FootHills Bible Church, Littleton CO
On behalf of Foothills Bible Church I want to take this opportunity to express my appreciation to the Foundation for Evangelism for your visionary support of the Web Empowered Church ministry.
We are a church of between 2500-3000 people. We ‘discovered’ WEC almost 2 years ago while searching for a solution to our woefully inadequate Web presence. With the advisory assistance of Mark Stephenson, Glenn Kelley and others at WEC, we were able to realize our church vision of creating interactive Web sites that would provide information to surfers & seekers, church family, and students, as well as broadcast the gospel message across the globe via our sermons and other tools. Their creative vision of what other things were possible also broadened the scope of our own vision for this ministry. We now have a transcription team that is transcribing sermons for us to put up on the Web where they can be translated into a number of languages using AltaVista’s BabelFish tools, an audio Podcast, a video Podcast (almost ready to launch), and our prayer teams are now also actively engaging people through the Prayer Connector in prayer for needs across the congregation and community. These are a few of the tools we’ve implemented.
We were able to completely re-design and build our 3 new sites in a relatively short time (approximately 6-7 months) with the assistance of tech support from Red Red Design, Vine Hosting and WEC forum & advisors. Without their invaluable help, our Web ministry would never have come to fruition in this brief amount of time and without a great expenditure of financial resources. WEC has also continued to provide us with helpful technological updates for the Typo3 extensions, and has been forging new trails with new ministry tools, which we are delighted to be able to implement and use for the Kingdom of God.
We are looking forward to building online educational tools to expand our educational ministries for those whose schedules don’t allow them to participate during normally-scheduled class times. In addition, we believe the WEC tools afford the ability to reach out to our missionaries across the globe and to enhance their respective ministries.
We launched our basic site in February 2007, and have spent the past 9 months since, exploring, learning, developing and implementing new features (extensions) for use with our congregation. We have found that the greatest challenge is not the software, but building the infrastructure(s) needed to support the Web ministry. As we pursue this ministry, however, we have found that the Lord is bringing people to us with the passion and vision for reaching out to areas we would never be able to otherwise touch.
For example, we have a missionary couple based here in Colorado, Norm and Becky Wretlind, who have developed a Neighborhood Evangelism ministry and have won hundreds of people to Christ through this ministry (http://www.neighborlyevangelism.org/) . A few years ago, they took this ministry to India, and held training sessions there for the indigenous pastors. They have been back to India annually, building this ministry, and just this week a new, expanded team will embark on the 2007 trip which will be teaching over 400 new believers and 70 pastors who have been reached through the Neighborhood ministry. We are currently engaged in planning to expand our Web site to include a section in Hindi so that we can continue to minister to these believers in India. We also desire to create additional sections of our Web where other missionaries across the globe can have their own unique presence to their geographic populace. This vision would never be possible without the Typo3 tools and support of WEC / VineHosting.
My role here at Foothills Bible Church is three-fold. I administrate the church non-financials database (Shelby Systems), I administrate the church Web site (using Typo3), and I conduct almost all of the training of staff (paid and volunteer) for these two software programs and other miscellaneous programs. I have a master’s degree in Instructional Technology, but no real background or training in software development or IT networks or systems. While Typo3 has the capability of being a very complex (and therefore, potentially highly powerful) tool, WEC has designed the system to be user-friendly for people without extensive software development backgrounds. It is precisely for this reason, that churches such as ours, without highly-trained technological staff, can quickly learn the software well enough to build and develop a reasonably presentable Web presence in a short amount of time without exorbitant financial outlay. I am probably the most technologically proficient member of our staff (with the possible exception of our IT person who only deals with Phone & computer systems—not software) If our church staff can learn Typo3 in just a few months and build a site as nice as ours, any church can.
I continue to share our WEC experience with many other churches in our local area and beyond, and am actively involved, currently, in building a second site for a Christian non-profit organization ministering to inner-city youth in downtown Denver. We are immensely grateful and dependent upon WEC for the support and vision they provide. We thank you from the depths of our heart for the role Foundation for Evangelism plays in this ministry.
Because of His Grace,
Mary Beth Maidment
Foothills Bible Church
Operations Administrator
