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The Internet makes large-scale collaboration possible, with Wikipedia as Exhibit A. Theopedia and others have tried to do something similar for theology and commentary.

But sometimes smaller-scale ideas can be just as productive, as in the area of personal or family Bible study.

This is something that I have been thinking about for quite some time. I have written numerous Bible study series for our fellowship groups, complete with leader notes. I have toyed with the idea of contacting a publisher and trying to get some of them in print, but it seems to me that that is not the best way to get them into people’s hands. Many churches are reluctant to purchase a booklet for every member and potential guest of a Bible study group. Market considerations keep the minimum price up around $7 or higher per booklet.

What I envision is a collaborative site where pastors and other Christian leaders can share studies that they have prepared. To make it useful, it seems to be that it would be good to have a basic statement of faith that covered the essentials but was broad enough to include a wide variety of Christians. Each contributor could even have a profile indicating his or her background. It would also be possible to have someone review studies before they were made available publicly to provide some basic quality control. But perhaps a ratings system could accomplish this as well. As a busy pastor, I don’t have the time to wade through hundreds of pages of junk in order to find a gem (think of YouTube). There has to be some way to zero in on well written, exegetically sound studies without sorting through a lot of garbage. A few years back I obtained a free subscription to a sermons web site. There were lots of sermons available there, but I found very little that was really useful. I have pretty high standards for preaching, and expository preaching is still pretty rare.

Another question is whether or not to charge a fee for downloads. There are two possible reasons for charging a fee: (1) to help cover the costs of running the site, and (2) to provide the contributors with a small payment when their studies are used. The costs of hosting are minimal, although setting up and maintaining the site could run into some money. I think that author payments could help provide provide some much needed additional motivation for contributors. Then I would charge a per-church fee for downloads, based on the church/fellowship size, with permission to make copies for everyone in the group. There would need to be some sort of “preview” option to check out the study, and a feedback system so that newcomers could identify the authors whose work has been the most helpful.

I have even considered setting something up at cyberpastor.net. But it would only become useful if it “took off” and enough people begin to participate, and I think that it would be fairly difficult to gain the necessary momentum. Maybe it would be easier to get one of the big Christian sites to do something like this.

What do you think? Do you see a need for something like this? Would you participate? How could it be done? (ESV article sighted on Scott Yang’s Playground)

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1. Online Video will go mainstream
2. Web 2.0 will continue its momentum
3. Content management systems will increase dramatically in popularity
4. People will search online for everything
5. Organizations will have to inform people on their terms

You can read the full article for the details. Since the community that my church serves is pretty high tech, I see most of these phenomena in evidence on a daily basis. But there is a comment on the article from a pastor in rural Oklahoma who reminds us that some people are just learning how to use email.

What do these trends mean for ministry, and what steps should we consider taking this year? We already have the church web site set up using a CMS, and a significant percentage of new visitors to the church find us on the web. But we could do more with interacting as a online community. The problem here is that there are so many social networking sites that it is difficult to know where to put our efforts. A few years ago I set up a forum on our church web site, but no one made use of it. Instead of focusing mainly on the official church web site, we need to develop a vision for church members to use their personal blog, xanga, or myspace as a platform to share the Gospel. The church is the Body of Christ, and we need different members carrying their ministry into various social networking sites.

One site that I should mention here is MyChurch.org. This is a new social networking site for Christians that is unique in that it has a place for churches as well as individuals to set up an account. From the About page:

MyChurch.org is a free online tool for churches to outreach and build community by networking their congregation. Amongst some of its features are a library for sermons and media, a social network, a classifieds board, a collaborative blog, a photo sharing app, and an event calendar for you and your church.

What is especially cool is that Joe and Carol, two of the founders of the site, attended CFC while there were in college. Joe sensed God’s calling to establish this site as a ministry, and quit his high tech job to do this full time. Naturally, I had to set up my own account there.

One other area that has significant implications for ministry is the explosion of on line video. Christian Web Trends has a great series of articles on use of video in church ministry, including an article on Three videos every church website should have. One of my goals for 2007 is to add some video to our church web site.

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I have also changed the look of the Category pages, and moved the category feed link to the bottom of the corresponding category page.

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Today I received an email with the following message:

We are writing you today to tell about some good news regarding your bluehost account. Starting May 1st Bluehost will be offering 15 Gigs of disk space, and 400 Gigs of data transfer. As always when these upgrades occur you aren’t charged a thing.

That’s almost 4 times the storage than I started out with less than a year ago, for the same price. This time I had to hit “Reply” and request the upgrade, but that is very easy. I think that it is very cool that they informed their current customers about the upgrade even before it appears on their web site. Compare this to my former host, which upgraded the accounts that they were selling but didn’t even inform the current customers. I had to discover the upgrade on their web site and call them to request the upgrade. Add 24/7 toll free telephone support and a price of $6.95/month (when you pay for 2 years), and it’s a hard deal to beat!

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For any interested Wordpress users, to create this side blog I used the sideblog plugin by Kates Gasis, with a few modifications of my own to make it work the way I wanted to.

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The title uses a .png graphic file with a transparent background.  Until IE 7 is released, you need a workaround to get it to display properly. If you are interested, this is where I got the script to correct the problem.

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All future technology posts will be there. The posts from that blog will not be crossposted to my Xanga, so if you are interested in tech posts you will have to look there. If you want to follow that blog, I suggest that you subscribe via RSS or email.

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