Are you following “best practices” for online ministry?
Since many of you may be new to my blog and research, I wanted to make you aware of the “resources” section and some of the online ministry tools I have put there. The “resources” section is available both at my main site and my Facebook page.
One of my first projects in the area of online ministry was to seek an answer to the question: what makes online ministry successful? This led to the development of a research project to determine the “best practices” in online ministry. From November 2007 to April 2008, over 300 ministries took a survey and reported on how they were doing Internet ministry. From the data collected, a series of “best practices” were developed matching ministries who reported success with their Internet presence with answers to the survey questions. I presented the results of this research at the Internet Ministry Conference in October 2008. › Continue reading
Full research write-up posted
For those of you who have been asking me for documentation related to my presentation at the Internet Ministry Conference, I have now posted a six-page report on my web site that details my findings. In conjunction with this, I also wrote a short summary of these findings for the Church Marketing Sucks blog.
My next project
After I was done speaking at the Internet Ministry Conference last week, several people came up to me and asked “what is your next research project?” Several people suggested different areas of research, including a couple who offered up their own ministries as research subjects.
So, what is next? Well, there are two answers to that. First, my next big project is planning and teaching my course in Internet Ministry here at Biola. This course is being advertised for students at the seminary (Talbot), the School of Intercultural Studies, and here in the School of Business. Here is the course description:
The Internet is the greatest communication technology ever developed by man. It is imperative that the Church learns how to use it to its fullest potential. This course will study the use of the Internet as a tool for ministry using a combination of lectures, case studies, and hands-on laboratory work. Special attention will be paid to the effectiveness and limits of using the Internet as a ministry tool.
The course could take many directions and my hope is that several more research ideas will come from the course. Additionally, I may develop a textbook for these kinds of courses as there does not seem to be any yet. As I develop and teach the course I plan on blogging about it – so stay tuned.
The second answer to “what is your next project?” is that I will probably continue to dissect the data from my Internet ministry survey and continue to break down the results. These will also be posted to my blog. If you have any ideas on what sorts of data analysis you would like to see, please let me know by commenting on this post or sending me an email!
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Welcome to Lessons From Babel
This blog is where I share the latest thoughts on my research in the world of Internet ministry. Feel free to join the conversation by leaving a comment. For more information on what I am doing in 2010, see my first post of the year. To find out more about me, my company, and this web site, or to see what resources are available on this site, click on the images right below this.
- Dave Bourgeois
