Free Photos and Graphics at CreativeMYK.com

Ever wish you had your own graphic artist for your church?  Love to use ProPresenter for Mac or MediaShout for PC? Wish you had more cool backgrounds for your presentation software or your series art?  Have we got a resource for you!

CreativeMYK.com is a site that offers all that and more.  The site allows graphic artists and photographers to share their work with users who can download the art for FREE.  There are some minor restrictions on the use of the images, but they don’t interfere with most of what you’d want to do.

If you’re trying to build your own graphics and want some feedback, the site also hosts a community that is willing to help you out.  You can upload your work and ask for critique and suggestions.  Pros, people with talent, and some without will give you feedback and offer help.  Sometimes, you just need the right eyes on your work to make something that’s OK something really good or even great.  Don’t underestimate the impact a small tweak might have on the overall look and feel of your sermon series or the mood the right background image will add to the worship set.

Another unique feature of this community driven site is that many artists are willing to customize their work just for you.  They will actually take their raw files and adjust color and text to fit what you’re trying to do or put your title in or even add your Church’s name.  And most are willing to make these tweaks and adjustments for free.

Click the link above and browse around to see for yourself what’s offered.  You’ll thank us. Then join up (we receive no benefit if you do), and let the upgrade begin.  We love sites like this that help Churches get better easily and require little to no budget adjustment.  Have any suggestions of sites like this for others?  Share them below.

Track Your Church Attendance, Giving, Salvations, and Baptisms for FREE

If you don’t count, you should. And you should keep up with it. You should compare it week to week and year over year. You’ll learn trends. You’ll remember what worked, and you can quantify it. You’ll be able to go back and evaluate that great series that turned out to be not so great, and that one that gained momentum out of nowhere. You’ll be surprised the questions you’ll start asking yourself and your staff. Don’t get caught up in the false humility of not counting. Also, don’t do it to boast. Do it to know. Do it to be better. Do it to be a good steward. Do it well, with easy access to it that you can control, and do it for free.

ChurchMetrics.com is a FREE resource that allows you to input your weekly numbers from attendance to giving to salvations to baptism to a web-based application. You build your own secure and private user account and can set it up to share with those you’d like to have access to this information. Once it’s online, you’ll have access to the data anywhere you have an internet connection. There is even a mobile application for it you can use with a smartphone. (All the more reason to order your Nexus One today!)  All the information is available in it’s raw form, but it’s also compiled in useful charts and graphs to help you find the trends.  It also comes with a handy dashboard that gives you a quick snapshot of what’s going on in your ministry.  If you’re a multi-site church, it’s even multi-campus ready.

You know what?  On second thought, you might not want to be accountable for the information you’ll find.  Maybe you shouldn’t do it.

Bible Reading Plans Update on YouVersion

Youversion recently upgraded its Bible Reading Plans.  You can even customize it based on a length of time you’d like complete it.  Here are some of the hightlights…

Now is a great time to get started with a reading plan (whenever it happens to be that you read this). YouVersion’s solution could be just the tool you need.

Blog-Seth Godin

We read a lot of blogs.  ChurchOnline247 is, at this time, essentially a blog.  Since it’s core to who we are and how we stay connected, we’d like to recommend some blogs that we think are good, or even great.  The first one we’ll recommend isn’t going to be what you might expect.  While there are practically thousands of good (and in our opinion some great) “religious” or “Christian” oriented blogs (and we’ll get to many of those eventually), we’d like to push on your borders a little bit with our first recommendation.

The blog is published by Seth Godin and can be found here.  Seriously, you should just put this bookmark in your browser now, even subscribe to the RSS feed.  If you can open up your mind to apply the principles and concepts that Godin seems to endlessly post, you’ll learn a lot about making yourself better, being more of the you you were created to be, keeping the vision and mission of your church pure, thinking “outside the box,” crafting your message, getting the word out about who you are, and the list goes on.  You will probably find yourself browsing the archives for the gold you know you’ll find there.

I’m sure many of you won’t get it at first.  Some of you may never return because of this unorthodox recommendation.  But it’s definitely worth a little heat and a few subscribers or visitors for the difference this will make for the few of you dig in and mine how apply the good stuff you’ll find.

Online Church Services- Saddleback Church

Saddleback Church based in Lake Forrest, California, has eight (8) worship venues and six (6) campuses.  Senior Pastor Rick Warren is well known in the Christian community and author of the best-selling Purpose Driven Church.  Warren started Saddleback Church on Easter of 1980, and it has grown to be one of the largest churches in the country.  Pastor Warren and Saddleback Church’s influence has now spread around the globe.

You can visit Saddleback by taking a nice trip to Southern California, or you pull up your chair to computer and attend online.  Saddleback offers live streams of its services here.  Live services are streamed on Saturdays at 4:30 and 6:30 PM, and on Sundays at 9:00 & 11:15 AM and 4:30 & 6:30 PM.  All times are Pacific.  If you arrive at a time when services aren’t being streamed live, a countdown clock will appear indicating when the next service will air.

On Saddleback’s live service page you can join a chat, take notes, look up passages in the online Bible, and complete a response card.  You can also download the sermon notes and a discussion guide.  Archived services are also linked to the page so that you can watch past messages in case a live one isn’t available.  Saddleback also links to other ministries from their live service page that can connect you to small groups, offer an opportunity to give financially, learn more about Christ, and find care and help.

With the internet becoming more and more important in our lives and the quality that new technologies allow, Saddleback’s campus is a great one to bookmark.  If you always wanted to live in Cali but just can never seem to get there, at least you can worship at a church that’s making a difference in the OC.