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.
Online Bibles
There’s this verse in the Bible you know is there. You want to find it. You don’t have Bible software. You don’t have a concordance, or you’re somewhere your concordance is not. There’s no need to fret. There many free online Bible sites that allow you do word searches. Some even have some extra juice when it comes to features. We will list a few that you should bookmark.
YouVersion: We’ve already referred to YouVersion a few times because of their smartphone Bible App. YouVersion allows you to search multiple versions and translations; keep an online journal; engage in community; upload/download videos; see the thoughts and ideas of others; create your own account; follow a reading plan; and more.
BibleGateway: This online Bible site allows you to search multiple translations; search the Bible by topic, follow a reading plan; check commentaries; download the Bible in ebook form; and use other study tools like Bible Dictionaries; and more.
StudyLight: StudyLight.org allows you to search multiple translations; consult concordances and other study tools; check commentaries; read multiple versions in parallel; participate in forums; enjoy humorous cartoons; and more.
While there are other similar sites (some of which we will likely add later), these are our favorites. Enjoy and may your Bible reading and study shift into overdrive.
YouVersion Bible App in Top 10 on Blackberry App World
We don’t make the news, we just report it. A few days ago we pointed you to the LifeChurch.tv Bible app for iPhone, Blackberry and Android. The Bible App points to LifeChurch.tv’s online Bible platform call YouVersion. You can check it out at www.youversion.com.
The Bible App was recently updated, and only two days after 2.0.5 was released to make the Blackberry App compatible with the Blackberry Storm and Storm2. It took only two days for the App to break into the top 10 on Blackberry App World.
While exciting for the church, I’m sure you’d agree that the big win is the win overall. The Bible is being distributed globally and the trend for installs are coming in at over 350,000 per month. Per Month!
That’s a wholelota Bible reading. We’re proud of those guys at LifeChurch.tv. Congrats to their Digerati Team! Big win for us all!
