Archive - March, 2010

A bold mission demands bold living

March 4, 2010 in for Churches, Outreach

Avis car hire has a bold mission statement (or tagline). I’m sure you’ve seen it:

Churches have mission statements too.

  • College Park Church has the mission: “Igniting a passion to follow Jesus”.
  • Church by the Bridge has the mission: “Living for Jesus. Loving like Jesus”.
  • Redeemer Presbyterian has the mission: “Seeking to renew the City Socially, Spiritually and Culturally”.
  • Covenant Life Church has the mission: “to build a community of gospel-centered people.”
  • Emmanuel Church has the three-fold mission: “to glorify God – Father, Son and Holy Spirit by listening and responding to God’s word obediently;
    loving one another practically; and proclaiming Christ boldly”.
  • St Andrew’s Cathedral has a slightly longer mission: “To glorify God by proclaiming our Saviour the Lord Jesus Christ in prayerful dependence on the Holy Spirit, so that everyone will hear his call to repent, trust and serve Christ in love, and be established in the fellowship of his disciples while we await his return”.

These are mission statements set big expectations.

What’s the mission statement for your church?

The challenge for us (and for Avis) when we set and then promote these mission statements is to actually live up to them.

Too often, corporate mission statements are dreamt up in board-room meeting of the marketing executive, who forgot to tell the staff that they should actually try harder. (Avis – this hasn’t been my experience with you – you just have a mission that’s easy to use as an example!)

My point is, too often the behaviour doesn’t come close to matching the mission – there is a disconnect between the bold mission of the company, and the people who have face-to-face contact with the customers (i.e. the people who actually need to implement the mission).

And as a result we cause harm to our brand, or more importantly in our case, tarnish the reputation of our God.

We need God’s help to live out these missions. We really need God’s help. But, by God’s grace and with his power at work within us, we can live up to these bold missions.

And when we miraculously do, all the glory goes to God.

Video: Holy Subversion

March 3, 2010 in Christian Living, Videos

I came across this video on the Crossway blog. It’s a little different to the videos I usually post here, which are intended to be played in church. This video is to promote a new book – Holy Subversion. I’ve posted it here because it taps into something I’ve been feeling troubled by lately – that people don’t often ask me about the hope that I have. And I wonder, as this author does, if my hope looks too similar to the world around me.

Holy Subversion from Crossway on Vimeo.

Tools for ministry: Clicky

March 2, 2010 in for Churches

Here’s some questions for you:

  • how many visitors does your church website receive?
  • is this number increasing or declining?
  • what are the most popular pages on your site?
  • how long do people spend on your site?
  • which page are people most likely to leave your site from?
  • how many people are viewing your site from their mobile phone?
  • what do people search for to find their way to your site?
  • what do people search for when they arrive at your site?

These questions are answered by using an analytics application, and analysing this data assists to continually improve your website to ensure it is useful to those who visit it.

I’ve used a couple of different analytics applications, namely:

There’s a limit to the number of analytics programs you can use because the more you use, the slower your site will be. So I’ve limited my analytics to two applications:

  1. Google Analytics, and
  2. Clicky

Google Analytics is the industry-standard and a no-brainer. However, there’s so much data available and so many ways to view it, it can be a little bit overwhelming. This is where Clicky enters the scene, and provides not only an application that is very easy to use, but one with its own secret weapon.

Clicky’s Interface

First off, the interface. Here’s what the dashboard looks like (click to enlarge):

The data Clicky provides is comprehensive – traffic sources, web browsers, operating systems, countries, cities, searches, downloads, clicks – if you can track it, Click reports on it!

It’s also very easy to view your visitor data on your mobile device (if that’s the kind of thing you like to check out while you’re on the move!):

Clicky’s Secret Weapon

However, here’s the main reason I use Clicky. Clicky has a feature that not even Google Analytics provides. Real-time data. The data that you view in Clicky is real-time – you don’t just see what happened yesterday or three months ago, but you can see what’s happening on your site now. How many people are on your site, what countries they are from, who referred them, what they are looking at. This is known as ‘Spy’ , and it’s a really useful tool. You can:

How Much?

Clicky provides a free version, but the Spy function isn’t included. I use the ‘Blogger’ plan at US$4.99 per month – it’s not free, but it’s close enough! I use this for 98% of my analytics activities, and occasionally pop back into Google Analytics if I’m after some super-complex data (which isn’t very often!).

I highly recommend it.

And if you decide to use it for your church website, can I ask a favour? Click on this link to Clicky (http://getclicky.com/59007) – or any other link that I’ve included in this post. Why? If you click on one of those links I’ll receive a small proportion of your payment for referring you. It’s not much, but if you were going to sign-up anyway this will help me keep Communicate Jesus running. Thanks.

Ideas for using technology for the good of the gospel

March 1, 2010 in Christian Living, for Churches, Outreach, Pastors

This weekend I’ll be presenting a seminar at the church weekend away on the topic ‘ideas for using technology for the good of the gospel’.

What would you speak about?

In what ways would you encourage your brothers and sisters to use technology?

Does your church website have a mobile version?

March 1, 2010 in for Churches, Outreach

On the post ‘What content management system does your church use?’, Brian asked a question about mobile versions of church websites, i.e. websites that can be easily viewed on a mobile device, such as a Blackberry or iPhone.

Brian’s questions was specifically about ways of creating mobile versions of websites, but whilst I have no experience with building mobile sites, I thought I’d show you what my church is doing. The mobile site our developer built is – http://i.cbtb.org.au/, and here’s a screenshot:

One of the features I particularly like about this version of the site is that it makes it easy to follow along with the church’s daily Bible reading plan. On the bus or train on the way to work, people can look up the verses for today’s reading, and view these verses on their phone.

Does your church website have a mobile version? And, linking this back to Brian’s question, how did you create it?

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