My friend, Tony Steward, contacted me to let me know about This Christmas presented by LifeChurch.tv.
LifeChurch.tv will be hosting a whole bunch of Christmas worship experiences at Church Online this year. Church Online’s Christmas experiences are perfect for people who may be traveling, people who have friends or family who do not attend church, and anyone else who would like to join an online community for Christmas worship.
The Digerati team is excited about reaching people who aren’t planning on attending church this holiday season, and they’re committed to providing a welcoming environment in which they can experience the message of Christ’s love. They have 12 different online experiences scheduled on Wed, Thurs, and Friday! Christmas day!
Go here to get more information and download free Christmas music!
MERRY CHRISTMAS from Church 2.0 and the LifeChurch Digerati Team!
Glo is the newest digital bible study tool from Zondervan. Glo is a inexpensive highly visual bible study tool for the masses. This tool does not have the depth of Greek / Hebrew tools, concordances, and commentaries that many preachers, teachers, and pastors want. However for the regular church member or small group leader this is a phenomenal resource.
The Spiritual Home Base and use of Lenses are brilliant breakthroughs for a digital tool.
The Spiritual Home Base tracks and reports your progress of what you have read, watched, experienced, as well as how much time you've spent in Glo.
The Lenses allow you do drill down in to content using a tagging system. Just think of this as very powerful topical and timeline search. To to BibleGlo.com to see more.
The only downfall I have seen with Glo is only avaliable on the Windows Operating Systems. And I'm waiting to see how well their share and socialize functions work. Haven't seen much in their tutorial and demos.
Coming in at a very modest price tag of $50, Glo is a great bible study software!
For those who don't know Logos Bible Software is the power house of Bible Software Packages. Although I have read many mixed reviews of the changes that have been made in version 4, Logos is still the most comprehensive and powerful software on the market. Logos has recently added a iPhone/iPod app. In a society that is on the go, it is very important to have access to your bible tools where ever you are.
The biggest downfall with Logos software is it's price tag. You are easily going to spend $1000 to get one of their robust packages.
During Christmas they are running a 25% discount code: DECKTHEHALLS
If you were thinking of purchasing Logos Bible Software, take advantage of this discount!
This week I'm going to feature some different bible study tools / packages. Before I do, what software packages are you use?
Amazon is giving away MP3s for Christmas in what they are calling 25 Days of Free
If you don't know I am a huge fan of Worship House Media. Not only do they save me hours of time surfing for the best video for our worship gatherings by offering many different producers works, they give a lot way for FREE!
Your not going to want to miss 12 Days of Christmas.
On the 1st day of Christmas Worship House Media gave to me Fearfully Made
...and a partridge in a pair tree!
ChurchMediaDesign.tv is a great site to learn more on how to use and create media for church.
Their newest episode #89 featured a documentary that Hillsong Television made about “Church News”. Church News is a 3-minute segment in their weekend services where announcements are made or ads as they call them. There area a lot of good tips on filming and producing video elements in this show along with the resources, technology, and programs they used to produce this seqment of their weekend services.
It's worth checking out! www.churchmediadesign.tv
TruthCasting is a website that will allow you to host your sermon video's for free. Now they are offering you a customized iPhone app that will show up on iTunes for a small fee. Check it out.
Following my post a couple days ago on Going Where the People Are, I wanted to say that going where the people are isn't enough, nor is content alone enough.
You need to be attractive and compelling. That's why CSS and layout is important. Don't worry you don't have to really understand CSS, but think of it as code that organizes content in attractive and compelling ways. In lamen terms it is code that personalizes the layout and background to websites or social networking platforms.
IT SETS YOU APART
One of the best facebook examples that I have seen is Soul City Church's fan site.
Yes, the photo to the left is a photo of their facebook fan site, not there website or blog.
Very attractive and compelling. It sets them apart from all the other churches on facebook. You can see more unique facebook fan pages at facebookdesigns.org.
THE ADVERSE EFFECT
The adverse effect of going from attractive and compelling look to a less than compelling layout is JesusCreed.org that has moved to belief.net. Even though Scott McKnight is brilliant, his content off the charts, the layout that belief.net has moved him to is distracting to say the least. It's actually difficult from me to read his content now because of the poor and distracting layout.
Check them out below and let me know which one is more attractive and compelling?
The old JesusCreed.org look...
The new...
It's obvious, that in the social networking scene, facebook has emerged as the front runner. Not only is Facebook powerful because of it's ability to collaborate, communicate, invite, and present to one another. But it's powerful because it's where the people are. I can't even tell you how many people (from nearly every demographic) want be my friend on facebook. And I can't tell you how many people who have never set foot into our church gatherings/services, but have become a fan on our churches facebook fan page. So now our church has direct access into their lives and a platform to connect with them, and the best part is that they found us!
If your church or organization is not on facebook, you should be. I always say, 'Go where the people are.'
One of the most creative designers I've crossed paths with is Barton Damer (Alreadybeenchewed.net)
At Guru's conference Barton did some fabulous tutorials that are now online.
BartonDamer-Tutorial 1 from Echo Conference on Vimeo.
Igniter Media is running a promo code to save 25% off any order. The code is 'SITEPROMO' and it's good until October 15th.
Bible Gateway, a great resource for online scripture, among other things, recently noted that the greatest amount of traffic to their mobile site, mobile.biblegateway.com, is none other than Sunday morning during church.
It was comforting to know it's not just me.
Should we be encouraging people to use their mobile devices to access the Word on Sunday mornings (or whenever they worship) in order to help them become aware that the scripture is often no further away than their belt clip or purse during the rest of the week?
P.S. If you've not seen Bible Gateway's Bible-in-a-year via RSS and email, you may want to take a look. If you have trouble keeping yourself on track, having your reading show up with your regular news reading could be helpful.
Just gave the old C2.0-the blog a face lift. Come check it out...
More importantly - What questions do you have about Technology and the Church?
We want to address relevant topics so let us know.
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This October, YouVersion Live will give you a brand new way to interact with live events like church services, conferences, and more. Want to know how you’ll be able to use it?
Join us for a live webinar: Wednesday, September 23 at 2:00-3:00 PM CDT at http://www.youversion.com/live
LifeChurch.tv Pastor, Innovation Leader Bobby Gruenewald and Digerati Pastor Terry Storch will guide you through YouVersion Live and show you how this free new tool can work in your environment.
• What will it look like to use this in a church service or other live experience?
• As a communicator, how can I use it to help people get more out of my message?
• How will people find a live experience?
• What will it take to set up an experience ahead of time?
• How likely is it that people around me will be able to use it?
Get answers to these questions and have a chance to ask your own during this free webinar. To join us, just go to http://www.youversion.com/live on Wednesday, September 23 at 2:00 CDT. Hope to see you there!
The YouVersion team
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So mark it on your calendars!
YouVersion Live looks amazing. Check out this ChurchCrunch Exclusive of YouVersion Live with Tony Steward.
YouVersion Live Exclusive from John on Vimeo.
Own the Mix is an awesome site for your sound guys/audio team. If you are a church leader and value excellence in all of your ministries you need to get this.
Imagine the best in audio giving your team tutorial and tips of how to better your worship ministry. Imagine having access to a group of the best audio techs on the plant at anytime. It does cost $20/mo or $200/yr, but it would be worth it for your team until they have developed.
I've seen some companies try to push this, but Granger Community Church is the first place I've seen adopt them.
Check out Tim Steven's and Mark Beeson's blog posts on why they added them.
I never have cash on me. If it wasn't for online giving with automatic withdraw, I'm not sure I would give on a regular basis. I know that's bad coming from a Pastor, but it's true.
Do you think online giving and giving kiosks detract from the worship aspect of giving/offering/tithing?
DreamHost is offering FREE web hosting for Non-profits. Yes Church, this means you!
Click here to see how you sign-up.
THE NINES - On 9/9/09 Leadership Network and Caltayst is having a conference from 9:09a CDT and will be approximately 9 hours. Each speaker will have 9mins to communicate one thing, idea or principle to you.
THE FORUM - presented by LifeChurch.tv, Southeastern University, and 316 Network on Sept 10-11th looks to be a very high quality, high impact leadership conference.
You will want to check both of these out, and why not, they are FREE!
Has your church?
- Give people something positive to say
- Be the church “that”
- Make it easy for your members to invite others
- Throw a party
- Don’t do boring types of marketing
- Put your pastor’s picture in your direct mail cards
- Be Relevant
- Be the church that changes lives
What is your favorite and least favorite? What would you add to the list?
Looking for ways to serve your church community and even your city? Check out TheCommon.org
How awesome is that!
FreeCountdowns.net is a great site for FREE Video Countdowns.
Well it's not Blockbuster, but there will be blockbuster movies online for free through EpixHD. Many of you may use hulu for TV shows. Epix will be the Hulu of movies.
Let's see what comes of Epix when it finally goes live.
If you need to fax a file or document and you don't have a fax machine. Check out faxZERO. It's Free!
There are a lot of church and ministry conferences out there. And everyday it seems I hear about a new one popping up. What I want to know is what is your favorite conference? If you only could go to one, what is the one to go to?
Food Tidings is a perfect website for your church's food ministry. Set up a schedule for a new mother and let people sign up for the day they will cook for them. They can put what they are cooking that way people will not get the same meal twice.
Check it out!
You've got to check this out...
Gurus User-group from Church Tech Talk on Vimeo.
Hope to see you in Louisville at Southeast!
With the economic crunch at we are in churches need to save money. See how we made a green screen for less than $10.
Tim then edited the footage on an very old version of Sony Vegas Video Editing and we came up with this...
Also the spinning 'Plugged IN' box was made in Google Sketch Up which is Free.
What's you thoughts can we truly have virtual community in the Church?
Is your church website ugly? Need a new one?
Tony Morgan and Collide Media are giving a free website overhaul (valued at $1499) to whom ever has the ugliest website and the most interesting story.
Click here and register to win!
Want some free swag? Check out crazychurch.com
Three churches came together with two beliefs
- Church stuff out to be the best stuff.
- Churches ought to share that stuff.
- Over at ChurchCrunch he did a great post on website layout called "Above the Fold"
- 9 reasons why youth ministry should host an online bible study.
- What is the role of the Pastor of Arts? [Video]
- You have nothing to prove, and no one to impress. [Video]
I was a big support of jott when it came out [see previous posts]. However, they have slowly transition from having all of their features for free a year or so ago to offering no features for free today. Not smart...
So I have been looking for other free solutions and along came Dial2Do.
And it kicks the snot out of jott. Not only does it have all features that jott has, but it also can read your calendar, email, weather, news feeds to you. All commanded by your voice! Sick! And did I mention it's FREE!
Check it out.
Check out the second genereation of Kindle's over at PCWorld.
Amazon is now selling it.
Need to setup a shared folder online to store large files [videos, music, photos, etc.]?
I know I'm late in the game, but Google announced that Google Notebook will go away in the future.
I suggest using Evernote as a solution. Evernote is very easy to capture things off of the web and then add your ideas. You can journal and much much more. Also Evernote has an Google Notebook import for those who don't want to re-enter anything. Very cool! And it's free. (They have premium edition that gives you more features and better experience, but the free account is fine for basic capturing functions)
Here how Evernote works...
I believe it is very important in ministry to get your ideas out of your head and on to paper or a electronic document of some sort. So develop some system and stick to it!
Rick Warren is doing a live webcast! NOW!
I wanted to know what you, your church, or your ministry are wrestling with in the New Year?
I hope to get some good dialogue going, so I can write on topics that are passionate to you and your context.
What do we need to rethink?
