Back on 9th November Peter Zammit of Christ Church Newport posted a comment in response to my April post Hobsons Bay Churches website is being rebuilt. Here’s what Peter wrote:
It is great to hear that the website is being rebuilt. Will it be ready for Christmas? It could be a great tool if we used it. How many people do use it?
The book advertisements are a bit of a distraction on this part but maybe something is better than nothing? One of the things that might help is that we advertise the Website within our own churches. We could easily each post our own weekly newsletters on the site. Then if you missed out on Sunday or lose it you know where you could go to look at it. If it gets big could each church have its own little site on the Website?
Could people just send in an article for the magazine on a quarterly basis. I know someone who is doing a bit of writing maybe he could contribute a piece each quarter?
What do you think? Any other ideas?
These are excellent ideas for consideration. I’d like to throw this open for discussion, and make some suggestions of my own.
First, the magazine never was a goer. However, why could we not develop the blog to take its place? It is no problem to turn the existing blog into a multi-author blog – in fact, this was always my intention. All that is needed is for aspiring bloggers among the Hobsons Bay Churches community to get in touch with me about their ideas about what they would like to write. Some simple guidelines would need to be developed to ensure that the writing supports the purpose and ethos of the HBC network, but personally I see these as a pretty wide net. If an author seems suitable then I will set them up with a login account and show them how to use WordPress. It’s not difficult.
It would be great to have at least one blogger in each fellowship, or, alternatively, a person in each church prepared to pass on material for inclusion in the website.
One criteria that might help would be to keep a major emphasis on growing the Kingdom of God in Hobsons Bay, rather than too narrow church and personal interests.
HOWEVER – Given my conviction that there is only one Church in Hobsons Bay, with many congregations, then what affects, inspires, troubles, blesses and encourages any one congregation likewise must affect and be important to us all. And this applies whether that church is officially affiliated with Hobsons Bay Churches or not!
So, given the minimal amount of communication that presently occurs between churches, ANYTHING that increases that sharing is likely to be good!
How much do you know of the vision that the other churches have for their ministry in the community? For that matter, how much do many people really know about the vision of their own church?
Something that could be a help and a reassurance would be for a couple of editors to be appointed, not to control what is presented, but to assist writers with the focus, clarity and purpose of their pieces. Any suggestions?
I have seen 100s of church newsletters over the years. Wherever we visit we always pick one up to find out what God is doing with that congregation. Some are wonderful, but many are disappointing. Even though they have inspiring material extracted from other publications, which is valuable in itself, it has little or no relationship to what God is doing in that community. In the blogging community they would be considered to be space-filling and link-baiting. So, I’m sure many people could supply articles of this nature, but one task of the editors would be to ensure that a good reason is given for its inclusion – one that is very relevant to what God is doing among us.
Book reviews are good, especially if the book is helping your community further the mission of Jesus and enabling you to live more like a family together. Links and pointers to resources that you have found helpful, including books, conferences, seminars, teaching resources, worship, gathering and mission opportunities, etc.
In particular, if your church is putting on an event that might bless others in the community, make it known. Too often Di and I have been disappointed by finding out about such things too late to make arrangements to join in, or even only after the event.
As well as the blog, real discussion can also take place in the comments section at the bottom of each page. This has already taken place while the Directory of Churches has been sorted out. If you want to see the comments for a blog post, then click on the heading of the post to go to the post’s own page. The present arrangement is that anyone may comments, but their first comment will go to the administrator (me at present) for approval. Once an author is approved their comments will appear automatically. This helps to weed out the comment spam, of which there have been 9 in the last three days. Of course, if you make a comment you won’t see it until you refresh or reload the page. If your comments never appear then contact me and I’ll see whether the very effective anti-spam system has misidentified you, and I’ll fix it.
The idea of each church having their own page has always appealed to me. Technically it’s a little more difficult than making more authors for the blog, as the structural integrity of the website itself could be at risk with too many unskilled people creating and editing pages. However, I can certainly create a page for each church, if content and ideas are sent to me for inclusion. Because of the workload that would result if each church wanted to change its page regularly, it would still be better if most news came through the blog, with the church page being a description of the main features of each community, photos of people and facilities, links to websites, location maps, times of major meetings, ministries, staff, contact details, etc. These would form a static resource which can be linked to when the information is refered to in blog posts. Each church page would have the same sort of comment section as all pages in this site, so that conversations can easily be held there.
I am about to embark on a complete redesign and rebuild of our own church website for Williamstown Baptist Church and Beth Tephillah Ministry Centre, given the radical changes that are taking place in our direction of ministry in the community. So I might put some of that material up on this site as an example of what can be done for a church page. If others have ideas for their own church page, please let me know.
I am also working on updating the Blogroll and Links parts of this site, so if your church has a website, please send me the address. Also, if you know of ministries in the community that have sites, or any other online resources that can help our gathered ministry in the community, please pass them on.
Ok, it’s over to you. let’s see what we can make of this website as a blessing to the community and a resource in our living for Jesus.
Mal
Now I get it. I hope it’s okay the blog advert came up on the home page. Please forgive me if I have done something wrong.
Actually Mal,
I dont get it.
I wanted to post (is it a blog?) on the fact that a group of people from Christchurch Newport plus Ballan and Westbourne and other went and helped with BlazeAid last Saturday 5th March in Charlton. 19 of us went and despite working hard we had a fabulous time.
The farmers were very appreciative of the work we did with them, mainly clearing fences and help getting them back up. They also appreciated telling us their story and showing us first hand how they had been affected. Like Frank saying, “We have lost 40 years of hard work into our house in town. It feels like we’re back where we started.” Despite this they keep moral up as best they can and get on with the months of work they have to do to get back to scratch. There is still plenty to do and with the help of http://www.blazeaid.com/ you can go or send a group to help out too!