Calvary Church Planting Network

We live in a digital society. More than 70% of Americans have Internet access at home. This makes the internet a major mission field. Every church planter should utilize the internet to help promote the church. Most people look at a website before they visit the church. As church’s still spend thousands of dollars on Yellow Page ads, newspaper advertising, and radio broadcasting, the new generation of planters are abandoning what seems to be the way of the past and devoting almost all their resources to using the internet. And what is amazing is that you can do quite a lot for a little bit of money.

E-mail

If you aren’t doing e-mail, then you’re missing out on connecting with virtually everyone. I get aggravated when I here pastor’s say, ‘I’m too busy to email’. If Jesus was alive today, I guarantee that He’d have a slamming email ministry. If Jesus wrote the Seven Letters of Revelation 2-3, I’m sure He would have emailed them.

A Website

Every church should have a website. Period. For the younger generation, if you don’t have a website, you are already antiquated. A church should have a good, up to date website. And pick a simple, short web address. When I first planted Calvary Chapel New Brunswick, NJ, it was called Reason to Rejoice Christian Fellowship. We had ‘www.reasontorejoicefellowship.org’ as our website. What a lousy web address! It was too long and people would always mess up the spelling and have a hard time finding us. Add on that my old email address of ‘pastordaniel@reasontorejoicefellowship.org’. A nightmare. www.reasontorejoice.org was much better. A church should have no excuse. Get a website.

You can also put up sermons and videos on your website, as long as you have enough bandwidth. This is a great way to get people to know about who you are and what you’re about.

For good insight into a good website, look at websites like www.cnn.com, www.yahoo.com, www.espn.com. You’ll notice that they all run with a certain style and it’s that way for a reason. They have spent virtually millions on marketing and research to try and get people to spend time on their website. Instead of spending millions, study what they did and recreate it for the glory of God.

Blogs

In our digital world, people still crave community. Blogs (short for weblogs) offer that. Popular blog locations include wordpress and blogger. You can have a blog up for free. This is a great way to help build community online. I am presently using www.danielfusco.blogspot.com as a sort of online diary about the planting of Calvary Chapel North Bay. The big drawback is that someone has to do some policing of it. Sometimes blogs can get pretty nasty as people can be that way. But it is a great opportunity to promote community online. As I said, blogs are free, so you can’t really beat the price.

MySpace

The much maligned MySpace is actually a tremendous internet resource for churches. You can connect with people in your area simply by doing a search of your area. You can add friends and people can choose to either allow you or not. We have a blog for our Sunday night ministry, Liquid, www.myspace.com/liquidmarin . You can do bulletin blasts and all of your ‘friends’ can find out about the new things that you are doing. Oftentimes, churches have MySpace pages for their Youth Group. I highly recommend it for both Youth Groups and the Churches themselves. Again, MySpace is free. You have to love the price.

Craigslist

Born here in San Francisco, if you live near a city, everyone is on Craigslist. It is a great opportunity to let people know about your church. Now we tried to use it here in the Bay Area but we were flagged and removed because the people here around San Francisco are generally hostile to the Gospel. But it wasn’t like that in New Jersey. It’s a great opportunity to let people know about what you are doing. Again, the ads are free so you can’t beat the price.

Google Ads

A lot of ministries are using Google ads to promote their churches. I personally have never used it, so I can’t speak on it from experience. I’ve been told that it fee is nominal (you pay by the number of clicks your website gets) but I’m not sure if there is any real return on your investment.

As the world becomes more digital and connected via the Internet, the body of Christ has got to stay on the cutting edge of technology to get the Gospel out. Don’t be left behind. Have a strong web presence.