Feasibility of the Average American Church Running a Website

Fun, if for no other reason, it'll expand my own understanding of all these skills. I'm in the process of working through much of this where I am working.

For those that aren't aware, the Internet Ministry Conference is a great place to find things about use cases of ministry on the Internet, though largely para-church. I'll be attending that and would love to see you guys all there. Registration Deadline Aug. 31st: http://www.internetministryconference.org/. I've been signed up for this conference since before it was open to the public back in Jan. or Feb. and have gone twice. It is a great conference and they have a great venue.

As far as going into the world... :-) That's what the guys I'm working with specialize in, we're a mission agency, that's exactly what we do! That isn't a problem here. I may suffer from the "too deep in to see the true problem" syndrome that drupal is recovering from now in the usability area. :-)

The culture thing is important. In my case, this has been best done one-on-one, through sharing my passion and the stories of others. I've been collecting stories about this sort of thing. My mom has been using facebook statuses as her prayer list of late and enjoys being able to use the comment feature to ask details about the people's status and let them know she is praying for them. Another lady I know has managed to pull in a huge group of blog readers who she has exhorted in their Christian walk as young ladies due to her connection with a college and through participating in other people's blogs. Another guy I know has been talking with me about how he can use facebook as a witnessing tool to his son's friends. My wife uses MeetUp as an opportunity to meet other mom's of toddlers, build relationships and share her faith. The Internet maintains the relationships, but the personal connection in real life accelerates the relationships. I can also speak to the way I've had my eyes opened to what the opposing view points really are rather than what a Christian tells me they are by having actual conversations with non-Christians in a non-threatening way. When I sense someone is open to it, these capture people's attention.

In all realism, I find that I'm stereotyped as the tech-guy though. Many people seem to assume the things I like to share are better left with the tech guy and have no practical value to themselves, especially as the age increases or exposure to the Internet decreases. Getting past that is rough. My strategies so far have been to excite my wife about it and watch her share, powerful with women. :-) Alternately, I focus on some other individual with influence. Since coming to FIM, I've seen 1/4 of the board of director's join facebook with some ongoing activity. That's exciting to me and they are increasingly encouraging and exciting about my ministry. :-) That's good for the agency, but it sure helps me a lot to have their support!

:-) Simple Tools is a driving element in my side-contracting business (just check the front page). I want to give them the power of Drupal but hide the complexity. I think we need more people trying to stand up that sort of thing. As has been mentioned, there are services that do so with their own CMS things. My biggest beef with them is that they are very inflexible. A church can't pickup the site and take it elsewhere if they have a problem. They are looking at a total rebuild. In my mind, the greatest benefit of providing the service of drupal hosting for churches with a personal attention is that they can take their database, modules and theme and build their own server from an old P3 running off the church DSL line if they really want to stop paying me a monthly maintenance fee. However, that isn't a priority that most churches probably think to look for.

This is why I gave up on the idea that judging a church by it's website was a bad idea. I just found that in my church hunt, good vision was directly connected to websites that someone could be proud of.