MondayMorningInsight.com brings relevant news and leadership tips to over 23,000 church leaders on a weekly basis. Yes, it gets delivered via email on Monday mornings! And did I mention it was free? Sponsored by ChurchStaffing.com, also a great resource for church leaders, they have also started blogging daily at http://mondaymorninginsight.typepad.com
-- an excellent quality resource!

With 86 percent of college students using the Internet, several ministries are beginning to reach out to them online. Everystudent.com confronts college students with the claims of Christ in nonthreatening and attention-grabbing articles, and also provides an archive of streaming video with unscripted life stories and invitation to e-mail dialogue with five people (that changes every 15 minutes). IamNext.com sports a tagline of: where college and university students are going. DeeperDevotion.com encourages students to know God more intimately, through daily devotions, journals, forums, and suggested readings.

www.VirtualChurch.com is an online "church wherever you are", with worship services that's custom (randomly) generated for you to attend by listening. (Windows Media Player 9 or greater required) Traditional worship delivered over streaming audio with over 365 billion different services possible. They call it guided selection by the Holy Spirit. Brought to you by a ministry network that also includes MountainWings.com -- reportedly the world's largest inspirational email, with over 1 million daily subscribers in over 125 countries, TheOnLineWord.com -- large archive of sermon audios, and CryofTheSpirit.com -- inspirational Flash movies.

Four years ago, in an interview with Quentin Schultze from 2000 titled What the Internet Revolution Means for Youth Ministry, Schultze, a communications professor at Calvin College, anticipated how the Web would affect teens' lives and what changes & developments would come on the Internet. One thing that remains true even today is, and I quote, "There will be a two-tiered Web world for the church—the multimedia megachurch Web pages on one hand, and the typical, shoddy church Web sites on the other." Read the full article to see what else came true, and what didn't (yet)!

Joy Leadership Center announced the recipients of the 2004 Entrepreneurial Church Awards. Let's take a look at the honorees and their websites:

Trinity Lutheran Church, Omaha, NE (no website; info?)
Grace Lutheran Church, Loves Park, IL
River of Life Lutheran, Chugiak, AK
Point of Grace Church, Waukee, IA

Apparently the award is for Lutheran churches and their effort at building bridges to serve their local communities, rather than their websites (except for Point of Grace).

Using several of the best search engines, I could only find 1 of them. The other 2 could only be found after extensive research. Sure would have been nicer if their websites were easier to find! And an unintended corollary: one could be doing entrepreneural ministry without an entrepreneural website.

One of the most leading edge of Web technologies is called Wiki, an open-content document managed on its own website by its website visitors. Depending on how it is configured, any website visitor can add and edit content at a wiki, and the goodwill of people (and volunteer moderators, sometimes) is wonderfully able to keep the content up-to-date, accurate, and growing. Some Christians have launched a wiki at www.theopedia.com to provide a living encyclopedia about all things Christian, including basic theology, Christian issues, church history, religious movements, and more.

This Christian Computing article by Walt Wilson titled What is the Purpose of Digital Technology? takes a step back and considers why Christians should be using technology in the first place with reflections and insights from the Scriptures. A good thing to occasionally pause from the constant flow of technological innovations and to reconnect with a biblical perspective.

How A Local Church Can Have A Global Presence Through Cybermissions is a great step-by-step overview for how your church can have a volunteer team of cyber-missionaries who can minister cross-culturally to unreached peoples at a total cost of between $1,000 to $5,000 a year and see between 100 and 1,100 decisions for Christ. My sense of things is that costs can be even less, as Internet technology becomes more affordable and more people are getting online. Just add sweat equity and stir.

ConstantHope.org offers free animated Christian electronic greeting cards, inspirational Bible verses and music, free church bulletins, and more Bible-related resources! Project Constant Hope is a ministry of American Bible Society to offer resources that give hope and comfort.

This article titled Website Mines Movies for Relevant, Biblical Truth refers to growing numbers of internet resources (websites, for short) that help pastors and lay ministry leaders to use popular movies to explore and illustrate biblical themes. Dr. Marc Newman and a few friends were discussing ways to bring the gospel to young adults, and the conversations led towards how movies have influenced society and how movies could be used to communicate biblical truth. Newman has launched a website called MovieMinistry.com as a subscription service, while other movie-and-ministry websites offer content for free, like www.ministryandmedia.com, www.hollywoodjesus.com, and www.thefilmforum.com. Also see previous eQuip blog entry dated June 30th.

Rob Williams has started a new blog to share his web ministry notes at http://eministrynotes.blogspot.com/ -- it's one more place to bookmark for growing your online ministry! In his opening remarks, he wrote: "To have an effective web ministry you need to make sure you are addressing the many issues involved in marketing, delivery, and response." He defined the terms as follows: Marketing = let the right people know your site exists for them, Delivery = to move someone through your site to desired action, Response = to engage people in conversation for ministry. Visit the website now at http://eministrynotes.blogspot.com/

From an interview with Preston Mitchell, Executive Pastor at Fellowship Church in Grapevine, Texas -- 10 things I didn't know about church until I became a pastor (items related to online ministry in bold):

1. Denominational affiliation is not a priority for unchurched people.


2. The church has to have a clear vision and purpose statement.


3. We should operate our churches as if they were twice as large as they actually are.


4. The church works best when it is staff-led.


5. Churches live and die by the 80 percent rule.


6. We have to keep the fires of evangelism hot.


7. We should hire our staff from within our church.


8. We should pay our staff well.


9. Build your church model around the skill set of your senior pastor.


10. Creativity is a must.

AllAboutGod.com is a compelling website that reaches out to skeptics, seekers and a hurting world with powerful evidence for the Christian faith. According to the website, each month thousands of visitors come to their website and hundreds tell about their profession of faith or recommitment. With 2 staff and over 80 volunteers, they're doing online ministry! Visit the website to see how they do it.

"You've known for years that the Internet offers new ways to expand communication and ministry, but you're not exactly sure what to do about it. You've heard about "creating community" on the Web, but there may be a strong dissonance between what you hear and what can be done." In Church Executive's "Make technology work for your church" , read this conversation with four Silicon Valley technology leaders about maximizing your Internet strategy. Read full article.

Internet Ministry by Ex-Witch Helps Pagans, Witches Find Jesus

"A Web-based ministry is helping pagans and witches find Christ. The conversations center on Jesus at ExWitch.org, although many of the visitors have pledged themselves to false gods. Kathi Sharpe once offered incantations as a witch and her soul to false deities. Now she offers Jesus to many of her former cohorts of the occult through her Internet-based ministry, www.ExWitch.org. The ministry's site is comprised of a series of public and private message board forums. Since its March 2002 inception, ExWitch has processed more than 100,000 postings." Read full article online.

DigiTracts.com is a visually attractive website with many online evangelism presentations and resources. Online presentations of the Gospel can be viewed, downloaded, emailed to a friend or stranger, or even embedded onto your website.

Your church or ministry can do more online than just having a website. Imagine a way to provide your vital information and data online, as described here in this Church Executive article: "... church Web sites provide a virtual front door to the sanctuary and a logical entry point for members, visitors and seekers. But just as the Internet holds great potential for spreading an organization's message via a Web site, it also holds great potential in how an organization manages its vital information. By taking information management online, organizations can make key pieces of data accessible to more people regardless of location, date and time." Read the full article.

Review of Evangelistic Christian Web Sites is a web site research project consisting of 956 reviews of 306 websites. Five college students at Taylor University (three women and two men) participated. While this was not a comprehensive project, it is a starting point at evaluating some evangelistic uses of Christian websites. (Note: this research was done in 2002, so most websites have changed since the time of research). Visit the website.

"One Church, Many Websites" A church can have more than one website for its ministries and its church life. One church in Southern California has over a dozen different websites. Here are a few of the websites associated with Saddleback Community Church:

www.saddlebackfamily.com - for members, this is their 'inside scoop.' On this site, church members can link to specific sites for All-Stars (kids), Wildside (Jr. High), HSM (High School ministry,) CRAVE (College), Elevation (Singles), each of their purpose teams, and more.

www.saddleback.com - for seekers and visitors to Saddleback.

www.purposedrivenlife.com - for resources and free daily devotions.

www.purposedriven.com - helping other Purpose-Driven churches around the world.

www.pastors.com - ministering to pastors for over 20 years.

The Lausanne Committee's 2004 Forum for World Evangelization began last week, and is actively keeping everyone informed via their website! Their Forum Media and Communications Team is providing Daily Forum Updates and a Daily Blog from Thailand about the latest happenings, including the latest thinking and recommendations from 31 issue groups. The Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization (LCWE) is an international movement for the purpose of encouraging Christians and churches everywhere to pray, study, plan and work together for the evangelization of the world.

TroubledWith.com is a collection of articles, resources and referrals organized by topic around family issues and concerns. Their goal is to help families by providing complete coverage of issues including a brief introduction to each topic, an overview of the issue at hand, Q&A with experts and tips for making things better. Particularly worth noting is their promotional tools page, and how they've made it very easy for website visitors to tell others about their website. (TroubledWith.com is an outreach website of Focus on the Family.)