Brainstorm Church 2.0
Open page for brainstorming. As this page gets too full, we'll group like content and move it to a new page.
Techniques and technology
Need to make visible/transparent via web
- professional email (constantcontact.com)
- website with streaming video / Youtube.com
- blog
The following is from Fountain Street Church's "Century Vision"
http://fountainstreet.org/A%20Century%20Vision2.pdf
- Liberal Religion is about spiritual liberation.
- Freeing people to be truly alive is the mission of liberal religion.
- A liberal church exists to make this happen. It does so in three ways.
- by proclaiming the liberating vision
- by helping people pursue a life of spiritual liberation throughout life, and
- by living that life, personally and as a community, in the wider community.
From that "Org 2.0" document
- Put Yourself on YouTube. It is now the 8th mostpopular website on the Internet. And you can be there for free.
- Get Found on Technorati. Technorati tracks blog posts and site changes. Registering your URL takes only a few
minutes.
- Measure Your Traffic. Free with Google Analytics. Measure your marketing campaigns. Google provides critical information about where your traffic is coming from and how people are navigating through your pages.
- Tap the Blogs. Run a search on technorati.com or feedster.com to determine which bloggers are talking about you and your area. Then cultivate relationships with them.
- Donations with Squidoo. The fastest-growing fundraising co-op on the Web helps nonprofits raise money and drive traffic,by letting people create easy-to-build web pages on any topic.
- Digg It!. Digg.com lets people vote on the news and web pages that are important to them, bringing the best stuff to the top. This is a free way to get lots of traffic to your site.
Church 2.0 is relational
First principle is simple: Church 2.0 is relational. It depends on building decentralized connections between people. But Church 2.0 uses a variety of modalities to build connections between people, and not just traditional Church 1.0 modalities such as Sunday morning worship services and committee meetings. It also uses new technologies to help people connect, including:
- Streamed videocasts of worship services (for shut-ins and people who just couldn’t/wouldn’t come to church that week)
- Podcasts of sermons you can listen to on your commute
- Minister’s blog(s), and blogs by other religious professionals: DREs, musicians, etc. — where you can exchange ideas and comments with church staff
- Other blogs?
- A wiki for lay leaders, to facilitate transparent and accessible governance
- Regular email delivered by a service like “Constant Contact,” so you can customize the kinds of email you want to get from the church
- Maybe some kind of social networking site?
- What else?
Not everyone is going to have good Web access (although Church 2.0 will have computers with Internet access available during social hour), and not everyone is going to want to use all the different modalities. That’s fine. The real point is that Church 2.0 doesn’t exist in just one modality
Church 2.0 and peak oil
Church 2.0 will help congregations meet the needs of church members as fuel prices rise dramatically after peak oil. The Web site of Church 2.0 could have a map of the surrounding region, showing where church members live (click to send email, though you don’t see the email address), and where regional small groups meet (click to get contact info). Streamed video-audio worship services.
Church 2.0 and accessibility
Church 2.0 could extend church to persons who find regular church inaccessible:
- Interactive text-based sermons (e.g., on a sermon blog) could allow some accessibility to deaf persons
- Streamed audio/video to reach shut-ins
- Text-based church governance could allow greater participation in governance by blind and deaf persons
