Outside The Box Ministry

It has been some time since my last post.  I have been busy working on a very exciting outreach strategy that utilizes short films to start spiritual conversations.

As part of my ministry work with The JESUS Film Project (a ministry of Campus Crusade for Christ) we have been testing the use of short films for outreach around the world over the last two years.  With the field test that we have done we have found what worked the best in one-on-one, small group and large group settings.  As a result, we have produced a DVD with 11 short films that will soon be available to purchase.  My team lead a seminar a few weeks ago at the National Outreach Convention in San Diego sharing and showing how a church can use the short film DVD to reach their community.

I am excited about all the potential uses with the DVD tool.  Some churches are using it for church planting and established churches are using it to reach their community.  The DVD is subtitled into 9 languages too.  To find out more about the Short Film Stategy visit the Global Short Film Network website.

I will be heading to the Catalyst Conference later this week. This is the first time for me to attend, but I am looking forward to it.  They are expecting around 10,000 people to attend.

If you are not familiar with the Catalyst Conference it is “a three day leadership experience like no other. A unique approach to programming and learning, defined by fun, dynamic attendee experience, leaders are personally challenged to become “change agents” within their organizations for the ongoing creation and emergence of the church.”

You can find out more information on their, very interactive, website. It may not be to late for you to sign up. If you have attended before, I would love to hear your throughts about the conference.

Ministry Marketing Coach is about to start a series of articles on marketing secrets for nonprofits.  A few things you will learn:

• How to develop a marketing plan for your nonprofit
• Get the inside scoop on nonprofit publicity tactics
• Leverage the power of research on a tight budget
• How to use marketing to get people to adopt new social behaviors
• Positioning your nonprofit for the future

You can follow the series by subscribing to the Ministry Marketing Coach RSS feed here.

Several month’s ago I became familiar with Creo Productions.  They are a full service video production company located out of Michigan.  Some of the work they have done includes producing videos to promote books.

They combine narration with graphics to communicate in a short period a time the central message of a book.  They are very powerful in comparison to reading a synopsis for a book.  You can check out some of their work on their website.

They have produced videos for Greg Stielstra, author of “Pyro Marketing” and Michael English’s “The Prodigal Son Comes Home“.

On a side note, you can download a complete audio version of Pyro Marketing from Greg’s website for free.

Facebook, the social utility that connects you with people around you, has over 3,000 types of applications that you can “plug-into” your personal profile. There are many different types of applications available. You can display the books you are reading, the music you are listening to, rate movies you have seen, draw graffiti and much more.

Since Facebook has opened their platform to developers to develop their own applications you continue to see new ones come up almost every day.  I’m not the only one who has been thinking about this recently, but this would be a great opportunity to develop Facebook applications for ministry purposes. Dan over at Blog Ministry has posted about this idea as well. He has created a Facebook Brainstorm discussion board for you to share your ideas.  Dan mentions in a few posts that there have been several applications that have been developed by Christians for Christians.

Here are a few that I have come up with:

1. Who Is Jesus- an application that updates daily talking about Jesus and a link to how you can know Him personally.
2. Ask a Christian- an application where someone can post a question and others can answer it.
3. Share Your Story- an application that enables you to post your testimony by text or video

What are your ideas?

Are you looking for new ways to reach people with your message or looking for more distribution sources to deliver your content?  There is huge potential for evangelism and discipleship using mobile technology.  You can find an extensive guide on the Internet Evangelism Day website.  Here is a list of ideas for using mobile phones for your outreach from the site.

1.  Downloadable Bibles and books
2.  Video clips and mini-presentations
3.  Text messaging
4.  Wallpaper (screen backgrounds)
5.  Games, ringtones, wallpapers
6.  Web Access
7.  In developing nations

Last night while visiting my local Barnes & Noble, which my wife and I enjoying doing often, I very much enjoyed eating a chocolate chuck cookie from Starbucks and read a lot of the book, Free Prize Inside: How to Make a Purple Cow by Seth Godin.

In his book, which is an easy read, he outlines how a company should rethink how they spend their money on advertising, doing BIG innovation projects and R&D. Instead they should focus on “soft innovations”. These are about small ideas that anyone in an organization can think of. It is all about what Godin calls, “making your product into a Purple Cow.”

You can apply this idea to your organization or church by creating an environment for your staff or congregation to be a “champion” of an idea they might have that can bring change or a great opportunity that can make an impact on your community, nation or world.

I have written about Squidoo before. For some time now I have been using my “lens” as a way to test the interest level that visitors would have in a certain topic ( Sermon, Church and Ministry Videos).  In my testing I have found the Squidoo pages rank very well in natural searches on Google.  For example, if you do a search on “church videos” my “lens” comes up, as of the writting of this post, in the top ten of the natural search.  It also has done well under the searcn term “ministry videos”.  I recently added the term “sermon videos” to see how that will do.

As a result, I found that there was interest in the topic so I created a new blog which I have linked to it from the Squidoo lens.  This has been a good source of new visitors to the Church Video Reviews blog.  So, if you are thinking of creating a new website, blog, business or product consider using a website like Squidoo to do testing.

Are you stuck on a project or finding a new idea?  Instead of giving up, check this out whatagreatidea.com.

In the latest edition of Outreach magazine they reveal the 2006 Resource of the Year Awards. This year’s “Best” award goes to Bill Hybel’s book “Just Walk Across the Room”. You can check out other category winners on Outreach’s website.