Approach

Applying Internet technology to truly empower church ministries around the world is a challenging task. It requires a detailed understanding of ministry needs, creativity and innovation, and the technical know how to create the applications. And, in order to make these new capabilities available to numerous churches, delivery mechanisms must be developed, and training is needed to teach churches how to use these new capabilities. The magnitude of this effort necessitates a team approach among many of God's people with different skills, gifts, and backgrounds. Teamwork and partnerships are critical to the success of this movement. And in order for the Web-Empowered Church to be effective and practical, the creation of the Web-Empowered Church needs to come from a co-development among many diverse and healthy churches. As a result, the development is not being done by a web company, a Christian institution, or even a single co-located team. Instead, the strategy is to partner with churches to perform the majority of the development and testing. The Web-Empowered Church needs to be practical and usable in regular churches by regular people doing real ministry.

After analyzing the challenge we have divided the strategy to web-empower the Church into three parts. These parts are: 1) technology, 2) training, and 3) tools.

CyberMinistry is newer than most ministries in the church. The first web server and web page was created by Paul Kunz of Stanford University in 1991; and Mosaic, the first publicly available web browser, was introduced in 1993. Most other church ministries have a few hundred years, or even a few thousand years head start. :-) In CyberMinistry, we've learned a lot, but we still need to learn a lot more through experimentation and teaming with some of the best and most innovative of God's people. This strategy includes the establishment of "Researcher Churches" that act as "CyberMinistry research laboratories" to try new approaches and report on the results. We are identifying and recruiting innovative and diverse churches to become Researcher Churches to help us learn more about how Internet technology can best be applied to support church ministries. They:

• Help define requirements for ministry-enhancing web-applications.
• Help define and prioritize the creation of the web applications.
• Use and evaluate the web applications in real situations within active ministries.
• Provide feedback on what works well and what does not, including suggestions for improvement.

In an effort to develop new and innovative solutions, we also assemble groups of selected ministry leaders and visionaries to brainstorm ideas for web-empowering the Church. In addition, we will use this website to enable anyone to submit ideas or suggestions. As much as possible and practical, we want to gather the collective insight and creativity from all God's people. At the same time, we are not looking for theoretical solutions. We want to develop practical, demonstrated solutions that work in average churches with average people.

We must provide extensive resources to help educate church leaders and lay people on:

• The benefits of Internet ministry.
• How the Internet can be applied to empower ministries.
• How to use and apply the tools created in this effort.

The strategy includes creation of several resources including books, workshops and conferences, extensive on-line teaching, and on-line discussion groups. Just as we want to web-empower churches for ministry, we want to web-empower this effort to maximize effectiveness and to keep costs down. Most of the teaching and other resources will be available here on the Web-Empower Church web site.

The tools WEC plans to develop include:

• Installation: Automated support for installing and setting up a web server to execute the WEC System, upgrading to the latest WEC version, and moving existing WEC sites to new servers.
• Administration: A simpler administrative interface enhanced with wizards that help walk users through common tasks. The current version is highly capable, but may be difficult for churches to learn.
• Templates: Automated support for selecting, customizing, and installing WEC templates to provide a professional look and feel for an entire church website. Many templates will be developed to give churches a broad array of choices.  
• Ministry Extensions: The majority of the WEC effort will focus on developing/maintaining powerful web applications called "Ministry Extensions" that can be easily incorporated into a church website and will enhance ministry effectiveness and reach.