In the midst of a plea for Christian bloggers to network and dialogue together, Brad Hightower strikes a chord in my heart:

When I was a new Christian, the first book I read was “The Selected Sermons of George Whitfield”. Whitfield was an open air preacher from the First Great Awakening. When I walked by a vacant lot in those days, I used to say to my buddies, “Do you see that? That is our pulpit”.

Well, the new mode of proclamation has arrived .... The blogoshere is the open air pulpit of the 21st Century. The open air preachers have arrived.

A couple of reasons Brad’s comments caught my attention:

1. George Whitefield is one of my favorite personalities from church history (for a very fascinating read, consider Arnold Dallimore’s two-part biography of Whitefield - here and here); and,
2. His assertion that the blogosphere and the web are the open air pulpit of today. How true!

Reading this has opened up all sorts of lines of thinking in my heart this morning as I think back to reading about Whitefield and his open-air preaching and considering how that applies to today’s world of web evangelism.

From Niall Kennedy’s blog:

the printing press at the fingertips of the masses

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�.

Dean Peters, of Heal Your Church Website, has some great things to say about how churches should optimize their websites to be easily found in search engines.

The only thing I might take issue with in his list is his advice to include the church�s name, denomination, city and state in the title tag. In addition to appearing at the top of your browser window, the information you include in the title tag will be the text which shows up as the title of the search engine listing.

Here’s my reasoning for not including the church’s name, etc. in the title tag:

1. If your site is targeted toward believers, then most believers in your local area will probably know how to find your church without using a search engine. Even if they do use a search engine, they will probably already be searching on something like “baptist church topeka kansas,” and would assume that the listings which were returned by the search engine would be for Baptist churches in Topeka, Kansas. A title tag with the church’s name, etc. would therefore be a bit redundant (at least for that particular searcher).

2. If your site is targeted toward unbelievers (and it’s my conviction that church websites should be aimed primarily at those who do not yet know Christ), then I don’t think unbelievers will find the name, denomination, and location of your church to be relevant at all. That’s because most unbelievers today don’t think that Christian churches have anything relevant to say to them.

I would much prefer to see churches develop pages which speak to the felt needs of unbelievers (through relating the stories of real people in the congregation) and then set the title tag to pertain to those felt needs.

For example, if a church were to include the story of one of their members who had suffered from cancer, the title tag for that page might read something like “John Smith Survived Cancer.” That title would tend to draw the attention of an unbeliever suffering from cancer much more than a title which read, “First Baptist Church - Topeka, Kansas.” Hopefully, the unbeliever would then click through to the church’s website, become engrossed in John Smith’s story, and eventually want to meet John Smith because his story is so compelling.

When our churches market their websites, I believe we should start with the presumption that unbelievers are not interested in what we have to offer. Our websites, though, if promoted appropriately, can be used to intrigue the lost enough to lead them to consider the claims of Christ (through witnessing His power in the midst of authentic Christian communtiy - once they are drawn to meet some of our number because of our real stories).

All of that being said, I do believe that Dean’s list, for the most part, has some very important advice for church webmasters to consider. If you haven’t visited Dean’s site in the past, I would strongly encourage you to bookmark it (or subscribe to his RSS feed) and visit often.

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.

Dale Lature has some poignant things to say here about web evangelism, spiritual formation, the power of story, and modern-day communication tools. I especially liked this from the end of his post:

I can’t help but feel that the potential for aggregating a powerful “suite” of communication tools is reaching an apex in this day of the dawn of the blog. By combining blogs, dynamic data driven Web sites, web forums, digital photography and rapid maturation of multimedia that is accessible to increasing numbers of folks, the story telling power of the Web has siginificantly matured.

I think Dale and I are kindred spirits - effective outreach flows out of community and the stories of community’s participants. The web is at its best (in terms of being an effective tool for evangelism) when it is telling the stories of real believers and of the communities in which they participate.

A great post by Keith at Under the Acacias about Biblical imperatives to keep in mind while blogging.

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.

Tim Hutchison, medical missionary to Kenya, recently wrote about why he blogs.

Here are his general reasons, but you should go to his blog to read his explanations of each:

To Inform
To Share Our Experiences
To Entertain
To Process The Events of Life
To Challenge Others

A great set of reasons for missionaries to use blog technology!

I first heard of Tim’s site from Church Marketing Sucks who heard of it from John I. Carney

Blog Business World has some helpful suggestions on dealing with comment and/or trackback spam. For Christian organizations, this type of spam can be especially onerous. I would agree with the author that we shouldn’t let the fear of spam keep us from using a blog format for our websites. At the same time, not turning off comments and trackbacks requires that we be vigilant (this is particularly on my mind today as I found approximately 15 instances of trackback spam on this site today - all for static areas of the site that have comments and trackbacks turned off).

Neil Cox, of IndyChristian.com mentioned his newest site in his comment on the post below entitled, “City Reaching.” But I think his new website, called ChristianCityNewsBlogs.com, deserves more play than that!

Dedicated to using blog technology to spread the gospel of Jesus throughout America (city-by-city, neighborhood-by-neighborhood), this new site is definitely worth a visit!

I have a great deal of interest in using the web in city reaching projects. So as I was reading my regular diet of RSS feeds this morning, I was interested to notice DJ Chuang’s post on his Equip blog entitled Reaching Cities. Naturally, I clicked through to read more.

DJ mentions a United Nations report, GodLovesIndy.com, and also a great surprise: our very own ChristianCruz.com.

Be sure to read DJ’s comments as well as one additional link to a great resource for those interested in reaching their cities.

See also:

• Our List of Localized Portals
• A Strategy For Local Internet Outreach, our white paper which presents a vision for using the web to facilitate face-to-face relationships between believers and unbelievers in a specific locality. This represents the second phase of our two-tiered city-reaching vision, with the ChristianCruz concept representing the first phase.