Share Your Church

dv8 tube

admin — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 04:04:34 +0000

Meth Alliance of Paulding

bdadmin — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 23:46:18 +0000

my journey, His glory

Rodney — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 23:36:06 +0000

This is my personal blog. If you want to know more about me, take a look.

dv8 student ministries

admin — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 04:37:48 +0000

New Providence Baptist

admin — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 03:14:16 +0000

Portfolio Page Updated

Rodney — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 02:13:55 +0000

Check out our updated portfolio page for a listing of all SYC sites. We look forward to building on our portfolio on a regular basis as we help non-profits, ministries, and organizations Share Their Church. It’s more than a name, it’s your opportunity, it’s our mission.

Pastor’s Blogs

Rodney — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 05:18:03 +0000

“There’s no way our pastor will blog. I’m not even sure if he knows what a computer is.” I hear that a lot, and in a lot of cases it may be true. However what your pastor doesn’t know is that he probably already blogs, he just doesn’t do it on the interent. Each week when he writes his article for the newsletter, it’s a blog post. When he writes down a thought for the week in the bulletin, it can become a blog posting. Pastors have been blogging for ages they just didn’t know it.

So what does this mean for your church today? I’m glad you asked. It’s time to introduce your pastor to the internet. Not just as an information gathering tool, not just a place to waste your time or rot your mind (hulu.com), but as an outreach tool.

Here’s a real world example. Someone new moves into your community and begins their church hunting by researching it online. They come to your online brochure and think it looks like a nice church. Then they click over to another church down the road and up front and center is an article the pastor just finished writing. The pastor shares how the silly things kids sometimes say really get us thinking on the deeper things of God sometimes. On top of that, the site features upcoming activities and last weeks sermon. Which church do you think they’re going to visit this coming Sunday?

Some pastors just blog their lives. As interesting or various things occur the pastor writes abot it. Some use it to build up to the Sunday sermon, others just put up a random thought or question each week. No matter how you would like to do, DO IT. Christianity is not about a religion, it’s about a relationship with Christ. It’s time to start using your website to build relationship and not only share your life, but to share your church.

Google Analytics

Rodney — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 04:14:40 +0000

We’re going to spend the next few weeks looking at google products that can help you share your church better. I know, I know Google is one of those companies that you either love or hate, and I’ll be honest with you. I love them. There’s lots of other products, companies, and services out there that may do a better job than google at certain tasks, but over all Google does a wonderful job at bringing it all together. That being said I would like to take a look at a less popular google service called google analytics.

I use google analytics on every site that I make, design, or consult on. This tool is amazing. Here’s what it gives you for free

visitor/hit/page count
unique visitor count (based on browser/IP)
browser info for all visitors
location of all visitors
keywords which brought visitors to site
avg time spent on each page

Did I mention that all of this was FREE? If you’ve read any of my other articles you know how I feel about free. Google really has put together a wonderful tool in their analytics service. Does this mean that google has access to your site? Yes, not like the google crawler wasn’t all over your site before or anything. Google also makes it very easy to implement analytics. Simply sign up for their service and copy a small piece of code into your .html or .php and voila you’re done. So, now for the big question. How does this help you Share Your Church? The information that you can gather from this tool is indispensable. Do you need multi-language support on your site? What is bringing people to your site? Maybe you need to highlight that information. Maybe add more info to the home page, or maybe just make simpler navigation. I’ve made numerous modifications to sites simply based on the information found in google analytics. Is analytics the best tool out there? Probably not, but you’d be hard pressed to find one simpler.

Drive By Chalking

Rodney — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 04:10:17 +0000

It seems that outreach and seeker sensitive are two of the most popular buzzwords in our churches today. What happened to servanthood? Having a church full of servants is a great way to reach out to the community because the community then sees a church that truly loves people the way Christ loves people. We normally equate servant outreach with serving people outside our church, what about showing love to people inside our church out in public?

The other night I took some of our youth group and we paid a visit to the pastor’s house. We just made sure to do it when we knew he was at the church and we chalked his driveway. Armed with a small bucket of sidewalk chalk we proceeded to write down our favorite verses, words of encouragement, personal notes, and a 12 foot diameter smiley face on his driveway and front walk. We didn’t get a chance to talk to any of the neighbors (none came out) or share the Gospel with anyone, but we did share the love of Christ with our pastor. Was it a little odd? Yep. But it gave the student to be that Barnabas type servant and share their love with the pastor. Maybe part of outreach is sharing love with each other and encouraging your brothers and sisters in Christ to allow them to share Christ’s love with others. Just a thought. If you’d like to see pictures feel free to visit our youth group site and see how we’re trying to Share Our Church.

week one, mega church

Rodney — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 00:34:26 +0000

I’m not quite sure I would call the first church we visited a mega church but I would call it honking huge. When we pulled into the parking lot I needed help fron someone to simply point out what door I needed to be heading for. I didn’t want to walk in the wrong door and end up getting lost in the church somewhere (it really was that big). I had parked in the visitors lot, and was finally able to get someone’s attention to point out where I needed to be going. Visiting a church as a parent is drastically different than visiting without a child. First you have to decide if you want to keep your child with you, and then you have to decide if you trust the nursery workers to keep your child safe. Well, I was the with my wife and my very young (6 month old) son. We decided to put him into the nursery during the service since we knew some friends that went there and they seemed to like it all. We left the children’s wing and made our way to one of two sanctuary’s. We waited for our friends outside the door of one of them, and apparently 400 people had the same idea. So giving up on finding anyone, we made our way into the sancuary. We looked for a seat for a few minutes and were then guided by ushers into first available seats. (In fact the ushers made an entire row of people scoot down so we could sit.) The service was nice. We learned later on that the other sanctuary in the building had a closed circuit projector view of the pulpit area, not a live person. The service seemed very much like a production. I’ve always enjoyed listening to this particular preacher and enjoyed his serrmon this Sunday, something about Jesus and the stock market. After service it took a while to pick up our son and get back to our car. Leaving the parking lot was a nightmare. We saw two car accidents, and almost got caught in one ourselves. There were a good number of off duty police officers direcring traffic, so nobody had to wait very long. We finally got back home and had time to reflect on our morning.

Good

great use of music, drama, environment
a visitor parking lot (that’s just awesome)

Bad

not able to talk with pastor after service
had to get greeter’s attention for assistance

Are you kidding me?

no signs from visitor lot to children’s wing
no way to distinguish visitors with that many people there, no way to follow up with them

Lessons learned

visitors are important and need to be treated that way
signage is very important
make sure staff is available after service
make sure greeters are excited about their ministry, much more likely to greet people right off the bat