Richard McManus gives us his take on the top 10 Web 2.0 moments of 2005.

Effective Web Ministry Notes comments on an article in the Orlando Sentinel regarding how college coaches are sending text messages to recruits’ phones as a tool in their recruiting efforts. We need to figure out how to use texting in our student ministry strategy.

One of our senior ministry leaders is replying to e-mails from a hundred or so people who e-mailed her. Many of these people are on Road Runner e-mail addresses. (Road Runner is the Internet service from Time Warner Cable.) She started getting bounce-backs from Road Runner that look like this:

The e-mail system was unable to deliver the message, but did not report a specific reason. Check the address and try again. If it still fails, contact your system administrator. exchange01.church.cor.org #4.0.0 smtp;452 Too many recipients received this hour. Please see our rate limit policy at http://security.rr.com/spam.htm#ratelimit

So I clicked the link and read about Road Runner’s rate limit policy. Turns out that we didn’t have forward DNS for our mail server, exchange01.church.cor.org, which caused us to fall under the category of “Systems With Incorrectly Configured DNS Entries”. Accordingly, we are limited to sending e-mails to 10 Road Runner customers per hour. Since we have literally thousands of people in our congregation with Road Runner addresses, this is a problem.

Needless to say, we corrected the DNS issue right away, but how long will it be before Road Runner’s system checks again and realizes we fixed it?

Later in the same Road Runner page about their rate limit policy we read:

The SenderBase Reputation Score that Road Runner uses as part of its inbound email rate limiting decision cannot be looked up on the SenderBase site as a direct query.

Woo hoo. So Road Runner is going to base its rate limitation partly on the SenderBase Reputation Score, but there’s no obvious way for me to find out our score. Road Runner, this is not serving your customers well. How are we supposed to explain to our congregants that we can’t get e-mail through to them due to a policy of their ISP that’s so complicated, even us IT guys can’t figure it out or do anything about it?

Seems as if this whole “no church on Christmas” thing is generating a lot of discussion. Even national popular press stories are appearing, such as this on one MSNBC.

Chuck Russell, my fellow Appian Way blogger, linked one of his seminary professors, Ben Witherington, who really blasted churches for closing. Ben’s post drew a lot of comments.

Another perspective is from Perry Noble who explains why he decided not to have services on Christmas. Perry also takes the opportunity to poke fun at the controversy.

And then there’s Rich Tucker who linked a very old story about Resurrection explaining that we’ve bucked the trend by being traditional in some ways, yet we’re still successful. By the way Resurrection is having worship on Christmas Day, and so is my wife’s church, Living Water. So hey, if your church is closed, you’re always welcome here. 😉

Kevin D. Hendricks of Church Marketing Sucks points us to a new report on the results of a survey on church marketing of over 500 church leaders across the country. This short report is worth a read.

Kevin says, “It’s not Barna material by any means, but it is some interesting stuff.”

Tony Dye of Perimeter Church just completed a great series of blog posts about what a good Church Management System (CMS) should do and how it should work. This is great reading for any of you who are considering installing a CMS or changing your existing CMS.

I wonder if any of the CMS companies out there are sophisticated enough to be paying attention to this discussion in the blog world. Some of Tony’s comments seemed aimed directly at the vendors of popular systems. Are they listening?

Six months ago the closest thing to retail at Church of the Resurrection was selling CDs and videos of sermons. Today we have a bookstore (that sells our own CDs, videos, etc. as well as other typical Christian bookstore stuff), a ticketing system for selling reserved seat tickets to events in our main sanctuary, and now a coffee shop. Whew! I’ve never managed technology in a retail operation before, so it’s been a learning experience.

For the bookstore we’re using Booklog software and have been happy with it. For ticketing we’re using Wintix and Webtix from Center Stage Software. It is functional but unimpressive (ask me for more info, if you’re interested). For the coffee shop we’re in the process of installing Restaurant Manager. Should have it running by the middle of next week.

In the process of installing all of these retail systems, we have discovered a great Internet vendor called POS Micro that sells all of the required specialty hardware such as cash drawers, barcode readers, keyboards, receipt printers, etc. They have stuff in stock, can ship overnight, can take orders until 8:00 pm Eastern time, and are inexpensive. Highly recommended.

Adam Roberts from Shepherd of the Hills UMC in Douglasville, Georgia describes how Methodists really are in the theological middle. In the post he quotes Adam Hamilton, our senior pastor. Scott Jones, the Methodist bishop in Kansas agrees, and refers to this position as “The Extreme Center.”

The United Methodist News Service just released a nice article about churches doing podcasting. It features a number of quotes from Peter Metz, Resurrection’s Director of Communications.

Jason took the nerd test. I thought I was a nerd, but I must bow to Jason who scored a whopping 96!