Get personal

Is your church looking for an effective way to draw more people? In my parish, our pastor regularly encourages people to share their personal faith story, to tell people how being a Christian makes a difference in their lives. We Christians can be a shy bunch when it comes to opening up.
The River [...]

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The Anti-Welcoming Church

Having trouble getting new people coming to your church? Maybe your church isn’t so easy to find or as welcoming as it ought to be. Catholic churches don’t tend to think a lot about marketing and how to make themselves newcomer-friendly. Here are 10 Ways To Keep Me From Discovering Your Church. How many is [...]

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Church averages 10,000 downloads in just a few months

Another article about how churches are adopting online communications: blogs, podcasts, chat rooms.
You never know what forms of online communication might work, but the key is to get out there, try and experiment. Given the cost of these tools are so low now, and so many people are on the web, churches can’t afford to [...]

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I need help

Last week my wife, who is 8 months pregnant with twins, had to go to the hospital. Seems the little ones (we don’t know if they are girls, boys or one of each, although we have an idea) were getting ready to come early. That is often the case with twins, but 4.5 weeks early [...]

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What are you doing to preserve your data?

Churches and other non-profits have important, critical data that should be backed up on a scheduled basis, stored at a reliable source off-site. I suspect, tho that most churches backup process is like this:

Backups happen sporadically
Not all important files are backed up
Backup files are stored on the same computer as the original, or on a [...]

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Grab your credit card for the big show

On Friday of last week, I got Fr. Tony’s podcast up on iTunes. The process is fairly straightforward. There is a large icon on the main podcast page in iTunes for adding your own podcast. You then have to type in the url of the podcast feed. The url is then grabbed and all the [...]

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Faith nourished

Just came across a Catholic Register article on how Catholics are using the internet in creative ways. Of note is how the Internet breaks down barriers and enables dioceses and parishes to utilize programs offered in other diocese, including marriage prep and RCIA.
I remember how valuable going to an Engaged Encounter weekend was for Rowena [...]

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Breaking new ground

Fr. Tony Man-son-hing is one of the people pushing the boundaries of DeoWeb and online communication in the Diocese of Sault Ste. Marie. He was very active while working as the Chancellor, publishing content on a steady basis. This includes a weekly “In the Loop” news item for priests sent out via the message centre [...]

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Let Google manage your email + other goodies

Google is now packaging together 4 of their services in a connected bundle for organizations:

Gmail for email
Gtalk for instant messaging
Google Calendar for managing schedules and events
Google Page creator for web pages

My first thoughts after reading this is that churches and dioceses can benefit well just by switching to Gmail, and ignoring the rest for now. [...]

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Church for Men

Why is it that churches are filled more with women than men? This is true of all denominations. Here are some sobering stats from the U.S.:

On any typical Sunday, 6,000,000 married women will worship without their husbands. That’s one out of five.
About 90% of the boys who were raised in church abandon it in their [...]

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