A Few Good Links: Late August Roundup

Today, I just wanted to highlight a few posts from other Christian blogs that I found interesting, and thought others could benefit from.

  • Jim Walton discusses complacency and his recent wake-up call in Called To Complacency. Glad to hear you're doing ok now Jim!
  • Thanks to Dan Lee for pointing out MinistryHome. I'm still just beginning to check things out (my site's here), but it looks like a great service.
  • Also from Dan Lee is a good article about using the Fruits of the Spirit as a tool in blogging. Sometimes in all of our blogging work, we forget the KISS rule. Sometimes we just need to get back to basics, and that can be very powerful as an outreach tool.
  • Strategic Digital Outreach also has an interesing article discussing if we should include a gospel presentation on our websites. It's an interesting analysis, which covers both the benefits and drawbacks of doing so.
Alright, that's it for today.

Blog Ministry flickr Lab

This morning, Dan Lee of Blog Ministry announced the creation of the Blog Ministry flickr Lab. This is his blogging answer to the Church Marketing Lab, and is using it to try and encourage better design on Christian blogs. I think it's a great idea which I had briefly thought would be useful following my first visit to the Church Marketing Lab. Thanks Dan, for bringing the idea to fruition.

I'm eager to get involved! What better resource to bounce new ideas off of than each other?

Link Love: July 7th, 2006

Today I'm sharing with you a few new links I've come across this week. Use at your own discression.

First is the Evangelism Forum, a new place to discuss evangelism practices and experiences. They've also got a category specifically on web evangelism which you may find useful.

Second is a series on Church Website Annoyances by Tim Lehrian on his experiences as IS Administrator for the North Indiana Conference of The United Methodist Church. Check out all five volumes of his work below. It also sounds like there may be more to come!

Third is a bit of fun with The Missionary Game developed by Anders Torvill Bjorvand that was unveiled at the Global Christian Internet Alliance conference. It's free and playable online, and is an interesting foray into the mix of technology and Christian faith.

That it for this edition. Make sure to swing by the main site to vote on our current poll about web-related work experience if you haven't already...I'll be hilighting the results on Monday.

eBible: The Good Book Gone Web2.0

eBible is one of those things I've been following for a while now, but didn't get a chance to play with until recently. If you haven't heard of it yet, it's the latest electronic incarnation of the Bible, this time as a web2.0 application. Honestly, when I first heard of it, I wasn't all that excited, but now I'm beginning to see why it would be very useful.

Because eBible is available in beta by invitation only for right now, I had a hard time getting my first invitation, but finally got to the head of their waiting list on the site and got a direct invitation. The timing of my invitation couldn't have been better either, because I was invited to preach at my church July 9th while our pastor is out of town. So earlier this week, I was doing some searches for verses to compliment my sermon, and I decided to use eBible to do so.

Two features stuck out to me right away:

  • Tagging verses allowed me to place labels on each verse regarding to the topic of the verse as well as why I was tagging it. For a pastor, this could be very useful because you could tag verses by sermon (by date, title, or some other label) to better keep track of when you last used that verse and why.
  • Searching eBible was also much easier because it not only searches the actual text, but all commentaries you have as well. Not only that, but it searches for all forms of a word and not just a straight text search (for example, a search for "anxiety" will search for "anxious" and "anxiousness" among other variations). This makes searching for verses related to a topic much easier.

There are also several versions of the Bible available right now, so you can have your King James or your NASB, among others. You can also purchase commentaries, dictionaries and encyclopedias to search through as well, so the information may never end.

For now, eBible is a great tool to look into if you can get an invitation. While it may not have too many church website applications at this time, if you get in and look at the forums, you'll see there are a lot of add-ons and features that will be coming that could be great resources for any church website (Verse of the Day, RSS Feeds, Reading Checklists, etc.), so eBible is definately a resource to keep an eye one.

Oh, and if anyone would like an invitation to check out eBible, I've got one to spare, so please leave a note below with your e-mail address (in the name at thatplace dot com format so you don't get spammed) and I can get that out to you. All I ask is that you pass on at least one of your invitations (you get 3) to anyone else who leaves a comment below. Then we can share the wealth of this great new resource.

QuickLinks: More Food For Thought

Just a few QuickLinks this morning to provide you with some more food forLinks thought when it comes to your church website (this also happens to be much of my daily reading list):

  • The Appian Way - Thoughts on using technology to spread the gospel.
  • Blog Ministry - About web evangelism and ministry through blogging.
  • Church Marketing Sucks - One of the more more popular Christian sites on the net, pushing the envelope on how and why we should better clarify the truth of Jesus Christ.
  • Christian Web Trends Blog - From the web host and designer OurChurch.com, this blog is a relatively new addition to the Christian Webmaster community.
So if you're looking for some other places to get ideas for your church website, there's a few to get you started. Of course, If Jesus Had A Website will always be here with new ideas as well!

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