RE: Like No Other Christmas Eve

We hear about things like this a lot in the secular world, but I am very glad to see the level of Fellowship Church's impact during the Holiday season. It is unfortunate, but many churches and other ministries will never look at other ministries to help move themselves forward. We are supposed to be the body of Christ which has many members...We should be learning from each other so that we can all have this much of an impact in our own spheres of influence! This event should show the body of Christ a new level of excellence and expectation!

As Fellowship Church has grown over the past 14 years, we've added more and more services each Christmas and Easter to accomodate the incredible number of people. We have done as many as 11 and 13 services in previous years, each one completely identical, using the same personnel and a live message from Ed Young. This year, we decided to do something completely different; we rented the American Airlines Center, home of the Dallas Mavericks, for two community-wide Christmas Eve services.

After months of planning and preparation, thousands of mailings to homes across the metroplex, and an all-time record of over 2,100 e-invites sent via the website, today was the day. I don't know if any of us knew what to expect, but when nearly the entire lower bowl was full 40 minutes before the first service, it became apparent that something truly special and blessed by God was about to occur. I was serving on the third level and had an incredible view of the main parking lot and entrance to the AAC. It was overwhelming to watch thousands upon thousands of people stream in, with traffic on both sides of I-35 at a standstill. Earlier in the day, we wondered if the third level would be necessary. By the time the service started, a crush of people was filling every single seat in the third level and we were searching for overflow. Fifteen minutes into the service, most of the seats behind the stage were full and, as Terry Storch describes on his blog, the fire marshall actually forced us to close the doors.

I sent Terry a SMS message just after 3:00 that said it all: "Have you ever seen anything like this?"

Thank you God for making all of this possible, and for the chance to be part of an amazing moment. The prayer of each one of us is that lives will be changed forever.

Here's the story as told by the Dallas Morning News.

[Via Leave It Behind]

Podcasting & The Church

There has been a lot of buzz about Podcasting, but if you look at iPodder you will find that there is not a lot of activity in the "religion" section. There are some churches that have taken what many would call a leap of faith, but I the question is, "why is it such a leap"? I think that the church normally takes a back seat on technology. There are very few churches that even keep up with what is going on in the Tech space. Churches like Fellowship Church in Texas, have shown us, not only can it be done, but it can be done well. We also have to look at the culture of our congregations and ask ourselves the question, "Will they use the service"?

RE: Washington Post Co. Buying Web Magazine Slate

WOW - I guess this should not surprise me, but I was just thinking about doing a Print Newsletter. Maybe we will have to rework our approach to be able to insure that we do not wast money on something that people really do not want to read. This takes me right back to the blog Idea, and with so many people showing that you can be effective with this medium, paper almost does not make much sense!

  By Howard Kurtz / WaPo
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The Washington Post Co. said today it is buying Slate in an effort to boost the newspaper company's online traffic but does not plan any editorial changes at the eight-year-old Web magazine.

Update: Discussion on this article has expanded. Read remarks from Joe Gandelman, Hugh Hewitt, Kevin Roderick, Jeff Jarvis, Scott Rosenberg, Taegan Goddard, Kevin Drum, Ann Althouse, and Glenn Reynolds.

[Via memeorandum]

RE: You Need an e-Newsletter and a Blog

I have spent a lot of time working on very large web sites, and every time we thought about doing an e-newsletter we decided we should not! Now, I must admit, I have always thought that is was a good idea, that is until I truly understood the power and impact of blogging. I think that there is so much more that can be done on a blog as apposed to on an e-newsletter. For those that are really busy, you can forget the E-mail approach when it comes to E-News. I go through so much E-mail per day, I don't even look at all the pretty graphic stuff. But my aggregator is always running. I guess that is really the difference. blogs have made staying current with the information much more efficient.

From the always informative Marketing Profs, here's a short article on three reasons you shouldn't abandon your email newsletter for a blog, or (I suppose) vice versa:

My advice for now is to continue publishing an e-newsletter. If youÂ’re sending it in HTML, trim your design down to the bare minimum and make the file size as small as possible. This will give you a better chance of getting past the spam filters and other blocking tools being used by major ISPs, such as AOL.

Though we're big blog advocates, blogs are just another tool in your marketing arsenal. The open rate on email newsletters is falling (it's around 39%), but they're still an important mechanism for communicating with your customer base.

A small note on Marketing Profs' feedback mechanism. They claim to "value my feedback", but unfortunately all I can do is rate the article from 1 to 5 (or 'terrible' to 'excellent'). That's not feedback--it's just cruel to the person who wrote the article. Why not open up comments like The Tyee does, and see how it works? Cross-posted to my day-job blog.

[Via DarrenBarefoot.com]