows you to read them without actually visiting them in your browser It works much like e-mail with a headline (subject) and a preview pane that lets you read the body of the post. I prefer to get my feeds via my e-mail program. As a service to you, I’ll recommend a few excellent programs or services to help you read feeds.

I use Thunderbird as both my e-mail client and RSS reader If you are a yahoo mail user, the new format has an RSS section Gmail has a feed section (but I really don’t like it) a much better option is reader.google.com If you use Microsoft Outlook, then try News Gator which works as a plugin For Firefox users, (hopefully all of you) there are many extensions, none that I really love, but Wizz seems well supported and good

If anyone else has a suggestion they particularly love, leave it in the comment section.

I’ll end this post with the feed address of several of my favorite blogs and sites, there are no podcasts in this list

SBC related blogs

Sports related Blogs

Comedy

My Friends

Shopping

InterfaceLIFT (Cool desktop backgrounds)