Launched very very qui­etly about a week ago. It’s hardly content-ready but that should hope­fully come over the next week or two. We’re keep­ing busy and hope­fully there’ll be blog thin­gies going even­tu­ally. It’s cur­rently built around Word­Press, which is a choice I made a few months ago [and now… you fin­ish this sen­tence]. The con­tent was tak­ing ages to get per­fect so our staff team decided it’d be best just to launch it and replace the old thing. So now we’ve got an incom­plete new web­site! ;-) But it’s get­ting some­where, praise God for the gifts of tech­nol­ogy for communicating!

The upcom­ing events thing doesn’t have any­thing yet (and should), and will be incred­i­bly inter­est­ing. I think the cal­en­dar sys­tem is prob­a­bly still too counter-intuitive (it’s a Word­Press plu­gin designed to link to blog entries) so I prob­a­bly need to look at other options for that. There’s also a dis­tinct lack of media library aspects that could mean more work when graph­ics or other doc­u­ments need upload­ing, but we can address that in good time. By address, I mean change to a real con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem. Sigh, no-one but myself to blame, really.

Speak­ing of church web­sites, I found one in the Syd­ney Angli­can dio­cese that I actu­ally like! Shock, hor­ror! It belongs to St Peters Church Cooks River (located in St Peters the sub­urb, that is). I’d prob­a­bly make the nav­i­ga­tion square on the cor­ners and if I were to use anti-aliased text make it some­thing leg­i­ble, or just plain HTML nav, but other than that I quite like the feel of the site. The less I say about markup the bet­ter, I think. It’s all done with Dreamweaver tem­plates, which is an awe­some option I’d be tempted to embrace but for the cost which we really can’t afford for the flex­i­bil­ity it doesn’t give com­pared to a multi-user CMS. One other new web­site of note is Moore College’s recent update. Seman­ti­cally beau­ti­ful, solid design, okay CSS imple­men­ta­tion (it… really doesn’t work too well at higher res­o­lu­tions in Opera at least, I can’t be both­ered open­ing another browser right now)

Any­way. Ours is good for the minute. It’s get­ting bet­ter, promise. And we’ll have half-decent cre­atives for it some­time in the hopefully-not-too-distant future once the one or two graphic design­ers in our midst are politely roped into cre­at­ing such things :) I’d love to see more blog con­tent, pub­li­ca­tion of more mate­r­ial we pro­duce inter­nally (most recently is the sheet on “How to choose a good church”, but there are plenty of oth­ers), a high-quality kid’s/youth min­istry sec­tion (not just for youth — Dave Blowes is try­ing hard there with the JAM web­site — but for shar­ing what we’re doing with par­ents and childrens/youth pro­grammes at other churches), greater mul­ti­me­dia stuff (mostly for those who aren’t reg­u­lars at Matthias and want to see what we’re doing, but also for archival pur­poses), elec­tronic giv­ing to make that eas­ier, and online part­ner data­base that would effec­tively be a search­able church direc­tory (secured, obviously).

I’m just pray­ing we don’t slide down the slip­pery path into tech­nol­ogy depen­dence along the way, because it scares me so much. I’m not afraid of us turn­ing into a church that embraces tech­nol­ogy and uses it effec­tively and exten­sively: I’m afraid we’re going to wake up one day and will be play­ing a video that’s all about a pas­sage from scrip­ture instead of actu­ally read­ing the bible itself in a meet­ing. I’m not afraid of the power of media under God: I’m afraid we’ll see the power of media and slowly God could slip from the pic­ture as we think we can evoke a response using it with­out turn­ing to His word.

This is the sin­gle most dif­fi­cult thing for me about being involved with tech­nol­ogy imple­men­ta­tion in an Evan­gel­i­cal church in Syd­ney. We’re new to this stuff. The dif­fi­cult thing is that it hasn’t been done before (except in Pentacostal/‘charismatic’/AoG cir­cles, which are slightly dif­fer­ent — I won’t com­ment fur­ther for fear of say­ing any­thing divi­sive here), and even where it has been it’s not been done holis­ti­cally. Approach­ing media is approach­ing the world’s way of com­mu­ni­cat­ing, which is so decep­tive and shal­low and often ill-informed. The chal­lenges that face us are rel­a­tively new, though their essence is not. We must hold onto what we believe whilst try­ing to com­mu­ni­cate those beliefs as clearly and effec­tively as pos­si­ble — but our com­mu­ni­ca­tion is noth­ing with­out the growth pro­vided by God.

What then is Apol­los? What is Paul? Ser­vants through whom you believed, as the Lord assigned to each. I planted, Apol­los watered, but God gave the growth. So nei­ther he who plants nor he who waters is any­thing, but only God who gives the growth. He who plants and he who waters are one, and each will receive his wages accord­ing to his labor. For we are God’s fel­low work­ers. You are God’s field, God’s building.

– 1 Corinthi­ans 3:5 – 9

Plant­ing and water­ing can take the form of a DVD or a web­site or a ser­mon in MP3 for­mat as read­ily as it could a book or an evan­ge­lis­tic ser­mon: none of these things are any­thing with­out the growth pro­vided by God.