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.

This year I restructured my life and business endeavors, so that I can start Open Church, an independent nonprofit focused on equipping global Church leaders with free ministry resources to download and ideas from all cultures.

Bits of Open Church’s vision have been stirring in my heart for years, connecting, and building upon each other. The Open Church website is anticipated to launch in early 3rd quarter 2011. I want to see more churches collaborate.

Free Ministry Resources

If the churches of one city pooled together their different resources – financial and human, they would have more literal and figurative money than they know what to do with.
- Dallas Willard

I find great truth in Willard’s words, but I dream about what it would be like to have thousands of churches globally aggressively sharing their resources with each other. Think of the time saved from not trying to reinvent the wheel. Think of the money saved. With that volume of collaboration, you can still have plenty of variations and choices among similar resources. Rather than 100 churches all doing the same thing, let 5-10 churches create that resource and give it away. Let the remaining 90-95 churches used those saved resources to impact the Kingdom of God in a new way.

By providing the technology platform and manpower to make sharing resources easy, Open Church turns the desire to share into a reality for those interested in equipping the global Church. Open Church’s central hub format simplifies user access, synergizes reach, and reduces costs for contributors.

Global Ministry Ideas

Generally speaking, the majority of ministry thought leadership influencing the global Church comes from white, upper middle class, American men. While their thoughts are good, they are naturally limited by culture and best suited for reaching people like themselves.

Open Church’s idea platform features these mainstream perspectives but also intentionally seeks out expert voices from underplatformed niches, such as G12 Africa, Europe, Chinese house church, Latino Americans, Black Americans, Indian Americans, college ministry, etc.

The goal is to present a holistic scope of ministry perspectives not only to cater to each niche but also help readers become more well-rounded and balanced. By mashing up ministry ideas from all geographies and cultures, it becomes much easier to recognize what are timeless Biblical principles and what are cultural best practices.

How You Can Help

At the moment, Open Church is 100% volunteers. The cost savings and extra manpower allows Open Church to do more, offer more, and reach more. If you feel passionate about Open Church’s vision, you can help the following ways:

1. Pray for Open Church — its mission and leadership.
2. Prayerfully consider contributing your time or resources.
   Open Church is currently lining up volunteer editors, writers, translators, resource managers, and resource contributors (particularly curriculum and administrative tools not just graphics). For more information about serving in these roles, please complete the volunteer signup form.

If you are interested, I’d love to explore ways for you to be involved.

Loading…

To kick off what I hope to be more frequent posts here at ChurchRelevance.com, I am excited about conducting this May a month long series on Bibles.

I have learned a lot about Bibles while preparing for this series. What is semi-yapp? What is the difference between translations? Most surprisingly, it has changed the way I actually read the Bible. I have switched to a high craftmanship printed Bible for in depth study, an audio Bible for at work, and a mobile phone Bible for on the go.

For those uninterested in Bibles, don’t worry. I’ll also be live blogging Catalyst Dallas, featuring new books, and hopefully fitting in a few posts on my own perspectives on ministry.

UPDATE: Using Random.org, the following commenters were randomly chosen to each win a free ticket to Cultivate Conference – Jefferson Henson (#4) &  Jeremy Davidson (#5).

Cultivate Conference (Huntington Beach, CA) is just two weeks away, but you can still win 1 of 2 free tickets I am giving away to Church Relevance readers.

You can join church leaders from around the world convening in southern California on May 4-5 to discuss the intersection of culture, innovation, and church communication.

HOW TO WIN A FREE TICKET:

1. Simply leave a comment on this post. (you can only comment once)
2. Be able to attend Cultivate Conference if you win a free ticket.
3. At 7:00p CST on April 21st, two winners will be chosen using a random number generator.
4. A free ticket code will be emailed to each winner.

A limited number of seats are available. So if you want to be guaranteed a spot, you may just want to go ahead and register for Cultivate Conference.

Further Reading:
2012 Church Conference Calendar

The spring edition of the top church blogs list is now published. The most obvious change is that the list has grown to 200 well read blogs.

To see the list, ranking methodology, and selection criteria, click over to the top church blogs list.

The top church blogs list would not be possible without reader suggestions each year. So if you don’t see a blog on the list that you think should be there, please mention its domain in the comments.

Here are the points of interest worth mentioning about this spring’s list:

• Tim Challies took a dive to #30 because Google pagerank is currently not available for his site. He typically has a pagerank of 5, which means he should have been ranked #3. Sorry, Tim.
• Reformed bloggers continue to strengthen their rankings while contemporary Evangelicals continue to drop.
• Sites that keep changing their domain or RSS feed url suffer temporary and sometimes permanent setbacks as they start over on reader counts and inlinks. It happened to Justin Taylor in 2010 when he dropped from #2 to #8 when he switched his site to The Gospel Coalition. After a year, Justin Taylor finally rebounded to #1. This year’s major domain switch drops go to Jon Acuff whose domain switch caused him to drop sixty-two spots from #6 to #68 and Anne Jackson whose domain switch caused her to drop one hundred thirty-three spots from #33 to #166. They’ll bounce back.
• This is the first edition to feature bibliobloggers (biblical studies blogs). Shockingly, I was clueless about this niche until several months ago. They even have their own Top 50 Bibliobloggers List. It is intellectual gold.
• Compete traffic does not usually like to give data for Blogspot, WordPress.com, and non-US domains. Unfortunately, that skews the rankings unfairly.
• Blogs that are part of larger sites, such as The Gospel Coalition, The Christian Post, USA Today and Beliefnet, receive boosts because Alexa and Compete only count full site traffic (although Compete can track subdomains depending on formatting).
• Blogs that have been successful for many years can afford to not post much and still rank high because they’ve earned a nice Google pagerank and stockpiled inlinks and RSS readers. After my light posting in 2010, I don’t deserve my ranking of #14, but having over 1,000 posts with strong search engine optimization sustains my traffic.
• Having a successful blog requires more luck or divine intervention than ever before. If you started blogging in 2000, you needed to be consistent to be successful. If you started in 2005, you needed to follow best practices. Now great content, consistency, best practices, and networking do not guarantee success. Some of the best blogs I have found do not appear on the list.
• In fact, I recommend checking out the following blogs that didn’t make the list: Think International, Tony Steward, Fellowship Creative, Exploring College Ministry, Relevant Children’s Ministry, and Tim Schraeder.

Read the top church blogs list and share your own observations.

UPDATE: Do not use my coupon code. Use “LC” instead for your special discounted rate of $199 per person (regularly $319). It is good through March.

In a couple of months, Catalyst Conference is coming to Dallas, TX at Bent Tree Bible Fellowship for several days from May 11-13, 2011. I will be live blogging the sessions. If you are attending, let’s try to meetup during the event (leave a comment).

Main speakers include Andy Stanley, Donald Miller, Joseph “Rev Run” Simmons, Christine Caine, Matt Chandler, John Perkins, Gary Haugen, Craig Groeschel, Scott Belsky, Scotty Smiley, David Platt, and Scott Harrison. Musicians and performers include Michael Jr. Aaron Keyes, Gungor, Amena Brown, and Lecrae Moore.

If you have not registered yet, you can save an extra 15% by using the promo code: FOB
Use “LC” for your special discounted rate of $199 per person (regularly $319). It is good through March.

I hope to see you there.

Further Reading:
2012 Church Conference Calendar

In two months, The Ideation Conference takes place on March 28-29, 2011 in Long Beach, CA.

Charles Lee, the founder, has been gracious enough to offer a 15% conference discount for anyone who uses the code IDEA15 to register.

THE CONCEPT

The Ideation Conference is a special topic with a special vibe. It is designed for business and nonprofit leaders who work towards human good, and it is designed to creatively inspire not just through the speakers’ words but through the environment and attendees as well.

THE VENUE

This year, The Ideation Conference will take place at Long Beach’s Museum of Latin American Art.

THE SPEAKERS

This year’s speakers include Aaron Young (Boys & Girls Club), Ben Keesey (Invisible Children), Ben Morrison (Laugh-Aid), Chad Mayer (ShareFest), Charles Lee (Ideation Consultancy), Chris Heuertz (Word Made Flesh), Craig Watson (Arts Council for Long Beach), Dan Portnoy (Portnoy Media Group), Esther Havens (humanitarian photographer), Jeff Shinabarger (Plywood People), Joel John Roberts (People Assisting the Homeless), JR Kerr (Aitreni Group), Keith Kall (World Vision), Lee Fox (KooDooZ), Mark Horvath (InvisiblePeople.tv), Mike Foster (Plain Joe Studios), Nikole Lim (Freely in Hope), Rob Morris (Love146), Randy Paynter (Care2.com), Rod Arnold (charity: water), Sam Oh (Fresh & Easy), Scott Belsky (Behance), Sean Carasso (Falling Whistles), and Tyler Merrick (Project7).

For more details, visit IdeationConference.com.

Further Reading:
Church Conference Calendar

SoChurch is offering 5% off their plans with the coupon code “kshaffer” (case sensitive).

SoChurch is a new church communications platform that launched this month that offers church member management, group management, social media integration, prayer requests, email blasts, event management, and needs & gifts all with the support of mobile apps and analytics (for premium plans). SoChurch can also integrate with Arena or Fellowship One church management software.

If interested, check out more details at SoChurch.com and enjoy the 5% discount with promo code “kshaffer” (case sensitive).

Not only do you get a discount, but you also help support Church Relevance by using the affiliate code.