The Internet is now as ubiquitous as Coca ColaTM or McDonald’sTM. Throughout the world the internet has been able to reach some of the most inaccessible places as access moves to satellite. We can now hear stories, both heart warming and tragic anywhere in the world, through people accessing the internet and uploading information instantaneously from any location.
With such a huge global penetration into people's lives, many churches have not seen or do not see the benefit of how the internet can complement their existing church community. Possibly due to it being perceived as too technical or even a cost factor entering into the decisions.
As a web designer and developer of small church web sites and large community sites, I have seen the benefits that can be achieved with some forward thinking and a relatively small cost.
Others who see the benefit of how the internet can complement churches are David & Tamara Posthuma from E-Church Essentials. They have a dream to facilitate churches and help them shift their thinking to an online experience, where church groups or large denominations can create and access information online to serve their people and where an individual user can also benefit.
After 3 years of research and development E-Church Essentials was launched. A system built where churches can create a website, facilitate people & groups and deliver educational curriculum or E-Learning quickly and easily online, all for a small cost.
The integrated system is formed around three main Spiritual Formation phases, as explained on their site…
Attraction & CommunicationI had the privilege of looking into what David and the team have created with E-Church Essentials and was excited by the system. Now even the smallest church can have access to the tools that would have previously cost tens of thousands of dollars to put together.
The E-Church Network provides ministries with one of the most powerful website builder and management system available, as well as a full-featured event calendar for communicating ministry-wide events, department-specific events and for managing individual events...all related to your ministry. Websites, designed correctly, can be a highly effective tool for attraction and communication.
Equipping In Christ
The E-Church Network enables ministries to build their own professional E-Learning programs and courses, in order to train and equip people in Christ Jesus. E-Learning capabilities include full multimedia, assessments, tasks and virtual classroom forums where students and facilitators can meet, relate and learn together. Today's adults prefer to learn online rather than in a campus classroom...now for the first time, E-Learning is unleashed to the local church...and it's easy to use, fully customizable, and highly affordable!
Mobilize People for Ministry
The E-Church Network provides people with personal assessments (Personality / Spiritual Gift / Leadership Style) that are designed specifically to help them and their spiritual leadership understand how God created them, and for what ministry purpose. Then team building tools enable ministry leadership to define ministry teams, define team member profiles, and search for ideal ministry candidates based upon those profiles.
While the ability to build sites and calendars and managing member data is an important part of church life. The most exciting feature for me was seeing how online learning can now be achieved. I believe this is one of the most important steps forward in churches being able to educate members through uploading their own course material for others to learn from.
Leonard Sweet refers to 2 types of people, Digital Immigrant and Digital Natives. A Digital Native is someone who was born into the digital age, where computers and online internet access is first nature, always being apart of their lives. A Digital Immigrant is a personal who has had to adopt this life, born before computers and having to learn how to use them. David, Tamara and the E-Church Essentials team are helping to facilitate the Digital Natives by providing the online experience they are looking for, and helping the Digital Immigrants shift their paradigm and understand why it is important to adopt an online presence.
I encourage you to check out E-Church Essentials and let David and Tamara show you first hand how they can help you move your existing tools online.
Malcolm Hawker is a church planter and owns
Webdesign Studio in Sydney,
Australia. He has been pastoring for 18 years and developing websites online for
almost 10 year. He oversees three large online communities THEOOZE, ALLELON, DTOUR and continues to consult and develop
web sites for churches in Australia and the USA.