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.

I believe that the internet provides today's church with a historic opportunity .... to tell the old, old story of Jesus and His love in ways which could only have been imagined in times past. The objective of this website is to explore the various ways in which today's technology can be used to spread the gospel around the world.
