Category Archives: Technology
Ridge Church New Website Sneak Peak
A few weeks ago I mentioned that we were working on a new website for Ridge Church. That’s true actually. We’ve been keeping it under wraps.
But today, I’d like to give you a small sneak peak of what is coming as early as next week!
I give you a sneak peak of the uber gorgeous Ridge Community Church’s new website….
New Ridgechurchonline.com Coming Soon
Things We Tried That Sucked: iCampus
Props to Gary Lamb for the idea behind Things We Tried That Sucked!
Internet Campus
Before we ever had our first official service as a church, we started playing with the technology and equipment that would allow us to broadcast our services and events live on our own internet channel. We called it an iCampus. We had NO idea what we were doing. So like anybody with passion and a dream, we just did what we knew and worked with what we had. That worked OK for a little while.
We started broadcasting our launch team gatherings and preview services. We never really garnered much attention online because we didn’t advertise at all at this point. The most we had online was about 15-20 at a time. It’s not a bad start, but here is why it sucked and why we ultimately pulled the plug on it.
- The quality was bad. We didn’t have good lighting in our venue to get a good enough quality video, even though we had a great camera. It doesn’t have to be perfect quality, but people at least want to see who is on stage.
- Sound quality was not very good. It wasn’t until the end that we figured out how to get good sound quality in the venue we were meeting in. That hurt worse than the video.
- Internet connection was iffy. What ultimately did us in was the venue we started out in, had an iffy connection. People would complain about freezing and such. We determined it wasn’t so much the connection, it was the broadcasting program we were using. It was new technology at the time and it wasn’t really tested yet.
- Our new venue had even worse connection problems. Our new and current venue is a hotel. Lots of people are using bandwidth every Sunday so to broadcast would be very difficult.
So after a few months of “testing” we decided to pull the plug until we figured some things out. We had the right people on board to make it work, but just had some things not working in our favor at the time. It was never a completely dead project. In fact, we are currently about to begin testing again with some newer technology, better equipment, and a better sense of what we’re doing. Just because something fails, doesn’t mean it’s dead. iCampus may very well live again soon.
The Ridge Podcast Update
Chris Hill, our pastor of GCD (getting crap done) has been working overtime to get our podcast straightened out. We’ve had some issues with recording and sometimes just gremlins in the system that has prevented us from getting them out. But alas! The podcast is alive!
The last series, Chainbreaker is up as well as some older ones and week #2 of Urban Legends, the church just wants your money. Hopefully last weeks message on God will not put more on you than you can handle will be up soon too! You can listen HERE
Why We Engage The Online Community Part 2
At any give time, during any given day, there are millions of people cruising the online world. From reading the Bible, I gather a lot of things, but one things sticks out to me; Jesus was always around people and he always went to where the people were or allowed easy access for the people to come to him. So with that in mind, how are we as the church doing the same? Here is how The Ridge is tackling this issue:
- Before we ever had a service we had a Myspace page and Facebook page. People are on social networks…millions of them. Thousands of people that live in our ministry area are on social networks so it makes sense to engage them there. Honestly, we don’t use Myspace much, but we use the fool out of Facebook. In the very near future, we will also take advantage of Facebook ads, which will put us in front of thousands more specific people.
- I’ve been a fan of Twitter for a long time and am pretty much hooked on it like crack. Twitter is a great tool to use with the church. This allows us to mass communicate to our people, as well as make connections with others to get out info and upcoming info about events in the church. Twitter has grown 400% over the last year. It’s the new way to text message to the masses.
- Very early on in the beginning planning process of our church, we decided that since we were going to have a strong online presence, we needed to do more to engage people than just connect with them through social networking. Out of that thought, came our iCampus. iCampus is our internet campus where we broadcast our worship experiences live online through our website. Through our beta testing with the campus, we’ve already seen an interest from people who would like to check out our church but would really like to check it out from a distance. This gives them that opportunity. However beyond that, it gives us the opportunity to put the Gospel in front of hundreds to thousands more people. I’m a firm believer in this technology and think that if you have the ability to do it and staffing to make it happen (it’s not as expensive as you think either) you should take advantage of it. We are contstantly changing and tweaking this to make it better and hope to have it top notch for those of us in The Sticks when we launch this spring. iCampus pastor Chris Hill is doing an awesome job of getting us there.
Our mission is to reach people who are distant from God to see them awakened to life in Christ and that will never change. The way we do it is contstantley evolving and changing. We also want to give the people who attend The Ridge every opportunity to connect their friends to the Gospel. And to do this we gotta go world wide.
Props to Lifechurch.tv and Newspring Church as well as others for being inspiration to us in these endeavors
Let’s Share
If you have iTunes, and most of you do, then you and I should share. Yes, let’s share our music and messages through Simplify Media. It’s a new App you can use to share your iTunes music over the internet with people you choose to share with. You can use it on your iPod Touch, iPhone, or your home computer/laptop. Yes, it’s pretty stinkin’ amazing. And if you’re wondering, no you can not take music from others playlist, so it’s not like illiegeal downloading. It’s more like your friends internet radio station.
Check it out and add me as your friend, Screen name is THERIDGEPASTOR
Let’s Share.
