As 2010 approaches and Restore completes our 2nd year, I really want to examine our website.

• What’s works?
• What’s missing?
• What needs to go?

How would you answer the following questions about your church’s website:

1. What do you love the most about your website?
2. What would you most like to change about your website?
3. What’s that 1 thing that you dream of adding to your website?

Thanks for taking the time. I really admire and respect the work you do for the Church.

Jennifer Taylor, who writes the Buzz article for The Christian Standard was kind enough to tell our text messaging story from Restore. Thanks Jen.

Here’s her article:

Rich Text
Believers have shared prayer requests for centuries—but only recently have they shared them via text message.

To wrap up a seven-week series on the Old Testament, leaders at Restore Community Church (Kansas City, Missouri) wanted to guide the congregation in praying about its major themes. In week six, Restore invited everyone to opt-in for a week of prayer reminders by texting the word “testament” to a specific number. Each person who signed up received one text message each day the following week.

“For instance, the first series theme was blessing, so the first day we sent a text message asking people to think about how God had blessed them and how they could bless others,” says Tommy Bowman, creative arts director. “The message invited them to reply with a short texted prayer. We did this each day and collected all the answers.”

On the following Sunday, week seven of the series, Bowman displayed more than 50 of the anonymous prayers during worship.

“I edited out the very personal ones and copied others into our presentation software,” he says. “The band played a song, and we asked everyone to silently pray these prayers along with the person who had sent the message.”

A Restore member created TextCaster, the software used to send the messages and organize the responses, and he was eager to help the church use it in some way.

“But we never use technology just to do it—it must further the mission of the service,” Bowman says. “This also succeeded because we introduced text messaging for a specific time and a specific reason. So we built trust with our church which enables us to use this technology again.”

More than 170 people signed up to participate, and even more found it an especially meaningful experience.

“People saw their own needs in the words of others, and commented on the privilege of praying for them,” says Bowman. “People connected to these prayers.”

www.restorecc.org

Last week, we as a church prayed together for 7 days. How’d we do it?… with our phones.

In service we had everyone pull out their phones and opt in for a week of test messages. For the next 7 days, a message was sent out guiding everyone through their prayer for that day. Each day, the pray lined up with a theme from our seven week Testament series:

1. Blessing
2. Waiting
3. Testing
4. Wrestling
5. Dysfunction
6. Discovery
7. Reconciliation

We had a great response and last Sunday we we’re able to pray everyone’s prayers as a community as they were displayed on the screen. Here’s a preview:

• Thank you God for allowing me to walk through tough times in order to have a greater compassion and influence in others lives. Show me these opportunities!
• I am waiting on God to show me peace…my heart is so heavy I find it hard to be alone with my thoughts.
• A job. . . and please help me to never again be confused about who ultimately is the great and true provider.
• Father give me wisdom and strength to get through the loneliness and to raise children in a broken home.
• God you have helped me realize that You were there even through my addiction waiting for me to come back to You.

Whether you attend Restore or not, join us for our 7 day Testament Prayer.

To sign up, simply text “Testament” to 74574. You’ll receive a confirmation and then your prayer instructions every morning for 7 days. You’ll then simply reply back each morning with your prayer. Hope you join us!

Kem Meyer of Granger Community Church is on a blog tour with her book and I’m happy to be a stop. I gotta a free copy of the book too:

I polled my readers and asked “what should I ask Kem?”- Well I’m going with a question about social media from Scott Clayton of Life Connection here in KC. (Thanks Scott. I got a copy of the book for ya!)

Here’s the Q&A:

Q: Is social media the new wave of communication from the church to the unchurched? If so, how might we best use this medium to maximize impact in our cities?

A: I don’t think social media is a new wave of communication from any organization to their audience, but from the audience to the organization.

The number of social media users is up 87% since 2003 (no distinction between churched or unchurched) and now outnumbers email users for the first time. In the past year, the time spent on social networks increased 73 percent, Nielsen says.

Worth noting; the smartest organizations are using social media to listen to what customers and competitors are saying. They don’t jump in with the self-centered perspective of “here’s another outlet for us to talk.” They use it as an opportunity to deliver great customer service fielding real-time questions and customer feedback—good and bad.

You choose which audience to respond to and which to absorb, but without looking through that social network window…you risk making decisions about your church based on incomplete or inaccurate information.

If a church isn’t ready to set up a blog, Twitter or Facebook account, I think that’s ok. At a minimum, churches should be searching to see what real people in their community are saying about their faith and experience at church. Here’s three places to start: Technorati, Google, Twitter

Thanks Kem for stopping, for the great answer, and for the book!

So Kem Meyer is stopping by on a blog tour. I need to propose a question to her about communications strategies at church. What do you want to hear the answer to?

Submit your question below as a comment. I’m picking my favorite question to submit… if it’s your question, you get a free copy of Kem’s new book. (She’s sending 2 and I’m keeping 1). Thanks ya’all!

I'm continuing to think about how to utilize text messaging at Restore. We have the service all setup for us, thanks to TextCaster. Some of the questions I'm asking are: Why? Why not? How? How often?

I found a post from Tim Schraeder on Church Marketing Sucks, where he discusses text messaging at Park Community. Here's what he said:

Reasons why you shouldn’t:

• Because everyone else is. Let’s be honest, so
  often we look and see what other churches are doing and instantly think
  we should do the same. Make sure it’s a good fit for your church and
  your context.
• If people in your congregation are technologically behind. If people are barely using your web site, chances are they aren’t ready to receive text messages from you.
• If you use it as a Band-Aid. Many of us are
  struggling to manage our communications, and you should only introduce
  texting as a means to enhance your communications–not to fix any
  systems that might be broken.

Reasons why you should:

• To lower the barrier between the pulpit and the congregation.
  If you opt to do texting Q&A sessions in your services, it allows
  people the opportunity to voice questions or thoughts they might not
  normally have the opportunity to express.
• To have direct communication. Texting
  enables instant, direct communication with people. It’s not dependent
  on a postage stamp, the printing press and doesn’t run the risk of
  getting lost an inbox.
• To take a sermon deeper. Whether you give
  people the opportunity to ask questions in your services or text them a
  reminder throughout the week. It’s a great way to keep the conversation
  going and remind people of things they can apply during the week.

Things to watch for:

• Get their Permission Opt-in. Don’t go through
  your church database and add everyone’s mobile numbers to your texting
  list. Give people the right to opt in and respect the permission they
  give you to interact with them.
• Avoid spamming. Don’t spam people with
  unsolicited messages. Remember most people are paying the dime for each
  message you send. Only send what’s vital for the church as a whole. Or
  allow individual ministries like youth groups or college groups to
  create their own opt-in lists.
• Don’t replace electronic communication with personal contact.
  One of the dangers of texting is that it can take away from the
  relational dynamic of personal contact. Use texting as a means to
  create community, not to take away from it.

So does your church text message? What are your thoughts on all of this?

It's come up quite a bit recently among our team at Restore. From art to marketing to communications, we desire to be innovative, but occasionally found ourselves saying "let's see what church a does" or "didn't church b just do this…?"

Is that wrong?  Can you be innovative without being original? Is being original the goal??

Tim Stevens' timing was perfect. He recently posted on this topic and if you struggle with this, it's a must read. Here's a snippet:

So for everyone in ministry, in business, and in life – strive to be new and original – but strive more to be effective.

Any thoughts on this topic??

What are we singing at Restore this week?? Now you can find out, listen to, and even purchase the music that we are singing for the upcoming Sunday.

So now, every Sunday, that "new song" won't be new to you. Check out the page now HERE

I read the blog Church Marketing Sucks on a regular basis. In a recent post was a clip of a video interview from the Director of Communications at Foursquare Church, Brad Abare. As we try to develop our communication strategy, was as churches have a tendency to copy others. We try to be the church on the cover, and not who we are, the church on the corner.

Check out the video:

Catalyst Voices – Brad Abare on Communication Challenges from Catalyst on Vimeo.

What are your thoughts??