ChurchHacks.com

Not much can happen in a worship service without the people in the sound booth making it happen. Sound engineers have, in most cases, complete control over delivering the stuff from the platform to the peeps in the pews. Unless you’ve dabbling in a new avant-garde form of worship and preaching using techniques from the silent movie era, you rely heavily on your amplification system. There are very few elements in your worship service that take place without being routed through your sound system. If you’ve ever participated in a church service where the power went out mid-service, you’ll know what I’m talking about.

The “sound guys”, as we often refer to them, are important to the success of a worship gathering. In many ways, they can either make the service operate smoothly or crash with one slip of the finger. Following is a list of tips and ideas to help the sound engineers in their ministry of enhancing and supporting the worship experience and ensuring the delivery of biblical teaching.

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My wife, kids, and I moved to my home state to live near and reconnect with family. Even before the move, we started looking for a church that was similar in beliefs and ministry philosophy to the church we had been involved in for the last several years. Being an Internet-savvy guy (ok, I’m a geek!), I decided to church shop in the comfort of my own home using the vast resources of the World Wide Web. Having spent many years as a full-time web site developer and using the Internet for most of my waking hours, I have an excellent understanding of how it all works and how to quickly and effectively search for what I’m looking for. In fact, I pride myself in being able to locate useless bits of trivia and legitimately useful information at a pace that would put my name in the Guinness Book of World Records.

However, this had me stumped. I spent 4-5 hours over a period of two days trying to find a church for us to attend. My various searches revealed several churches but none of them met our criteria. What was more perplexing than being unable to find a church that would fit us was that the search in itself was so difficult. A simple search for churches in our area didn’t provide us with any useful results. Finally, after throwing my hands in the air in frustration and shaking my fists at the heavens, I discovered a church listed in a small advertisement in our free, weekly newspaper… the most unlikely place to search for a church.

I concluded that either the Internet isn’t set up well for churches to be listed, the web is so populated with junk that it is crowding out legitimate sites relevant to your search, or churches aren’t using the Internet and its capabilities to their advantage. Since there is very little I can do to restructure the entire Internet, I decided to help churches by instructing them on how to use the web and their church web site to help church shoppers to find their church with minimal effort.

If you don’t have a church web site, much of this isn’t going to help you. The first step for you is to make haste and purchase a domain name and get a web site for your church. For those of you who do have a site, get with your resident web geek and consider making some of the following suggestions happen.

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Email: either you love it or you hate it; you control it or it controls you. ITSecurity.com has compiled a list of tips and hacks that will enable you to utilize email more effectively, securely, and politely. Since incoming and outgoing email is a probably a big part of your day and is an important method of communication with some of you, look through their list and see what tips you can implement to communicate better and free up your time for worship and people ministry.

When people read out a phone number, they use “phone rhythm.” No one has to explain “phone rhythm,” we all just seem to do it automatically, “…713…555…12…34″. Similarly, when we answer a phone call we all say, “Hello.” No one taught us to do that, but somehow we all seemed to pick it up.

So why is it that when it comes to emails, there are no accepted standards? Even though 6 billion emails are sent every day, almost no one agrees about simple things like email etiquette, how to organize a note, or whether emails are considered private or not.

The 99 tips in this article make up the best in email practices. From how to ethically use the ‘BCC:’ to what attachments will make your mobile emailing compatible with everyone else’s, this list covers everything you need to know about emailing.

Hack your email 99 different ways (via Lifehacker)

My church has been focusing on the Ten Commandments during our weekend worship gatherings and this past Sunday was number seven: You shall not commit adultery (Exodus 20:14). Jesus instructs us in Matthew 5:27-30 that adultery includes the act as well as the thoughts leading up to the action, so don’t think you’re off the hook if you haven’t committed the physical act of adultery. Since I’m not the one preaching here, I’ll move on.

If you’re in pastoral leadership, you’ve probably read many articles and books on the subject of protecting yourself in the area of marital faithfulness and more recently about not taking the bait of Internet pornography. I don’t feel I need to develop a rationale to convince you to pursue Christlikeness in these areas because you should know better. If you’re a student of God’s Word and are in church leadership, as a pastor or in lay leadership, you should already understand how God thinks. Others have accomplished that much better than I could so I encourage you to dig up those magazine articles and books and go through them periodically and prayerfully. We know there is a hook attached to the bait and a fisherman at the other end of the line with every intention of pulling you in. It’s good to re-read those materials and remind yourself of those truths from time to time because our minds might blur the distinction between the bait and the provisions God has given to us.

Think of it like reverse beer goggles. Beer goggles enable the drinker to view the not-so-attractive barfly as a thing of beauty the more alcohol they consume. The more we study God’s Word and other materials on the subject of purity, the clearer the lines will be between that which God has blessed us with and that which ensnares us.

While I’m not going to give you instruction on why you need to have victory in this area, I will give you some ideas on how you can succeed and steps you can take to reduce the chance of making the wrong choice.

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This article is the second part of the series Extending Your Sermons Beyond Sunday. Be sure to read the first article, if you haven’t already.

Nine seasons of Seinfeld sadly came to a close as Jerry, George, Kramer, and Elaine sat in a cold, lifeless prison cell as a result of their selfish ways and thoughtless inaction. A small tear ran down my cheek when I watched the last of the Lord of the Rings trilogy knowing that this was the end. The telling of such a great tale had been told only to live within my memory (oh, and the books that I tried to read and gave up on. But, whatever.). Those evenings in May of ‘99 and December of ‘03 represent the void that is present in my soul every Sunday morning after hearing good, Biblical preaching, a moment that lasts for about thirty to forty minutes and then ceases to exist outside of our memory.

But soft! The proper placement of ones and zeros on a computer or an optical disc or the reconfiguration of a piece of magnetized tape can capture the essence of Seinfeld, Middle Earth, and a 30 minute message allowing them to exist in my collection forever and ever.

Technological advancements in the last few decades and especially the last few years have changed the way we can capture, store, and distribute media. Take technology by the reins and allow the people in your congregation to relive those moments at their leisure… not a season of Seinfeld, I mean, but your series on Jesus’ prayer in Matthew 6 or your message on Psalm 23. Here are some ways you can use technology to extend the shelf life of your sermons.

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