The first time someone visits your church shouldn’t be the last, but in our efforts to help someone feel welcome we can often do just the opposite. It’s kind of like the pushy salesmen – the harder you try the further you push them away.
Take a look at a couple ways people tend to separate themselves from visitors when their real intent is to get closer.
This keeps coming up everywhere I am lately; We hear about someone who didn’t like something about how we do what we do and our response is “well, we can’t please everyone.” I say this all the time, backed up with what Jesus said about people that were being neither hot or cold, and what Jesus told people that if you follow me that the world would hate you.
And most people would agree. We can’t please everyone. But does that mean we shouldn’t try?
There are many ways to accept gifts (or tithes) on a church website. Many, however, have serious drawbacks.
In this article, Kent Shaffer lists some of the most common ways churches are offering this option.
Jesus told us to expect hostility and negative reactions, but he didn’t tell us to dismiss them, and he certainly did not tell us to cause them.
Last month The Brana Group released a study that tells us what the youth of our country think of Christianity. Here’s the most important parts…
They think Christianity is judgmental, hypocritical, and old-fashioned. Is that how we are supposed to be? Continue Reading »
Seems like everyone is asking me this lately, so I might as well post it.
I use software called WordPress – it’s open source, php/mySQL based. The software is free to download (you have to host it on a web server). I host the blog on my company’s servers, but you can get a basic blog hosted for free at WordPress. They start charging you for anything other than a basic blog with a few readers.
This software makes it so that you don’t need any HTML or programming knowledge to be able to make pages, upload images, or write articles for your website. You can actually make a whole website like this if you can work around the limitations of the software.
There are many free templates you can use, or you can make your own designs (you have to know what you are doing for this, I’m not teaching that part here).
If you want to remove some of the limits that the free version sets, my company can set you up with the same software on our hosting system, get you into a more custom design, and help you with some of the more custom programming if needed.