In case you didn’t see Scott Reese’s post on Myspace & Paul, I wanted to highlight it even though it’s been four weeks since he posted it. Scott is doing some very solid thinking here.

Since summer of 2005 I’ve been thinking a great deal about how blogging and social networking sites (like Myspace, Xanga, and Facebook) can be used for evangelism and outreach. See some of my previous posts on the subject here, here, here, and here.

I’ve made some efforts to educate management here at Resurrection about the potential, but haven’t been able to spark them into action yet. Is anyone out there aware of a church that’s effectively reaching out through social networking sites?

Mark Stephenson, director of Web Empowered Church (WEC), posts here about how “online community” used to mean forums, but now takes many different forms. These days there are many places on a site where users could potentially post their own thoughts, requests, questions, feedback, and so on. Mark explains how WEC already has a wide variety of extensions for TYPO3 that provide church-specific functionality that fosters online community.

Lee Grady at Charisma Online posts here about MegaVoice, a company that makes a solid-state, handheld audio player device, similar to an iPod. The MegaVoice is preloaded at the factory with audio that can’t be changed by the user, and is capable of running on solar power. Using these devices, illiterate people all over the world can now hear the Bible read in their native languages. How cool is that?

More background here.

Duncan Rein, CEO of Silas Partners, posts here regarding how CRM (Constituent Relationship Management) should be and inevitably will be fully integrated with the church’s website. This is further fuel for our previous discussion with Tony Dye and others about Church Management Systems (ChMS) and Content Management Systems (CoMS).

To put it in concrete terms, at Resurrection we’re using TYPO3 for content management and Shelby for church management/CRM. I’m in agreement that ultimately we need to: A) integrate the two; or B) replace both with something else already integrated; or C) develop an open source church management/CRM that we can natively integrate with TYPO3. Right now we’re working on option A, but somewhat reluctantly since this is inelegant and it’s difficult to see how well it will work over the long term. Option B isn’t a great one for us because we’re fully committed to TYPO3 and Web Empowered Church. That leaves option C, for which my heart yearns, but we can’t pursue because we have no funding or interest among executive management here.

Hmmm … Maybe we take Tony’s suggestion and sneak this in the back door by gradually building a CRM/ChMS in the form of TYPO3 extensions?

Web Evangelism Bulletin has just posted a new article about Blog Evangelism. The article includes a brief but good overview of the difference between a blog and a traditional website. This would be good for anyone in your church who is struggling to understand the point of blogging and how it can be used in evangelism.

Naked Conversations, the long awaited book about blogging by Scoble and Israel is out now. Here’s a review by Kathy Sierra. I’d be very interested in the thoughts of anyone in the church IT community about this book. Has anyone read it (or started to read it)?

A number of church tech bloggers have linked and commented on the reports regarding a recent study about teens and religion (for example: here and here). Teenage Research Unlimited did the study for B’nai B’rith Youth Organization (BBYO) an international group committed to reaching and teaching Jewish teens.

There are actually two stories here. The first story is the survey data (Word document) that BBYO released and many newspapers reported and bloggers have commented on.

The second story is that BBYO has built a new online community for Jewish teens called b-linked. The site is their strategy to address two findings: 68% of teens say religions is important to them and 92% say they want a better connection. I wish I had more time to investigate and comment further on this, but at first glance it seems that they’ve spent some money and built a really nice site. They report having 3,480 teens signed up so far. We need to pay attention to this. If they stick with this strategy and make it work, there will be a lot for us to learn.

Wired News reports that visitors to your website form an impression of the visual appeal of your site within 1/20th of a second. So how important are visual designers on your web team?

Here’s another use for blogging in the church. First United Methodist Church of La Vergne, TN recently started using a blog to publish their church newsletter to the web. I think this is a cool way for a small church to get started using web technology at no cost.

Mark Batterson: “Prayer is spiritual priming. When you live in prayer mode your spiritual radar is on. Your spiritual antenna is up. If you don’t pray there will be countless God-given opportunities that come and go without you even knowing it. Why? Because you aren’t primed and ready!”