We've seen & heard different lists of essential website features, like must-have Drupal modules. Most of them are calendars, blogs, etc. So here's my tough question:

When a church wants its website to focus on bringing the Gospel to the lost, what features, elements, structure, design, modules, etc. provide the best tools to do so, both for their local community and to a global audience?

Every congregation is different and in a different community, so the details will change from place to place, but are there certain features that are nearly critical?

On October 10, 2010 (2:00 PM Eastern/ GMT-5), Rev. Dr. Joel Heck of Concordia University, Austin will give a one hour presentation on the Book of Genesis, followed by a question and answer session. While the host congregation will be Shepherd of the Ridge Lutheran Church in North Ridgeville, OH, Dr. Heck will give his presentation from Austin via streaming Internet video. We will, in turn, broadcast this presentation live via our website, shepherdoftheridge.org . Anyone anywhere in the world with a broadband internet connection can watch live.

OK, we're currently using PowerPoint for services but are looking into MediaShout. We don't really need all of MediaShout's ability to import music &c., since we're currently assembling our services using CPH's Lutheran Service Builder. (We're liturgical.) We export into PowerPoint format, and would then presumably import the ppt into MediaShout.

So I know we can add animated backgrounds, which ppt can't, and maybe some extra transitions, but I'm wondering what specific effect MediaShout could have on our service slides that we can't already do with PowerPoint?

Looking at Fluid/Fluidity for Mac and https://wiki.mozilla.org/Prism as a cross-platform solution, has anyone considered using something like this to create a custom app as an easy downloadable item?

Specifically, has anyone seen a Drupal system for this?

So I was reading the great critiques at http://mediaoutreach.com/tag/f... and noticed some people are looking for bookstores on church websites.

Amazon has their "astore" that allows people to set up a sort of "mini-Amazon.com" with only suggested products. So we could set something like this up, embed it into our site, and offer suggested reading and other recommendations, which would be great to encourage people to follow-up on various studies we're doing. And if we set it up, we get a (~4%) kickback on the deal.

I'm really interested in thoughts on this.