One Book I’d Like to Read: Listening To The Beliefs of Emerging Church with Mark Driscoll

Listening to the Beliefs of Emerging Churches - edited by Robert Webber and Mark Driscoll, and featuring some of the “heavy hitters” in the emerging church conversation.

At Midwestern, I heard quite a bit about the emerging church. One of my seminary profs has been blogging about it and I’m very appreciatitive of his contribution to helping me (and us) understand it better — the good, bad, and ugly.

Here’s a sample chapter download (PDF).

Zondervan, if you’re listening … I’d love to have a review copy of this book! :-)

[Found via Mark Driscoll]

January 31, 2007 · Filed Under Books, Church Marketing

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Blogging Tip: Create a Favicon for Your Blog or Those Cute Browser Icons

Art sent me an idea for a blogging tip: How to create a favicon … or those cute little browser icons located just left of the website address in your browser.

Rather than recreate the wheel (or tutorial), I thought I’d give you some links or “favicon generators”:

http://www.chami.com/html-kit/services/favicon/
http://www.antifavicon.com/

OR … how to create a favicon in Photoshop.

Get some inspiration for your favicon also with this excellent list by Smashing Magazine.

January 31, 2007 · Filed Under Blogging Tips, Church Marketing

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LifeWay Research Study Gives 5 Characteristics of Standout Churches

I really appreciate the new focus of LifeWay President Dr. Thom Rainier on doing quality research. This Baptist Press article details 5 characteristics they found in “19 standout churches:”

1. Pastor sets the bar
2. Church atmosphere
3. Evangelistic appeal
4. Intentional outreach
5. Not all the same

Read the full story here.

MORE RESOURCES: Check out the LifeWay Research site, including the MP3 podcast and PowerPoint slides for this study.

January 30, 2007 · Filed Under Church Marketing, Surveys

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Two Quick Ways to Make WordPress Look Like A Regular Website and Not a Blog

As I’ve said before in this tutorial series – Using WordPress to Run Church Websites – WordPress was really designed for creating and maintaining blogs.

But as we’re exploring in this series, it can also be used as a way to easily create and maintain small to medium-size churches.

There are two quick and relatively easy ways to make WordPress looks less like a typical blog and more than a fully functional, clean and sleek church website: creating a static home page and a dynamic sidebar navigation.

OK, those are fancy, $2 words, but I had to use them …

Now, I’ll explain what that means.

January 30, 2007 · Filed Under Church Marketing, Rockin' Web Sites, Web Site Design, WordPress

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Picking a Great WordPress Theme For Your Church Website

This post in the Using WordPress to Run Church Websites series is about finding an existing WordPress template (”theme”) that you can adapt to use for your church website.

Now that we’ve established the basic layout we’re looking for … it’s time to find a WordPress theme (WordPress-speak for “template).

One super great features of using WordPress is that hundreds, maybe even thousands, of website designers offer their themes for free to the public. And as one great theme designer said, you can save literally thousands of dollars by using these free themes.

You can browse all these at the WordPress Community Themes Viewer here.

January 27, 2007 · Filed Under Church Marketing, Web Site Design, WordPress

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8 Key Characteristics of Church Planters

A couple months ago, I had the opportunity to interview Dr. H. Stanley Wood, editor of Extraordinary Leaders in Extraordinary Times, a book based on a comprehensive research study on church planters.

Although the research study was based on mainline denomination’s new church developers (mainline for “church planters”), their findings cross denominational lines. They interviewed more than 700 church planters.

One thing that didn’t surprise me is that church planters share many of the same characteristics of entrepreneurs aka business owners.

Here are the 8 core traits:

January 26, 2007 · Filed Under Church Marketing, Church Planting

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