That is a great question and I have no idea what the answer is.

I would warn against using blogger for now. We had quite a bit of discussion recently in the forums about bad spam links being added that look like they are part of the blog.

I do like this idea. Something basic, something free, something that would reach people, something that would help coordinate.

Maybe there are different blog sites that don't suffer from this spam problem blogger has.

I'd love to see some church specific services that did something like this but add a few more features. Something simple, free for churches, multi-lingual, and easy to use. Maybe put out by the denominations building these churches (they would have some money to host some of this on a world wide scale)...... idea brewing... time to send some emails.

Anyone know of anyone doing this? I think it's a great idea.

Matt Farina
Geeks and God Co-Host
www.innovatingtomorrow.net
www.mattfarina.com

Are you talking about that bar that appears on top of the page with that looks like this?:

SEARCH BLOG |FLAG BLOG | Next Blog >> Create Blog | Sign In

I may do a mock-up on a blog I registered and don't use.... I'll post back here with the idea...

Something elso I like about this is that it can be done by someone with a very low geek rating.

Okay, I stole a few images from the web, and threw this together.... The idea is to show how the blog and navegation would work as a content management system. I am sure that with tweaking it could be very functional...

here's the link:
http://smy3brazil.blogspot.com/

Now, give me some opinions please.... :)

I kinda like this conceptually. For churches with no funding. (Note: this does not include churches who just don't think it's a priority so they don't give it funding)

In my case for both IE6 and Firefox 2 the church header image is not where it's supposed to be. The top of the image starts about halfway down the header.

Matt Farina
Geeks and God Co-Host
www.innovatingtomorrow.net
www.mattfarina.com

Thanks for letting me bounce this idea off of you. I did what I did in about 20 or 30 minutes. Since it is just a mock-up, I am not going to put anymore time into it. I do think that with the templates and page control that blogspot gives, it would be possible to tweak this into a workable idea. I just got into blogging 3 months ago and, so I still don't know which free services out there offer what...

What I will do, is try this concept for Igreja Batista da Vitoria. It is one of the churches that fits the description in the first post. The pastor is bi-vocational, but has enough internet access to blog from time to time. I also think with the proximity to the university, and the ability to maintain this website by going to a lan-house, the church could designate one or two people to keep the content fresh with the next church events and such.

I am also planting churches in a place where the internet is just being discovered. These churches are house churches and cell churches, with no professional staff, so this is the reason I am thinking through this.

I also thought it might be a good way to store some useful materials. I work in an area that is still low in literacy and a chronological bible story podcast might be an option to make the Bible available to those who can't read. Church members could download and burn CDs with bible stories for those they are reaching. (I am also looking at low-bandwidth ideas, and I know y'all did a podcast on that too)

Let me know what you think might work and any sites or services you might recommend for this.

Oh, yeah, my real blog is www.smy2brazil.blogspot.com

Check out http://wordpress.com/. You can have a blog there without the next blog link or other hassles blogger has right now. Oh, and it's free, too.

Matt Farina
Geeks and God Co-Host
www.innovatingtomorrow.net
www.mattfarina.com

I am checking out wordpress.com right now. After having cut my teeth on blogging with blogspot, the controls aren't as intuitive to me, but I think after playing around for an hour, I'll understand it all well. I noticed that it is available in Portuguese, so that is good.

Interestlingly, yesterday there was something on lifehacker about using wordpress as a website CMS. I'll go back and read that.

I'm a fan of wordpress as a blog (mostly) and a fan of using wordpress.com in the way you described for churches needing an alternative to have a website.

But, Wordpress really isn't a CMS. It should not be used where an actual CMS can do the job.

Another place to check out is http://www.mychurch.org... though I don't think it is really good at the multilingual thing.

Matt Farina
Geeks and God Co-Host
www.innovatingtomorrow.net
www.mattfarina.com

It can definitely be stretched a bit beyond just a blog.
You can have many non-blog pages and have your home page be one of these. The blog content can be filtered to give you something resembling several different blog streams organized by contributor on category tags. Theres lots of theme's and they let you sytle and modify them a bit. If you ever go the route of running the site via a paid host account, you can do much more through selection and customization using a large universe of free plugins and themes.

It's kind of a gentle intro to the CMS concepts. But it is limited, not really a full site portal or platform, its still a blog on steroids. If you can be happy with that .... its great. I know of a few small congregations in USA using a webhost installed copy in that manner and it delivers pretty good results using a mimimum of effort and expertise. It's what sold me and a few others on the CMS approach to setting up and maintaining websites.

The free versions will offer you less, but still substantially more than Blogger.

Mark

I've set up a real site for Igreja Batista da Vitoria. It is very generic and that is obvious. I will get some digital camera pics of the church building and maybe some of the ministries. http://ibvjf.blogspot.com the other mockup I did, I will just use to play around with templates and widgets.

I'm impressed. That looks pretty good.

Matt Farina
Geeks and God Co-Host
www.innovatingtomorrow.net
www.mattfarina.com

Thanks Matt,

I don't know code, I just messed around with blogger, and then did a search on the net for templates and hacks.

From what I understand, once I get a welcome text from the pastor and a picture, I can configure that to be a front page or entry page, that will always appear first when someone enters the site.

Then, I can put up a tab bar below the header with links to posts. I'll configure the blog to show only one post at a time as default. If the topic is broad, the post that will appear when the link is clicked will be a post full image links to the more specific posts... For example if one clicked "Ministries" a post with links to the various ministries would be the one to appear.

Well, that's my navigation system idea. I've never done this before, so it's just a guess. I still think this idea is going to work well. Here in Brazil, where I am, the internet is a new thing to most (last 3-5 years kind of thing). So it's not out of style to have a .blogspot address or anything like that.

Any suggestions or ideas?

(oh, in case you didn't notice) the side column that says "Jesus disse:" has a quote of Jesus from the Bible that changes every time you refresh the page.

I didn't notice that the quote changed each time you refreshed it. That's really nice.

Can you write up how you did this? I think this could benefit a lot of churches. If you write it up I'll help you spread it around to help others. I think this is great.

I like where you plan to go with the menu bar. I think this might end up looking nicer than most of the church sites out there today.

Matt Farina
Geeks and God Co-Host
www.innovatingtomorrow.net
www.mattfarina.com

Matt, thanks for the plug of MyChurch. And congrats on your new project. Didn't know about it until I saw it on Techcrunch - although I'm disappointed by their comments and jabs that were meant to be offensive to Christians.

Let me know if you think there are ways we can work together in this space. I've spoken with some regional synod chairs, but I'd love to do something official with you and LCMS.

Joe

Thanks for the offer and I'll be in touch soon.

Matt Farina
Geeks and God Co-Host
www.innovatingtomorrow.net
www.mattfarina.com

I appreciate your information and the fact that I am not alone in wanting to use blogs as a forum for ministry and education. I just decided this week that I wanted to get going on this idea that has been stirring for awhile now.

When I checked out different "start up" articles, it seems that WordPress is the most recommended start up free format to use. I am getting ready to set up my first attempt today I hope. I really want to get linked up with some other Christians that can help me move forward in a positive way.

I love the changing scripture, can I get the information on how to set that up too. I have no tech background and cannot code anything that I know of. I am banking on point and click friendly plug-ins and helps.

I do believe that this is a medium that too should be used to tell the Story and I am already loving the international aspect that is available. Our church site is www.2RiversChurch.com feel free to check us out. I would like to stay in touch and learn from you and your readers as we go forward.

Can you tell me more about Geeks and God? kltthestory@gmail.com

Once I get the content and navigation system in, I'll go back and write a step-by-step of what I did and hopefully that will be of use to someone else. I doubt I'll be able to get the write-up on the forum before January, however.

Okay, I decided to work on this today. I put up a menu bar like many sites have. Right now the links all go somewhere, but not to the right place, because I am still lacking content. The idea is for these links to go to blog posts that will have appropriate links or such.

http://ibvjf.blogspot.com/

I'm liking where you are going with this. You are accomplishing a lot with a very little.

Matt Farina
Geeks and God Co-Host
www.innovatingtomorrow.net
www.mattfarina.com

Does this look workable? http://ibvjf.blogspot.com

The links on the right will, as is the plan for the others link directly to a blog post formatted with the information expected. The blog is going to be made to display only one post per page, so it won't look too much like a blog.

You have to use your imagination still, but can you give me some feedback?

This looks really good structure wise for a basic site and more than i imagined someone could do with blogger.

The shortcoming I see (and have no idea how to get around) is adding anything with interactivity to a site. This would have to remain basic.

Also, one of our pet peeves is when churches have a million links on their site. It would be nice if there were different links in the sidebar based on the different pages you were on from the main menu. I think this would go a long way for readability. Though, it may be a pipe dream. But, I never thought this possible here.

Also, and I won't nit pick..... but the look could be improved.

I'm impressed. Keep up the good work. I can't wait to read how you did all this.

Matt Farina
Geeks and God Co-Host
www.innovatingtomorrow.net
www.mattfarina.com

I am not trying to win any contests here, but I do want this site to be useable.

From what I'm leaning you can do quite a bit with CSS and Java and HTML on Blogger these days. I don't know any of them, but am seeing how to tag images and things like that. If I knew code, I think I could do much better stuff, but I really just want a functional site.

Once I get a blog post for each piece of info, that post can be edited easily and repeatedly with the dashboard, hence a poorman's CMS.

What do you mean about the million links? I decided to do 3 types of links. On the top, horizontally, will only be specific info about the church site address, history, pastoral staff, and contact info. The two sections on the right hand column are Ministries and Community. I will add or take out those links as I find them useful or not.

As far as interactivity, there is under community, a link to IBV on Orkut. On the orkut community, there is a forum and a way to send email to community members and put up pictures. If you're not familiar with Orkut, it is another facebook, myspace, kind of site.

Where you are at Okurt is the best choice being the top social networking site in Brazil. While I don't like sending people to another site to do part of the church you don't really have another choice in this case. Or, can you integrate part of Okurt right into the site on blogger? Can you get the newest forum topics from Okurt and display the 5 most recent on the blogger site somewhere?

Also, when you get a lot of links on a page with the different menus it can get cluttered. Is there any way to do a tiered menu? For example, have two menus. A main menu and a second one that changes based on where you are on the main on. So, if you are on the about link on the main menu the second menu changes to links about the church. Or, if you are on ministries from the main main the second menu would list the ministries.

Does that make sense? The second menu is smart and lists items based on the main menu.

Matt Farina
Geeks and God Co-Host
www.innovatingtomorrow.net
www.mattfarina.com