Today, as I went to Google, I saw something like this:

And good luck if you tried to go to Wikipedia. You probably saw something like this:

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Back in the day I put out this post. It was on the subject of how to discover songs that are being sung in churches all over the world. The idea is that you could search #sundaysetlist or even #worshipset in the twitter search and you could find lists of songs that were sung in a particular worship set.

Well, after seeing the tweet below from Allan Martin, I decided that we should start a new hashtag: #sabbathsetlist

Sometimes Seventh-day Adventist churches have unique needs and even unique songs that are sung in their churches, and there’s lots of pastors and worship pastors who could use some fresh ideas for what to sing. So…from my perch at the Pioneer Memorial Church, I’m going to begin doing this. Allan Martin from the Arlington Seventh-day Adventist church already said he’s in. We’d love it if you’d jump in as well.

When you send the tweet, we’d love to see three things:

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I met with our church elders privately. I then announced it to our church board. Afterwards I made the difficult announcement to the church. To get the full details and background you can read this newsletter I wrote to my church.

Here’s the gist: I’ve accepted a call to be the pastor of evangelism at Pioneer Memorial Church in Berrien Springs, Michigan. My last Sabbath at the Carrollwood Seventh-day Adventist church will be June 4th and our family will actually move north to Michigan the last week of June.

So why am I announcing this here?

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It seems that this coming weekend, March 19-20 is the National Day of Unplugging. A group called the “Rebooters” has been promoting the idea of people practicing the ancient custom of the Sabbath. They actually wrote a document called The Sabbath Manifesto in which they detail ten principles that they’re encouraging people to follow on the Sabbath.

If your church or ministry doesn’t have a website, it’s time to get on board. And now, people have less excuses than ever to actually implement one.

Here are a few options that have been around for sometime:

1. Cloversites.com
Out of these top three options, I think Clover Sites is making the best product out there right now for a variety of reasons. Here’s a good reason. They have mobile versions of your site that are built automatically. They have a killer video player that’s coming out soon. Check this out to see more of their options coming soon.

2. Ekklesia360.com

3. BridgeElement.com

A lot of these are pretty nice. But I recently found out about another major player out there called SquareSpace.com Square Space is a combination of web-host, website designer, and church management system. If you go to their page they have some seriously nice-looking sites on there.

There are a few advantages to using a system like this:

1. It’s WYSIWYG: You can log into the back end, select a template, and edit stuff using a “What you see is what you get” editor. So if you don’t know how to mess with the code, you can make professional edits that look good.

2. It’s much cheaper: They have an option that would cost churches $14 per month. This is much cheaper than paying $500-1000 for a one time setup fee for the other guys, and then having hosting fees that cost about $20 per month.

3. For those that know how to mess with code, you can add in and mess with the code to fully customize your template as much as you want.

There are some big names out there using SquareSpace for their websites, across many different industries. I suggest you take a look.

Have anyone ever used SquareSpace or considered it?

Most churches would like to be able to have nice graphics for their sermons series and for special announcements that come up. Unfortunately, not every church can afford to have their own graphic designer on staff.

That’s why I was excited when a few weeks ago my friend Pastor Javier Diaz let me in on an incredible resource that I wasn’t aware of. Naturally, I’d like to pass it along to you.

It’s called PowerPointSermons.com. The benefit of this website is that it has catalogued thousands of “branded” sermon series themes that you can choose from for a flat rate. From the website it says:

• Unlimited downloads on all PowerPoint and Jpeg stills
• Search, Preview, and Download over 7,500 graphic stills
• Enjoy downloading over 100 New Designs every month
• All Graphic Sets can be downloaded with or without text
• Enjoy access to 24,000 sermons and 33,000 illustrations
• Free Telephone Customer Support

They have three different price points beginning with $199 for a one year membership with unlimited downloads.

What seems really interesting is that you can also buy “design credits,” so that you can completely customize the text on a particular graphic. Each design credit costs about an average of $4.50. Check out the graphic from their site below.

All the graphics are also “banner ready,” meaning that they’ve already formatted all the graphics so you can make them into banners.

If you calculate the cost of what a graphic designer would charge for a sermon series graphic ($150-300 per graphic), the cost of a one year membership averaged out to $17 a month is a complete steal.

I recommend that you check it out.

What do you currently use for graphic for your church or ministry? Please share.

During the month of March there will be two church growth conferences sponsored by NEXT Coaching Networks. Dr. Ed Stetzer will be speaking at both of them.

One will be held in Warner Robins, GA on March 1, 2010. For more information and to register for this one click here.

The other conference will be held in Kissimmee, Fl on March 12, 2010. For more information and to register for this one click here.

I think they should be good!