It has been said that: "Movies are the parables of the 21st century." Even before the enormously popular Mel Gibson's movie The Passion of the Christ, many recent movies were being reviewed by Christians and Christian ministries. Popular Web sites include: HollywoodJesus.com (pop culture from a spiritual point of view), The Christian Critic's Movie Parables (Movie Reviews of Biblical Proportions), ChristianityTodayMovies.com, TheFilmForum.com (Christian conversation about the movies), MovieGlimpse.com (your insight to the movies), ChristianSpotlight.com (a ministry of ChristianAnswers.net), and PreviewOnline.org (publishing online Christian movie reviews since 1995). With resources widely available as this, growing numbers of churches are doing sermon or teaching series on movies. Perhaps movies can be a conversation starter to talk about God at your online ministry!

ForMinistry and American Bible Society staff members, including myself, will be in Indianapolis, Indiana, from June 30th through July 7th for the American Methodist Episcopal (AMEC) 47th Quadrennial General Conference. This is a special opportunity for us to talk with people in person and to learn together how to do ministry online. We'll be in the exhibit area at the Indiana Convention Center - if you're in the area, please stop by and say hello! As a part of active public communication, they are blogging their event as a Daily Report. Blogging is a great way to tell what is happening in your church, ministry, and/or community, since God is doing something everyday!

Spiritual Internet Use on the Rise: According to a recent Pew study, 64 percent of Americans have used the Internet for spiritual or religious purposes. When considering these numbers and the ever-growing popularity of the Internet for spiritual purposes, you can’t help but consider your Web site and online resources. Read the full article at ForMinistry.

Here's a book recommendation for you -- Back to the User: Creating User-Focused Websites teaches those who create Web sites how to think like the people who use them. This book enables Web marketers and developers to create sites that people want to use and to visit often. Read more about it and buy it online!

Fewer than one-third of all U.S. Protestant teenagers (32%) report that they personally read the Bible alone once a week or more often, according to researchers with the National Study of Youth and Religion. The majority of U.S. Protestant teenagers say that they read the Bible either less frequently or not at all. Furthermore, of all U.S. teenagers, only about one in four reads the sacred scripture of their religious tradition weekly or more often (26%). Large numbers of U.S. teenagers do claim religious affiliations and report attending religious services. But the findings here suggest that far fewer U.S. teens regularly engage in more personal religious practices of faith -- like scripture reading -- that many religious traditions, especially Protestantism, have long emphasized as crucial for spiritual growth. Read the entire story, including a breakdown by specific Protestant denominations, at www.youthandreligion.org.

This one is for fun -- Grace Christian and Missionary Alliance Church of Cleveland Ohio www.gracecma.org has put up a temporary Web site using great creativity (and obtaining appropriate permission) to launch its forthcoming Web site in early July. Click thru to view it before it's gone! You may also read a commentary & behind-the-scenes look about their Web design at HealYourChurchWebSite (note: the author of the HealYourChurchWebSite sometimes uses very blunt and frank language in his commentary, which may not be suitable to more sensitive readers.)

I'm back from vacation now, and armed with lots of pictures from my digital camera. I'd like to post them online to share with friends and family, but found it too limiting and costly to post pictures through my own Web hosting. So I started looking for online photo albums, and found 2 affordable services with unlimited space for an unlimited number of photos: www.smugmug.com and www.fotki.com -- at an annual cost of under $30! Photo albums can tell the stories of your congregation and your community like nothing else. They're fun to view and to share. Some services even offer photo printing and photo gifts, so you can create memorabilia of your church events. Read the about.com article, Photo Albums Made Easy, to see how easy photos can be shared on the Web. This comparison chart lists many online photo albums offerings - find one that fits your needs. Perhaps there's something to that saying: a picture is worth a thousand words.

Generous Giving is an incredible resource center (an initiative of Maclellan Foundation), with not only articles and books, but also events and a Marketplace where Christians can "shop" for giving opportunities! They've recently put together an excellent explanation for how to use PayPal Donations as a simple solution that enables nonprofit organizations to collect donations from your Web site! This is an ideal solution for churches and ministries that have no full-time technology staff or a customized online giving system.

Web-site technology can be used to support denominations and associations; here's a great example: "The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) launched 'People and Places Online' -- www.elca.org/peopleandplaces -- to help the church's lay ministers find new ministries within the church. The site is supported by the ELCA Department for Synodical Relations and the Division for Ministry. Lay ministers of the ELCA are associates in ministry, deaconesses and diaconal ministers. The church's 10,721 congregations are organized into 65 synods, which maintain rosters of ordained and lay ministers. Only synod staff will have access to information posted on the Web site -- the resumes of lay ministers seeking placement and the job openings of ELCA congregations, institutions and agencies -- to make any possible matches." Read the full article online.

Sometimes getting a church Web site to do what you'd really like it to do will take not only manpower but also money. When funding is available, professional companies can provide a highly customized online solution. Los Angeles’ St. Paul the Apostle Church decided their Web site needed a complete redesign to better reflect their spiritual mission, and they turned to Web development company A Far Site Better. Read the press release describing the process and the results. Then take a look at the finished results at www.st-apostle.org .

"First Baptist Church believes its website looks good. But more important to Minister of Education Jeff Humphrey, it is pulling people out of cyberspace and keeping them in church space. The congregation increased the resources it puts into its site after noticing how many techno-savvy residents in the northern Dallas suburbs are searching for church online, Humphrey said. The site, www.fbcallen.org, is designed to give visitors a glimpse into the life of the congregation..." -- from article titled, "Website becomes handiest item in toolbox as church seeks to attract, contact visitors" in The Online Standard. Read full article here.

I'm actually in the Southwest on vacation (in New Mexico, to be exact), while new daily entries are being posted here this week. This is accomplished by using a function called "content scheduling" built in to the ForMinistry WebBuilder tool. This is a special function only found in a select minority of Web site building tools, also known as content management systems. For those of you using ForMinistry WebBuilder, when you are logged in as an editor, you'll notice a little clock icon on the edit item bar over each item on your Web page. Click on the clock icon and set the date(s) and time(s) for publishing your content. You can selectively publish item(s) for a set number of hours each day, or publish items into the future like I've done.

Congratulations to Grace Cathedral for winning a Webby Award! Grace Cathedral is an Eposcopal church in San Francisco with a dynamic and aesthetically beautiful Web site. Capping a year that saw the Web play an increasingly vital role in everything from politics to pop culture, The International Academy of Digital Arts & Sciences unveiled the winners of The 8th Annual Webby Awards in May 2004. With record numbers of people going online to follow, debate, and influence world events, the Academy unveiled the winners for the year's best Web sites in 30 categories, including Activism, Community, Film, Music, News, Personal Web Sites, Politics, and Spirituality.

The Rev. Pat Umberger oversees a small church with a congregation of thousands. According to an Associated Press report, Umberger’s congregation extends well beyond southwestern Wisconsin through his operation of three Web sites: He set up a Web site for his parishes at www.johnsgar.com, a personal Web site (www.frpat.com) and a third Web site (www.cmonback.com) for people who have been away from the church and want to return. Umberger said his sites are different than many church sites, which are little more than a one-dimensional information sheet about the church. His sites are more interactive and live. Read the full ChurchCentral.com article

"It is wonderful each morning to tell about your love and at night to announce how faithful you are." (Psalm 92:2, CEV) Daily updates are a wonderful way to tell of God's work in our lives and in our church and ministry communities. Ginghamsburg Church posts an entry for its Transformation Journal Readings every day. CrossDaily.com has daily devotions from Charles Spurgeon's Morning & Evening Devotional. Heartlight.org provides positive resources for daily Christian living. Back to the Bible has 12 different daily devotionals every day. For a shorter quip, Christian Quotation of the Day is curated by Robert McAnally Adams. May you be inspired to speak of God's faithfulness via your Web site daily too!

In a Leadership Journal article titled The Strong Little Church, a "Natural church development" proponent says that smaller congregations outperform larger churches in seven of eight categories. This article makes a good case that smaller churches are more capable of having a higher quality of key spiritual qualities than larger megachurches. This is encouraging news -- especially since most American churches are less than 100 in size! And with the ForMinistry Web Builder uniquely available as a free (donor-supported) church Web site building tool, a smaller church can have a high-quality looking Web site to communicate to its neighborhood and to the world about what God is doing in their midst!

For many years, there was the 3 major television news channels, and now with CNN and FoxNews on the scene, and on the screen, there seems to be an ever increasing number of news and media outlets. Many of you may be feeling overwhelmed with so much news and information coming from every direction. And then there's the Internet - growing numbers of Web sites with news and information, as well as many other topics too. Wouldn't it be nice to have Christian news too -- news and information about the faith that we hold so dear? I've recently discovered 2 lesser known sources with beautiful Web site designs: ChristianNews, Canada's National Christian Newspaper, and A Chronicles of the Christian Faith . I'll also mention some other Christian news sources: Maranatha Christian Journal, Religion News Blog, Christian Headlines, AgapePress, Christian News Today, and Baptist Press News.

I'll be travelling to the Southwest next week, arriving in Albuquerque on Sunday the 13th. I'll be meeting a relative there, and she just emailed me to invite me to join her for a show that Sunday night. I used a search engine (Google) to look up the name of the show, and was able to view information about the performers, the location of the show, and even preview several video clips of the performance! The internet is so powerfully convenient to provide lots of information -- imagine how your church and ministry can provide more valuable information online!

ForMinistry staff are on location in Sacramento at the Christian and Missionary Alliance's General Council this week. The event website presents notably comprehensive information about the event schedule, speakers, streaming audio & video, and photo gallery. Audio archives even go back to 2002. This is a great example of sharing their resources with a larger audience through a robust website!

President George W. Bush granted an interview with 9 Christian editors and writers last week, describing his job as president to "change cultures". Read the (edited) transcript from that session at Christianity Today, Bush Calls for 'Culture Change': In interview, President says new era of responsibility should replace 'feel-good.'. President Bush also gave an impassioned speech at the first National Conference on Faith-Based and Community Initiatives in Washington DC yesterday, where I was privileged to see and hear it live.