The New Back Pew

This article was written for The Lutheran magazine by my dear friend, the Rev. Janet Hunt. It appears as an e-newsletter in their August issue



I'm convinced that a congregation's website is the new "back pew." It used to be that people who were checking out a church could arrive a little late, leave early and in between sit unobtrusively in the back pew. From there, they'd evaluate the friendliness of worshipers, the value of the sermon and the sing-ability of the music. From that vantage point, they would decide whether a second visit was in order.

As I lead worship, I'm aware of the latecomers who exit without giving me a chance to greet them and become acquainted. I'm also deeply aware that sometimes they are sitting in the "back pew" long before they literally find their way into the back pew.

Over and over, I've had new members tell me about their decision to visit our church, often spending considerable time on our website first. One spoke of looking for a congregation that cared enough about children to make sure it let people know it offered child care. Another listened to sermons online for a couple of months. She and her husband were coming from an especially painful church experience and wanted to test out whether this felt like a safe place before they decided to come to worship.

Yet another spoke of having hit a "faith bump" in her life while struggling with challenging health issues of family members. Between holding a full-time job and caring for an ailing husband and aging parents, the only time she had to think about looking for a church home was late at night, so she surfed the Web to do so. She looked for websites that were up-to-date. And she said our staff's prompt reply to her email was an important factor in her decision to join. I was surprised to learn that leaders of other congregations had left her pleas untended. To be sure, it was the congregation's people who helped make her decision, but without the technology such conversations may never have been possible.

This is why I'm convinced that a church's website is now both the back pew and the front door. It makes a first impression and may well be a factor in feeding someone on their faith journey long before they make time to join the congregation in worship. How can we ignore or neglect this important tool in reaching people with the good news of God's love?


Visit the article at The Lutheran to read the comments made by folks from around the country.

Keeping up with Facebook privacy changes

Facebook has some new ways that you can choose with whom you want to share your information. A helpful pop-up appeared on my facebook page this afternoon with a short tutorial, but if you didn't have time to look through that, or you haven't gotten the pop-up yet, here's a link to information about the new options that you'll see when you write a post.

You will now have an easier way to tag anyone in your posts. You can also automatically include your location whenever you post. That feature is able to be turned on or off. Before this change you were able to choose who could see your post - so long as you made that choice before you send the post. But once it was out there - it was out there. Your only way to take something back, was to delete the entire post. Now, you can change who can see the post even after you post something. Now, certainly that's not going to guarantee that whoever you're now blocking from seeing something didn't already see it. But, it is a new option.

Seems to me that these new options may be a reaction to Google+'s easier way of controlling who sees what you post - through circles. However, with the relatively small number of people involved in Google+ to this point, you can certainly get your message out to more people on Facebook (even if you exclude some folks from your post).

This may seem obvious to most of you, but it always bears repeating. Don't EVER put anything on the internet that you wouldn't want anyone to see, because once it's out there, it's really out of your hands. Just because you block someone from seeing a post, doesn't mean they may not see it over the shoulder of someone else - or get it forwarded to them from someone who you did not block.

"Privacy" on Facebook (or anywhere on the internet) is really a relative term.

How concerned about internet privacy are you?

Are you still using that same old password?

Hopefully everyone knows that you shouldn't use the same password for all of your online logins. But how on earth can you remember lots of hard-to-crack passwords?

There are several free (and not free) services that do an amazing job of keeping all your passwords in a safe place. My favorite is LastPass. You just have to remember ONE password to get into LastPass - and there are all the rest. LastPass even realizes when you're on a new site that's asking you to create a password - and it offers to generate a tough password for you. Then it automatically saves it into your vault.

Here's a great article about how to create a tough password. Amazingly, a string of easy to remember words is actually much harder to crack than a shorter random caps/no-caps, alphanumeric/symbol, impossible-to-remember password!

Read on! Get yourself a LastPass account and then have fun creating a really long easy-to-remember password!

Facebook introduces "Messenger"

Today Facebook released its new smartphone app called Facebook Messenger. It allows you to take your Facebook friends wherever you go and gives you the ability to instant message them whether they have the app or not.

It's integrated with Facebook messages and chats, so you can have access to those messages now wherever you are.

You can message friends, groups, and even those in your mobile contacts list. If a recipient of your message does not have Facebook Messenger, they simply receive your message as a text.

It's great for sending group messages. Once you have sent a message to a certain group of people, you can name that group and use the group the next time you need to send a message to those same people.

Best of all, it's a free app! Enjoy!

Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy! Three pane view in Gmail!

Oh boy, I'm excited! I am a HUGE fan of Google mail, but really loved the ability to have a preview pane in Outlook. That was probably the only thing I have missed from Outlook, but love so much else about Gmail, that I never really worried about it.

But, goodie, goodie, goodie! Google just announced a new Preview Pane View for Gmail and Google Apps Mail! I just enabled it, and wow! I can't express how cool it is. Yes, I get overly excited about geeky things like this - but this is going to save me a few seconds here and there hundreds of times a day. I LOVE things that will save me time.

You can read Google's blog post about the Preview Pane here. It shows some great screen shots of the new feature and explains how to enable it. It's just over in Labs.

Don't worry. If you enable it, and later decide it's not for you, you can simply click back to the old view. The lab adds a dropdown view option, so you can change your view to match your mood for the day! ;)

Let me know what you think of it. Do you prefer a preview view?

How do we update the site?

Send an email and within minutes your site is up-to-date.
Send a text message from your cell phone to update your site.
Attach a picture to an email or text to add interest to your web pages.
Email or send a picture from your cell phone to update a slideshow.

Not on Twitter yet?

Here are some great uses for Twitter that can be helpful in your daily life! Read this article, and you may break down and go make a Twitter account!

At Graddy Solutions, we encourage using Twitter (along with other social media sites) to get the word out about your organization. While it's best to create original content for all your social media outlets, sometimes there's just not enough time for that.

It's better to put something out there than nothing. So let us connect your website to your Facebook and Twitter, so that you can update all three in one shot. How's that for a day-saver?