My post is titled Leveraging Social Media for the Gospel.

Take a look and let me know what you think.

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Here’s the deal … I have over 600 friends on Facebook. I love that I can connect with a bunch of people through it.

I try to be pretty selective with who I add to Facebook besides I use it as a ministry tool also to connect with our college kids. Typically, though, when a minister or someone connected to one of my “ministry friends” adds me as a friend, I usually add them automatically – thinking there’s some watered down discernment factor there.

But lately – in the last couple of months – I’ve been barraged (spammed) with “grand opening” or church announcement messages from some of those.

So much so that today, I actually removed one as a friend.

Hot tip for pastors and ministers using Facebook: Find a way to build momentum for your church without spamming me, or, uh, other ‘friends’ who live thousands of miles away from your church, quite content with their own home church, and get extremely irritated when they have to delete your notification and consequently remove you as their friend.

It’s spam. Don’t do it.

Instead, create an opt-in Facebook Page, Group or event … ask people to sign up for those, in which they know, understand and commit to getting your email updates.

Rant over.

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Why would so many people be bidding up this church domain you ask?

Domain authority, age, and Google page ranking. This site was a few years old with a lot of incoming links and was well ranked with Google. Any person who purchased it would have the immediate benefit of a well ranked domain (for a little while) by using a common strategy that involves putting up some quick content pointing to the SEO wizard’s target site; the site they want to be higher ranked.

Long story short, we were able to rescue the domain from the auction block just in the nick of time before it would have been gone, and I’m sure, at the mercy of some hefty ransom to get it back.

Domains are an extremely vital piece of your church website, yet for some reason they go un-managed or ignored until there is a problem. I’d like to share a few tips for making sure your domains are safe and secure -hopefully eliminating the potential risk of your domain being stolen, expiring, or being lost.

1. Consolidate

If you are like me or many other churches you probably have a handful of domains such as the main domain, the alternative spellings, the youth domains, and the events of the past. Get all of your domains transferred to one single account. There is nothing worse than hunting around for five logins and passwords just to renew one domain

2. Access control

Who has access to your domains? Who is responsible for making sure they get renewed? It may be you or someone else, or even someone you may not even know! Whatever the answer, get your domain management on someone’s job description and under the control of a key executive leader. This person needs to be around for the long haul, dependable, and trustworthy. I would also suggest having access to this data be shared with an emergency back up person.

3. Track your expiration dates

Knowing when a domain expires is your job – not the web company! Don’t rely on when your registrar tells you either. Sure it’s in their best interest to remind you for a renewal but technology glitches happen. Add your domain renewals to your calendar. Even if you registered it for 5 years, check on it every year to be safe. Review your contact info and ensure that the person responsible for managing the domain name is keeping up with it.

These simple steps and a 15 minute check each year can save a lot of heartache and money! Build your name, protect it, and keep it!

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Matt Adams runs factor 1 studios, a web design firm dedicated to building awesome websites for churches, non-profits and small businesses across the country.

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For the new sermon series, where the website comes from, they’ve also bought some billboards pointing to the website and are mailing 45,000 postcards ….

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1. Upcoming events / news items, and
2. Personal blogs of church leaders

In this post, I want to expand on #2 and explain why I feel so strongly that church leaders should be blogging.

Double-edged benefits.

Blogging provides a win on two fronts. First, if you do a good job of blogging and a good job of educating your church on how to read your blogs (see more on that below), you can achieve extremely efficient and effective communication at a super low cost.

But even if nobody in your church ever reads your blogs, they still have enormous value. Their continual stream of content improves the viability of your website with search engines and presents your church to the internet as an active place.

This is why I say that blogging is by far the best place to focus your energy and resources if you are looking to improve your website. Blogging takes time. So forget about trying to add every little nifty gadget and gizmo that you think makes your website neat and pour your energy into providing a continual stream of quality content through blogging. This is where you have the most to gain.

Blogging is communicating.

Let’s set aside the trendy word “blogging” and just call it what it is. Blogging is communicating. Most every church leader from the beginning of time would likely agree that communicating is important. I think too many people get caught up in thinking that blogging is some kind of fancy internet fad or trend and that’s why they choose not to participate. But if we think about blogging as pure communication, I think its value becomes more clear.

Think about everything that you are trying to communicate with your church and even with those outside of the church. Put it all on your blog – thoughts on your vision and direction, new initiatives, events, announcements, philosophy, the reason why you made a certain decision … etc. Drill this down to each ministry level. If you’re a children’s minister, you need your own blog. At the very least, each primary church leader should be blogging about everything related to their church and their ministry.

How to get your church to read your blogs.

This one is easy. Just put information on the blog that they can’t find anywhere else. In every other form of communication you use, always direct them back to the blog for the full story. If you send an email, include only a small summary and give them a link to get the full information on your blog. In printed pieces, do the same thing. This is where having a blog CMS that supports friendly URLs is very helpful.

Then, teach your church how to subscribe to your blog. Nearly every major browser has RSS subscriptions built right in. Show them how to do it so that they’ll get your content automatically.

Integrate your blogs into your primary website.

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.

In conclusion.

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.

Tim Wall is a former church communications director. He currently serves as the director of product marketing for Element Fusion, a web development company located in Oklahoma City. In addition to leading worship part-time, he also blogs at DailyGenesis.

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Haven’t had time to really look through the site … but the design sure rocks!

Read the Baptist Press article here to get the background.

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LifeChurch sets the bar, in my opinion, in technological innovation (like starting an Internet campus in the virtual world SecondLife) … and the person behind most of it is Bobby Gruenewald.

Earlier this year, Bobby and senior pastor Craig Groeschel started a blog called Swerve, which I enjoy reading.

Anyway … after our lunch, I emailed him and asked him five or so questions that I thought would be of interest to us in church communications … here they are:

1. Why do you do what you do?

“I do what I do because I’m passionate about sharing the amazing freedom and love that I found through surrendering my life to Christ.”

2. What trends do you see in church technology? Good and bad?

“Many churches have used the web as a marketing tool or as a way to communicate more effectively to their members. Now, I see a trend toward Internet evangelism and community online … a more two-way use of the technology. I think that is great!

On the “bad” side of trends … I see a trend where some churches are looking to venue technologies like video projectors and intelligent lights to bring relevance to their services. I don’t know of any church where that technology by itself has brought relevance to something that is not already connecting with the lost. You can enhance or improve the delivery of a relevant experience with better tech like what I mentioned above, but the tech by itself is not what makes it connect with the hearts of people.”

3. What’s one thing you wish more churches would do?

“I wish more churches would work together.”

4. If you weren’t at LifeChurch and could attend any other church in the world … which one would you pick?

“Hmm … I’d hate to choose. I’d probably look for an online church where I could develop relationships with people from around the globe.”

5. How much time do you spend on Swerve?

“Don’t know for sure … probably around 5-6 hours per week in total.”

BONUS: Also, wanna tell people more about Open????

“I’d love to tell more people about LifeChurch.tv OPEN (http://www.lifechurch.tv/open). It is a site where we make available our creative resources (videos, graphics, transcripts, etc) for download, and they are all completely free. There is much more available on it today then when we first launched a year ago and the library of resources is increasing each week. We are committed to making it a great online service for users that has fantastic support and help. Hope many of your readers will check it out and tell others about it.”

***

Here are a couple of observations I made from meeting and having lunch with Bobby …

1. He’s pretty darn smart. (I think I knew that before meeting him.)
2. He loves to learn and grow.
3. He’s passionate about personal evangelism … and tries to find ways to be where people are.
4. He’s eager to help other churches (For evidence of that, see Open.)

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Head over there, sign up, and start submitting your favorite Christian blog posts. Also, be sure to browse through the stories that have already been submitted and vote on them.

I’ve been wanting something like this for a long time, and I’m glad someone took the time to make it. If I’m honest, I never really understood why Christian blogs, mine included, would have a “digg this” link. Digg isn’t exactly Christian-friendly. But with our own place to hang out and submit/aggregate our own stories, we can now create our own community much like digg.

So, let me encourage you today to get over there and sign up. Vote A LOT! Oh, and go ahead and add me as your friend. My ID is “nathanrice“. Also, if someone wants to be super-cool, you can go ahead and submit this story to Blogs4God and vote for it! That’d be a cool way to start things off

PS – Be warned that this site is running a bit slow and sometimes won’t come up at all.  I’m sure Dean is on it, but I just wanted to warn everyone.

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Jeff Kapusta recently launched a website called MyMessyLife.tv that provides a place for people to air out the messiness associated with their lives.  It’s quite similar to Life Church’s MySecret.tv.  I got to visit with Jeff a few weeks ago on the phone and he’s a great church planting dude but he’s also genuine.  I like the approach of both of these sites because it reaches and appeals to people who may not otherwise discuss spiritual or personal issues.  The flip-side is that I am a big fan of personal relationships, biblical counseling, and encouraging people to confess directly to God and not only through a website.  All in all I think these sites can be a great tool.

BTW – if you want to see some cool spiritual discussions going on, check out The Dialogue Blog!  Steve Jesmer and The Dialogue Church has some really deep conversations going with people in his community.

————————————————————————–
James Dalman is the owner/chief brand genius at the Branding Shed, a church planter, and a contributing editor to Church Communications Pro.

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I love this quote from Bobby Gruenewald : “Ten years ago, churches were asking ‘Why do we need a Web site?’ Now they’re asking ‘Why do you want to be a part of the metaverse (virtual worlds).’ Ten years from now, churches will look back and view that question as silly.”

Amen.

I believe technology can be redeemed (used) FOR the mission of the church, not to supplant it. And LifeChurch is blazing a new trail in this field … and showing us how church can use technology in new ways to take the Gospel to the whole world (whether they be sitting in front of a computer screen, or not).

Personally, it causes me and my thinking to be stretched in good ways. It forces me to ask myself hard questions … but good ones.

UPDATE: NBC Night News has done a segment on LifeChurch’s endeavor. Watch it here.

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