From the video section of USA Today, Church uses technology to reach members highlights the ways that Christ Fellowship Church (McKinney, Texas) uses an online Bible study guide, QR codes, Facebook, video streaming and podcasts to provide spiritual services to their church members.
As Jesus said, “My house shall be called a house of prayer” (Matthew 21:13), the internet does open up this possibility for more prayer to be housed at a church’s online presence. One huge (under-utilized) opportunity for online ministry is having a place for submitting prayer requests on a church website.
You can do this easily with a web form that either is a widget embed code that you copy & paste onto your web page or you can link to (a sample list of free and paid services listed):
On the December edition of Tech Steward Tuesday, we talk With Kenny Jahng (@kennyjahng on Twitter) about how Liquid Church is using social media and YouTube to put together a Virtual Choir for this Christmas!
[note on video: skip to 4:30 to start of interview, sorry for the mismatched audio levels and background noise]
On the November edition of Tech Steward Tuesday, we talk With Ileana Ortiz (@countrycuban on Twitter) and Seth Reineke (@sethreineke on Twitter) about how their churches are using social media.
(DJ Chuang) I’m honored to be invited to present at the Worshiping in the Matrix: technology in communication, culture, and the church conference via Skype video chat. Here are the slides from my workshop titled “Choosing Social Media that Fit Your Worshiping Community,” where I introduced several churches as examples of how they’re using social media to connect with God, to connect their worshipping community, and to extend their Gospel ministry; and also listed key questions to choose the right social media and web apps to fit a particular context.
interview with Tim Hutchings, who researched online churches in 2010, conducting “an ethnographic study of i-church, Church of Fools and LifeChurch.tv’s various online manifestations”
On this October livecast of Tech Steward Tuesday, we mentioned upcoming events for church tech leaders / professionals and meandered about the topic of megachrches — which is a context where tech is more vital to its production and program that it is often a staffed position.
Church IT Roundtable
regional and national roundtable events for Church IT professionals
On the September edition of Tech Steward Tuesday, we cover the topics of technology reliability (or lack thereof) and developing a content strategy for a typical church.
Come back again next month for another livecast of Tech Steward Tuesday, on October 11th at 2:00pm Pacific Time (5:00pm Eastern).
During the past several months, I’ve been researching and testing webinar solutions to host live web-based events that allow a presenter to interact with an audience. This was in preparation to offer livecasts and seminars here at the Tech Steward blog and also for online training at Worship Leader Magazine. I want to share with you some of our findings so you can save time looking for a webinar solution.
One of the challenges in finding a solution that’d work well is how different companies will use the same words but mean different things. An online event could be called a web conference or a web meeting or a webinar or a webcast and all of those may be used for online education, teaching, training, coaching, presentation, collaboration. And to do these web events, each platform offers different features — we were particularly looking for ones that had these features:
audio by either VoIP (voice over IP) or dial-in conference call; few had both integrated
webcam video of presenter
recording as a downloadable video file
cross-platformw with no downloading and installing extra software
Practically every webinar platform does allow the presenter to run through powerpoint slides and provides interaction via a chat room. Then the features diverge from there, as does the costs. So depending on the features you want, the experience you’d like to have, and the how much you can afford in your budget, here’s the short list of webinar platforms that we considered among our finalists.
The 3 most popular webinar/ web-meeting platforms have been around for several years, and have a fairly robust set of features: GotoWebinar, WebEx, Adobe Connect. Other newer platforms have a fresher “look-and-feel” design or streamlined fewer features that make it easier to use:
iLinc – very configurable for different kinds of meetings
GlobalMeet – very streamlined, great look; phone only, able to call attendees so they don’t have to dial-in
MyWebEvent – simple and quick, free for 3 people; screen-share, recording
AnyMeeting – free ad-supported webinar solution with robust set of features; or, ad-free for paid webinars using their registration process
Fuze Meeting – lots of features; has iPhone app and iPad app
MeetingBurner – currently in beta, looking to “reinvent” web meetings
In all, I took a look at over 60 web-meeting platforms. Each of these webinar solutions could be categorized as one of the following: 1. presentation-centric; 2. video-centric; 3. course-centric; 4. collaboration-centric/ discussion-centric. These general categories helped me to better understand why certain solutions had a certain feature set. In other words, depending on the kinds of online meetings and training that you’d like to have, one solution would work better than another.
There was a tech war going on. This rehearsal in a new church had frustrated musicians demanding EQ settings, monitor level changes and lighting fast reaction from the audio engineer. The stage was barking back at the booth. The booth was scowling at the stage. The “us and them” mentality was clearly present and one thing I knew I had to tackle as soon as possible. A full on Tech War was in place.
The Sound and Tech Team are Worship Leaders in my opinion as much as anyone else leading on the platform just as the architect who designed your church building makes a theological statement about your values. The leadership of Tech and Audio is a spiritual leadership.
How has your church developed its strategy for social networking and communications? Please share an example & we can learn together. Thanks in advance!
