Vision 100 IT takes us back to School

Thanks heaps to the Vision 100 IT team. This evening I spent a good while (along with leaders from a bunch of churches) thrashing through how to best use our various IT systems to manage our data and communicate with our church, and beyond.

Here are their six things on 'How to do IT well':

1. The pastor has to own IT. It's about consistency of vision and communication.
2. Have regular content, up to date content.
3. Get your 'Key Person' - you need that person. To update content.
4. Key Systems - get a sense of what you need and how to write that. Regularly oversee it with your key person.
5. Coordinate/Integrate all of your communication.
6. Make it Look Good - if it looks crumby people will think its dodgy. Quality of photos matter. It all matters.

Some Advice on using Social Media

• If your ministry or church isn't on Facebook, it's not on the Internet.
• All of your staff have gotta be on there.
• For members and visitors to see your involvement in ministry, in your particular ministries, then they see how you work and where there are opportunities to serve.
• Don't think of Facebook as a commercial front door, think of it as a window on your gathering, a window into your church. Incidentally, that way it actually becomes a commercial front door.
• Embrace the change: make Facebook for your church. Make your website for your visitors.

Some Warnings from the Graveyard of Social Media.

• Don't blindly link between social media--Facebook to Twitter linked, but then only commenting on one of those. Death.
• Facebook events are potentially where your ministry dies. If you don't invite people, post the image, include times, places, etc. then there's no point having it.

Some Best Practices in Social Media (esp. Facebook)

• Events: Fill out the detail first, when you begin.
• Don't put stuff into your page which is likely to change and get outdated unless you're confident it will get updated (so write a procedure). Provide links to your website, which will be updated.
• If it's announced up the front, then it should feature in your social media.
• Feed (some of) your new website content to your Facebook page.  
• Write a procedure to creating events on Facebook (or doing other things). Procedures for social media are a good and helpful thing (especially for delegating, quite apart from helping you out).
• Interaction. Do it.
• Give your posts personality.
• Twitter. Time is the filter on Twitter. Whereas popular posts stick around on Facebook.
• So e.g. rosters posted to twitter won't really get caught by many people.
• Organisations on Twitter must post regularly.

Why you should Focus on the Wrong Things

Welcoming guests, getting in touch with them afterwards, and then helping people 'break-in' to our church community, are things we've been working at recently at Crossroads. And that's meant a whole host of small changes (and many more to come).

But what I'm discovering is this: it's only when I focus hard on making one thing happen, that some-other-thing that gets me really excited comes into view. And if I'd never put in the effort on plan A, plan B would never have come to light.

Example: I've been trying to devise a 'response card' (or 'contact card', or...) that I'm actually happy with. Finally I go the wording, the layout, the everything, just right. But then Good Friday came along, and I realised that I didn't even want a response card. What I wanted was a Guest Book--something I'd never even thought of before. But here's the thing: the guest book took me about ten seconds to produce, because I'd done all the thinking on the response card.

I focused on the wrong thing, and the right thing came into view. I'm very happy with the result.

Check it out here.

Remembering Repentance

In preparation for this Sunday's Easter service at Crossroads--hey, you should come if you can!--I've been writing a sermon on one of Luke's resurrection stories. It's a ripper. Luke 24:36-49. But something that's really hit me is a reminder of the place of 'repentance' when the New Testament talks about people becoming Christians. Particularly, I'm wondering if that biblical emphasis is reflected in my (and, our) preaching.

Here's how Bock puts it (long quote, worth it):

“For Luke, repentance is the summary term for the response to the apostolic message […] Change in thinking (i.e., a reorientation) is basic to human response to God's message. People must change their minds about God and the way to him, especially their thinking about sin, their inability to overcome sin on their own, Christ's essential role in forgiveness, and the importance of depending on him for spiritual direction. Those responding to the apostolic message of the gospel must come to God on his terms in order to experience the forgiveness that comes in the name of Jesus. But repentance means more than changing one's mind about God. People must also change their minds about who they are and how they can approach God. Repentance involves turning to and embracing God in faith. Forgiveness of sin comes to those who stretch out a needy hand to Jesus, clinging to him alone and recognizing that without him there is no hope.” Bock, Luke (BECNT), 1940.

These two things gripped me: "Repentance"; and, "without him there is no hope"