Open Church’s launch has moved to March 1, 2012 for the ministry ideas section and likely April 2012 for the free resources.

WHAT HAPPENED?

Developing the site wasn’t as easy as our developer expected. After previous delays, we pruned off features to make a mid-January launch possible, but those pruned benchmarks were not hit either. Unfortunately, what is left is unstable and missing most of what we hoped for. It is clear we need to go a different route. The developer has moved on.

I apologize for this.

Any payment the developer received was underwritten by my company or came from my personal donations to Open Church. In other words, no one’s money was spent other than my own.

WHAT IS NEXT?

We are going to leverage customized high-end WordPress platforms to serve as Open Church’s phase 1 backbone. While this sacrifices some of our original vision for the site, it is more stable and cost-effective than trying to salvage what we currently have.

We need to launch something. Once we have a stable platform, we can better build and implement volunteer teams as well as better gather content and free resources for Open Church.

We will go ahead and create the wireframes and roadmap for phase 2 of Open Church, so that a more suitable platform for our vision can be built whenever the funding is available.

HOW DO I FEEL?

2011 was a year of challenges, providence, humility, and faith building.

God showed up in big ways for the areas we expected to be challenging if not impossible. Open Church received more enthusiasm than expected and more volunteers and interested resource contributors than we could initially manage.

At the same time, we were overconfident and then humbled in the areas of fundraising and web development. Those challenges forced us to think creatively, more efficiently, and with agility. However, the greatest gain was those challenges were crucial in growing our faith, increasing our prayer, and learning to give God credit in all things.

Twice we needed specific funds to continue, and twice God provided the funds through side projects within days of our deadline.

God is good. He gets the credit.

Skylark Audio Video is cleaning out their warehouse and offering some great deals on church audio, video, and lighting equipment.

The sale only lasts 48 hours (through December 29th) and while supplies last, so be quick to call 888-365-7770 or email info@skylarkav.com to get the special deals on this gear.

Year End Sale Special Deals

Aviom A-16II Personal Mixer
only $500

Aviom 16/o-Y1 A-Net Card for Yamaha Consoles
only $700

Aviom AN-16/o v.4 16-Channel Output Module
only $900

Sennheiser EW300 Series Wireless Microphone System
only $800

Sennheiser EW300 Series Wireless In-Ear Monitor System
only $800

Chauvet LED Par56 56-24B Lighting Fixture
only $150

Chauvet LED COLORado Batten 72 TOUR Lighting Fixture
only $700

Chauvet LED COLORado 2 Lighting Fixture
only $950

Over the past year, I have taken on side projects to help fund Open Church. A few months ago, I was given the providential opportunity to join the team at Skylark Audio Video to lead their rebranding and ongoing communications.

Formerly known as AVi Worship, Skylark Audio Video was founded in 2005 by recognizing churches’ need for more attentive care and financially responsible audio, video, and lighting systems without compromising high-end performance.

Although young, Skylark is one of the few church audio video companies that LifeChurch.tv (Edmond, OK) chooses to work with. While popular among multi-site churches, Skylark also helps church plants take their first steps and 100-year-old landmarks overhaul their church audio while still preserving their historic character.

4 REASONS WHY I JOINED SKYLARK

What I appreciate most about Skylark is their emphasis on high performance, frugality, relationships, and the client’s best interests.

1. High Performance Technology
   If you are going to get a church audio, video, and lighting system, you need an AV company that stays current, knows their stuff, and can turn all the talk into reality. While you should never base your decision solely on an AV company’s technical prowess, you should never choose one that lacks it.
2. Frugality
   This is where Skylark really stands out. Some churches think they need the most expensive equipment or to build everything now for the future. What they don’t realize is they can almost always slash their expenses without sacrificing tech quality by choosing more reasonably priced gear and designing the church AV system for scalability and add-ons when needed. The opposite is also true. Penny-pinching to the extreme costs more in the long-run because cutting-corners leaves you with gear that can’t perform until you upgrade. Skylark gives each church advice on where to spend and where to save in order to meet their goals.
3. Relationships
   Skylark regards their clients as friends and family. We work to understand how your church operates and then customize their approach to mesh with your team. The goal is to create less work for you and your organization. When the focus is on relationships and not a business bottom line, it is much easier to ensure each church is happy, taken care of, and using Skylark for years to come.
4. Your Best Interests
   Making your best interests Skylark’s top focus doesn’t make sense to some businessmen. It means spending more time. It can mean sacrificing some paycheck to get you the best solution (not the priciest one). But Skylark does audio, video, and lighting because they love it, and they learned quickly that focusing on your best interests is Skylark’s best interests because it keeps clients coming back, and it helps the cause of Christ.

Before I joined the team at Skylark, Marcus Walker (the founder) and I had several conversations to determine if we were a mutually good fit. I asked, “What values unify your team and drive their performance?” And I love his answer.

We don’t say what are values are. They just are. What unifies us is the constant pursuit to be better than we were on the last job. The quest to learn more and do things better unifies us. We love our job. We are doing what we love and getting paid for it, and it actually means something.

FREE CHURCH CONSULTING

One of the ways Skylark serves churches is by offering free audio, video, and lighting consulting. No strings attached. You need a church AV system that meets your goals, fits within your budget, and works for your facility. We would love to start a conversation to identify what is the best solution for you.

Call 888-365-7770 to get started.

I’ve discussed the backstory and fringe opportunities of Open Church. Now we need your help to launch Open Church in January 2012!

• We have had tremendously enthusiastic feedback but few actual donations yet.
• We have over a hundred volunteers and potentially 10-20 terrabytes of free resources.
• It takes an initial investment to make it happen and save the global Church millions of dollars.

2 Ways to Meet Our Launch Goal

1. CHURCHES - $500 monthly from 31 churches for a 6 month commitment (PDF)
   
2. INDIVIDUALS - $31 monthly from 500 individuals

Your support guarantees hosting for 3.5 terrabytes of free resources, on-going web development, and a team to manage hundreds of volunteers.

Download a 1 page PDF to give your church’s senior leadership.

Disclaimers

• I will not get rich off Open Church.
• I have committed to not take a salary from Open Church until October 2012 or later.
• My wife and I have liquidated assets and made lifestyle adjustments to fund Open Church.
• I have funded 80% of Open Church’s costs thus far since February 2011.
• And Open Church’s team has collectively funded over 90% of the costs thus far.

Many have dreamed about better global Church collaboration, but it will never happen unless people are willing to prayerfully sacrifice the time, money, and egos to make it happen. If you are passionate about Open Church, please join me in sacrifice.

A 3rd Way to Meet Our Goal

Hire us to do consulting, branding, graphic design, or web development. Buy an ad on Church Relevance. Ask us to speak at your event.

We’d prefer to spend our time focusing on Open Church but are willing to take on some side projects to make it a reality.

How to Donate

We accept donations via credit cards at https://secure.openchurch.com/donate
For questions, please email info @openchurch.com

I have already discussed the vision and backstory behind Open Church. Now I’d like to share some of the fringe opportunities that future phases of Open Church may have as long as God wills.

Open Church intends to be much more than a hub for ministry articles and free downloadable resources. Phase 1 will focus on these basics, but we are structuring the organization and the web platform to quickly adjust according to God’s leading.

Over the past year as we have laid the groundwork for Open Church, we have had hundreds of ideas of what could be accomplished if enough people sacrifice the time and money to make Open Church a reality. We pray about these ideas. Many of them are good concepts but not the right fit with Open Church’s mission. However, some of the ideas resonate deeply with God’s leading and open our eyes to exciting new possibilities. Here are some of the ideas that we are most excited about:

7 FRINGE OPPORTUNITIES WITH OPEN CHURCH

1. Scripture Engagement
   In his works of 1539, Martin Luther warns of the danger in collecting great libraries outside and alongside of the Holy Scriptures lest we waste good time and neglect studying Scripture. We are excited about the free church resources and ministry articles that Open Church will offer, yet we recognize the Bible as the greatest resource of all. To ensure that Scripture is a priority both online and offline, Open Church is exploring how to best partner with and serve organizations that do Scripture advancement well, such as Biblica and American Bible Society.
2. Volunteers for Global Church Projects
   We are currently organizing teams of volunteer graphic designers, editors, web developers, translators, and many more skills that can help create in-demand resources and help people package resources for their culture by their culture.  While it will take hundreds of volunteers to run Open Church well, we expect the global scope to actually attract more volunteers than needed for operations. The overflow of volunteers can be assembled into fluid teams that can ebb and flow to projects outside of Open Church that offer the greatest potential to impact the global Church.
3. Offline Resources
   The Internet is an incredibly efficient way to spread ideas and resources. The overhead costs are minimal. However, only 30% of the world’s 7 billion people have access to the Internet. We are excited about the ability of Open Church phase 1 to rapidly equip ministers globally, but we realize that long term goals must address how to get offline resources to the other 70% of the globe. These resources are mainly printed word and pictures but could also be audio on electronic devices as well as much more. It will take collaborating with locals and already established organizations and experts. We do not have all the answers for how yet, but we are already forming relationships with organizations and experts who can help. An example is Antoine RJ Wright of Mobile Ministry Magazine who specializes in mobile Internet but also works with ministries to get resources to remote areas with wireless devices but no Internet by attaching Wi-Fi hubs to 2 terrabyte hard drives.
4. Reaching Microlanguages
   There are about 6,900 languages spoken globally. And the top 100 languages account for 90% of the world’s population. More than half of the world’s languages (3,524) have fewer than 10,000 speakers each. I call these microlanguages, and together they account for 8 million people globally. Open Church wants to be able to equip people regardless of what language they speak, simultaneously reaching the top 90% and bottom 0.1% of the world’s speakers. Again we do not have all the answers yet, but we are prayerful exploring ideas and collaboration opportunities with experts like Tim Jore of Door43 and Distant Shores Media. Tim is a former Wycliffe Bible translator pioneering new ways to empower microlanguages to translate and equip themselves with ministry resources.
5. Acquisition of Licensed Content
   Sometimes the best resources are stuck behind rigid paid license models. It is not necessarily a bad thing, but it can be. Open Church is designed to keep overhead costs low. We would love to raise funds over and above these costs to acquire previously licensed content. For example, the Bible was translated into a more obscure African dialect whose speakers want to create free audio Bibles to reach their storyteller culture, but the local copyright holder will only allow it if money is charged and royalties given. Money is a barrier that is keeping some of the most effective resources from reaching people and changing lives. What if together we can acquire high impact resources and give them away for free?
6. Insights into the Behavioral Science of the Global Church
   Lifeway Research and the Barna Group offer outstanding insights for the Church. However, there are limitations to polls and surveys. In the age of supercomputers and the Internet, we now have opportunities to process complex relationships with millions of variables and discover the science behind humanity such as, Twitter users are happier in California than New York, happiness and sadness spread just like disease, and time availability determines Good Samaritans. Because Open Church categorizes its content by the creator’s age, gender, ethnicity, geography, role, ministry model, denomination, and theology, we can evaluate user trends to analyze the relationships between content, much like how Netflix’s algorithm can tell why someone will like one movie but not another. In other words, what are the dynamics between a Reformed Southern Baptist millennial from Texas and an Emergent Anglican Baby Boomer from the United Kingdom? With time, we hope that Open Church can better understand the complex dynamics across the 39,000+ denominations of the global Church.
7. Read, Consume, & Stream Resources Online (no download required)
   Particularly in emerging economies, it is not always feasible to have the means to download a resource and then print it or burn it to a DVD. In some contexts, it makes much more sense to be able to stream and instantly consume content. Whether curriculum, a video, or some other resource, Open Church would like Christians to be able to use resources on demand straight from the website. So rather than downloading, a small group leader can just pull up individual curriculum lessons on his smartphone. During bedtime stories, parents can pull up video shorts to teach their kids spiritual truths. And a children’s minister in India can teach from the Bible and then show a 5 minute Bible story video translated into Hindi-Urdu.

Again please keep in mind that these are fringe opportunities for Open Church that we are prayerfully considering. The ultimate roadmap is up to God’s daily direction.

WANT TO MAKE OPEN CHURCH POSSIBLE?

We still have a long way to go to find 500 partners willing to contribute $31 per month. Or if you are a church, consider supporting our digital missions with a commitment of $500 per month for 6 months.

You can donate at https://secure.openchurch.com/donate

Two weeks ago I had the privilege to spend the morning with the team at the Techology Show discussing the story behind Open Church. You can watch the video here.

And here are some highlights:

Open Church helps Christians globally equip each other with ministry ideas and free downloadable resources.

HOW OPEN CHURCH BEGAN

• Prior to Open Church, whenever I’d work with different groups on global Church collaboration projects, a question that we would wrestle with is how can we go further than what has been done before? How can we get past dogmatic differences. How can we get past politics and red tape?
• I also saw the importance to have an unaffiliated, independent entity that doesn’t have an agenda other than to collaborate and resource the global Church. This way people do not have the excuse of not participating because they do not like the megaorganization or church celebrity behind it.
• How can we take this even further? Let’s put barriers and parameters on leadership to limit egos and greed and strings attached. Let’s keep things impartial among contributors.
• I wanted to help other ministries do this, but I couldn’t find a group that had the right corporate culture, bandwidth, and desire to pursue it.
• So in fall 2010, I was working with tech startups, and I felt clear direction from the Holy Spirit that I needed to start Open Church because: (1) it is the right timing and (2) by doing it now before any tech startups were profitable, people would say, “Look what God did!” rather than “Look what Kent did with his money.”
• I spent the next 6 months phasing out of the tech startups getting LifeChurch.tv’s blessing since I spent the previous couple of years helping them with various initiatives.

THE DNA OF OPEN CHURCH

• We have a big core value of impartiality which has changed everything. Most best practices in marketing, fundraising, and website user interfaces are highly based on partiality. We want to be sure that we are not being partial and unintentionally pushing away some subculture of the global Church.
• However, in some ways we are partial. We do have high benchmarks of quality acceptance. We evaluate content for quality, theology (gospel, Great Commission, & 2 love commandments), no bipartisan politics, no slander, and no self promotion.
• The impartiality comes among contributors. Open Church is a place where the village pastor in Malawi is treated the same as Billy Graham.
• On a base level, we want to reduce inefficiency. If we provide a $300 resource to 10,000 users, the global Church just saved $3 million which can be used for orphans, widows, or creating more resources to give away.
• We also want to increase access to quality resources. This will raise the quality benchmark for future resource creators.
• Ultimately, the vision for Open Church is much bigger than just distributing free resources and articles. Long term, we want to come alongside and not strip cultural strengths from a people group but help them create resources for their culture by their culture in whatever medium works best.

OTHER HIGHLIGHTS

• It is no longer just the big megaorganizations that can give away stuff for free. Some of the best church graphic design is coming from church plants. So you can have a 1 month old church plant that can impact the global Church. Churches no longer have to wait 20 years to be influential. They can start resourcing and influencing the global Church in their first week.
• My prayer for the 3rd generation of megachurches is that they are focused on collaboration without credit. It takes letting ego go, but it also takes letting control go and trusting in God to take care of things.
• Sometimes our systems are holding us back from being the best that we could be because we are too focused on avoiding embarrassments or avoiding mistakes or doing things to a certain level of excellence. But the Bible is pretty messy and sloppy. You need to find the tension between stability and scalability. You can’t be so rigid that you hold yourself back.

For more discussions that intersect technology and theology, be sure to check out the Techology Show.
For more on Open Church, visit OpenChurch.com.

Compassion International is helping solve the water crisis with a new water filtration system called Water of Life.

A gift of $55 will provide a child and their family safe drinking water for life. More specifically, it gives:

• Compassion’s Water of Life system (provides over 1 million gallons of clean, safe water)
• Education on improving hygiene and sanitation
• Support for improving community water and sanitation sources where needed

The investment is something well worth considering. You can make it happen at Compassion.com.

A month ago I blogged about Open Church, a new nonprofit I am helping launch that equips global Church leaders with free ministry resources to download and ideas from all cultures.

The response thus far is exciting.

• Volunteers are signing up.
• The site is being developed (launch date TBD).
• And we have free downloadable resources from numerous organizations ranging from a large publisher to an influential megachurch to a young church plant.

It is clear that the challenge for Open Church is not finding ministers willing to contribute ideas and free church resources. The challenge is having the manpower and finances needed to scale the operations and site infrastructure to accommodate the high volume of opportunities we’re receiving to equip the global Church.

Currently, Open Church is supported by Church Relevance advertisements and Create Etc client work. This covers the basics. It allows me to focus on Open Church full-time and have the development team necessary to create and maintain the Open Church site. It also covers minimal operational costs such as government fees for establishing a nonprofit and some server costs.

Through Church Relevance’s relationships, Open Church is fortunate enough to receive thousands of dollars of professional services at no charge. Overhead is low, and volunteers will help keep it that way.

That alone is enough to make Open Church work well. Yet with more support, Open Church may very well become the world’s largest repository of free church resources.

Outside of Church Relevance and Create Etc, Open Church will only be funded by donations. We will not offer advertisements or try to sell products through Open Church because we believe those money-centered activities can at times hinder global collaboration or unintentionally steer an organization in the wrong direction.

4 Ways to Make Open Church Possible

1. Donations
   Your generous one time or monthly gift will help put resources and ideas in the hands of ministers around the world. You can donate online at openchurch.donortools.com or email info [AT] openchurch.es for details on mailing a donation.
2. Buy an Ad on Church Relevance
   I would love to help get the word out about what you do! When you advertise on Church Relevance, your money goes to basic operational costs for Open Church and to put food on the table for myself and Open Church’s site development team. For more information, please email kent [AT] churchrelevance.com.
3. Hire Create Etc
   Need a website or a logo design? Create Etc can do that. We have been creating websites, social networks, blogs, and marketing strategy for ministries and businesses since 2004. Like Church Relevance ads, hiring Create Etc helps cover the basics for Open Church. The challenge with this is it pays the bills but also takes us away from working on Open Church. For more information, please email info [AT] createetc.com.
4. Book Kent Shaffer to speak at your event for “free” or consult your church for “free”
   I will speak at your event for “free” or consult your church for “free” provided that you cover travel expenses and make a donation to Open Church. Of course, this is subject to availability. For more information, please email kent [AT] churchrelevance.com.

Your donations help make it possible to have servers to host terabytes of free downloadable resources, forge relationships with ministries worldwide, organize hundreds of volunteers, and make big-impact ministry ideas a reality.

If you know churches, organizations, or individuals that may be interested in supporting Open Church, please send them the Open Church 2011 Vision brochure.

If you have questions about Open Church, please ask them in the comments section of this post.