If Jesus Had A Website

With everything my family and I been dealing with regarding my mother the past few weeks, I've spent a lot of time sending out prayer requests and e-mails, as well as time on the phone, to keep everyone up to date. Normally, I'm not a big prayer request kind of person (I may ask friends to pray for certain things, but not too many "public" requests), so this experience has made me think more about the process of receiving and distriuting prayer requests.

In my church, we have a special e-mail address for incoming prayer requests that one volunteer checks, and then they send out requests to a distribution list for the congregation. It works fairly well, but does involve some manual intervention to get the requests out. If that volunteer forgets, a prayer request may not go out soon enough.

So, I guess I've had the following thoughts and questions regarding prayer requests:

• How does your church handle prayer requests?
• What's the most effective way to reach a large percentage of your congregation in a short amount of time? Typical options include e-mails, a website announcement and phone-chains.
• Should someone moderate/filter prayer requests (so that requests like "I just burned my toast and I know it's going to be a long day because of it, so please pray for me today" don't need get through), do you just let everything through, or do you trust your members to use their best judgement?
• Would you feel comforable having your prayer requests posted in a church forum or on the website for all to see, or do you keep them to an "inner circle"?
• I think that if prayer requests are very public, some people may be less likely to ask for prayer because they are more private people.
• However, this greater transparency allows congregation members to get to know one another (strengths and weaknesses) at a deeper level, which should be good for the church as a whole.

I'd be interested to hear from you all on this subject if you have the time…

In case you missed it over the weekend, Google will now be reporting subscriber counts for Google Reader and Google Personalized Homepage to feed managers like FeedBurner. As long as I've been using FeedBurner, I've known about the inaccurate counts for Google subscribers, so it's nice to now see that the numbers are much more accurate (in fact, I found that IJHAW has about 20 more subscribers than I realized, pushing it well over the 50 subscriber mark…thanks everyone!).

So, if you've been using FeedBurner for your church website, this should be a good explanation of why you may have noticed a big jump in your counts. Thanks to everyone who helped improve this feature for all us users!

You may have noticed that it's been a little quieter around here the last week, and for the most part it's because I just haven't had the time to deal with the site…

Last weekend, my mother went into the hospital because she was feeling ill and having terrible headaches, and shortly thereafter she was admitted to be treated for a mass in the brain. She underwent Gamma Knife radiation surgery last Wednesday, has been getting daily radiation treatment since then, and may undergo chemotherapy shortly due to fears that the tumor is cancerous. It's been difficult for her and my whole family, as she is a breast cancer survivor, has been clean for over 3 years, and we all thought that chapter of our lives was over.

On top of that, she had just moved with my dad and sister to a new community, nearer my wife and I, less than a week before being admitted, so she's dealing with all new doctors. I also started a new job last Monday before we knew exactly how serious things were for her, and I haven't had the option of taking days off. Then this past weekend, the transmission in my car broke down on one of our trips to visit her and my dad, and it looks like we'll need to search for a replacement.

It's been difficult, let alone all the other stuff that has been piling on, and I know we could all use your prayers. In the meantime, please excuse the sporadic updating of the site.

Also, if anyone would like to submit a story as a guest author to help fill the void, please feel free to submit them to gnilsen@ifjesushadawebsite.net.

Thanks for your prayers in advance.

In case you, your pastor, or anyone in your congregation doubted the potential in a well-designed and well-maintained website, you can turn them to the FACTS on Growth report and get the numbers to back you up. They're very strightforward and compelling.

Thanks to the Web-Empowered Church Developer blog to bring this to our attention!

Once again, a big thanks to everyone who participated in last month's poll. Sorry about getting to the results so late, but I started a new job this week and the change has kept me busy.

So, our results clearly show us that we've got a lot of people working on the early stages of their websites, which tend to go:

1. "Awesome! I made a website, and it doesn't look half bad."
2. "I learned how to do more things, and now the site looks like crap. Now I'll basically start over again and redesign!"

If you actually uttered those words in that order, no I'm not spying on you. I just pretty much said the same to myself several years ago when I was starting out.

Anyway, I'm encouraged by this because even though not a ton of people were focused on the "bleeding-edge" website trends, it's just nice to see more people actually taking a look at the importance of having a site, and the impression a site design can have on visitors. I'll take a couple dozen of those cases over a handful of podcasting and vidcasting upgrades (no offense to those guys who are focusing on that), because it means more churches are trying to lay solid foundations online and things will likely grow from there.

Regardless of how you voted, keep of the good work everyone!

This month's poll is a simple "Where in the world are you?" question. I've seen some trends in visitors in my Clustrmap, but that tracks visits and not people, so I'd like to get an idea of where y'all are coming from to make sure I'm not missing any important topics that I need to cover in the international theatre! Make sure to swing by the main IJHAW page to vote!

Ok, this is one of those interactive topics where I'm going to ask a question, answer it for myself, and you can respond as well in the comments below. Here it goes:

What tools/software do you use to help you develop and maintain your church website?

Here's my list:

• ColdFusion – The backbone behind all my sites, which I picked up at an old job and get to get back to full-time this coming Monday (YAY! ). Here's some more background if you're interested: Coldfusion @ Wikipedia. I'm currently using version 7, which has built-in features like generating the graphs that I use for the poll results.
• Eclipse and cfeclipse – Eclipse is a great open source development platform for all kinds of languages, including Java, HTML, and CSS. cfeclipse is the plug-in/package that allows for ColdFusion development in Eclipse.
• mySQL – For my databases, staying with the tried and true (and popular) open source database.
• SQyog Community Edition – A great GUI front-end for managing mySQL. This version only has the basic features, but it's still very good. For MS SQL 2000 people, think Enterprise Manager and Query Analyzer in one.
• IrfanView – I'm no graphics guru by any means, but IrfanView is my favorite image manipulator. It's small and powerful enough for most of my use.
• TinyMCE - This little package handles the textareas in my sites (like the comment area below) to both ease of input (WYSIWYG) and security (restricting allowable tags in the input). Two birds with one stone, and very customizable (each textarea can have it's own settings).
• Web Developer Extension – I use this Firefox toolbar to help me test, debug, and validate my code. Also works with several other browsers.

Well, that's everything I can think of now, at least for the bulk of my work. What do you use? Got any packages you really like you think others could use?