Our men’s group (which is actually the Baptist Men’s group within my church’s Brotherhood department) meets once a month and we’ve struggled over the past couple of years with several issues related to attendance. One issue has been up-and-down attendance (for example, 12 one month, 24 the next month, then back to 12 the following month). Another issue has been alternating participation where we might have 12 people two months in a row but they might not be the same 12 people. The two main problems with having a different group each time is that a) if you’re trying to conduct business and make decisions from one meeting to the next, you find yourself having to start over each time you have folks who didn’t hear the prior month’s discussion, and b) if you had both sets of 12 people at the same time you’d have twice the attendance at that meeting.

So, how can you use online video to help solve some of these issues as well as enhance your group in general?

1. The tradition with our men’s group is to have a meal with each meeting. And most months we prepare the meal ourselves. One of our favorite meal ideas (and probably yours as well) is to grill out (hamburgers, hot dogs, etc.). So why not capture some fun candid video of the guys cutting up and enjoying the festivity of the meal portion of the meeting?

2. Another standard element of our regular meeting is a 7-minute devotion. Post this to your site and it not only promotes the value of your monthly meeting but it can also minister to a much wider audience than just those who were actually there in attendance.

3. Community projects. Beyond the regular monthly meeting, our men’s group gets together for special weekend projects in the surrounding community. One example is a tradition we have of raking leaves in the fall for elderly families and widows. Occasionally we might remember to report back to the church during the Sunday morning announcements that we had a successful Saturday raking leaves, but posting video of this — with both a fun side and a serious ministry side — could encourage someone to join the group and be a part of that important service to the community.

4. Mission trips. Our men’s group just got a disaster relief trailer to help with recovery efforts following a disaster such as a flood, hurricane or tornado. Especially since this is a new project for the group, it would be a great idea to get video of any excursions with the trailer so that the church can see the equipment — as well as the men of the church — in action. And, there’s the same point I made about the community projects: men in the church who aren’t already involved may be inspired to get involved after seeing video of a meaningful mission trip.

5. And of course for practical purposes, it might not be a bad idea to capture the business portion of your meeting on video so those who miss a meeting can get caught up between months.

This might be as good a place as any to throw in a few thoughts on the video production itself. Personally, I’m a big believer in being true to who you are as a group. Don’t try to “fake an image” for your church by having expensive looking, highly polished, over-edited video just for the sake of having that, that simply doesn’t represent who you are as a congregation. And don’t feel like you have to spend a fortune on professional video production if you don’t have the budget for it. Round up a video camera, hand it to someone in your youth group and tell ‘em to go to town with it. Casual, candid video content can probably tell a prospective visitor to your church a lot more about who you are than an expensive production can. And you certainly don’t want to mislead anyone and have them be disappointed when they physically visit your church.

So here are my brilliant ideas:

1. Video a virtual walkthrough of your classroom facilities
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2. Capture some impromptu video of a Sunday School class in progress (just make sure it’s not a boring one — we have one class at my church that laughs its way through half the Sunday School hour)
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3. Hold a high attendance Sunday where you issue a fun, “embarrassing” prize to the Sunday School director if you meet your high attendance goal (a crazy hat, outrageous wig…whatever) — and have him or her wear it the following Sunday for the camera
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4. Replace your regular Sunday School hour with a Sunday School fellowship and have class members give the camera reasons why they love their Sunday School class (sounds cheesy here, but if you get the right people on camera you could get some really great material to edit later).


5. Go from class to class and have each teacher personally invite folks to join their class the following Sunday; thoughts should be prepared in advance so the teachers have polished comments to share with the camera that introduces them as a teacher, what age group they teach, the size of their class, etc. — selling points for that particular small group.

Sounds simple enough, right? Play around with it. See what you get. And see if it works. Create some kind of mechanism within your regular Sunday School process to determine, when you have a visitor, what brought them there. If they say, I saw the video on your website, you’ll know it works.

So let’s circle back to a point I halfway hit on a few lines ago. Custom designs are “likely to take longer and cost more” and a lot of times that’s taken as a negative. But watch how fast I can argue that from the other direction. A lot of times you get what you pay for. One business reason why website providers offer ready-to-go templates in the first place is because they can be very cost-effective for them as well. The less conscientious developers may release the fastest, most least inspired designs they can come up with in order to maximize their profit. Of course, not all are like that, but some certainly are. On the reverse side of that, the more time you spend on a custom design and the more meetings you have to discuss it and refine it, etc., the better the final product is likely to be. And if you get something in the end that you and your congregation are truly proud of that will carry you a good many miles down the road, it could well be worth the extra time and money invested in the custom design process.

But let me flip my own coin on the whole, “their site looks just like mine” issue. There are several ways in which templated sites can be made to look different from one another even though two sites may be based on the same ready-to-go design. In some cases, there may be multiple variants of a template available for use (red, green and blue versions of the same design for example). It may also be possible to add a logo or other unique features to a selected template in order to reduce immediate similarities. With some providers (E-zekiel is an example of this) you can actually select different templates for each Web page…which means your combination or assignment of the templates throughout your site could easily be different than the selections made by another church throughout their site, even if you’re using many of the same designs.

Hm, let’s see. How else can we approach this. What if you change your mind? Or, worse yet, what if your mind is changed for you via staff turnover, new church leadership (e.g., deacons or church council members), indecisive committee members, etc.? If you feel like this is a high likelihood within your organization, there may be some value to considering the templated approach. In many cases there’s no extra charge to switch out a template with a new one. (But you do need to check this out beforehand as some providers do charge for design changes.) Whereas if you do go through the whole custom design process and pay for that, and not to say you’re stuck with it, but it would probably not be cost effective and a good use of your time to frequently change the site going from one custom design to another unless you actually have planned to do that and have budget set aside for that.

This point is a little difficult to explain but it makes sense to me (more or less). One of the pros to going the custom route is that you have the opportunity to work with a professional Web designer one-on-one to explain your vision and have them turn that vision into a reality. My counterpoint to that idea is that some folks are not really able to articulate what it is that they want or like. In my day job for instance, I work with clients all the time that can’t begin to tell you what they want but they can tell you instantly if they don’t like something once they have something to look at and comment on. Obviously this isn’t insurmountable for a Web design team, but, by the same token, if you go the ready-to-go template route, you can pull a selection of templates from the library and present those three or four examples to an individual or a committee and have them simply select the one they like the best out of that assortment.

Some providers also try to offer the best of both worlds in different ways. For example, some providers offer “tweaking” services where, for a relatively nominal fee, you can have them customize a ready-to-go template. So this introduces the idea of a hybrid approach. You might like most of what you have with the pre-existing template, and with just a few minor changes you’re left with the feeling or the outward impression that this is now customized or custom designed for your church; but without the full process and expense of a 100-percent custom design.

What do you think?

Please chime in and let me know which side of the fence you land on. Which direction has your church gone? What experiences (both good and bad) have you had with either approach?

But I think one of the real appeals of the site (to me at least) are the extras you get to play with. You can “Amen” sermons to show that you enjoyed and would recommend that sermon, you can leave comments, tag sermons, let other people see your favorite sermons, add photos, and you can create and save personal playlists of sermons.


The four buttons at the bottom of each entry are to listen, download, log in and view feed respectively.

A Random Take

Obviously there are fundamental reasons why a site like this one is important. One, it’s a way to minister to the online community. Two, it’s a way to promote your church. But I’d like to take another, fairly specific angle to the discussion of online sermons today just for the sake of this article. My church started looking for a new pastor about a year ago after our long-standing pastor retired from the ministry. Our pastor search committee received over 150 resumes for consideration in addition to referrals and others they were interested in looking at as a potential candidate for our church. Several members of the pastor search committee have talked about how invaluable online sermons were in the search process. Choosing a minister is a delicate and incredibly important step for any church. In the past, you might be able to visit a minister’s church once or possibly twice to hear a live sermon on a Sunday morning or you might receive a tape of a hand-picked, pre-recorded sermon from the candidate, but with the wealth of online sermons that are available today, you can come a lot closer to getting a real, honest feel for a pastor’s style, level of energy, theology, philosophies, etc. from a broader sampling of the preacher’s material. You can listen to one or any number of sermons, you can listen to them in a controlled environment where you can properly focus on the message, and you can e-mail links around to other members of the search committee to share recordings of interest. Not to minimize the overall usefulness of a site like Sermon Cloud, but, especially with the ongoing state of the economy, finding the best possible fit for a church staff position can be a tricky and complicated process. Having a library of sermons like this from potential pastoral candidates from all over could be a very useful tool in the quest for a new church leader.

A Little More of the Technical Side

This is all fairly straight-forward, but the sermons are available as streaming audio and they can either be played directly on the site, downloaded, or added to a playlist. The dialog box for the streaming audio contains all the basic features you would expect…play, stop, pause, beginning, end, volume, repeat, etc. You also have some options for viewing the playlist showing in the window.

So how easy is it to find a sermon on a particular topic though? That’s a good question. Just playing around with the Search tab a little tonight, I tried searching for the word “love.” This brought up a long list of sermons either with love in the title of the sermon or love in the title of the church that posted the sermon (e.g., “The Love of the Father” and “First Love Church” were two of the entries the search engine returned). I tried several keywords and since all of the search returns had the keyword either in the title of the sermon or in the name of the church, it didn’t look like there was any way to search for the keyword where it may have been mentioned somewhere within a sermon message. Of course that sort of prompts a whole other technical discussion, but it doesn’t look like Sermon Cloud has that functionality yet. But I could be wrong. But you can sort the search returns a few different ways…by date posted, title of the sermon and by number of downloads.

And as far as the “Amen” feature goes, it looks like most of the sermons posted have 0 Amens. The highest ranking sermon of all time on the site only has 18 Amens. Sermon Cloud is powered by Ekklesia 360 though, so I’m sure the site will be getting more and more traffic as it matures and more folks start to post to it and use it.

Does your church post to Sermon Cloud? How well is working it out for you and your congregation?

“There’s An App For That.”

You know, you used to hear people say all the time, “I just need time to sit down and do that.” Now you just pull out your handheld portable device of choice and take care of it while you’re still walking, never mind the need to sit down. If you’re interested in— and have the mental bandwidth to — maintain your website on the go, Squarespace does offer a lot of versatility in the ability to edit your site remotely from your iPhone. You can post and edit blog entries, upload photos, preview updates, access traffic statistics for your site and a bunch of other cool stuff. For the more ambitious Squarespace users, you can even manage multiple accounts at the same time. Here’s a quick breakdown of what you can do from your iPhone:

View Site Statistics

You can view the number of unique visitors to your site, the number of page views, popular search terms, RSS subscribers, top referrers and that kind of thing.

Manage Content

You can approve posts, edit drafts, and delete and publish content.

Preview Your Site Online

A full-featured, live preview mode lets you see everything on your site to make sure it looks the way you want it to before you publish any new or updated content.

Post To Your Site

As one example, you can snap a photo on your iPhone and post it directly to your Squarespace site. You can also compose blog entries and publish them from the Post tab.

Manage Multiple Accounts

If you’re up for it, you can bounce back and forth between multiple Squarespace accounts. You can post a blog entry on one site, finish a draft on another, and check stats for a third all from within the same app.

Edit Your Posts

You can draft a blog post on your iPhone and schedule it for publication at a later date and you can edit it at anytime. You also have access to your categories and tags through the app.

Upload Multiple Images

You can upload, order and manage multiple images attached to a single post.

Online/Offline Editing

If you’re in an area with low reception, the app allows you to compose and save messages directly to your phone’s internal memory. When you have decent reception again, you can just hit “Sync” to push posts to your live site.

How Do I Know If Anyone Is Really Accessing the Material I Post?

This is an excellent question, and one that you should probably know the answer to. Just to create an extreme example, if only one person has been to your church’s online photo gallery in the last six months, is it worth all the time and effort involved in compiling the photos, making final selections, renaming the files as necessary, resizing, optimizing and posting those files? What if someone is spending up to 10 hours a month managing this gallery. Is it really worth it for one user? Or, you could ask the question, “why?” Why aren’t more people accessing this resource? Do they not know about it? Is it difficult to get to? Is it difficult to browse? Are they not interested in the events you’re posting photos of?

And keep in mind that there are dozens of different ways to look at traffic on your site. In other words, it’s not just about how many people see your home page. You can look at first-time visitors versus repeat visitors on a page-by-page basis anywhere on your site. You can look at how many people access a particular PDF. You can look at how many people use a link to an external website. And you can also determine at what interval you want to look at this information. Weekly maybe, in between Sundays? Or perhaps monthly? Or, you may even want to monitor the traffic daily or possibly even hourly if you have something time sensitive going on that week. Once you understand what is going on with your site you can look at how effective or ineffective you feel it is in providing usable, meaningful information to your congregation.


Example of site traffic information generated by the Squarespace platform for a Squarespace site showing daily site traffic.

And that brings up another good point. Who is your site really geared toward? The church member, the occasional visitor to your church, or the potential visitor who is checking out your website trying to decide whether or not they want to physically visit the church? I ran into this briefly a few weeks ago in discussing my own church’s website. Organizationally within the church certain programs fall within certain areas with certain people over those areas. So, of course, there’s a degree of logic in organizing content on the church website based on that structure. After all, most people who attend the church know where those things fall because they know who’s in charge of them. But someone with no knowledge of the inner workings of your church wouldn’t necessarily know to look there. It’s not intuitive to them. So, buried or cryptically placed content on your site could lead to a reduced number of page views. If there’s conflict involved in organizing the material the way you, as the webmaster for example, would want to organize it, there may be a third option that could at least help. If a piece of content needs to be placed or buried where it’s hard to find, maybe you could create a featured link to it somewhere on the home page. Or maybe create a redirect, special landing page or special search term(s) to help make sure people get there easily and that it’s sufficiently promoted.

Where Do They All Come From?

Another dimension to site analytics you may want to consider looking into is the idea of IP geolocation, where you can attempt to ascertain the city, region or country of the visitors browsing your site. This would tell you if you have potential church members in the immediate area, or if possibly word of your church has extended beyond the city (to residents in the county, surrounding cities, etc.). Or possibly internationally, especially if you have any international missions activities going on in other countries. This extra bit of information might help you to post content of special interest to interested parties in surrounding areas.

A Template That’s Not a Template?

“Templates that aren’t templated.” That’s what it says on the Squarespace site (http://www.squarespace.com) where it talks about their design options. It took me a second to think that one through but what they’re saying there does make sense. A Squarespace site comes with about 14 designs, but over 60 style variants. Each style allows point-and-click control over each element of a particular design. In other words, each of the 14 templates includes a number of color and style variants, and each variant can be even further customized and refined. This combination of options helps to make sure that your church’s website looks unique when compared with other Squarespace sites with similar content. And that addresses a question I’ve seen posed a lot lately. If you and 1,000 other churches are using the same provider, and that provider offers 50 “static” templates, it seems like there’s a pretty good chance there’s another church out there with a website that looks almost exactly like yours. And that takes away from your feeling of individuality, right? Squarespace’s point is that with their stuff you can change it enough that you won’t find any two sites that look suspiciously the same. So it’s a site based on a template, but it can be modified enough to make it look like a custom design created specifically for you.

So What Kind of Control Do You Have Exactly?

This is just an example, but one easy way to fundamentally change the look of a web page is by adjusting the column options for that page (e.g., going with one, two or three columns, adjusting the column widths manually, etc.). Once you make those choices, you can start playing around with where you want your navigation and how you want that to work. (Squarespace has multiple navigation variants, drop down menus, etc. In fact, they say that all of their designs support any column and navigation arrangement “you can dream of.”)


Column layout can make a huge fundamental difference in the look of your page. Modify the navigation options and placement and adjust the colors and you have what looks like a custom design in no time.


This value selector allows you to control the width of your content in this particular element.

Here’s another example of a type of control. CSS control. Behind the swell interface and the glossy sliders you have access to a developer-friendly foundation where you can bypass the WYSIWYG interface and access the CSS directly for that level of control over the elements on the page.



And Everything Else…

One thing that appeals to me is the ability to view changes to the site you’re editing in real time. This avoids a phenomenon that I experience all the time with the service my church is currently using…I realize it’s not best practice, but I usually have one browser open to edit the site and another browser open to the site itself so I can refresh the page once I’ve published the changes to see how the changes look live. Of course you can also “preview” the changes you make within the editing framework (usually in a separate window as well) but it’s still not as slick as what Squarespace offers.


The way you can change font properties, character spacing, line heights, margins, padding, etc. really couldn’t be any easier than this interface makes it.

Also, the presentation of your site is essentially independent of its content, which means you can switch the style of your site without having to worry about your site “breaking” on you. One example I can give you of this is with some photo galleries I’ve worked with where you have to manually resize your images to match the pixel dimensions of the template space you’re working with exactly. Otherwise, if your image is 640 pixels wide and the template wants the image to be 580 pixels wide, your template is going to “blow apart.”

I think ecommerce solutions can fall easily into this category. Sure there are a lot of ways out there we could collect money online for whatever reason, but what’s the point in that? What reasons would we even have? Let’s look at a few specific ideas and then we’ll talk a little about making it happen.

Online Giving

This keeps coming up at my church, especially with the group that includes the younger married adults with children. They already pay most, if not all, of their bills online and they have a good many of them automated. They want a way to do the same with their weekly tithes and offerings. It helps with budgeting. It keeps you from having to write and keep up with checks. And especially for this particular group, it’s hard enough getting to church on Sunday morning with the kids and remembering everything else that’s needed for the morning…finding your offering envelopes and checkbook is just one more thing. And with some solutions you can automate the process weekly or monthly so that it helps regulate (A) what you’re giving and (B) what the church is receiving. I’ve said this before, but I could see it being of great use to the church finance committee et al. to be able to budget around what they see as a set amount coming in from standing auto drafts. Give or take, but it would still give them a great ballpark estimate of what’s going to be coming in each month.

Event Registration

Most of the time you have to contribute at least some kind of payment or deposit when you sign up for certain types of church trips and special events, and how is that handled at your church? I usually see people handing checks and money over in the hallways between services and classes. I suppose it’s also taken up when specific groups meet (like youth paying for a retreat at their regular Wednesday night Bible study). And that works. But it seems like there are some disadvantages that go along with that:

• It takes time away from teaching for example, if you’re collecting money during regular class or group time.
• If you’re depending on handing a payment to a specific individual, you have to first find that individual and that’s assuming that they’re actually there that Sunday or Wednesday night.
• If you’re dealing with a lot of cash transactions, you may have to deal with making change, writing receipts, keeping the money secure and accounted for, etc.
• If you’re dealing with checks, you may need to collect or verify key information and look for errors in the filling out of the check itself which can be stressful if you’re trying to process a lot of payments at one given time.
• Most churches wouldn’t be set up to accept debit cards, credit cards, PayPal, and other popular forms of payment if you’re paying in person at the church.

Of course you could also argue that not everyone is comfortable paying for things online, not everyone has Internet access, not everyone has tools for electronic payments (PayPal, debit/credit cards, etc.), and so forth. But you could always continue to accept cash, checks and money orders in addition to anything you offer as an online option.

Purchasing Christian Resources

It actually took me a minute to really visualize this one myself. At first I have to admit I was imagining some full-blown money-making Christian bookstore or Amazon.com operation, but when I stopped to think about it, we sell stuff at the church all the time. We got new shirts for the handbell choir and everyone gave the director money for the shirts. Periodically he issues new handbell gloves as well that we usually try to repay him for. We sometimes ask for a nominal fee for DVDs and CDs to help offset the cost of production or the materials involved in packaging the discs. So if you look around, you’re probably already collecting money for something and you’re probably dealing with some of the same issues presented in the section above. So, for starters, you could provide options for paying for some of these things online through a type of online “store.”

But from there you could expand based on what you’re able to support. For example, you might see a new book come out that you would highly recommend to your Sunday School workers. Sure, you could tell them all to run by the local Christian bookstore to check it out, or you could send them to your church website to look at it at home or at work at their convenience and purchase it online through the church website. The church could then take orders for a few weeks and buy a large one-time quantity to fill the individual orders and save all those people the collective time and gas involved in getting a copy themselves. You could even drop the books off in their respective Sunday School rooms. Doesn’t get much easier than that. And don’t misunderstand…I’m not suggesting the church try to make money off of something like this; it’s really about helping to get valuable resources into the appropriate hands as easily as possible in an effort to make sure everyone is properly equipped for the journey they’re on or the responsibilities they hold.

And there are similar examples for the sale of music. At one of my previous churches, we would have regular concerts and we would usually purchase a supply of that particular artist’s CDs, DVDs, etc. to continue to sell after the night of the concert had passed. Again, to make that resource more easily available to minister to the members of the church. Making that available through the church website, again, alleviates a number of issues with staffing a point-of-sale, collecting money at regular times and at odd times, etc. I’d imagine you could also tie all this into an electronic inventory system as well to help keep up with what you have on-hand, when it’s time to reorder, etc.

Pay for Downloads

Here’s one I hadn’t really thought of until today. But what about paying for downloads? I could see this as a creative form of fundraiser. Or a way to offset the cost of making a video clip, audio clip, publication or presentation available to the church membership. A lot of possibilities with this one.

Making It Happen

So what’s out there that can help with this? I’ve sort of been working through a mini-series covering specific aspects of Ekklesia 360 and I think this might be an appropriate time to bring them up again. They offer what appears to be a fairly comprehensive suite of features that allow you to enter “products” and capture sales through your church website. You can add and edit products through a customized solution; edit your posted products easily by logging into the CMS and saving your changes, etc. To help put this into some context, I think part of what Ekklesia 360 offers is a shopping cart approach that is integrated into the feature they provide. They also offer some advanced ecommerce tools as well, such as tax tools, a shipping calculator, allowance for custom products (SKUs and descriptors, etc.), advanced reporting options and QuickBooks integration.

So what’s the solution? I’m sure there are several different things you could include in your communications plan, but one of them could be integrating a blog with commenting functionality into your church’s website. A blog could be an effective tool for your church staff, committee chairs, program directors, etc., to communicate the ongoing vision of the church, share where things are in committees, post other informal journal-style entries or commentary, etc. The blog posts could be set up to combine text, images or other media related to the topic at hand. You could then allow church members and possibly visitors as well to add their comments to the post hopefully giving your church leadership some valuable feedback and insight into the issues being discussed. Ekklesia 360 for example has a commenting system that allows for the easy approval or disapproval of comments so you can maintain control over appropriate content on your site.

It’s something to think about. Obviously adding blogs with comments to a church website could introduce a long series of pros and cons, but it might be worth a try and you might find that the pros outweigh the cons in the end. Especially if you have a responsible and responsive church membership.

There are a lot of different ways to deal with this. Some are as simple as having someone greet the visitor and show them around the church, personally inviting them to join the various programs you offer. But if you’re looking for a more high-tech solution, which might be more appropriate if you have a larger church with a higher volume of weekly visitors, there are some church management system (CMS) solutions out there that can help create a stronger connection between visitors and the life of your church using what I would call task automation tools. Ekklesia 360 is one such solution that helps churches manage this process and ensure that hospitality and a positive experience create the impression you need to keep that individual or family returning to your church each week.

For example, their CMS allows you to input visitor cards from any Internet-connected computer. Church staff can then create “rules” based on how they would like to communicate with new visitors. You might want to have a welcome e-mail sent automatically via the system as soon as their information is added. You can also immediately match ministry leaders with visitors who express an interest in a particular ministry or program. We deal with prospect lists all the time at my church, especially for Sunday School and the adult choir program. I could see it being a very efficient thing if the minister of education got an e-mail automatically if someone filled out a visitor’s card checking the box that they would be interested in joining a Sunday School class. Or if the minister of music got an e-mail automatically if someone wants to join the choir or maybe volunteer to sing in the church service. The ministry leader can also log into the system and add comments so there can be increased visibility and coordination between ministry leaders. (In other words, the minister of music could know that the minister of education has already called the person twice and had been unable to reach them. If the minister of music gets through, he could be prepared to help make the connection with the other programs the visitor is known to be interested in.) Additional rules can also be set up within the system to help automate tasks that have been agreed upon as “standard operating procedure” within the church. For instance, it might be customary for the pastor to visit them at their home within three weeks of their visit to the church. The pastor could receive weekly updates and reminders letting him know what his commitments are with regard to those visits and if any become overdue.

I see all this as being one more tool to help build your attendance and make your outreach efforts more productive. And I’m sure there are more uses and examples than what I’ve mentioned here. If your church is already doing this—with Ekklesia or any other CMS—I’d like to hear what you have to share.