North Haven Church has a blog called Fresh Blog, focusing on daily insights from the Bible and a quick prayer you could offer up to God.
This is a really neat way to provide daily inspiration to folks who might not even think to pick up their Bible throughout the day. Instead, they can drop by your site.
But something I think is even cooler, although I’m not sure how often they’re using it, is this:
From time to time, you will be able to read the thoughts of other members of North Haven Church, too.
They’ve found a great way to communicate that God is moving in the lives of not only pastors, but other members of the church. Not only does this help people connect with God, it helps people connect with one another.
It’d be nice to see them labeling some posts as “from a member of New Haven” or using another way to mark them as “from the community,” but I still feel they’ve got a great idea here that could be useful to other churches.
Chris Case
June 1, 2009
We’ve got something just like that at our church http://www.feedoneanother.com
Kelly Adkins
June 1, 2009
We are working on more a more interactive web strategy like this at our church (http://www.gogracefellowship.com), but in the few months it will take to ramp it, we’ve just been using Facebook.
For example, we just started a one-month fasting challenge, creating a simple page for people to respond and share their experiences both on the wall and on the discussion tabs. It’s only been one week, but it’s been eye-opening as to what God is doing (and not doing) in the lives of our community. It has been fascinating to watch people encourage one another and connect in a place where they already are.
The Church can’t pursue the avenue of crowd-generated content and dialogue fast enough. It immediately takes the church from being exclusively leadership-to-community to embracing/encouraging community-to-community — faster than any small group ever could.
Luke
June 1, 2009
We’ve been doing something like this on our youth ministry blog for a couple years now. Students will write the Song of the Week, or a devotional, or a short story, or a recap of an event… all great stuff. It’s amazing how many comments we get when it’s the spiritual family (not just the pastor who “get paid to talk about Jesus stuff” posting. Definitely a must for our online space.
Erik Teichmann
June 1, 2009
We did something like this during our capital campaign. We put together a devotional booklet with devotions from a variety of members, and then released one on the website each day.
Rob Dale
June 1, 2009
We’ve been doing that for a few months now, and it’s really allowed our church blog to take off. Each week, a number of church members share their thoughts on the talk from that week.
You can check it out at http://wp.bikerschurch.com/?page_id=280
David Squire
June 3, 2009
We’ve been doing an original daily devotional (5 days a week) for about three years now.
Of the 15 or so writers, 12 are “regular folks” — not clergy, not staff, just members and friends of the church. We have about 400 subscribers.
You can check it out at http://www.JesusMCC.org/bestill
Karl
July 3, 2009
Central Vineyard Church as been using a Blogspot page for it’s website for over 4 years. By request members of the church can post things that are happening and church leaders can get information out to the church quickly.
Karl
July 3, 2009
http://www.centralvineyard.com (redirect to centralvineyard.blogspot.com)