ChurchTechToday.com

During the holidays such as Christmas and Easter, many churches rely on special events – larger and more frequent church services, holiday-themed performances, concerts and even art galleries – to draw people in to their church as a form of outreach to the community. These events are wonderful tools to communicate the Gospel beyond your front doors and assist with overall church growth.

But before your events begin, it’s critical to take a look at the way you register people and take tickets in order to guarantee that your facility will have enough room. Taking tickets for events online through your website is a wonderful solution for both events that incur a fee and those that do not.

“TicketU has made it easier for our members to invite guests, which helps with our outreach to those who may not have a church background,” says Candy Phillips, church hostess for Bellevue Baptist Church. “Last year, our Easter Memphis Passion Play drew more than 25,000 people. Although we still sell tickets at our box office, more than 50 percent of the tickets we sell are sold through online ticketing.”

With Easter just around the corner, reserving seats for the Easter services, purchasing tickets for the annual Easter egg hunt, or reserving box seats for the Easter Musical online just might be the way to go for your church. TicketU is an excellent solution that can turn your administrative nightmare and into a springtime dream.

Sign up to use TicketU for your online ticket sales by April 1, 2010, and receive your first 300 tickets free (a $300 value).

Click on the links below to read more about churches that have successfully implemented TicketU for outreach:

• Bellevue Church’s Easter Outreach Success
• Online ticketing for Christmas production increases outreach
• First Baptist Church eases the manpower burden on church volunteers with TicketU

Funding ministry is a huge topic in the church community these days, especially as this recession wanes on and forces many of us to take stock in what really matters. Technology can play a big role, as you’ll find out from listening to this podcast series on Build Community, Fund Ministry.

Last week, I got together (virtually) with Ben Stroup of ChurchGivingMatters.com, Steve Caton of Church Community Builder, and Tom Roepke of New Hope Community Church to record a six-part series on Build Community, Fund Ministry. It was awesome. We talked about so many issues that will interest you greatly.

Today’s podcast is on the Lifecycle of Church Membership and Assimilation. This is a six part series. Each Monday, I’ll post a new podcast capturing our discussion. I will also post a brief outline so that you can quickly preview what will be discussed.

I hope you are as blessed by this series as much as the four of us were in the process of creating it.

Here is the outline of our first conversation:

Lifecycle of Church Membership (with focus on assimilation)

Key ideas:

1. Ben reviews the Acquisition-Assimilation-Retention-Attrition model from Church Giving Matters.
2. Church membership is a process and mirrors personal relationships.
3. There is great need for church leaders to manage assimilation proactively.

Listen or download the first podcast.

Today’s blog post is taken from a press release put out by LifeWay and ServiceU:

For church leaders trying to navigate the digital age, the challenge can take on biblical proportions. While the psalmist looked to the hills in his hour of need, pastors, staff and lay leaders today find themselves looking to the “cloud” – that place in cyberspace where a host of new Web-based resources and services are found.

It’s all part of the digital church, where multimedia and social networking are as common as hymnals and printed bulletins. And LifeWay Christian Resources is making it easier for church decision makers to access and download a wide range of resources through the new web portal, http://LifeWay.com/digitalchurch.

“We launched Digital Church to provide solutions that will help churches be more effective in ministry,” said Tim Vineyard, LifeWay’s chief information officer. “Ministry leaders now have access, in one place, to a full range of digital resources. Digital Church services and solutions are easy to use and come from trusted resource providers.”

The “cloud services” available through Digital Church include existing LifeWay resources such as WorshipMap Pro and SongMap, the groundbreaking online services that enable users to download and customize worship music; LifeWayLINK, the church Web-site service; and eMediaLINK, the solution for adding online video to ministry Web sites. It also features new services available through alliances between LifeWay and Fellowship Technologies and ServiceU.

Among these new services are:

• Church management software and advanced member management tools through Fellowship Technologies, which provides safe, secure options for churches to manage their sensitive membership data. Fellowship Technologies has state-of-the-art check in systems that are scalable for any size church.
• TransactU™, software that equips churches to set up online giving and event registration. The software comes from ServiceU Corp., a world-class software development company. ServiceU is one of the few companies in compliance with the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standards as a Level 1 Service Provider – meaning customers can have the highest degree of confidence in the security of their credit card information when making online purchases or donations.

Tim Whitehorn, founder and CEO of ServiceU, comments, “The LifeWay name carries a high degree of trust with churches nationwide. We are honored to work with LifeWay in helping churches utilize technology to further their mission.”

Other services and service providers will be added in the months ahead, said Vineyard, who added that Digital Church helps ministry leaders in a number of unique ways: It’s easy to access from any computer with a username and password; it’s highly secure and easy to navigate; and it’s trusted because it features well-known LifeWay resources and LifeWay-recommended services and service providers.

The Digital Church initiative is part of a larger strategy for LifeWay, according to President and CEO Thom Rainer. In his address to trustees earlier this month, Rainer said LifeWay will maintain its historic biblical fidelity, but enhance its delivery systems to keep pace with the digital needs of the church.

Rainer cast a vision for LifeWay for the next decade. “LifeWay will be the ministry leader in the digital world,” he told trustees. “When people think about digital Christian resources, they will look to LifeWay. A digital strategy is critical to our future.”

“We want to provide the best content and delivery that makes a ministry difference to our constituents and customers,” he said. “With cutting-edge ministry resources and a tech-savvy business strategy, we are better positioned and aware of the opportunities that lay before us.”

I’m really excited about Leadership Network’s Online “Aha!” Conference that’s happening this Wednesday, March 3 from Noon Eastern/9am Pacific and wanted to let you know that you can still register for this event – best of all, it’s FREE!!

No, LeadNet isn’t paying me to publicize this event, it just sounds awesome and I can’t wait to hear from Christian leaders all over the country on what was their “Aha!” moment in ministry that changed the trajectory of their careers and lives. The event’s tagline is, “New voices. Fresh ideas.” I don’t know about you, but I could use some fresh ideas.

So click here and register for this free online conference. All you have to do is join online to get an infusion of freshness into your ministry – whatever your position is.

Here’s a quick list of a few of the 40+ leaders that will be sharing on Wednesday:

• Bobby Gruenewald, Lifechurch.tv
• Todd Harper, Generous Giving
• Shane Hipps, Mars Bible Church

Thanks to Todd Rhoades of Leadership Network and Monday Morning Insight for putting this conference together!