StretchyChurch

I’ve finally started making new videos! And I’m having so much fun doing it!

I uploaded my two newest videos to YouTube and have embedded them here. The first one is the song, I’ve Always Loved You, by Third Day. We used this video to open our Ash Wednesday Service, and it set the tone beautifully for that service.

The second one is the song, Breathe Deep (the Breath of God), by Lost Dogs. We’ll be opening the service this Sunday with this video. I’ve posted some thoughts on this song in an earlier post called “Breathe Deep the Breath of God.” (Apparently the video I’d embedded in that post has disappeared. No matter. You can enjoy the video in this post; it’s much better anyway! Heh heh…)

Anyway, here are the videos….

A friend of mine–Kevin Womack at Fletcher Hills Presbyterian Church–just sent me this link about National Community Church in Washington, D.C. Mark Batterson is the pastor there and does some pretty creative stuff.

Since he was going to be gone one weekend, Mark did his sermon on video for that weekend. But instead of just standing in front of the camera talking, Mark did his sermon from all over the city. What a dynamic way of communicating a message, especially considering our culture and today’s younger generations!

Click here to see the video. On this page, click on “Watch Now” under the sermon “How To Manage Finances.”

Crazy… Click here.

Not sure I’d want one, though…

Man, this blog thing is just going down the tubes, ain’t it?! But, y’know, I’m ok with it. I’ve noticed this happens every now and then. I post like crazy for a few months–and then I get burnt out. I take a break and then after a while I start posting every other day again!

Anyway, my buddy, D.G., just started a podcast called The Guys Podcast. Pretty funny–basically just three guys talking about stupid stuff. Check it out here.

So we’re working on a redesign of our church website using WordPress as the foundation of the site. Should be kinda cool—it’ll be a blogging-based church website.

But in working on the redesign, I spent some time looking at some “great” church websites. And after looking at a bunch of these “great” church websites, I realized that they all started looking same—cool flash headers, lots of pictures, lots of videos, lots of images of people with their hands raised and looking generally spiritual or happy, most of them white, upper middle-class.

That’s all ok, but to be honest, it got a little annoying after a while. In contrast is the website of Mars Hill Bible Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where Rob Bell is the pastor. The homepage is essentially a randomized black and white picture. Only one of the pictures (that I’ve come across) shows a white American mother and child. The rest of the images are of African children in a small, run-down schoolhouse, or women working in a sweatshop, or African and white children playing together—kinda like they’re saying, “We don’t exist for ourselves. We exist for them.”

I like that.

While scanning the Collide Magazine blog, I followed a link to an article about an Oxford professor who suggests there is a 20% chance that we’re living inside a computer simulation. In other words, human beings may be virtual characters made up of computer circuits and code inside the computer of some divine computer geek. Funny article!

I’m just full of new posts today… Here’s an interview with three pastors on the role of technology in church and preaching.

It’s actually pretty good. It’s more than just a plug to use lots of technology in church. It asks some of the hard questions of how the use of technology affects community, relationship, etc.

Here’s a quote from the article:

Using technology does not mean the church is accommodating or succumbing to the culture. It’s respecting where people are at and where they’re coming from. People come to church from an image and media driven culture. I have to respect and understand that, but I also need to provide something that they don’t get anywhere else. I think that’s part of the draw toward mysticism and even monasticism we are seeing. The desire for a transcendent connection with God is very anti-technology. So that may be part of what the church needs to explore.

Check out the rest of the article here.

I’ve been thinking about church websites for the last couple days. In my church site surfing I realized that big churches don’t necessarily have good websites and some small churches have great websites.

I really think that a great website is critical for a growing church these days. I don’t have a statistic to back this up, but I suspect that most people who are considering attending a church will look at the website first. And I bet for a lot of those people, what they find will determine whether or not they actually show up on Sunday.

Some will say, “But you can’t judge a book by its cover!” I agree. Some great books have bad covers and some bad books have great covers (I recently had to stop reading a book halfway through because it was just, well, not interesting–but it had a really cool cover!).

But if a church is worth visiting, why shouldn’t that church do its best to reflect that on the website?!

I’m sure this kind of stuff is nothing new to most of you, but I wanted to pass on a link that I found and thought was pretty helpful. It’s a website called Great Church Websites. Unfortunately, you have to register and pay to get the full benefits of this site (something I haven’t done), but they do have a pretty helpful page with a ton of design tips/things to consider for churches. Some of my favorites include:

• Most church websites are designed entirely for their members, or unwittingly exclude non-Christians because of their choice of language and content.
• Avoid all ‘churchy’ jargon and ‘Christianese’ language throughout the site, especially on the homepage.
• Include some ‘meet our members’ pages.
• Consider a ‘New to this site?’ visitors link on your homepage. This enables you to offer a particular welcome to an outsider.
• Do not place too much information on your homepage.
• Avoid ‘churchy’ graphics – open Bibles, stained glass windows, doves, candles. And appeals for money.
• Use at least one graphic of a person’s face on the homepage.

There are a ton more tips like this, but these are just a few that I think more churches need to consider.

A quick intermission in the hospitality/incarnation series…

1) My parents got me this really cool book for my birthday called The Quotable Lewis: An encyclopedic selection of quotes from the complete published works of C.S. Lewis. This book is awesome!

It’s organized alphabetically by theme, so if you want a C.S. Lewis quote on, say, salvation…you just look up “salvation” and you find 11 quotes. Here’s a quote from The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe:

“Please–Aslan,” said Lucy, “can anything be done to save Edmund?”

“All shall be done,” said Aslan.

Or if you want something non-fiction, here’s something from Mere Christianity:

We must not suppose that even if we succeeded in making everyone nice we should have saved their souls. A world of nice people, content in their own niceness, looking no further, turned away from God, would be just as desperately in need of salvation as a miserable world–and might even be more difficult to save.

For mere improvement is no redemption, though redemption always improves people even here and now and will, in the end, improve them to a degree we cannot yet imagine. God became man to turn creatures into sons: not simply to produce better men of the old kind but to produce a new kind of man.

2) The second thing I want to mention is this really great website my brother showed me last night: Techdeals.net. You need to check this site every day! They’ve got phenomenal deals on all kinds of stuff–mostly technology, but not only technology. And there’s new stuff everyday!

I found a deal on a 1GB SD card for which I paid a total of $5.47 on Buy.com! That’s after a $15 rebate and $20 off for checking out with my Google account.

Anyway, check it out–Techdeals.net.

Church Marketing Sucks recently posted an article on doing outreach using My Space. The author (guest blogger, Joe Suh) is the co-founder of MyChurch.org, a My Space lookalike that seems to be designed for building community among Christians. The article also touts MyChurch.org as being a vehicle for reaching out to non-Christians, although as one commenter named Matt states, “It seems to me that MyChurch.org is about as effective for outreach as a church advertising on Christian Radio.”

The article is worth taking a look at. It’s actually sparked a pretty intense debate regarding the validity of using My Space for outreach purposes. That debate alone makes this something worth reading. Check out this article and the debate that continues to rage here.

P.S. Take a closer look at the picture at the front of this post. Did you notice what’s so cool about it?