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Archive - March, 2009
Will video kill preaching?
At the Next Wave Ezine, Bob Hyatt writes an interesting article on the rise of video preaching (one preacher being broadcast to campuses of the same church) and the dangers this presents. Bob explains – “we’re talking about the death of preaching in evangelicalism by all but a small handful of Celebrity Communicators who have little knowledge about those they teach from such far distances.” Read “Video Venues: The Death of Preaching“.
108 Easter books for $1 each
Desiring God has a great Easter special. They are selling cases of books, audio books and booklets at crazily cheap prices. For example, get 108 copies of “Fifty reasons Jesus came to die” for $1 per book (plus shipping). Check out the rest of the offer here.
There are lots of reasons to love the Desiring God ministry. Here’s two:
- They offer many of their books (including “Fifty reasons…“) for free download. If you want to download it and print it, you can.
- How’s this for a pricing model:
“If you can afford to donate more—great! If you can’t afford $140.00, then we will accept whatever you can afford. If God gives you a vision for distributing these books, we trust that he will supply the funding to get them out.”
5 (useful) links #1
It’s an amazing world out there, online. Things are changing, growing, developing (and also dying) every day. Every now and then, I’d like to share with you some websites and online developments that don’t necessarily have a clear link to ministry, but are interesting to check out to learn how our internet is changing, and the opportunities these changes might present. Of course, there might be little to no application for ministry – I might just share links that I’ve found curious, quirky or cool! Here’s 5 to kick us off:
- NoPhoneTrees is a great concept, giving you the numbers you need to press when calling an organising to speak to an actual person (i.e. skip through the ‘press 2 if your call is about a bill, press 3 if…”.
- Day Counter allows you to put in any two dates, and it will tell you how many days there are between those two dates. Useful for working out how many days since you last…
- Worldometers has some fascinating statistics on our world with counters ticking over to display what’s happening in the world right now. Want to know how many babies have been born? What about military expenditure by governments today?
- Woot is an online store that just sells one product per day. Interesting concept – I’m sure there’s good savings for the seller and the buyer when bulk items are put up for sale.
- Charity: Water is a charity to provide clean and safe water to people in the developing world. It’s a nice looking website (which first caught my attention), and a good cause.
Easter at Church by the Bridge
Following my post about Easter media resources, Jeremy Halcrow asked what resources I would use if I was putting together an Easter service. I thought I’d share some of the ways my church (Church by the Bridge) is promoting Easter services to the community, and some of my thoughts on the best media to use.
We’ve produced a postcard (front pictured below) to be delivered to each letterbox in our parish. We’ll also be handing out these postcards at a fair trade market we’re holding this Saturday. On the reverse of the postcard are the times and details for each of our Easter services.
This is complemented by a banner on our website (pictured below). Many of the visitors to our church come via the website, and we’d like to ensure that any people who receive a postcard in the mail can easily see when they visit the website that we’re the same church.
Church by the Bridge will hold nine services over the Easter weekend, running with the theme “Words of life and death”. Some of these services will be traditional (such as the 8am classic Anglican service), whilst others will attract a very different crowd (e.g. the 6.30am dawn service under the Harbour Bridge, with hot cross buns and coffee).
I’m still thinking about what media would be appropriate for the different services, and also given the theme. I would like to interview people in the community about what Easter means to them. I think the personal interview is a good way not only of making contacts in the community, but also of displaying some real thoughts and opinions that might resonate with newcomers, but also give regulars insight into what other people in the community might be thinking. For example, we did some vox pops last year during World Youth Day:
What happens when you die? from Church by the Bridge on Vimeo.
I’m not sure any of the suggested videos will tie in with what my church is doing, but I think that some of the imagery will be powerful on PowerPoint slides in communicating visually that some of the important themes of Easter. I’m also keen to produce a video that focuses on words and their power, (hopefully helpfully) relating back to the theme.
Is your church running with a theme this Easter? What media will you use to support your communication of that theme?
