Lauren Hunter

Having a great 'about us' page is one of the best ways churches can do a great job of sharing who they are, their mission, their beliefs, and giving people a glimpse into your church culture. This website page is also sometimes called "Who We Are" or just plain "About." Whatever you call it, there are some fundamental topics to cover in this section to help first-time guests, visitors, your community and your members have all the information they need about what fuels your organization.

You might have found yourself in this kind of a situation that I found myself in: You're running your church website which is built on WordPress. You have swapped out the events for the week, you've added the pastor's blog post and scheduled it, then you check the front end by going to your church's site. Something has gone wrong.

Graphics design and social media go hand-in-hand. For the church communicator and pastor who need to have all social media channels firing at all times, knowing what sized images and graphics to use both for personal accounts as well as for church social media channels is very important to appear professional and engaged. 

I have to admit, buying a smartphone is not what I call fun. If you have piles of cash hanging around, perhaps you enjoy this process, but for the rest of us, figuring out what device to invest in is well, not a walk in the park. If you have a large mobile carrier such as AT&T, Verizon, or some other big name carrier that charges a few dollars shy of a mortgage payment for phone service, you might be able to get the latest and greatest phone, or amortize it over several years so that you aren't really aware of how much it's costing you. Once you know what plan, you can take a look at the battery life, operating system, storage size, and other features that help define your smartphone experience. 

We recently shared some tools and options for pastors to utilize video to save time in ministry. Today, we're going to take a look at using video specifically in ministry to encourage, connect, and inspire your congregation as well as assist your worship team in learning their music. Video is a pretty amazing tool - the sky's the limit in terms of all its many uses, in many different 'zones' of ministry. 

With the advent of Pokemon Go and all the excitement last year with this augmented reality game, more technologies have been released and are currently being developed to take advantage of both augmented and virtual reality--both in secular and religious applications. In case you're already confused about what the differences between these two technologies, below is a helpful infographic with information to clarify what defines each technology.

You know the scene. You succumb to your elementary-aged child begging to play Candy Crush on your phone. Ten minutes later, your phone is down to 50% and it's only 11:00 am. You're rushing to a lunch meeting and as you hand your child back to your spouse to take an urgent call from a church member in need on the way there, you discover that your phone is suddenly down to 25% by the time you get to Panera. It's only lunchtime and you have visits and errands before making it back to your desk where you can plug in. You could join a support group for pastors with old smartphones that don't hold a charge well, or you could employ some of these helpful smartphone battery-saving tips:

From smoke signals to social media, communication tools sure have changed a lot over the years. It can be tough to try and keep up when technology has forced so many changes, at such a rapid pace. At the end of the day, getting your message across to your audience still remains a challenge, however, we have more tools at our fingertips as church communicators than ever before.