Being and Becoming Virtually Religious

2012/03/27 By 1 Comment
faith communities today

“Virtually Religious: Technology and Internet Usage in American Congregations," the latest Faith Communities Today (FACT) report, provides insight into the current role of technology in churches by means of an aggregated data set that includes responses from over 11,000 congregations affiliated with over 120 denominations. Congregational use of technology continues to increase: During the most recent decade (2000-2010) congregational use of email and websites more than doubled: email Read More …

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The Day My Blog Didn’t Appear on Facebook

2011/11/22 By Leave a Comment
Facebook2

Social media is designed to be social.  With so many users leveraging multiple channels, many tools exist to make it easier to share information across channels.  While I no longer use Facebook as much as I once did, I have continued to import my blog posts as notes.  A few days ago, I received the following message when I logged on to Facebook: Changes to How You Share Content in Notes You currently automatically import content from your website or blog into your Facebook notes.  Starting Read More …

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Review of The Church and New Media

2011/09/09 By 1 Comment
The_Church_and_New_Media

Meet the Authors Brandon Vogt is a Catholic layperson who blogs about theology, technology, social justice and books at ThinVeil.net.  Vogt contributes the text's introduction and conclusion while relying on authors with varied backgrounds and expertise to contribute the chapters:  Father Robert Barron, Jennifer Fulwiler, Marcel LeJeune, Mark P. Shea, Taylor Marshall, Father Dwight Longenecker, Scot Landry, Matt Warner, Lisa M. Hendey, Thomas Peters, Shawn Carney.  Additionally, the book Read More …

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New Church Growth Via Social Media

2011/09/01 By 1 Comment
out of the box

Out of the Box Worship Center in Hillsville, VA is a non-traditional United Methodist  small town church that is gaining attention for its dramatic social media driven growth. Launched in January 2011 as an extension of First United Methodist Church of Hillsville, VA, the new church start has grown enough to need two services in their 180 seat worship center. So What? Out of the Box's pastor, Ronnie G. Collins, stated, "When the church first started, we placed one full-page ad in the Read More …

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Your Church’s Social Media Goals

2011/08/05 By 1 Comment
adam bowers

Adam Bowers, owner of Adam Bowers Media, recently blogged about the advice he gives churches about creating social media goals.  Since there is no universally accepted standard of success and no simple way for parishes to determine how their results compare to other churches, he presents a solid framework for developing a social media strategy: Do your homework – research pre-existing social media use at your church. Before you can formulate goals, you need to make sure that those Read More …

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Why Your Ministry Should Have a Blog

2011/08/03 By Leave a Comment
guy_chmieleski

Guy Chmieleski has served in campus ministry at four institutions of higher education associated with three different denominations (Baptist,  United Methodist and Church of Christ).  On his blog, he shared his own experiences as a blogger, a bit about a presentation on why blogging is important that he made recently to the United Methodist Campus Ministry Association, and four reasons why he will be integrating a blog into his campus ministry work and thinks other ministries should Read More …

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Misleading Blog Post Titles

2011/05/20 By 1 Comment
headlines

I write about matters of faith that matter.  Many of the ideas for my posts are birthed by content on blogs I frequent on a regular basis or ones that are recommended by some of my many friends in ministry on Twitter. Over the last few weeks I have encountered a number of misleading blog post titles.   While some creativity is essential in crafting titles, it should not extend so far that the title has no real link to the topic(s) addressed. So What? As a result of my recent Read More …

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Toward A Christian Response to the Death of Osama bin Laden

2011/05/05 By Leave a Comment
MarkHanson

Osama bin Laden’s death has been a lead news story for the last several days.  Over the course of the week I have read a number of tweets, Facebook status messages, and blog posts commenting on the matter from a Christian perspective.  These reflections represent a wide range of theological beliefs, including a number that place United States citizenship above one’s place in the reign of God and sound quite unChristian.  In contrast, I offer the words of leaders from two of the mainline Read More …

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Theology in a Post-2004 World

2011/03/14 By 1 Comment
John Deyer

After writing about Philip Clayton's “Theology and the Church After Google: How This New Age Will Change Christianity” a few days ago, I found myself in several discussions about the topic.  One of my conversation partners directed me to an article John Dyer wrote on the topic for Christianity Today's guest opinion column "Speaking Out," which was published this past weekend. Dyer is a graduate of Dallas Theological Seminary where he is now employed as Director of Web Development. Read More …

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