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By admin on December 26, 2008  |  Comments 0

God’s Daytimer

The Church Blog site recommends our featured site, God’s Daytimer. God’s Daytimer is a website designed to be a place to spend a few minutes each day to connect with God. The Online Bible Studies page provides a short daily Bible study and hopefully a time for a moment of reflection.

Check out our latest feature on God’s Daytimer, Fifteen Minutes With God. This is an opportunity for you to spend fifteen minutes with God by following the Lord’s Prayer as a model. Click here to go to the Fifteen Minutes With God page. This will help you to develop a consistent daily prayer time.

As you end your quiet time don’t forget to check out what’s happening in the world. Click here to go to the Christian World News stories page. This will help you to direct your prayers more effectively.

We have included the RSS feed for God’s Daytimer on this site for your convenience.

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By admin on December 26, 2008  |  Comments 0

Internet Pastor Online

The Church Blog site is happy to present the Internet Pastor Online site. Internet Pastor Online is here to help answer the tough questions we all face. You can ask questions about living in the Kingdom of God, about the Bible, and anything else that might affect the life of believers. You can use the Ask the Pastor page to send in your questions. You will find helpful reading materials recommended by the Internet Pastor on the Products page. We also encourage you to take time to respond to the articles and to comments that other readers leave.

Internet Pastor Online | Ministry is provided for education and entertainment purposes. This site is in no way a substitute for a relationship with a local church/pastor or with a licensed counselor when necessary. We look forward to spending time with you in the days ahead.

We have included the RSS feed for Internet Pastor Online on this site for your convenience.

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By admin on December 26, 2008  |  Comments 0

Christian Book Club

The Church Blog site is pleased to introduce you to the Christian Book Club Online. The Christian Book Club is a place for people who enjoy reading to get together online and share their thoughts and questions. On the first of each month a new book and a new round of discussion is started. The book being read is divided into four sections and at the beginning of each week a new discussion ensues. All you need to do is come to the site whenever you can during that week and add your own comments and also respond to the comments of others. The Christian Book Club operates at its best when you participate with your comments. We will read old classics, new offerings, and even from time to time some books that are kicking up a little controversy. A book being selected for club reading is not necessarily an endorsement of the book. You are free to agree and disagree with the authors. The hope is to be able to read from a wide range of Christian thought.

Christian Book Club Books

To find out what books we are reading currently and in the months ahead go to the Christian Book Club Books page. If you don’t already have the book you can order it right there by clicking on the icon of the book. You will then be directed to either the Amazon.com or CBD.com sites where you can make arrangements to get your copy.

Questions or Suggestions

If you have any questions about how the club works or you would like to make suggestions about books you would like to see the club read, go to the Contact page and fill out the information on the form. We will answer your questions and appreciate your suggestions.

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By admin on December 25, 2008  |  Comments 0

Church Growth Consulting

On the Church Blog site we are bringing to you a group of featured websites to help you in all areas of Church blogging. We would like to introduce you to Church Growth Consulting.

This is a helpful website with a lot of free information on church growth and church growth ideas. They also offer very reasonable church growth consulting services. The following is taken from the Church Growth Consulting site:

This site was born out of my passion to share with pastors some ideas for helping to grow the church. You can find a wealth of ideas about church growth by reading through the articles on Church Growth | Software and Consulting. You can read about how to set up a web ministry or church website. You can read about servant evangelism projects. You can read about how to think through the process of helping your church to grow. I have spent my ministry figuring out how to do things that people said couldn’t be done. Your church is to small to do that. You need to wait until you have more money or more people or more this or that. It seems to me that there is a scripture that says “With God, all things are possible.” I like to think of this site as Church Consulting for pastors and churches that really can’t afford it. To that end, you will find a wealth of information for free on this site. If you need a little extra help I can help you to work through a lot of issues over the phone. Go to the Church Growth Consulting page and read about the service we provide. We can help you think through a lot of different areas of ministry. Below is a partial list:

  • The Advantages of Multiple Services (even for small churches)
  • Church Planting (Starting a church)
  • Pastor Transition (Good and Bad)
  • Servant Evangelism / Outreach Ideas
  • Short Term Mission Trips
  • Affinity Groups
  • Small Groups
  • Raising Up and Training Future Leaders
  • Internet Ministry
  • Internet Radio Station
  • Video Venues
  • Prayer and Ministry Team Training
  • Pastor to Pastor Mentoring / Encouragement / Prayer
  • Recovery Ministry

Feel free to contact me with any questions. I always try to answer as many questions as I can by email and of course for free. I look forward to hearing from you. I hope you enjoy Church Growth Consulting and encourage you to sign up for the free RSS feed or email subscription.

We have included the RSS feed on this site so that you can click on the latest articles they have published.

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By admin on December 25, 2008  |  Comments 0

Church Webmaster

Church Blog would like to introduce you to another helpful website called Church Web Master. The Church Webmaster provides a wide array of services to help you utilize the Internet in growing your church. The potential impact of the Internet is an amazing thing.

“The Church Web Master is here to help churches with their web ministries and church websites. The Internet offers a huge ministry field and yet some churches have not yet moved into the ministry because of a lack of expertise or people power. That’s where Church Web Master steps in. We offer a wide range of services and plans to help your church get involved in this exciting area of ministry. We look forward to laboring with you in the future to advance the Kingdom of God and hope that you will consider us your Church Web Master Online!”

Not only does the site provide a lot of information for potential church webmasters, it also offers some very reasonable services for setting up and even maintaining church websites. People who are searching for churches today use the Internet. You need to have an Internet presence!

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Starting a Church Blog - Part 4

Here on Church Blog we are writing a series of articles to help churches get their web ministries started. These articles attempt to provide information to help the process of starting a church blog a little easier. In this article we will talk about WordPress themes and plugins.

One of the advantages of using WordPress in a self hosted format (this was discussed in a previous article in this Church Blog series) is the availability of wide variety of themes for your site. A WordPress theme is the design of your blog. There are thousands of themes for WordPress, many of them are offered for free. A nice looking theme will have a significant impact on your site. A well designed theme will also make the blogging process a lot smoother. There are also themes available which you can purchase for $50 (fifty) to $250 (two hundred fifty) or more. We have found that the themes from Solostreamhave worked really well for us. The themes from Solostream.com are attractive, easily customized, and very easy to work with. This Christian Blog site is using a theme called WP-Vybe from Solostream. If you want to check out the themes that are offered just click here to view more details.

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Once you have a theme in place you can really fine tune your WordPress Church Blog by adding plugins. There are thousands of plugins which are available for WordPress and they are all offered for free. You can find a plugin to do almost anything you can imagine on your blog. We use plugins to provide a verse of the day, backup the site automatically, make it easy and safe for people to contact us, make it easy and safe for people to donate to us, and more. You can check out the plugin directory at WordPress.org to get an idea of the plugins that are available. Installing a good theme and some nice plugins will really make your Church blog pop!

Starting a Church Blog - Part 3

On Church Blog we are writing this series of articles to help churches get there own Church Blog and web ministry developed. We have talked about some of the free options in previous articles, now we are discussing the advantages of using a web host and WordPress for your Church Blog.  WordPress is easy to work with, it is free to use, and there have been hundreds of amazing plug-ins developed to help you really tailor your web ministry. There are also a lot of really amazing themes that have been developed, some free and some for sale, which can help give your Church Blog a unique and professional appearance. We discussed domain names in our last article. In this article we are going to talk about getting a web host.

When it comes to web hosting there are a lot of options available. I use Good News Domains for my web hosting needs. They have several good web hosting plans to choose from, and their customer service has always been top notch. The process for getting a web host starts like this. Go to Good News Domains at www.goodnewsdomains.com and then click on the Web Hosting tab. You will see the following screen:

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On the bottom of the page are the three options for web hosting at Good News Domains. They have an economy plan, a deluxe plan, and a premium plan.

webhost2For most of you the Economy plan will work great. If you think you might start more than 10 Christian blogs in your web ministry, then go with the Deluxe plan. One of the advantages of a web host is that you can have multiple sites hosted without having to spend more money. The Economy plan would allow you to have up to 10 different blogs hosted. The Deluxe plan would let you have uo to 25 blogs and the Premium plan would let you have up to 50. This might be a good option if you hope to have people in your church start their own blogs as part of your ministry.  You could purchase one web hosting plan and then let people start their own Christian Blog for free, or you could split the cost by how many people start a blog and it would only be $3 or $4 dollars a year. Starting multiple blogs on a web host is done by utilizing sub-domains. Be sure to choose the linux version if you are going to be using WordPress for your blog. Speaking of WordPress, one of the reasons I use Good News Domains is that they include WordPress in their value applications and will even install it for you.

webhost3The process of getting WordPress installed is fairly simple and I have written a series of articles on how to create a blog at My Newbie Blog (www.mynewbieblog.com). You can check out the articles there if you need a little extra help. In our next article we will talk about picking a theme and installing some plug-ins.

Blogs for Evangelism - Part 1

One of our goals on Church Blog is to demonstrate how people can use the Internet to have an impact on the Kingdom of God. This can be done by starting blogs and websites for believers, but also by starting blogs and websites that are more geared towards evangelism. By learning the basic principles of setting up a blog and some simple SEO (search engine optimization) techniques it is possible to get sites started that have the potential to reach people all over the world. To demonstrate this principle we are starting a site called Current Events Online. We will work on this site to get a good return on the search engines and then we will develop ways to use the site as an evangelistic tool.

For this demonstration, we have purchased a domain name from Good News Domains, (www.currenteventsonline.com), we have chosen the free hosting plan (we will be dealing with a banner across the top of our site but by using the free hosting we can run this site on the $10/year we are paying for the domain name),and we installed WordPress.

To make the site readable we have added some quick content to the site by using six RSS feeds from various news agencies and by adding video feeds of current events from all over the world. Here is what the site looks like today:

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We will further develop the site by writing articles on current events from a biblical perspective and adding them to the site. Our hope is to present a balanced well thought out approach to sharing our viewpoint in a way that will encourage discussion and allow us to build relationship with our readers. This site will start to reach its potential after it begins to show up on the search engines and we will keep you posted on it’s progress on Church Blog.