Email
How often do you check the email that comes through your church web site? Much of mine is spam from overseas, but every now and then there's an important message. This week it came from a person looking for a Bible Study group to join. I replied within a few hours, with a quick, polite message and I now have a new friend whom I met for the first time at Church this-morning. He said to me, "I have emailed a dozen churches in the last few months and you are the only one who has replied." It pays to check and answer your web site emails. Most churches would have someone who is willing to do this once a day. That's all it takes.

What Do You Count?
I know that, by and large, we're over counting bums on seats. Pastors today don't live or die by attendance figures (unless numbers are going up or down, but that's another story). However, numbers are still useful and if you're going to count something, people are what we're about, right?Which raises the question: what numbers do you count? On Sunday we had a low attendance (I'm over it, the therapy helped), but then in preparing to move our database to a new service I discovered a whole bunch of people who are a part of our church that weren't there on Sunday. They were there the week before, or maybe the week before that, and might be next week. Just not this Sunday

Windows Movie Maker
Its a very basic product, and not one I use often...but....If you are stuck, it will rerender Flash (think Youtube format) and Quicktime products into a more useable WMV format....It will also allow you to rerender large MP3 files into more manageable smaller ones for uploading to the web. For example if you record your messages on Sunday, and they come out at about 40 megs, then get Windows Movie Maker can rerender them into a smaller size, say 3-4 megs for a 30 minute message. I post this because I know many pastors don't use high end video and audio software, and sometimes need to get little jobs like this done. (And almost everyone who uses a PC will

Global Leadership Summit
Through someone's generosity I unexpectedly attended GLS in Perth again this past weekend (second year in a row I haven't had to pay). People's reactions are fairly predictable when they find out the presentations are video taped, but you have to attend to appreciate how well it works. It's not just the speakers, it's the process. Anyway, this isn't meant to be a defence of the GLS format except to say, once again, it was excellent. What struck me this year was the variety, not just '10 points to becoming a great leaders'. Two stand-outs for me were: Tim Keller (author and pastor) on Leading People to the Prodigal God (OK, now I have to buy the book, drat it) - pure go

Sunday Nights
They really are the Pastors Friday night....does that make Mondays our Saturdays??