Connect with your church online!

If your looking for a way to get your church body involved with what is happening on your church website, give them something they want to read. Seems simple right? Well I find that many church websites tend to be just a web version of the good old tri-fold brochure. No offense to those types of websites (it is better then nothing at all) but your people are looking for community online! For many years Pequea Church has been publishing our sermon audio online. We have even experimented with sermon video. If you have dynamic preaching, your congregation WILL want to hear the message a second time, share it with friends, or catch up on messages while they were away on vacation!

Send-off prayer for missions team!

Another great way that I builds community online is by receiving direct updates from our missions teams traveling around the world! At Pequea Church we are a local church with a global vision. 10 years ago this Pequea Church was inward focused. Today, that has changed this summer alone we are sending around 80 people to places around the United States and to La Montanita Brethren in Christ church in Nicaragua. Missions teams build excitement within our church body. We celebrate each time our church sends a missions team! Our church body supports these trips financially and through prayer. When people invest in something the love to see the rewards. Our team is currently in Nicaragua and they have been sending back daily stories and photos as they work in Nicaragua! Our website traffic has nearly tripled since the trip started and the photos have been viewed thousands of times! Family members and friends of the team have been able to keep up with the progress as well as share the story! You can follow the story and see the pictures on our church website by clicking here.

What are ways that you develop community online? What are ways we as the church can do better? Give me your thoughts!

New Website Launched

Welcome to my new website! Within the last few weeks I have made the move to hosting my own website as well as purchasing my own domain name. This new site will be home to many more blog posts in the future as well as the start of something new for me in my own personal life. I am excited to tell you all more about this soon, just hang tight. I will release the news soon! In the meantime make sure that you update your bookmarks and RSS feeds since I am now using feedburner.

New Website for impact community

Over the last few weeks I have been doing some research, a lot of reading, and learning on a quest to launch a new website for our young adult community “impact” at Pequea Church. Impact is a gathering for 20 – 30 somethings that meets once a month corporately and then in home grow groups on a bi-weekly basis. I have maintained this blog for a little while now but this is my first ever complete web design with wordpress as the backbone. It is amazing the resources available for this platform online. Let me know what you think! I used hostmonster.com as the new hosting service for the blog instead of our previous hosting company Network Solutions who we have recently been very disappointed in for various reasons. By March I plan to have the entire church website switched over to hostmonster with an all new design and wordpress as the backboone. Here is the new site officially launched this week!

http://www.impactcommunityforchange.com

You Asked For It

Pastor Nathan Kilgore from Pequea Church

About two months ago our Church allowed anyone to submit message topics online to be preached in a three week message series starting in September. After submissions were received we narrowed it down to 6 questions knowing that we could only preach 3. Our first message which was preached yesterday was entitled “How To Affair Proof Your Marriage”. For the first time we have made the message available online to be viewed and shared with others. 

In order to accomplish this task we had a two camera shoot, one manned and one stationary camera. The cameras were mixed with an edirol V-4 mixer and then transfered onto a windows machine running adobe flash media encoder. We recorded the file directly to flv and uploaded it to our website. The entire message was viewable less then two hours after it was preached. If you want to check it out click here!

Church Websites

Here at Pequea Church we are really just beginning to understand the power of our website. We have gone through two different website designs since I started here on staff. We are currently in the process of designing an entirely new design and I came across this post:

“Does your church website serve two masters?”

Here was my response:

Thanks for this post. This has been something that I have been trying to create a stance on for a long time. I agree with most everything that you said but when we have sat down and talked with new people to the church and have talked with the church body as a whole the visitors need the information like service times, core beliefs, and directions to the church but they also don’t want to feel like an outsider. They also don’t like to be labeled guest or first timer. They will most likely never park in the guest spot etc. Most visitors that we run into want to blend in.

Even though guests/visitors come to church and try and sneak in and sneak out…my research says that they still have a desire to know what is going on around the church. They want to know that Pastor Bob is going to be available for them and they want to know about schedules, they want to know about the church wide news so that they are not completely out of touch the moment they walk in the door and see the poster for the latest fundraising idea or the latest message series.

Often times a guest or first time visitor website is so static. I have found people are more likely to come and check something out if they see an alive and active community which is something that is often difficult to display on a static visitor only website.

The line of “members” and “visitors” are blurred on our website. Sure we use google docs to collaborate but that is on a team by team basis. Usually this is something that even all the church members aren’t interested in anyway. For example our worship ministry really doesn’t have time to be checking in on how the young adult team ministry is collaborating on the next big event or vice versa.

I am continuing to be challenged on this topic…lets keep the discussion going and my challenge would be for each of us to get to know our church people and get to know the visitors that are walking in the door. Every community in the world and United States is different…don’t get on the ban wagon of “well it works for them”. Innovate a new idea, find out what works for your church and your community!

What do you think? Let me know!