Will Platnick's talk on Technology and the Church at the 2013 Upstate NY Synod Assembly.

1. Technology and the MissionalTechnology and the Missional
ChurchChurch
Will Platnick
Deacon, Southwest Conference

2. Workshop Info
Email: wplatnick@gmail.com
Twitter: @WillPlatnick
Blog: http://www.willdurness.com
View this slide deck at: http://www.bit.ly/sachurch

3. Hi, I’m Will
Deacon for the Southwest Conference. Member of the Synod Communication
Team. Spouse of Pastor Becca Ehrlich, Zion Lutheran Church in Frewsburg.
In my day job, I work for LifeChurch.tv, the largest church you’ve never heard of.
It’s a multi-site Evangelical Covenant church based out of Oklahoma that is
currently worshipping 50,000+ per weekend across their 16 physical campuses
and another 100,000 per week at Church Online.
I work for “Team Digerati”, the group that focuses on Mission through
Technology. I mainly focus on the YouVersion Bible App. My job is to keep the
servers that power our free services functioning properly.
In my previous life, I was the Chief Technology Officer and Operations Manager
of two different multi-million dollar web hosting companies in the Albany area.

4. Topics to Cover
Web Sites
Social Media
Putting sermons online and holding online services
Free and Non-Free Tools & Services to help manage your
church and empower your ministry

5. Information
Since this is a “general knowledge” workshop, I am going to be throwing a large
amount of information about a lot of things in a short amount of time. As a
reminder, you probably want to write down the web site where you can view this
presentation: http://www.bit.ly/sachurch
Neal Fischer (Director of Communications for the Upstate NY Synod) and I will
be holding online seminars and podcasts throughout the year that will go in
deeper into these subjects.
I am sending around a list where you can sign up for technology updates from
the Synod, and you can indicate what you’d like to learn more about.

6. Web SitesWeb Sites

7. Web Sites
Web sites are an absolute necessity now. During my time at
Prince of Peace in Clifton Park, the majority of new
members checked out the website before coming to a
service, even if they were personally invited.
Some new members came to us because they found our
website in a Google search.
A website is absolutely crucial for people finding
information about your ministry.

8. Ownership
First thing a church needs to do is identify a person who can
take initiative to spearhead a web site.
Does the person have experience or is willing to learn how
to make a website?
Realistically, how much time can this person spend on the
website?

9. Website Options
If the answer to both of these questions is “not a lot”, then you
have two options:
Use EasyChurchSites.com to build a free, one page website
that provides the most important information about your
church: Address, Service Times, etc..
Find somebody you can pay to build your website for you if
you have the resource of dollars.
WARNING: This will still take up time because you have to
supply them with the actual written content of the website.

10. Website Options
If you do have a person who is willing, has an aptitude for
technology and is willing to spend time on this important
missional project, then consider yourself blessed!
I’m going to spend some time talking about some website
different options and their pro’s and con’s.

11. EasyChurchSites.com
EasyChurchSites.com is a web application that I created to
empower churches that are short on resources to be able to
create a simple, one page website that provides the most
important information such as:
Address with a link to a Google Map
Service Time
Phone Number
etc...

12. EasyChurchSites.com
The service is free to use and has no strings attached. It’s
just something I wanted to make sure existed for the
Church.

13. EasyChurchSites.com
Pro’s:
Good first step
Free
Fast
Easy
No experience necessary

14. EasyChurchSites.com
Con’s:
Inflexible: Can’t move content around
Amount of content you can create is limited
Can’t make it visually look how you want it to

15. EasyChurchSites.com
The next genre of web sites are called Web Site Builders.
These are services that are specifically designed to enable
people who don’t know or want to know how to program to
design their own website.
Because these services host your website and spent a lot of
time and money making their product, there is a monthly or
annual fee associated with using them.

16. Web Site Builders
These are for churches who want a good looking
informational website, have a small to medium amount of
time and have up to $25/month or so to spend on it.
Square Space (www.squarespace.com) - Powerful but easy,
plans range from $8-24/month if paid annually. Attractive
templates, mobile-friendly websites.
Virb (www.virb.com) - Not as powerful as Square Space, but
inexpensive and also offers attractive templates.

17. Web Site Builders
Pro’s:
Easy to use
Not a steep learning curve
Huge amount of attractive templates
Search engined optimized
No coding needed

18. Web Site Builders
Con’s:
You are locked in to the service. If they start doing a bad
job at keeping your web site up, you can’t just take your
site and put it somewhere else that’s more reliable.
Not specifically made for churches, so things like sermon
podcasting aren’t built in.

19. CMS’s
The next and final category of web sites we’ll be talking
about today are called Content Management Systems or
CMS for short.
Content Management Systems are web based applications
that enable you to manage your day to day website without
having to program. They’re similar to the web site builders I
mentioned, except they are more powerful, flexible and in
the right hands can create the best possible experience for
your visitors.

20. CMS Examples
There are 3 leaders in Content Management Systems and
they are all free:
Joomla
Drupal
WordPress

21. Joomla & Drupal
These are both exceptional Content Management Systems.
With the right amount of time, energy and google’ing, you
can customize these CMS’s to do anything you want.
The Upstate NY Synod website is a Joomla site. I setup my
old church with Joomla (www.poplutheranchurch.org) to
help their webmaster build the site.
Once you know how the software works, maintaining your
web site and adding new content is easy, but there is most
definitely a learning curve.

22. Drupal
The creators of the Drupal Content Management System
have also created a great service called Drupal Gardens
(www.drupalgardens.com). It is a website builder service
similar to Square Space or Virb, but built on top of the
Drupal CMS.
What this means is that you can start our site off at Drupal
Gardens using their specially made enhancements to make
building your website easier, and then move it to the full
Drupal should you want to start doing more advanced things
with it.

23. WordPress
WordPress started out as a blogging platform, but is easily changed into a full
content management system.
Less of a learning curve than Drupal or Joomla.
There is a HUGE amount of church’s who use WordPress as the base of their
website, so if you decide to use WordPress you’ll be in good company.
There are plenty of vendor’s who specialize in making WordPress themes and
addons that are specifically geared towards churches. I’ll talk more about these
later.

24. Premium WordPress
Theme’s
While WordPress comes with a huge amount of templates to choose from, you can purchase “premium
templates” that are geared towards churches. They often include detailed instructions and sometimes videos
to help you setup your WordPress church site
These “premium templates” don’t just control the look of your website, they also add in additional
functionality like podcasting sermons.
http://www.wpforchurch.com/ - $49/year includes 7 different templates made for churches.
http://www.churchthemes.com - Hasn’t officially launched yet, but has a link to the Risen theme,
which is $45 one time one of my favorites.
http://www.wordpresschurchthemes.com - Links to a few premium different premium templates
Google “wordpress church themes” for more.

25. Series Engine
http://seriesengine.com/
Premium WordPress plugin that is used for managing
sermons. Costs $99 one-time, but is well worth it if you are
using a theme that doesn’t include a sermon manager.

26. Hosting your CMS
While all the content management systems I just talked about are free,
you need a place to host them. We call companies that provide this
service “web hosting companies.”
Usually, you’ll purchase a plan for a web hosting company that entitles
you to a set amount of resources. You then upload your content
management software to your web hosting account and run it from their
servers.
In addition to hosting, these providers also give you e-mail services, so
you can have an email address like pastorbecca@zionfrewsburg.com -
which is a lot more professional looking than a hotmail or gmail
address.

27. Hosting your CMS
Web Hosting Company Recommendations:
DreamHost (dreamhost.com) is one of the bigger hosting
companies out there and offers free website hosting to any IRS
501c3 nonprofit organization (that’s us!). All you have to do is sign
up and fax over your IRS letter, and you get yourself a $100/year
service for free. Hard to beat that generosity!
LiquidWeb (liquidweb.com) is more expensive (starts at
$15/month), but is faster and provides better tech support than
DreamHost. They are a more premium level hosting company.

28. Churchpr.es
A new company, Church Press (http://www.churchpr.es) has started hosting
WordPress sites specifically for churches.
They charge a $50/setup fee, which isn’t common for web hosting, but with that
$50 you get access to a sizable number of Premium church themes, many that I
already mentioned and would cost you hundreds of dollars to buy on their own.
Their goal is to package everything you need to build a WordPress site into one
service for one price.
I would definitely recommend considering these guys for hosting your
WordPress church website.

29. Pay Someone Else
While I haven’t used them personally, a few Pastor friends
have recommended Build a Church Website (
http://buildachurchwebsite.com/pricing.html)
They can custom design and help maintain your website, but
you’ll end up paying quite a bit more for it.
Again, you’ll still end up spending some time on this to
approve things and provide content.

30. My Personal Advice
If you have someone who has some time to spend on making your website and
you have a budget of $15-$30/month, I would recommend WordPress and a
premium theme over anything else.
Make sure your address, service times and phone numbers are updated
frequently and appear as close to the top of the page as possible.
Link to your Facebook Page if you have one (if you don’t get one right away) and
put it close to the top of your page.
If you’re going to have a News section of your website you HAVE to keep it
updated. Failing to do this makes your church look dead. It’s better not to have a
news section at all if you can’t commit to keeping things up to date.

31. Domain Names
No matter what option you pick to use with your website, you’ll need
a domain name.
Domain name is something like elca.org, lifechurch.tv or google.com.
It’s a name that is easy to remember that you point to your website,
which as far as the Internet knows is just a set of #’s (152.21.52.23)
that nobody wants to remember,
I recommend http://www.namecheap.com, I’ve been with them for
years and they’ve been awesome.
No matter what, I recommend avoiding GoDaddy at all costs.

32. SOCIAL MEDIASOCIAL MEDIA

33. Why social media?
We are called to share the love of Christ with all the world.
It’s important that we shine that love that Christ has shown
us as often as possible, utilizing all means possible.
A very common story is that church’s are now getting new
members because they saw a friend of theirs talk about their
church on Facebook.
As the Church, we need to cultivate that enthusiasm that
causes people to talk about their faith openly.

34. Social Media FALLACIES
Social Media will make you relevant - The reality is
that if you are not relevant in your local context, it is
doubtful that you will be relevant online. The technology
does not make you relevant, but it can make relevant
messages more effective in reaching a greater potential
audience.
Social Media is Free - Remember High School
Economics? There is a huge “opportunity cost.” It’s
impossible to utilize social media without a great time
investment.

35. Social Media ServiceSocial Media Service
OverviewOverview

36. Facebook
Over 1.1 BILLION users from all over the world.
This is the network EVERY CHURCH needs to be on. If you
spend time anywhere, this is where you’re going to be
spending your time. All your target demographics are on
Facebook.
People post status updates, photos, videos and links.
Vast majority of information is delivered through the “News
Feed” (more on that later)

37. Twitter
Over 500 million users
Who’s on Twitter: Large cross-section, but generally the most
responsive to your message are young adults (18-35)
People post “tweets” which are 140 characters of text. Sometimes
it can contain links to web sites, photos or videos.
You’d be surprised what can be expressed in 140 characters or
less.
Let’s talk hashtags.

38. LinkedIn
225 million users
The “professional” social network. More “networking” than “social
networking.”
Probably not a place where you’re going to evangelize, but it can help
make important connections with other clergy and lay-leaders.
Generally a safe place to “friend” congregation members, will let you
see what they do and point them towards a ministry that matches
their gifts.

39. YouTube
2nd most popular search engine behind Google
Any ministry that creates video content needs to have it on
YouTube, in addition to anywhere else they want it.
Upload videos with good content and creative titles. Tag the
videos appropriately.
How to make a viral video -
http://venturebeat.com/2013/05/29/how-to-make-a-viral-video/
There are no guarantees on a video going viral!

40. YouTube
Some users don’t upload videos to YouTube because when it
ends, there might be a link to a video with...let’s just say
non-Christian content.
In my eyes, that makes it even more important that we
upload inspiring, creative and interesting content to fight for
the attention of what people are “used” to seeing.

41. Pinterest
Pinterest is about 50 million users strong. It is the fastest growing
social network.
• What’s interesting about Pinterest is that it’s the only social network
dominated by women. As such, it’s a great place to work for doing
women’s ministry.
• Users “pin” photos and videos to boards. Very visual, everything is a
picture.
http://pinterest.com/nealffischer/ - Neal does an amazing job at
pinning great content dealing with the Church and Technology.

42. ELCA CONCERNSELCA CONCERNS

43. ELCA Concerns
• The synod has asked me to include some content about the
dangers of Facebook and social networking.
• The Conflict and Healing Team will be holding workshops
going much more in-depth on these subjects.
• Please send any questions regarding this topic to Pastor
Timothy Madsen of the Conflict and Healing Team,
buckleymadsen1@prodigy.net

44. ELCA Concerns
• Rule #1 - There’s no such thing as privacy. Facebook privacy controls
can be very confusing. There’s even been failures in the system in the
past where you could even read instant messages between people. If
there’s even one single person you wouldn’t want to read it, don’t
write it.
• Rule #2 - Don’t be inappropriate or intimate with anybody you’re not
supposed to. The ELCA is treating these reports as professional
misconduct.

45. Friend Requests
• Think through your general policy about “friending” congregants. Is it
better to wait until they request you to add them, rather than reach
out to friend members of the congregation on your own? This applies
especially to the youth of your parish or ministry setting. For example
one of your young members is on Facebook chatting with their friends
about doing something reckless or illegal on the weekend. Do you
have a responsibility to inform the parents. How would you handle
their complaint: “You knew about this and did nothing?” On the other
side, how would you handle the youth coming up to you and sayin
“you narc’d on me.”

46. Boundaries
• Have you thought through what you’re going to do when
you leave a call? Are you planning to “unfriend” former
parishioners? Are you prepared to put up a boundary
between yourself and your former parishioners so that
the one who follows you in ministry will have a chance to
establish him/herself? Have you thought through how this
is different than leaving your church and not worshipping
there anymore after you leave a call?

47. STRATEGYSTRATEGY

48. Start with Facebook
• If I were a bettin’ man, I’d bet that most people here have
started to use Facebook in their personal lives, am I right?
• Because of that, I’m not going to spend a TON of time
talking about logistics of using Facebook since most people
here get the general concepts.
• It will give you, by far, the biggest return on investment.

49. Churches on Facebook
• Hillsong Church -
https://www.facebook.com/hillsongchurchlondon
• LifeChurch.tv - https://www.facebook.com/lifechurchtv
• Luther Memorial Lutheran Church -
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Luther-Memorial-
Lutheran-Church/286016631419415?fref=ts

50. Basic FB Stuff
• Profile - This is what you get when you sign up for Facebook.
Everybody on Facebook HAS to have one of these and it has to be
personal for you, NOT your church.
• Page - This is what you will end up creating for your church by going
to https://www.facebook.com/pages/create/ - A Facebook Page is
setup for businesses, organizations, brands and celebrities.
• Groups - These are used mostly for communication and discussion
purposes. Some churches are starting to use private Facebook groups
to power communication between their prayer teams.

51. The News feed
• When going to blogs or websites, you usually get to what
you’re looking for by going to directly to someone’s page.
• This is NOT the case with Facebook.
• The majority of people rely on the Facebook News Feed to
read updates because they have hundreds of friends and
they can’t go to everybody’s page because it would take way
too much time.

52. The News Feed
• Knowing a little bit about how the News Feed works is
CRUCIAL to success.
• There are currently two ways the News Feed operates: Top
Stories or Most Recent. There is a small arrow in the top
right corner of the news feed that allows you to select which
one you’d like.
• If you select Most Recent and go to Facebook every day,
you’ll usually stay on the Most Recent view, but not always.

53. The News Feed
• Most people get their news feed in the “Top News” view,
which means Facebook uses some algorithm to determine
what gets shown. They don’t tell us precisely how it works,
but part of it is based on popularity, which in Facebook
translates to likes, shares and comments.
• So, most of your church members will not visit the church’s
Facebook page itself, so your job is to make sure the content
you are posting as the church is getting in the news feed as
much as possible. This means you need the help of others.

54. Assemble a Team
• Social media can take a fair amount of time, so having a
team is usually better than one person.
• Not everybody on the team has to be the one making the
Facebook posts, but it’s helpful to have a core group of
people who make it their job to share, like and comment.
This is especially important when getting started.
• Every like, comment and share is one step closer to
improving the likelihood of your content getting in front of
eyeballs.

55. Ask for it
• In order to make sure your content is seen, you need to ask
for it.
• At church, get up and mention the Facebook page regularly
and encourage everybody to Like the page, like the posts and
to share anything the church posts that strikes a cord.
Explain why it’s important to our job as Christians to spread
the Good News through any method possible.
• In your posts, ask people to like or share. Many will do it,
and it’s not “chintzy” or in poor taste.

56. What to Post
• Now that you know how what you post will get seen, now you
have to figure out what you’re going to post.
• I break it down, perhaps too simply, into two categories:
Inspiration and Action.
• Inspiration posts are links to scripture, photos and other articles
meant to increase the faith of members of your congregation.
• Action posts are announcements about things that are
happening that you want to encourage people to be a part of.

57. When/How Often
• Not an easy question to answer, you’ll have to experiment.
There are some rough guidelines.
• You should post somewhere between 1 and 4 times per day.
• Experiment with the times that you post to see what
difference it makes to the popularity of your post.
• Buffer - http://www.bufferapp.com is a great tool that can
automatically post for you at set times.

58. Questions on SocialQuestions on Social
Media?Media?

59. Online church servicesOnline church services

60. Putting sermons online
• This is effective for reaching beyond your walls and helping
the people who can’t make it to church hear your sermon.
• Step #1 - Record it. This is one of the biggest steps and the
logistics of this are unfortunately beyond the scope of this
talk.
• The path many churches are taking is that they are starting
out simply putting their sermons online without much or
any editing and as they get more serious about reaching
outside of their walls, start to allocate more resources to
video production.

61. Resources
• Many churches use a service called Vimeo
(http://www.vimeo.com) to upload and store their videos.
They offer a free version, but I recommend the cheap
$60/year Vimeo Plus plan which removes ads and enables
lots of nice features.
• Churches that are doing audio podcasts can look to services
such as www.soundcloud.com to handle their podcasting.
• Embedded sermon videos on your Facebook page get great
exposure.

62. Online Services
• More churches are starting to try and wrap their heads
around the concept of holding an entire service online.
• They are still considered controversial...it’s definitely not for
everybody and isn’t designed to be for everybody.
• They can be live or taped.
• I figure it might be helpful to describe what this looks like,
since many people here have never been to an online
worship service.

63. Church Online
• LifeChurch.tv is considered the pioneer of online services. We have a
team and a service called the Church Online team.
• We don’t consider this to be the future of the Church, the future is in
our churches as they are now. This is just a different delivery vehicle
for the Gospel.
• We get around 100,000K visitors per week and most of that traffic
comes in through advertisements.
• During the week, we hold over 40 services staffed by hundreds of
screened and trained volunteers.

64. Church Online
• LifeChurch.tv does something fairly unique that other churches aren’t doing...we
are taking out Google Adwords during our service times on addiction keywords,
such as those about porn.
• This is unique and I am not advocating that everybody do it, it definitely has
pro’s and con’s.
• Pro’s: We have seen countless #’s of people enter into a relationship with Christ
who may otherwise not have because God brought them to Church Online.
• Con’s: We end up with a large number of foreign people who clicked on our link
looking for porn and think they’re in a sex chat room. We constantly have to
work on striking a balance between the needs of reaching EVERYBODY with the
Gospel and taking care of the needs of our church members.

66. Tools to Hold Online
Services
• Church Online Platform - http://www.churchonlineplatform.com -
LifeChurch.tv took the application they wrote for Church Online and
gives it away for all churches for free. Just bring your own video from
services such as Lightcast or build your own streaming service (more
on that later). Vimeo can be used for promo videos, but you need a
service that at least simulates a live experience to work best with the
platform.
• Media Social - http://www.mediasocial.tv/ - These guys do a great
job too, but their service costs around $100/month with a $500 setup
fee but includes a video service.

67. Lightcast Media
• This is the video provider Church Online uses. Plans start at
$75/month. I love these guys!

68. Build Your Own
• I will be publishing a guide shortly on using Amazon’s Cloud
Computing services and a media server called Wowza to
stream Church events for practically nothing, usually less
than a few dollars per event.
• It’s going to require a fairly technical person to administer
this solution, but the guide will be as concise as possible.

69. Live Broadcasting
• When broadcasting your entire service, you have to be
especially careful about making sure you have all the
licenses required for any music you use in your service.
• Popular providers have included UStream and Livestream in
the past. But thanks to Google extending their benefits to
non-profits, we can now sign up for YouTube NonProfit to
stream our live events for free! Check out
http://www.youtube.com/nonprofits

70. Other Great ToolsOther Great Tools

71. YouVersion Live
• www.youversion.com/live
• Create interactive sermon notes with
links to scripture!
• Register your church, and when they go
in the App and go to Live, it uses the GPS
to find churches near you, they can click
and pull up your notes.

72. ChurchMetrics.com

73. TableProject.org

74. Church Community Builder
• As churches grow from a small family-based model where
everybody knows everybody and everything and the same
people do everything all the time, they realize they need help
keeping track and managing various aspects of their
ministry, and this is where Church Management Systems
come in.
• The best product out there for small to medium size
churches is churchcommunitybuilder.com

75. WuFoo
• http://www.wufoo.com - This service provides a free plan
for creating online forms easily.

76. Email Communication
• These tools make sending mass e-mails a much nicer
experience. In addition to higher delivery rates, you’ll be
able to get metrics on how many people are actually opening
your e-mails.
• Mailchimp.com is my favorite provider and has great
features on their free plan.
• Church Community Builder users should look at
bombbomb.com, which features tight integration with CCB.

77. Google Apps for Non-
Profits
• http://www.google.com/nonprofits/products/
• Free!
• Collaborate on Documents
• Great email service at yourchurchdomain.com
• YouTube for Non-Profits that I mentioned earlier, allowing you to have more
control over your videos and stream live events for free.
• Google Plus hangouts lets you hold free multi-person audio AND video
conferences, even bridging someone in who only has a phone.

78. Great Resources
• http://www.churchmarketingsucks.com/
• https://twitter.com/search?q=%23chsocm&src=typd
• http://pinterest.com/nealffischer/ and
https://twitter.com/nealffischer

79. Q&AQ&A

80. Thanks!Thanks!