Brian Bailey, the Internet Manager at Fellowship Church in Texas, was recently interviewed by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel for their upcoming book on business blogging. You can read the interview transcript here.

The interview, which is well worth reading in its entirety, touched on Fellowship Church’s use of blogging in its ministry.

The part of the interview which intrigued me the most was Brian’s answer to the question, “How has (blogging) changed perceptions of the church?”. Here is a portion of Brian’s answer to that question:

The increased openness that blogs have encouraged has helped people feel a greater sense of connection with the church, whether they are local members, curious seekers, or staff and leaders from other churches. We have sought advice from other churches and brought a sense of community to our shared mission.

I like it because it confirms something I have said before (here and here and here): people want to hear an authentic voice and blogging can provide an avenue to share that authentic voice with a larger audience than just church members.

Thanks to Brian Bailey’s blog, Leave It Behind, for the heads up!

David Posthuma of E-Church Essentials recently sent me an email to introduce me to his ministry, and I was intrigued by what I saw.

The first clue I had that something was a bit different about E-Church Essentials was the inclusion of a video testimony on one of the sample church websites to which E-Church Essentials points visitors.

One of my biggest hesitations about church template providers has always been their systems’ apparent inflexibility to handle the model I advocate for church websites (a series of profiles of real people within our congregations being used to intrigue unbelievers and leading them to face-to-face relationships with believers around common interests and life experiences). E-Church Essentials appears to provide an easy way for the stories of real people to be added to a church website which I find quite encouraging.

David has also posted a good introduction to his philosophy of online ministry on his blog. This presentation, which covers a general introduction to online ministry, current internet culture, and an interesting approach to online ministry which he calls his Ministry Matrix, can be found here.

Dean Peters wrote a masterful essay yesterday about how continuing to add solid, fresh content to our websites will result in greater traffic to our websites and to our physical gatherings. I especially liked this excerpt:

Not convinced? Let’s go back and take a look at JesusIsLord.com. For all the ‘love notes’ I received over my original review of this site, it still remains as an uninvested talent in the form of a domain name that might as well be hidden in a tin-can on the ground because it remains focused on leading people to Christ - leaving them to their own devices once they’ve prayed the prayer. There is nothing here that answers the tough questions, just a few hyperlinks that ‘hand-off’ a would-be disciple in the fashion of Jack Chick.

Dean is saying something very important here, and it’s something I’m afraid that web evangelists often forget - relationship is the key to any effective outreach, digital or not. If our websites encourage visitors to pray the prayer of salvation but don’t provide a way for visitors to enter into the community of believers (preferably through face-to-face contact with one or more believers in their local area), then I am afraid I have to doubt the effectiveness of the outreach. As I’ve said over and over again, authentic Christian community is the foundation of all effective outreach (cf. John 17:21-23).

JollyBlogger recently had some thoughts about the validity of a cyber-church concept in which believers would “meet” together as a church in cyberspace and not in physical places.

Let’s just not confuse the cyber-community with real Christian community.  We need the incarnational, fleshly, sensual elements to be a real church and a real Christian community. 

If JollyBlogger is correct, and I think he is, then what does that say about web evangelism efforts that are not born out of real Christian community? What does that say about web evangelism that does not result in new believers participating in authentic Christian community?

I try to always keep in mind that the ideal (although it’s not always possible, in creative access nations for example) is that people come to Christ through exposure to authentic, face-to-face Christian community and that our web evangelism efforts are most effective when they are introducing unbelievers to that authentic, face-to-face Christian community.

In a comment on my post below ("Dean Peters on Search Engine Optimization For Churches,” a post which is actually a trackback to a post on Dean’s site), Dean Peters referred to an aspect of church website design which I believe is very important, but which I suspect many church web teams do not employ on a regular basis:

.... my metrics (yeah, I got numbers) show one is better off aiming at people new to town or are looking for a switch or are rekindling a once apostate state with queries that include �denomination/brand + church + location� ... e.g. �baptist church rockville maryland�.

Tod Bolsinger has some interesting things to say in his post Why Pastors Should Blog. What caught my eye especially was Tod’s insight into the way the blogosphere can be used by Christians to intelligently respond to marketplace issues in a timely manner.

I’d encourage you to go and read his post in full.

OSMinistry (The Open Source Ministry Project) is a great website for people interested in the use of modern-day technology by churches and ministries. I just discovered a relatively new forum on their site (their forums are great in general, by the way!) called Blogs and Blogging.

Within that forum, there is a discussion about a church (Jacob’s Well in Kansas City, Missouri) that hosts and aggregates the blogs of its members. See this page on their site to see their aggregation of blog posts.

There is such great potential here for conveying the authentic voice of their community to unbelievers in their local area (and beyond). So many church websites are limited to service times, program descriptions, staff bios, etc. While these things may be necessary (I’m not entirely convinced myself), they certainly don’t convey a complete, authentic voice. Because what really makes up our churches is our people, and we need to relate their stories to the unbelieving community if we ever expect to draw unbelievers to Christ.

I have a different vision than most of how church websites can/should be used. When churches started jumping on the web bandwagon a few years ago, we saw a lot of sites which were not well-designed, to say the last. Sadly, we still see plenty of poorly designed church websites.

Now days, though, we are at least seeing more and more well-designed sites in the church arena. Some of that is due to church webmasters becoming more proficient at their craft. Some of it is due to the proliferation of companies offering template-based solutions to churches and ministries (while some may decry the “cookie cutter” approach of those companies, at least they don’t offer templates with spinning crosses and blinking text!).

As church websites become more and more usable and attractive, I believe that the next question we need to ask ourselves as a “community” of church webmasters is, “How can our websites be used most effectively?” Personally, I see very few church websites that make me think that the people responsible for the church’s web presence have spent much time considering that question.

Many churches (and other groups such as Bible colleges) are planning to mark the first Internet Evangelism Day on 24 April. By using a downloadable PowerPoint presentation, video clips, dramas and other resources, they are creating a custom ‘do-it-yourself’ non-technical focus slot, to share with their members the enormous potential of the Web for effective outreach. Part of the program is how to make effective church websites.

For more information, visit InternetEvangelismDay.com.

Mike Boyink commented on the last post and added that a blog-based church website should have entries which “move past the ‘things are happening at our church, and you really should come to a service’ type posts.” (make sure to read all of his comment, not just the part I’ve quoted!)

It’s such an important aspect of the concept, that I thought I would use this post to draw attention to Mike’s contribution and then add an additional thought of my own.

I couldn’t agree more with Mike’s perspective! Too many churches use their websites to focus on programs, staff, services times, etc. But those things really aren’t the life of the church. The true life of the church happens (or should happen) outside the four walls of the church building (if the church meets in a building) - as believers meet each other over dinner, at skating rinks, on walks around the neighborhood, in classes together, etc. And that’s the life that our websites should reflect - the joys and struggles we encounter in our daily lives and how we celebrate with each other in the joys and support each other in the struggles.

Online conversations via a blog-based church website are a great way to express that life, as long as they eventually lead to face-to-face relationships.

To see a great example of this, take a look at the website of the church Mike and his family are a part of: Manna in Holland, Michigan

JollyBlogger, a personal blog written by David Wayne, the pastor of Glen Burnie Evangelical Presbyterian Church in Glen Burnie, Maryland, has recently written about a new beta website for his church (for those who don’t know, “beta” simply means they are in a testing phase).

The new website uses TypePad, a popular blogging service, and it definitely has a blog-feel to it - complete with a three-column look, lists of recent posts and comments, a photo album, categories, etc.

What is most exciting to me, however, is that the church has decided to take a big leap and leave the commenting system open so that anyone can add a comment (or a trackback) to entries on the front page of the site.