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Creating Excitement in a Church Service

April 15, 2009 in technology,web tool with 3 Comments

Want to create some excitement in a church service? Do something really different. Perhaps something you’ve never done before. So what’s something we (leaders) never do in a church service? We never ask people to pull out their cell phones and actually turn them on!

This past weekend we kicked of a brand new sermon series for Easter called “He Still Moves Stones.” And as an opening illustration we did an interactive social experiment where we asked people to pull our their cell phones, and to vote live on what their greatest struggle is.
Here’s a picture of what they voted on:
They would vote by sending a text message to whatever struggle they were dealing with the most. And how did they react? It was electric. It just took about 2 minutes, but it was a lot of fun for me (and for them) seeing the numbers change live. After all was said and done, this ended up being the final tally. And I told them that these would be the four topics we’d be covering for the next four weeks, so people already had an interest in learning more, since these were things that they voted on as being significant struggles in their life.
You can’t do do something like this every week, but the reaction and the interest it created in the series was priceless. To learn more about using this feature go to www.polleverywhere.com
What about you? Have you tried something that has helped to create some excitement in a church service? What about the opposite? Have you tried something and found it to suck the air out of the room in an awkward experiment gone bad?

Planning Center Online

March 10, 2009 in web tool with 3 Comments

Do you wish you had a way to organize and schedule your volunteers and people on your worship team? There’s a great website called Planning Center Online which gives you this ability. The video shows you some of the best features. Check it out. And if you’re using it, please let me know, cause I’d love to ask you some more questions about it.


Introducing Planning Center Online from Planning Center on Vimeo.

Here’s a funny video that gives you some more application of the danger of not using such a system:

Going Old School With Online Phone Trees

March 9, 2009 in web tool with 0 Comments

On my iPhone I can send “group” text messages. In Twitter, for those that are followers, you can update people on all your happenings and messages. And through email, of course, you’ve always had that magical ability to send emails to huge groups of people. But, believe it or not, there are still some people that do not use any of these things. I know, this is the time for the collective gasp!

So what do you do if you need to contact large groups of people, but don’t want to spend hours on the phone calling a group of people?
In the old days you would spend up to $1000 for a “phone tree.” That’s an electronic device where you can record a message, and have it automatically send that recorded message to hundreds of different phones. So if you need to message an entire church, you could do this quickly and easily. The only problem is that these things are expensive. So what do you do when you’re in such a quandary? Go to the internet, of course! A few days ago I started poking around on the internet and discovered that there are many online phone tree systems, many of which you can use for free.
One of them is called FreePhoneTree.com. The setup for this online phone tree seemed to be a little odd. I went through the regular registration process, but after I finished I was greeted with this message in my email inbox:
I found this email to be disturbing on several levels. For one, who receives a snail-mail “welcome letter” for registering on a website?! For some reason this gives me the creeps. Secondly, this was a few days ago, so even if they meant “email” instead of “mail” you would think that after three days I would receive the confirmation email. But no, none has yet arrived. So I’m officially mentally wiping this company from my mind, and moving on to greener pastures. Does this email seem odd to anyone else, though?
I did have success with another company called DialMyCalls.com. The registration was straight forward and only took a minute. The site works by you creating a list of different numbers that you want to be called. So you might have a group called church board, worship team, volunteers, or whatever else you might want to call the groups. The only catch with this site, is that if you’re using their free system, you can’t call more than 50 people at the same time, and the message that you send out has to be 30 seconds or less. I entered in a few of my leaders to try it out, recorded the message, and was rewarded by the thought that I will be saving myself time when I want to remind people of a meeting or of something important. You can edit the settings so that it can leave the message on someone’s voicemail, or you can have it call the people back until someone picks up. I would call that the stalker mode, but I’m sure that they have a more technical and non-scary term for that.

What do you use when you need to contact large groups of people? Have you experimented with any phone tree systems?

Poll Everywhere in Churches

March 6, 2009 in web tool with 0 Comments

Props to Greg Phillips who let me know about a cool webtool called Poll Everywhere. This is a tool that let’s you do live polling via your cell phone by sending a text message. It’s kind of like how people on America’s Funniest Home Videos are asked to vote on their favorite video by pressing the buttons by their chairs. This is the same concept, but with a cell phone.

It seems that this is being used by churches in some innovative ways as well. Wayne Cordeiro, pastor of New Hope Church, used it to poll his church live on how often they spend time with God. You can view the video here. Here’s also a great CNN article about how Poll Everywhere is used to encourage people to text questions about the current message that the pastor is preaching. The pastor can then address the questions as he goes along, if he so chooses. Here is the blog to Poll Everywhere where some other uses are noted.
There are some price constraints, but if used in groups of 30 or less, it’s free. I can imagine using this in a series as well. I also think it would be good to use in a membership class, for people to anonymously give feedback.
What about you? What are some innovative ways that you can imagine using this in church or in your ministry?

Keeping Track: The Importance of Church Management Software

March 5, 2009 in assimilation,web tool with 9 Comments


Upon graduating from seminary three years ago, one of the last things on my mind was how to track attendance and follow-up on first-time guests. Armed with fresh theology and some church growth principles, I threw myself into preaching well and implementing small groups. And though those things have been a huge blessing, I realized that much more was necessary.

I needed to begin keeping good track of who was coming and going and why. So how do you do it? How you do keep track and help to assimilate the people that come to your church event? There are a number of reasons why you’d want to, and a number of ways to do it.
Why you should:
  1. To evaluate the effectiveness of your programming: If you don’t know how many come, you have no idea if you’re reaching your goals. Don’t have any goals? Ask Jesus to help you with that one.
  2. To know who needs follow up: If you’re not keeping track, you’re just looking at an amorphous mob of people that are all the same and have the same needs. The reality is never quite like that.
How you might:
  1. Paper: You might have a trusty notebook where you enter the attendance and information of people. If you have nothing else, and you don’t have a computer, you can rock it old school-style like this.
  2. Computer spreadsheet: If you have a computer, you might be tempted to use Excel or another spreadsheet to enter the information of your people. Though you may be able to accurately log their information, you’re putting the information at risk. I heard of one church that used this method successfully with up to 700 members. One day their spreadsheet became corrupted, and they lost all their information. The weeping and gnashing of teeth began on that day for them.
  3. Web-based application: I believe that this is the best option for a few reasons. For one, multiple people can add and edit information at the same time from any computer with web access. Two, you don’t have to worry about your computer or notebook being destroyed. If your computer happens to blow up, you still have the information since it’s stored “online.”
Who you might use:
There are probably about a dozen church management systems out there including Fellowship One, Arena (Shelby), Connection Power, ACS, and others. After considerable research, I ended up narrowing my options down to Fellowship One and Connection Power. Fellowship One is used by the likes of The Journey Church, Lakewood Church, and Fellowship Church. In other words, it’s used by many of the “major league” churches out there. It also includes major league pricing. It’s very expensive. Their cost is based upon average weekly attendance, like most similar systems, but they have quite an expensive setup fee. The pricing alone narrowed down my option to Connection Power.
Though it’s not perfect, I like Connection Power for a variety of reasons:
  1. It has a built in assimilation system for followup. If you don’t already have a system for followup, this will be important to you. It’s a followup system based upon calling people that attend for the first time. When people attend, they are “assigned” a care-caller that gives them a welcome call and answers any questions they might have. I tried this out, but this system didn’t work out too well for us. We instead went with a followup system based upon the book Fusion.
  2. Price: It’s considerably less expensive than most out there, while retaining the majority of the features and value. For a church of our size (about 100), you will pay about $600 per year for the features that we use.
  3. You can use it to schedule your volunteers. When you schedule a volunteer for an event, it will email them with all the pertinent information, including a link they can use to confirm or decline the invitation. You can also set it up to send you a text message when you have been assigned a volunteer assignment.
I don’t think any of these systems are perfect, but for the moment we’re enjoying using Connection Power.
What about you? What are you using for these purposes?

Intense Debate Added to Modern Ekklesia

February 3, 2009 in web tool with 3 Comments


Over the last few days I’ve been adding several new additions to the Modern Ekklesia blog. This is for the purpose of making the site much more interactive. Today, I just finished installing Intense Debate, which is a more robust system for making comments and following comments. Users can now respond to specific comments, vote on the highest quality comment, and click to receive an email on further comments to keep the user included in the “debate.” 

Give it a try and let me know what you think.

How Skribit Can Help You Build Interactivity

February 1, 2009 in web tool with 1 Comment


I’d like to offer Skribit a happy belated birthday. They’re a little over one now! Haven’t heard of them yet? In addition to having a funny name that’s worth a  chuckle (it’s pronounced “scribe it”), Skribit can help churches and bloggers build interactivity.

Skribit helps build interactivity by allowing people to suggest and vote on topics that they’d like to hear about. (Full disclosure: I’ve installed it on my own blog, and am currently testing out the features. So if you’d like to suggest a topic for me to research and write about, write it in the Skribit tool on the Modern Ekklesia blog). This has originally been designed as a tool for bloggers, but I believe this could be of use to churches in several ways.
For one, churches can use Skribit on their website for a period of time for sermon suggestions. I’m planning on having a summer series called “You Asked For It! Top Questions From the Bible.” I’m asking the people to submit questions that they’d like to hear about. Out of all the questions that are submitted, I’m going to have them vote on the 8 most popular topics. They submit, vote, and prioritize the most important topics. That’s why it’s called “You Asked For It!” Get it? Ok…
Secondly, churches can use this as a digital suggestion box. The possibilities are quite endless. If you want to give people the opportunity to suggest and vote on anything, Skribit is your tool.
Have any other ideas for cool uses of Skribit?
**As an update, I’m planning on taking one or two questions a month that are addressed via the Skribit tool and answer them in a feature called “You Asked For It!” So thanks for the first two questions, and keep a look out for the new feature.
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