Mavis Moon

Hi Thomas,

If I understand your question correctly, the answer is yes.

Do you mean that you'd like to host your church website with another provider and still use Google Apps and GMail? That actually is what we do. When people go to www.sjcrc.org they see our public website. People wanting to log in to their Gmail or Google Apps go to a different address, or use the link I put on that public website.

For both things the domain name can be the same, so your Gmail addresses would have the same domain name as your church's website. When you set up Google Apps, if you already own a domain it will prompt you to do some steps that prove you own and have access to that domain, and then you can use that domain name for your Google Apps and Gmail.

Hope this helps.

Mavis

Nate, 

Sorry it took me so long to respond. I found this page comparing the free vs. "busines" Apps: http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/group/index.html. The nice thing for churches is that we get the "Education version" for free. This Wikipedia page also compares the different versions: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Apps.

Hope that helps.

Mavis

Hi Allen,

One Call Now looks like a great option. Using the phone rather than email might make a lot of sense, depending on the community, as you wrote.

Thanks for sharing the idea!

Mavis

Thank you, Anko! It's really valuable to get personal experience testimonies like yours.

I clicked on the link to this article specifically because I lead a small group and thought it would be good for me to learn how to encourage and help any of the members who might be "E.G.R" types. I agree that we can't label and classify everyone, but I find it helpful to learn different strategies and methods of dealing with different types of behavior.

As I clicked the link, I was hoping that the article would go beyond naming types of people and actually contain practical advice. This article definitely has some good, practical advice that I will find helpful as I lead my group.

Thanks, David!