Technology and the Mission: Conference Session

I was able to use Microsoft Producer to take my PowerPoint and integrate the MP3: Technology & Mission Session requires IE which contradicts the web standards I advocate, but I have not had the time to coordinate the PowerPoint presentation with the audio mp3 in Flash.  If you know how to do this and want to, let me know.  :)

Session Description: "There are numerous opportunities for churches to use technology to expand their reach, spread the gospel and gather people to your local church. Come learn practical ways to enhance your ministry and become incarnational-minded in how you do online ministry. Learn from case studies and best practices from churches that have been successful online."

The two main thrusts dealt with (1) how are you as the church communicating to the world online and (2) how are your reaching out to people through the web.  For example, if:

• - American ages 13 to 24 now spend more time online than they do in front of the TV.
• - 64% of wired Americans have used the Internet for spiritual or religious purposes.
• - During usability studies, 88% of web users went to a search engine first to accomplish a task and 53% of searchers didn’t scroll down past the first 4-5 results above the ‘page fold’.
• - MySpace (in terms of market share) is the top site on the Internet.
• - 45% of internet users, or about 60 million Americans, say that the internet helped them make big decisions or negotiate their way through major episodes in their lives in the previous two years

What should the church be doing in response to this?  I presented 4 best practice cases where churches used the internet to reach the lost and minister the gospel to them.