ChurchTechToday.com

How do you manage your ministry? Do you ask people how they feel, take a deep look inside yourself and check in with your “intuition?” Well, this is a discussion that is gaining relevance in the day-to-day lives of pastors, ministry leaders, and volunteers all over the world.

How do we measure the success of ministry? What is our ministry ROI (return on investment)? Truth is, many of us spend a great deal of time preparing for counseling, preaching, and leadership, but not on how to use technology to get disciple making right.

I had the pleasure of working with Ben Stroup (Church Giving Matters) and Steve Caton (Church Community Builder) on a very thought-provoking e-book that unpacks how NOT to follow your gut as your main strategy for ministry success; the idea is look at ways that technology can help in this area.

The e-book is an incredible resource for those interested in church technology, and for those that haven’t yet considered how technology can play role in their ministry–either way, I highly recommend you read or download it right now. It’s free!

In the next few weeks, I’ll unpack more of the e-book and open up the discussion on related topics. I look forward to your comments!

In case you weren’t aware, the numbers of people who access the internet from their mobile phones is skyrocketing on a daily basis. Mobile phones users now total well over 3 billion, while 2 billion access the Web regularly. With nearly 7 billion people on earth, it’s pretty amazing that almost half have mobile phones and two thirds of the earth’s population accesses the internet on their phones.

Additionally, there are 500 million users of Facebook in nearly 100 languages. Many in Africa and Asia can now read and update their Facebook pages without charge, using a mobile phone. The strategic mission gathering Lausanne 2010 (October in Capetown) will include a focus on these digital opportunities.

The folks at Internet Evangelism Day are working together with Lausanne 2010 to help people around the world unmask digital evangelism and assist people from all walks of Christianity in reaching non-believers through mobile phone technology:

They believe that the Web and digital media are God-given tools that are especially significant for relatively unreached countries and people groups for these reasons:

• Relationship-building potential
• Unique “pull medium” that allows for targeting
• Anonymous intimacy nature
• Digital phone as only communication device

To read more about how these two organizations view mobile phones for digital outreach, read the full article here.

Resources:

Internet Evangelism Day on Facebook

Internet Evangelism Day Official Website

Lausanne Movement Website

I’m really excited to share with you (in case you missed it a few days ago) that ChurchLeaders.com has officially launched! I was contacted by the site’s editor about six months ago regarding the site including my blog posts. I was thrilled and am very grateful to be a part of this project.

More than 200 leaders and organizations have contributed more than 3,000 articles, videos, how to’s, blog posts, videos, songs, and free resources to the site. Visitors can see fresh news and free resources on the site everyday.

After more than a year in development,ChurchLeaders.com introduced a new Web site dedicated to resourcing, informing, and connecting leaders all over the world for advancing the ministry of Christ. ChurchLeaders.com launched on Wednesday, August 18, 2010, featuring over 3,000 resources, including current news, fresh ministry ideas, and free resources for every major area of ministry — pastors, worship leaders, small group leaders, children and youth leaders, and leaders in outreach, evangelism and church planting.

Thus far, more than 150 partners have provided resources for the site, including content from Craig Groeschel, Ed Stetzer, Francis Chan, Anne Jackson, Doug Fields, Mark Oestreicher, Brenton Brown, Paul Baloche, Greg Stier, WorshipLeader magazine, Collide magazine, Outreach magazine, Children’s Ministry magazine, and many others.

“Our goal is to provide thousands of fresh, relevant, and useful resources to support the leaders of the Church,” remarked Brian Orme, general editor of ChurchLeaders.com. “Our editors and scouts will sift through all the great content available online for churches and present the very best of it in one place. Content is refreshed every day on all six ministry channels, and all content is provided completely free to all users. Over 42,000 church leaders are already subscribed to the newsletter: The ChurchLeaders.com Weekly.” “ChurchLeaders.com is unique in that it serves and engages all types of church leaders, from small group leaders and Sunday school teachers to pastors and youth workers to worship leaders and church planters,” said Scott Evans, the visionary and publisher of the site. “ChurchLeaders.com also gives pastors a site where they can send their leaders to for training, encouragement, resources, and practical how-to’s.”

“ChurchLeaders.com is a sister site to SermonCentral.com, which recently celebrated its 10 millionth unique visitor,” Evans continued. “We’ve been praying for almost 10 years for the right time to release ChurchLeaders.com. The time has finally come. It is our hope that this site will lift up and support ministry leaders as they strive to lead better in their churches.”

To best serve busy leaders, ChurchLeaders.com will continue to update and expand the site with the latest and most relevant articles, news stories, videos, and free resources available on the Internet. Leaders may share resources with other leaders using the site’s integrated Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking functions. ChurchLeaders.com also welcomes content suggestions from users in an effort to connect a growing leader community with the very best, most practical ministry resources for leaders.

ChurchLeaders.com is a web property of Outreach, Inc., provider of outreach products and services, including Outreach magazine. The mission of Outreach is to equip Christians and churches to share God’s love and the message of Jesus Christ.

The saga of my computer issues goes on. Today, still trying to recover from being without my main laptop for all of last week (and working from my kids’ incredibly lethargic computer), I’ve been slowly but steadily installing software that I use on a daily basis.

The Fry’s computer tech had to wipe my new hard drive clean, then install Vista from scratch, then install MS Office 2007, install all the updates, then transfer my data files over (instead of cloning the old hard drive, which had proved not to work very well after two attempts and lots of malfunctioning). So now, I’m reinstalling all of the programs I use on a daily basis. This takes time. I’m not very patient.

While trying to use Adobe Acrobat to convert some Word files, I could not get it to work – and I’ve come to find out that Acrobat 7.0 doesn’t cooperate with MS Office 2007. I just ordered the $89 upgrade from Costco.com.

I don’t want to whine about everything – my system is now lightning fast and I have plenty of room for all my media files and programs to run smoothly . . . so far, no big crashes.

Hello productivity, here I come! Do you have a church technology software (and/or hardware? saga to share? And no, I didn’t decide to go Mac