Featured Articles

Clover Website Winners

Here are the winners of the Worship Leader and Clover Website Giveaway and a little about them:

Winner:

Gary Hollinger
Pastor of Worship (and primary technology guy among other hats)
Emmanuel Bible Church
Berwyn, IL

Tell us a little about your church:
Emmanuel Bible Church is an independent Bible church averaging just over 500 in attendance during three Sunday morning services each week. EBC is located in Berwyn, IL, a predominately working class near-west suburb of Chicago. We are a multi-ethnic church that began as a Czech congregation over a hundred years ago. Through the years, as neighborhood demographics changed, an English language service was added to the native Czech and eventually the church became entirely English speaking.

We are currently seeing another demographic change as the area is becoming increasingly Hispanic. To accommodate their needs we have recently begun a third service in Spanish. More than 200,000 people live within a three-mile radius of Emmanuel but considerably less than 1% of those attend an evangelical church on a given week. It is our desire to make an even greater impact on our community by reaching them more effectively with the Good News of Jesus Christ.

Why do you feel your website needed an upgrade?
Emmanuel has had several volunteer webmasters over the past few years, but each of them has been admittedly "techie" rather than a designer.

Because of this our look has tended to be cluttered and complicated rather than warm, friendly and professional. In addition, the content interfaces have proven to be somewhat difficult for non-technical people to use easily. Because people are now primarily finding suppliers for goods and services via internet searches rather than through traditional advertising or yellow pages, it has become increasingly apparent that we need to upgrade both the look of our web presence and our ability to easily manage content.

At your church, who is in charge of the online properties?
Primarily volunteers with some staff oversight.

How do you intend to use your website in concordance with your church's ministry goals?
We see our new website as being a key ingredient in marketing our church to the community. We want people to know that Emmanuel is a great place to worship, find caring relationships and to grow in their walk with Christ. We envision a new look that will be far more engaging and easy to navigate as people seek to learn about the ministries available to them at EBC.

What are the 3 Internet-based resources that are most useful to you and your ministry?
worshipleader.com (particularly Song Discovery), worshiptogether.com (particularly New Song Cafe and free charts), mondaymorninginsight.com (church news, information, food for thought and humor from Todd Rhodes)

Runner Up:

Ken Hicks
Worship Arts Pastor
Hillcrest Assembly of God

Tell us a little about your church:
My name is Ken Hicks and I'm the Worship Arts Pastor at Hillcrest Assembly of God. I coordinate the worship music, fine arts, and media for the church. I also teach a Young Adult Sunday School class, and as part of the pastoral staff I take part in visiting people in the hospital and our shut-ins who cannot make it to regular services.

Hillcrest is a growing Assemblies of God church around 200+ in number. We have a wide range of ages, incomes, and races, but mostly you'll find your average friendly, hard-working family who loves God and loves people. Our community shows a similar diversity and our goal is to reach everyone for Christ.

Why do you feel your website needed an upgrade?
Our website was about 10 years old with small upgrades along the way, but mostly outdated. Though our goal is to reach all, we live and minister in a college town with many other schools nearby, so we would like to specifically reach out to that demographic along with the youth of our community. One of the first things a person of my age (30 or younger) is going to do when checking out a church or function is look at their website. Unfortunately, many of my generation are going to judge a book by its cover and just pass us by. We are so excited because this new website will be able to better advertise what is really happening at our church. As followers of Jesus Christ, we have the greatest message in all the world, and I think we should advertise that message to the best of our ability to reach as many as we can. In a time when we are trying to keep the house of God in good repair, a bathroom renovation is currently underway, and we are spending our resources on various outreaches, something has to give. I approached my pastor with a new website, ironically one from Clover, and though he wanted to upgrade we just need to wait and let the budget catch up with the vision. A week later I saw the contest in my issue of Worship Leader and thought, it doesn't hurt enter and pray. This is a real blessing to our church and what we are trying to accomplish.

At your church, who is in charge of the online properties?
Now that I'm helping to design this new site, I've been put in charge of our online content.

At your church, who is in charge of the online properties?
Again, we plan to reach as many as we can, but now we can do so with a fresh new look that represents what our church is all about.

What are the 3 Internet-based resources that are most useful to you and your ministry?
I'm sure our other pastoral staff have their own web-based favorites and needs, but as a Worship Arts Pastor I use SongSelect through CCLI and Praise Charts.com for chord charts and sheet music. I use iTunes and various artists' sites to find and review new music, and I use Facebook to reach out and keep in touch with my congregation and others in the community. I also frequent Worship Leader's website as you can see.

Runner Up:

Art Heckman
Music Ministry Director
Clayton Community Church

Tell us a little about your church:
Clayton Community Church is an Evangelical Presbyterian Church of roughly 700 people. We serve people from many walks of life and families. Our purpose is to glorify God as we connect, grow and serve. Our desire is that we are connecting both within our church family as well as with our communities outside of church. Our desire is that we are also raising up people who are passionate about God's word and are actively engaged in spiritual growth for the purpose of serving others and truly being God's hands extended. Serving is also extremely important to us because we believe that this was truly the heart of Jesus. Our lives should live out the love of Jesus.

Why do you feel your website needed an upgrade?
Since we are a mobile church, that meets at a school, our website should really serve as a point of connection and a way to give information to people. We were in a position where only one person had access to update the site and it just wasn't practical. Our website was not modern or easy to navigate and was not effective in reflecting who are as a community. We also did not have the budget to hire someone to manage the site for us and all of our staff were needing to use it to communicate with their teams.  In fact , most of our staff set up blogspot pages instead of using our site, which kept us somewhat divided in our communication.

At your church, who is in charge of the online properties?
Mike Basil, our high school director and I help him a bit.

How do you intend to use your website in concordance with your church's ministry goals?
We believe that having an updated site will support the ministry goals in several ways. This site will help us have another point of communication and connection, which will clearly show people how they can get involved. We will also utilize the website to direct people towards growth opportunities and development as well as provide access to resources. Our website will also be able to give people access to service opportunities both within and outside of our church community. We want to be able to direct people to one place that is simple to navigate so they can access information more effectively and easily.  Having a simple way to update the site will free up time for our ministry leaders to be more effective in their ministry roles without having to spend long periods of time troubleshooting technology.

What are the 3 Internet-based resources that are most useful to you and your ministry?
Blogspot, Google Sites, Box.net, Bible Gateway

---

This is an excerpt from Worship Leader magazine. To read more articles like this - click here to subscribe.

Visit SongDISCovery.com
Find the resources worship leaders need.