Tim Postuma

James offers some great advice there. I agree that WordPress is the best choice for most churches, especially if they've got someone in the congregation that builds sites in Wordpress, or can hire someone to do so. Can't go wrong with Wordpress.

We use Drupal for most CRCNA ministry sites, but I wouldn't use it for my local church. It's very powerful, but overkill for a church website. And even though the CRCNA has pretty much standardized on Drupal, we still use Wordpress in some situations.

But actually lately we've spun up a couple of product sites using Weebly (similar to Wix and Squarespace). Examples:
dwell.faithaliveresources.org
librosdesafio.org

Tools like that are incredibly easy (mostly drag and drop) with nice prebuilt templates. But you need to be content with their featureset because there's no ability to extend beyond it. So look at the list of features carefully, and especially compare that to some of the church-specific tools that James mentions. They all fall into the 'limited technical expertise required' category, it's just a question of what features you'd want/need.

Wordpress.com is probably between those two options. You get most of the functionality of Wordpress, but avoid some of the more technical aspects (and trade off some customizability).

Have you considered a Google Spreadsheet, Jack?

You can give access only to those who are authorized to see it. Those that are authorized can enter their contact as a new row. Having it in a spreadsheet allows it to be sorted, grouped, etc. People use their Google Account to log in (note that they do NOT have to use Gmail, a Google Account is simply a login and can be created with any email address).

When the elder's term is up, you can take them off the permission list and add the new elder to the permission list.

It does mean that all elders could see all contacts. If that's not OK, you could get fancier with a separate tab for each district, and then configure permissions so that elders can only see the tab that applies to them. But to do that you'd need to dig into the Google Spreadsheets help to get it set up correctly. It's a little more complicated, but still fairly easy once you figure it out.

That's just one option that comes to mind. Hopefully others can weigh in with thoughts about this approach, and other alternatives. I'm sure other churches have faced the same question.

In our church we have a full council (elders and deacons) as well as a small 'Administrative Council'. I'm assuming your 'Executive Committee' is analogous to that.

Our Admin Council is similar to yours in that it normally includes the chair of council, vice, and clerk as well as the senior pastor and our part-time operations manager. I don't see any problem with a non-pastor/elder/deacon being on the admin team, but I suppose a legitimate point could be raised about whether staff (pastor or not) should be voting or non-voting (what's the fancy name for that again? can't recall).

In our case, voting power never really seemed to be an issue we thought about. Our small admin team operated on a consensus basis, and most of what we did seemed to be either monitoring implementation or making recommendations to the full council which was the vote that really counted anyway. Our administrative council was more of a working group; the real decision-making power is with the full council.

I'm sure others can give a much better church order explanation of how it should work (Henry DeMoor's excellent Church Order Commentary likely covers this) but hopefully this perspective helps a bit in the meantime.

Thoughts from others?

By 'ministry evaluation tool' do you mean for evaluating specific ministry programs of your church, or the overall collective ministry impact?

Good question, Jeff, and it's great to hear there's interest in some of the out-of-print products from Faith Alive. I'm involved with the ongoing printing and distribution of Faith Alive products, so I'll share some of the thinking we've had about this exact issue.

First, it's important to understand that getting those electronic files created does cost money. In some cases, quite a bit depending on how old it is, what format the electronic file is in, etc. In some cases it means pulling it off of old media or converting from an old file format. Even if it's in a modern format, proper ebook conversion (ePub) can be a couple of hundred dollars per title. Bottom line...you need a lot of requests for a title to justify the staff time it takes to retrieve and convert it.

Having said that...we are working on a solution that will result in far fewer titles going out of print. It's called 'print-on-demand' and it enables us to keep titles in print even if the sales volume goes down to just a handful of copies a year. Once that is in place, we can not only keep more titles in print, but consider bringing back into print some older titles. We still have the costs mentioned above, but by 'restocking' it we make it available to more people and therefore the conversion costs can be recouped.

If there's a particular title you're interested in, please mention it when you call Faith Alive, or send a note to [email protected]. Our customer service reps are logging those requests, so we can track demand and make stewardly decisions about what titles to bring back.

Or we can start a list here, and open it up to other people reading this thread: What Faith Alive titles would you like to see back in stock?

Hi Christopher. A key decision will be whether you want to make the webcast public or private. If public, then you'll need a webcasting license for all your music, and you'll need to ensure you are legally allowed to broadcast video of the people/leaders in your congregation (I think this can be sometimes done with a blanket-notification (e.g. in the bulletin) but privacy laws vary and so you'll need to confirm the laws in your region - I'm not a lawyer). Google it and you'll find some other good articles like this.

Password-protecting the webcast so it's only available to members (who can't physically attend the service) would, I assume, change some of the above and make it much simpler. But that would need to be confirmed.

If so, then you could look at doing it as a Google Hangout (can have up to 10 people) or Skype or similar services. But instead of using the built-in laptop webcam, of course you'd need to use a good quality external camera/mic that can zoom all the way to the front podium. I've used $100 external USB cameras that might do the trick, but it depends on how far away the camera would be. Do some online shopping for USB cameras/webcams and I'm sure you can find something with a good optical zoom.

Hope this helps, at least somewhat. I've used these technologies, but not in a church context so maybe some others can chime in who have experience with it in a church service context.

With regards to archiving, I know that churches are asked to provide a copy of their minutes to the CRC archives. See more information here, as well as other advice about keeping congregational records. Hope this helps! Maybe others have advice about how their distribute the minutes within their congregations...

Good points, Amy, about the need for redundancy.

When it comes to cloud storage, I'm partial to Google Drive. It makes it easy to store files in the cloud and it takes only a second to add/remove people's access to the whole folder (as council members come and go). Plus they make it easy to batch-export everything so you can periodically save it to a local hard drive.

As a bonus, when council members get familiar with Google Drive/Docs there are a million other ways it can be used to collaborate.