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Launched my new site design here at Goodmanson.com. Hopefully you all have a much more pleasant experience as you lurk click around the site. I added a new Church Planters Resources section to list some of the things I’m involved with to help church planters. You’ll probably see some changes as I add/edit things over the next few days…

Church Planting Resources has been relaunched with a new design and backend system. It is now 83% SEXIER. Church Planting Resources is a site created for those who are involved in church planting and running churches. The goal is to provide a free exchange of information to help build the Kingdom and ultimately spread the gospel. It provides free articles on things such as how to file 501c3's, Sample Articles of Incorporation, Sample Constitution, By-Laws and Statement of Faith and a host of technology tips, resources & guidance for churches.

DO YOU HAVE A CHURCH PLANTING RESOURCE you'd recommend? Now you can submit suggestions and help the nearly 1,300 church planters who have signed-up with Church Planting Resources.

Imago Dei was selected by ChurchBeauty - church websites that inspire. This site has a number of great church websites for you to take a look at and get ideas from. Other sites listed include The City Church and Dulles Community, which have received lots of praise at Godbit. At Church Beauty, you can also filter sites by categories like churches whose website are css-driven or churches that receive high marks for their church’s website usability.

Church Plant Media signed up with Ekklesia 360 in the Fall last year. They now are landing 2 new clients a week for our combined companies. Pretty sweet. I’m going to fly to Orlando to the 2006 National New Church Conference to support their booth. (I also get to hang-out with all my friends from Acts 29, so I’m jazzed about the trip.)

Good read at Church Marketing Sucks: What Web 2.0 Means for Your Church. [Again, this is why we created Ekklesia, Sermon Cloud, ChurchAgent and many more to come...]

What does web 2.0 look like inside the church? What happens when we apply the same web 2.0 attitudes to church marketing?

* What if your church web site wasn’t just another place for information, but what if it was a connecting point for community?
* What if your congregation provided the content instead of your pastor (or in addition)?
* What if events were proposed, planned and put together by the people in the pews?
* What if the church staff did less and the congregation did more?
* And what if money wasn’t an issue?

Do you see where this is going? Suddenly you don’t have an overworked communications team doing all the updates. You have youth group members maintaining an online events calendar. You have a Sunday School teacher posting lesson notes on a blog and the learning suddenly happens outside of the classroom. You have older members of the congregation sharing their wisdom with younger members. You have people sharing and people connecting. Suddenly it’s not the pastor trying to do everything.

It’s exciting to hear this talk. It seems a lot of this conversation is happening but has yet reached it’s way down to the local church. What will be interesting is when the local churches start to ‘get this’.

We just launched Sermon Cloud as a tool to help churches use advanced sermon syndication. It is in BETA form with a handful of churches (12 and counting) signed up to start using it. Features include:

- Resampling mp3’s to be optimized for the internet.
- Syndicating content
- Podcasting mp3
- Tags (as sermons are added you can see the tag cloud on this site)
- Commenting on sermons
- Community voting to recommend sermons
- Searching for sermons
- and more…

NOTE: We have paused the release to get our first round of BETA churches up and running. We are still taking 100 add’l churches for our next round of BETA’s.

This month is going to be a very busy month at Ekklesia. New Life Presbyterian launched this month and now we are working on LifeSong, Rio Vista, Fuel Church and next month our pipeline is extremely full already:

4/3 City View
4/3 Adventure Church
4/3 Vineyard Church

4/10 Western Hills Baptist
4/10 Bible Church Intl

4/17 PDP
4/17 The Springs

4/24 Meadowbrook
4/24 Antioch

5/15 Acts29

It’s a good season as Ekklesia will be represented with Church Plant Media at the National New Churches Conference in April and a few other conferences coming up. Our goal is nothing short of total world domination in the church content management arena!

Joe Vasquez posted an positive review of Ekklesia Church Website CMS on his blog. Ekklesia is also mentioned on the Blog Ministry site.

One of the coolest things I noticed about Ekklesia’s software is how easy it is to manage sermons. Not only can you easily manage based on topics, series, and speakers, but adding files is a snap. You can easily upload the audio version of your sermon and make your site a podcast. Podcasting is an easy and effective way to reach people. BloggingChurch.com brings up a good point with its post “Podcasting = Increased Attendance“.

Joe provides screenshots and description of a number of Ekklesia’s features. He summarizes:

A website is an investment, a must have for today’s harvest. A person’s first stop for looking up churches to visit is the Internet, more specifically a search engine. A well written, well implemented, and properly administered website will open doors and allow a church to reach people in a niche commonly overlooked.

We’re glad to see people’s positive responses and we have had a large number of churches sign-up this month for the Ekklesia Church Website Content Management System. Coming soon will be affiliate and referral programs for bloggers looking to make some extra cash!

Ok,

I finally took the time to upgrade my blog and change the design I had!  Let me know what you think….I still have a few tweaks to finish it up.

Mike Atkinson has a good series to help churches think through their use of websites and technology.

Ok, I just saw that Fellowship Church launched a new website. I’d love to get your opinion about it….

Question: If you weren’t a Christian, what does the site convey to you about our faith? About Jesus?

A new website is launched: Church Technology Review is a website for churches to read reviews of church-focused technology (both specifically designed for churches and general companies) so ministry leaders can research solutions prior to selection.

I’m a sucker for technology. I love every 2.0 and processor upgrade out there. If you’re like me here’s a couple resources:

- 15 Tech Concepts You’ll Need To Know In 2006
- Introducing XUL - The ‘Net’s Biggest Secret (just when you got tired of hearing about AJAX, get ready for a wave of XUL stuff.)

Try a live demo of a XUL application.

I’m continually amazed at how little the church is utilizing technology for the furtherance of the gospel. [On the flip side, this is going to be a BIG year for us as we launch numerous churches on the Ekklesia Systems platform. Further, we have a number of other surprises in store that we will be launching to help equip the church for the work of online ministry.]

According to a new study about Churches and the Internet conducted for LifeWay Christian Resources of the Southern Baptist Convention, 1 in 4 churches neglect the ministry potential of the Internet.

• One out of every four Protestant churches in the United States has virtually no involvement with the World Wide Web despite the emergence of the Internet as a leading communication medium in the 21st century
• Only half of all churches provide staff with e-mail, and just under half maintain a website.
• 23 percent of Protestant churches use e-mail prayer chains, 18 percent have an e-mail church newsletter and 4 percent have an online member directory.
• Among content less likely to appear on a church website are Bible study material or helps, sermon transcripts, upcoming sermon titles or topics, sermons available in streaming audio, a bulletin board, forum or chat room, sermons in streaming video, testimonies and a way to donate online.

View a chart of this… (more…)