Congrats to The Rock, Ames Iowa , a branch of Stonebrook Community Church launched on Ekklesia 360 Church CMS. Matt Heerema at Direct Steps developed the site, end-to-end, (planning, design, integration into the CMS) the logo is by Relevant Solutions and the CMS is Ekklesia.  

Features

• Valid XHTML 1.0 Strict, CSS 2
• Custom Planet integration for blog aggregation.
• Powered by the Ekklesia system.
• Blog, Podcast, RSS
• A Flash featured announcement banner powered by SWFObject
• Photo gallery using phpFlickr and the Flickr API to integrate members’ Flickr photos.

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.

Ekklesia 360 relaunched our website and we’re proud to announce that we have six design companies that are now partners. If your church needs a website here are the companies to contact:

Church Plant Media specializes in creating custom web sites for church plants. Through the process of working with many church planters, they recognized that the majority do not have the financial resources to create a custom web site. Church Plant Media was born to help church planters in this situation.

Aaron McClung Design is an award-winning design firm specializing in high-end custom designs. AM Design often integrates flash and cutting edge web design for churches.

316 Design is a design firm with many years of experience designing high quality professional graphics and advertising material. Their experience and professionalism can deliver for any church’s need.

MindLightning Design Group In today’s progressive society, successful churches are deploying culturally-relevant websites to create a response and impact lives. This process reaches beyond graphic design. MindLightning offers web design, print production, outreach planning, brand management services, and photography to aid churches in conveying their message of hope. The words and images you use to communicate should be bridging the gap between your church and your community. What are you showing them?

Rockbeatspaper is a design consultancy that creates simple, elegant and intuitive websites for churches and corporate clients. Rockbeatspaper has deep knowledge about web standards and modern design.

Direct Steps is spearheaded by Matt Heerema. Entering the field as a programmer, Matt has six years of experience in the Web design business. He has background in each aspect of the Web development process, and is currently obsessed with user friendliness in graphic and interface design.

Interested in becoming a Design Partner?

We continue to seek excellent partners to build the best websites for churches. If you would like to offer your church clients a state-of-the-art Content Management System and more or if you have tremendous church design experience, please contact Monk Development.

Imago Dei Community (designed by their community with the Ekklesia Church CMS backend) launched today. This is one of the more ambitious Ekklesia installs to-date with a large site, 1,000+ people in the community and tons of data. Congrats to them on their hard work and the new launch. While you are there, I recommend Rick’s preaching to anyone!

[Speaking of re-designs, I changed the look at Goodmanson.com too!]

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!

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

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 just got my first Drucker book in the mail from Amazon, The Essential Drucker : The Best of Sixty Years of Peter Drucker’s Essential Writings on Management. This is a busy year in developing ministry leaders at our church so I’m trying to read a lot of resources on leadership to help equip our people.

Book Description: Father of modern management, social commentator, and preeminent business philosopher, Peter F. Drucker has been analyzing economics and society for more than sixty years. Now for readers everywhere who are concerned with the ways that management practices and principles affect the performance of the organization, the individual, and society, there is The Essential Drucker — an invaluable compilation of management essentials from the works of a management legend.

Containing twenty-six selections, The Essential Drucker covers the basic principles and concerns of management and its problems, challenges, and opportunities, giving managers, executives, and professionals the tools to perform the tasks that the economy and society of tomorrow will demand of them.

Any other good suggestion on leadership books?

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…)

A great article that lays out a case for proper usage of your website. Here are a few highlights:

1. Your target audience for church growth is Internet-savvy.
Most church growth comes from what we call the 18-to-18 range – people from 18 years old to families with 18-year-old children. This also happens to be the group with the highest Internet usage…..
2. Your Web site will be your “first impression” for many people.
(People) will often make their “first cut” shopping list before they ever come to town.
3. If you’re not on the Web, you don’t exist to many people.
A 20- or 30-something person is much more likely to use the Internet to find church service times than to look in the yellow pages or newspaper. Our informal surveys have shown that many young college graduates don’t even have yellow pages in their homes. My teenage daughter didn’t know theaters listed movie times in the newspaper – she gets them off the Web.
4. Seekers will visit your Web site before attending your services.
Savvy organizations are using the Web to educate visitors and encourage them to take the next step.
5. A whole generation exists that will seek “religion” online.
In his book Boiling Point, George Barna projects that 10 to 20 percent of the population will rely on the Internet for all of their spiritual input and output by 2010.
6. The Web site is too critical to be run by a volunteer.
7. You can’t afford a cheap site.
With a high percentage of your potential visitors viewing your Web site before they visit your congregation, you can’t afford a poor quality site. All the time and money you have spent building your congregation’s resources and reputation are worthless if people won’t visit the first time. Visitors are judging the values and programs of your church from your Web site.
8. People are viewing your current Web site right now.
(Read full article 8 things pastors need to know about e-ministry)

These cover a few of the reasons why a group of churches decided to build Ekklesia Systems. We have found it is far to important to have a well designed internet strategy to enhance the work of furthering the gospel in our cities. January is going to be a huge month for us…come back as we announce Ekklesia launching:

The Acts 29 Network
Imago Dei Community, Portland
Kaleo Church, San Diego
Desert Breeze Church, Los Vegas
New Life Presbyterian Church, La Mesa
Grace Church, San Diego
Eastridge Church, Clackamas
City View Church, Dallas
Bay Area Community Church
Life Song Church
and the list goes on…..

This fall, six couples joined Kaleo Church’s eight week pre-marriage class. The remarkable thing is, only one of these couples had attended Kaleo for more than three-months prior to the class. The other couples sought out a church because they decided to get married. Marriage is one of those events that cause people to reflect on their life, and frequently, people want to find a church to help them in this season. These people often bring (drag?) their non-Christian fiancé to church with them. It is in this moment, that the church has a great opportunity to communicate the gospel. In our case, two of those who attended became Christians while in the class.

Pre-marriage classes are just one of the many opportunities your church has to gather people into Kingdom mission. There are numerous windows in people’s lives such as pregnancy, moving, job loss, children growing up, marriage, death, counseling, etc. But let me explain how 10 people joined our church using pre-marriage as the example. Several months ago, Kaleo created a page on our website about San Diego pre-marriage counseling. When couples in our area search for san diego pre-marriage counseling, Kaleo ranks #1 on Google [and who doesn’t use Google?]. It is through this that all five of the couples found us on the internet. (More couples contacted us but opted against our 8-week Pre-Marriage course once they learned about our adherence to Scripture).

This is just one technique to use the internet for the spread of the gospel.

Case Study: How you can gather people to your church through search engine optimization for premarriage or any other ideas.

New Kaleo Church Website…coming soon. We’ve built the framework (nice web standards/css) for the new site. It’s going to be nice to finally move from table based designs on this one. We’re moving all the content now into the Ekklesia System (this is saying a lot when you have 100’s of articles and sermons!). But man, is it going to make life easier when we’re using ES from now on. Also, the url’s will be rewritten so instead of

/teaching/teaching.php?content=the-gospel-and-our-finances.html
/teaching/the-gospel-and-our-finances/

Which will have an added bonus for ease of use and SEO.

Ok, now throw out some suggestions. What does every church website need? What do you think is critical to have on the home page for visitors? I’d love to hear your comments as we finalize it. Also, if you have any great graphic design people who want to throw their hat in the ring, I’d love some cool images….