What does your church’s online presence look like? Hopefully your church has a website, at least—and hopefully it’s one that communicates your church’s message clearly, and not a website that looks like it belongs in the past decade. But even if your church’s website needs some serious help (and even a well-designed church site needs periodic review and updates), here are a few tools to help you, all from the Internet Evangelism Day website.

• First up is a very thorough 55-question church website quiz you can take to find out how your church website is doing. The quiz isn’t meant to be a list of set-in-stone guidelines—you might disagree with a few items, or some of them might not apply to your church’s site—but walking through this quiz is a great way to make sure you’re thinking about all the right questions. Notice that plenty of the questions are strategic rather than technical; these are questions to talk through with your entire church leadership, not just with the person who designed/is designing your site.
• A good follow-up to the quiz is IED’s list of 70+ tips for effective church websites. Lots of good discussion-starters, covering both technical and strategic aspects.
• It’s important to get your church’s website working effectively for your ministry. But it would be a mistake to assume that just having a website covers all of the necessary bases of your internet presence—what about social networking, blogging, and mobile devices? The IED site has a good overview of how to incorporate social networking sites like Facebook into your church’s ministry, as well as corresponding pages on ministry blogging and mobile devices.

Don’t let your church settle for an ineffective online presence—read through these resources and see what you can apply to your church’s website and internet ministry.

One of the things I take for granted in this life is the ability to go to the faucet, turn it on, and drink what comes out. It’s just an automatic process for me, but for many people on this earth getting clean water isn’t quite so easy.

Mission Network News reports on how Living Water International is combating this problem and changing people’s lives:

This year, Living Water International is rehabilitating more than 100 wells in Sierra Leone, where many open wells are contaminated by surface water during the rainy season.

Sierra Leone’s sanitation is poor, and its water table is high. So surface water transports all kinds of filth and debris into the wells. As a result, many people contract diarrhea and cholera - often fatally. Water-related disease is the single largest killer of infants in developing countries. Sierra Leone, according to UNICEF, is one of the worst places on earth to be a child.

Life is changing, however, in places like Calaba Town. Dr. Charles Kimbe, community health officer of Calaba Town, diagnosed 50 cases of cholera in 2007. In 2008, the town has not had a single case of cholera!

Read the rest of the article here.

Each year we at Gospel Communications run something called The Internet Ministry Conference (IMC). We consider it part of our ministry to mobolize and train those that are interested in internet ministries.

Last week Brian Atkinson visited Willow Creek and interviewed Ray Pelletier and Sam Haist for the IMC blog. Ray works as the Emerging Media & Ministry Specialist at Willow and Sam is working as an intern.

Their discussion ranged from online discipleship, to social networks, to how the church should use technology. Well worth a listen if you’re interested in how the internet is being used for the Kingdom of God: