A Theology of Workflow

Do you think Christians downplay the importance of productivity?

Yes, I think some do. Because we can think, Oh, it's not spiritual. You have to make a living and learn to do that job well. So I realized that I need to know more than theology; I need to know how to do my job well. That made me realize the importance of learning about the practical.

How does productivity fit with theology?

Theology gives significance to the practical. The practical helps advance theology. It's not that we have theology over here, here's practice, let's do these practical things that will help theology; rather, we can think theologically about the practical. That means we realize that the practical things we are doing are part of the good works that God created us in Christ Jesus to do. So when we're doing practical things, we're actually doing good works. That's a theological understanding of the things we're doing every day.

Is it somewhat an American ideal to be productive? Could you take your message to another country and communicate a similar idea?

I want to define it as getting the right things done. Sometimes that means just being with people rather than accomplishing tasks. Being productive on a Tuesday night might mean saying, I'm not going to do e-mail tonight. I'm just going to hang out with my family. Biblically speaking, productivity is about fruitfulness and serving people. So there doesn't need to be a tension between being productive and having relationships, because productivity exists for the sake of people. We need to define productivity not simply in terms of work products—get as much done as possible—but what are the things, tangible and intangible, that serve people and make life better.

This article first appeared in our sister publication Christianity Today. Click here to continue reading it. For more on productivity and office dynamics, check out the 2011 Church Office Planner and "Managing Church Calendars," an electronic training resource.

Food Safety for Church Holiday Meals

Also, if you'd like to learn more about food allergies, we recommend the electronic training resource "Responding to Allergic Reactions."

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Giving Debit Its Due

Bryce Collman started a business to help churches save money on electronic payment processing. Rather than use the bundled rates many larger processors charge to process payments by credit and debit cards, he offered interchange rates, which can save customers significantly.

Then he learned how many churches oppose credit card use.

"We heard repeatedly that they'd really like to take advantage of online giving, including the recurring component [which allows automatic tithing, even when people don't make it to church], but they're opposed to having their congregants use a credit card [since so many people are trapped by credit card debt]."

Other online giving systems accept debit cards, and some churches use PayPal as a way to offer a debit-based option. "But they didn't have any way to control that situation," he says, so if someone chooses to use or misuse credit, the church can't prevent it.

Collman's response is Ardent Giving Solutions, which prevents the use of a credit card for online giving.

This article first appeared in Leadership Journal. Click here to continue reading.

A New, Free Tool for Calculating Church Staff Salaries

One of the best resource books for determining church staff pay, The 2010-2011 Compensation Handbook for Church Staff, now offers a free, easy-to-use tool for church leaders. The "Free Compensation Handbook Worksheets Download," walks church leaders through The 2010-2011 Compensation Handbook for Church Staff, helping them identify a range of values that they can use to determine a starting salary for a new hire or a raise for a current employee, or to make an assessment of how fair—or unfair—a pastor or staff member's current pay is.

Based on a national survey of nearly 5,000 churches, The 2010-2011 Compensation Handbook for Church Staff provides reliable church employee compensation breakdowns for a variety of scenarios, including part-time and full-time positions. This information can be used to compare a church's payroll plan, or an individual's salary situation, with information from those of thousands of other church workers nationwide. The information is organized by position, as well as other factors, including geography and demographics. Compensation profiles are then organized by categories so you can easily determine base salary, retirement, health insurance, and housing allowance.

Using the new "Free Compensation Handbook Worksheets Download," church leaders can take personalized church data, such as worship attendance, church region, education level, years employed, and denomination, reference The 2010-2011 Compensation Handbook for Church Staff’s range of data using helpful step-by-step instructions provided in the worksheet, and then develop a unique compensation package range for most any church staff position.

You can find The 2010-2011 Compensation Handbook for Church Staff and accompanying free worksheet for calculating church staff pay at http://store.churchlawtodaystore.com/20cohaforchs1.html. The free worksheets are the third order button listed.

Easy Ways to Boost Church Website Traffic—Part 2

Editor’s Note: Last Thursday, we introduced Part 1 of “Easy Ways to Boost Church Website Traffic,” with freelance business and technology journalist Joe Dysart offering us some ideas about ways churches can generate more traffic to their websites. We also asked Kevin Hendricks, editorial director for the Center for Church Communication, to share his take.

Here are the rest of Dysart’s ideas:

• Become an easily quotable media source: Generate free—and valuable— news story links to your website by establishing a ‘go-to’ person on your staff for the news media. “Once you fill a niche and provide a unique perspective on your area of expertise, and once people are drawn to what you offer, they continue to return to you,” says Bob Baker, author of Poor Richard’s Branding Yourself Online, (Topfloor Publishing, 2001). “Not only because of what you do, but also because of who you are and what you bring to the subject.”

Places to list a staff member as an authority for your church include Experts.com; Newswise Contact Directory; Profnet; and The Library Spot.

Hendricks’ take: I'm not familiar with those specific sites, but I have seen http://helpareporter.com/ and that one seems pretty effective (mainly because it's reporters reaching out with specific needs, not just a general listing of experts). Of course becoming a trusted source for a media outlet is easier said than done. What works best isn't fancy new technology, but age-old relationships. Do some networking with the local media and you might be able to set yourself up as a go-to source. But it's got to be a real relationship, not just glad-handing and schmoozing.

• Update your e-mail outreach: A number of new e-mail promotion tools can help ensure your promotions remain eye-catching. One of the most innovative are graphic ‘billboards’ from Advenix, which appear on-screen when a user’s mouse passes over your e-mail title in the inbox.

Plus, you can include a live chat box in every promotional e-mail you send–which users can click on to text chat with church staff–with LivePerson’s chat service.

Hendricks’ take: I'm skeptical. Advenix looks like a slick gimmick with not a lot of widespread buy in—you need a plugin for desktop e-mail clients and there's no mention of whether major webmail providers like Google or Yahoo support it. Live chat doesn't strike me as a dire need for churches either. It assumes you have church staff available to chat 24/7 and assumes people are dying to chat up the assistant pastor. That doesn't strike me as a compelling way to update your e-mail.

Call me a traditionalist, but I think the best way to make e-mail work is to make it useful. Give informative, valuable content and people will respond.

• Offer RSS, an alternative to updates via e-mail: A small but growing group of web users now prefer to receive updates about products and services via RSS, or Really Simple Syndication. It’s an alternative web messaging system that enables you to quickly update your community without the hassles of e-mail. The primary advantage: you can send that content without worrying that your message will be caught up in a spam filter.

Web-Church for Christian Worship, for example, has its own RSS feed.

You can make any page on your website RSS-readable with an RSS generator. A good, and free one is IceRocket. IceRocket can generate a tiny strip of code that your designer can drop into your web page to make the page RSS-readable—in less than five minutes.

Hendricks’ take: RSS should be one of those invisible, no-brainer tools that's automatically added to any content that gets regularly updated. It's widely used among Internet geeks (like me), but to the general population it's Greek. Make sure any consistently updated content on your site, such as blogs, news, or events, has RSS, but don't spend much time focusing on this.

• Implement a serious links strategy: One of the easiest ways to get more websites to link to your own—and consequently get higher rankings on the search engines—is to link to those sites first, and ask for a reciprocal link.

Gracepoint Church has its own links directory, as does Columbia Road Baptist.

Fortunately, there’s a lot of software out there that will greatly automate this process for you. The best one I’ve found is FocalMedia’s PowerSeek SQL. It’s a solution that claims to be one of the most robust packages on the market—a claim I saw validated in my own test-drive of the software. Essentially, I was able to create a professionally designed, full featured directory with the software in a matter of minutes.

Hendricks’ take: It's true that other sites are more likely to link to you if you like to them. But it needs some context. Nobody cares about a link farm. Generating some in-bound links usually works best when you have a reason to do it, like an upcoming family event that a local mommy blogger might want to write about or a site that lists local resources for the homeless and they link to your church’s homeless ministry. But just asking people to swap links is kind of lame. I roll my eyes whenever someone asks me to link to them because they linked to me. Give me a reason to link to you.

• Optimize your site for speed: The easiest way to lose a community member—or discourage a new one—is to serve up a website that takes forever to download. "As Web 2.0 technologies like Ajax and DHTML have become more widespread, websites have grown more complex. The size of the average web page has tripled in five years, while the average number of objects has doubled," says Andrew B. King, author of Website Optimization. "All of this largess has led to inevitable slowdowns in display speeds. Some argue that with bandwidth inexorably increasing, slow response times have become less of an issue than in our dial-up past. The data show otherwise."

Specifically, King advises churches to use skinnier JPEG images wherever possible. You’ll also want your web designer to remove as much white space as possible in the HTML or other code you’re using for your site. Plus, go easy on fancy effects like Adobe Flash and Java applications. If those effects are on your site for gratuitous reasons only, they really don’t belong there.

Hendricks’ take: Anytime people have to wait for your site to load, you risk losing them. And you'd be surprised at how little it takes for people to lose patience. Definitely ditch that ridiculous Flash intro. And make sure your homepage isn't so graphic-intense that it takes forever. But it's also a balance—a text-only site will load lightning fast and then bore people to death.

• Other Resources:

“During the past 16 years, the best book on Web promotion I’ve ever come across is Susan Sweeney’s 101 Ways to Promote Your Web Site, Dysart says. “It’s an extremely easy, informative, practical read that enables you to prioritize your web promotion strategy, and offers you more than enough tried-and-true promotion ideas to keep you busy for years.”

Hendricks’ take: I haven't read that specific book, but there are all kinds of resources out there for marketing ideas. Spend an hour at Barnes & Noble and browse through a few books and you'll have more ideas than you could ever implement.

But the best thing a church can do is just make sure they have a good website. If you've got a decent site and you keep it updated and your own congregation uses it (perhaps the best indicator that you're doing it right), then you're bound to get more traffic. But if you don't have that to start with, then there's no point promoting something that isn't really ready for prime time.

For more on church websites, check out “Website Wisdom,” from Your Church Today magazine, which recaps research conducted last year about functions and features of church websites.

Easy Ways to Boost Church Website Traffic—Part 1

Editor’s Note: Joe Dysart, a freelance business and technology journalist in Manhattan, recently offered us some ideas about ways churches can generate more traffic to their websites. Outside of the standard answers—an updated, well-crafted site design, a presence on Facebook, and experimentation with Twitter—Dysart offered some additional ideas that might not be so readily obvious to church leaders.

Beyond these ideas, Dysart also offers the following tips for churches to generate more traffic to their websites:

• Take advantage of Google’s free webmaster tools: During the past few years, Google has released a number of free tools designed to help your site get the best play on the Google search engine. Sign up for a free Google Webmaster account for tools, tips, and tricks to optimize your website for the Google search engine.

This account offers enough help to keep you or your web promotion staff busy for months. And given that Google claims approximately 65 percent (or more) of all web searches each day, it’s critical that your website be optimized for the Google search engine. As an added side benefit, generally speaking, when a website is optimized for Google’s, it’s optimized for all major search engines.

Once you’re optimized, Google also offers a free website analytics service. This online service enables you to see, in great detail, where your web traffic comes from, what pages on your site are working, and what pages need improvement. Google Analytics also enables you to pinpoint the keywords that are bringing the most people to your site. All told, the service is consistently rated one of the top website analytics programs available, even though it costs nothing.

Hendricks’ take: Google Analytics is great, but it's kind of useless if you never check it or don't know what you're looking for—and that's what happens when we get busy. Stats can also be deceptive and elusive—don't put too much stock in them. But, for instance, if you did a newspaper ad with your church’s URL in big type and you don't see a blip in your stats, you better rethink that ad.

• Ensure your web videos are search-engine friendly: Your site’s web videos—currently the Internet’s hottest promotional medium—will rank higher on the search engines if you give the videos plain English titles that clearly describe the content. Also be sure to use your website keywords in links that lead to the videos on your site, as well in any description of the videos that you offer anywhere on your site.

Hendricks’ take: More than search engine friendly, make your videos user friendly. I can't scan your video like I can text, so give me a quick, useful description that will convince me to hit play. Usually the video player will do this, but make sure your users can see how long the video is. I'm much more likely to watch a shorter video when I know it's shorter. Also be sure you're putting your videos where people will watch them—YouTube, Facebook, and so on. In the days of social media, hosting media on your own site is anti-social.

Read Part 2 of “Easy Ways to Boost Church Website Traffic” on Tuesday.

Should Pastors Know What People Give?

A question on XPastor.org's Google Group asked whether pastors should know who gives what to the church. Is it primarily an issue of privacy, potential partiality, or accountability and pastoral care?

According to attorney Frank Sommerville, churches "should examine job and committee descriptions to determine who qualifies under a need-to-know standard." The reason: donor privacy. Those who have access "need to agree to a privacy policy requiring them to keep all donor information private and use it solely to perform their church duties," he says.

Churches must decide whether the pastor needs to know, such as for providing specific counsel and spiritual development tied to members' tithing. Once the church determines who has access, it needs to disclose this to the congregation so that donors "will have a realistic expectation of privacy," Sommerville says.

Here is how three XPastor.org members say their churches handle this question:

This article first appeared in our sister publication, Leadership Journal. Click here to read the rest.

Finding Grants for Church Building Campaigns

Are there corporate or foundation grants available to fund your church building campaign?

There may be, depending on who you serve and how church facilities are used. Your best chance of securing this kind of funding is if your congregation is building or renovating spaces that are (or will be) primarily used for community ministry programs serving people from the larger community. These spaces are often multi-purpose—used by your church members on Sunday for spiritual formation classes or Sunday school, then used during the week, for example, for after-school programs or a health clinic.

Grants like this don't replace the need for individuals in your church to support your building campaign. Grants might make up a third or less of total campaign support. Often, it is the last funding received—like the "frosting on the cake." Most grants like this are local, so identify funders that give in your city or state to find ones that fit. Look for the grantmakers association in your state (at http://givingforum.org)—many of these groups produce indexes of grant opportunities by state or region. You will need to look at funders that make "capital grants" and that give in the program areas in which your church works (health, education, job training, and so on).

Some possible scenarios for capital grants:

• Construction of a youth center adjacent to, or connected to, the church. Community youth come to the facility to participate in an after-school program, arts activities, and social events;

• Renovation of a church basement that is used on weeknights for a homeless shelter. Foundation funds might be used for upgrading the bathroom facilities, replacing flooring and lighting, or reconfiguring the rooms so that participants have more privacy;

• Renovation of space within a church for a new pre-school or daycare center. Grants might be used to bring the space up to licensing requirements—adding bathrooms or sinks, for example, or required safety features.

Before you seek capital grants for your building project, prepare to demonstrate the following:

• Your congregation's strong connection to the community and a track record in community ministry. Capital grants are usually made to established, successful programs. Show that you have been serving the homeless or neighborhood youth for the past 10 years, for example, with specific stories of how people's lives have been changed. Support from neighborhood residents or organizations will also help;

• A clear plan for the building project. Funders will typically want to see blueprints, clear budgets, and a timeline for construction. They also want to see that any issues with the building site have been cleared up already;

• A clear fundraising plan for the building campaign. Corporate and foundation leaders want to see committed people in charge of the campaign, and a plan for how funds will be raised: timelines; who will be asked for money and how; and information on the fundraising professionals you will work with;

• An explanation of how the new space will help advance your mission and better serve the community. Show how more people can be served, for example, or how new programs can start. Use visual language to describe what will happen in the facility on given days of the week. If the funder came over at 4 p.m. on a Wednesday, for example, what would he or she see happening?;

• Documentation of the community’s needs or issues. What pressing challenges affect your community? Maybe it's high unemployment or a low high school graduation rate. Show how the new space(s) you are developing will help address these needs.

Additional resources: Partners for Sacred Places—New Dollars, New Partners Program, http://sacredplaces.org

Should Churches Block Staff Access to Facebook?

Editor's Note: Evan McBroom, a ministry communications consultant, recently shared a story with us about an event in which a church staff member who handles the office's information technology revealed he was required to block staff access to Facebook. Evan questioned the move, seeing Facebook as a potential online equivalent to in-home or hospital visitations.

He shares more in this video:

Facebook One Another from Evan McBroom on Vimeo.