Living Open Source» Mission

Praying with stones and sticky hearts

Tim — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 15:34:18 +0000

With some trepidation we volunteered as a church to be part of the 2009 Year of Continuous Prayer across Merseyside. The idea being that each week a different church in Merseyside would take on the baton (a diary) and pray for the community. This week it was our turn…

We decided to use, with some minor tweaks the fantastic series of prayer stations suggested by Erica Schemper, which are based on the words of the Lord’s Prayer.

I guess some people hoped the whole world would turn up to pray, but prayer tends not to be such a crowd puller. Each day people have come and spent time quietly praying, guided by the stations. Some of us have stood at the door of our church and asked passers-by what we should pray for. And so this week our church has been a place of prayer. Interesting how they are often anything but.

There are also lots of other great ideas for imaginative praying on the Creative Prayer web site. Many people find it hard to know where to begin with prayer and are often helped to know that all the senses can be used when drawing close to God.

2 more days to go. It has been a good week.

Church Planting with WordPress

Tim — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 09:40:53 +0000

From the many e-mails I get about Wordpress-Driven Churches, I have noticed that church planters are frequent users of my WordPress themes. Steve Swisher over at Churches Planting Churches has also noted the tool’s usefulness to those seeking to push boundaries of church that bit further. His own church site, Essential Church, shows what can be done with this tool. My series on blogging your church with WordPress is also a good place to start, but I wanted ask why? Why is WordPress so good for this kind of application?

Is it Cost? When you consider how much you pay for a custom solution or for one of those church CMS sites, this is a no-brainer. This seems to be Steve’s point too:

Here’s how I got a great looking website for under $200 total start-up cost and only $50 per year total cost for the life of our church. (Steve Swish)

I’d go further than that. It can be a $0 solution, if you choose to use the hosted version of WordPress at WordPress.com. Many churches do.

Is it because it moves and grows? WordPress is Open Source. It has grown and continues to grow through community effort; more like what church is supposed to be than any church I’ve come across! Because of the huge community base, there are thousands of themes and plugins around to make it do anything. You will also never be locked in to WordPress, since as soon as the next best thing comes out, someone somewhere will have a way of moving your content painlessly. As if you would want to! It encourages community and grows with you.

Perhaps it is because it encourages the sharing of a story? Unfortunately many users of WordPress try and squeeze out the blog in WordPress, by making their home page full of static content. Churches moving from more conventional CMS and custom sites, struggle a lot when they move to WordPress. They think that a static welcome message and a statement of belief is enough to draw people in. Oh dear! So for church planters, the sharing of story is important, because it is a new story and because the people they are trying to reach are interested in joining a community that is living.

The book by Brian Bailey is well worth looking at too.

Are you using WordPress for a church plant in some innovative way to build community?

You’re Welcome

Tim — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 09:28:35 +0000

Last Sunday was Back to Church Sunday in the UK when churches up and down the land took the radical step of inviting people to church.

Last year we gave away free chocolate bars. This year people had to make do with a pen and a bright orange balloon. It is a pretty simple idea and does seem to bring people “back” to church. But having sampled church afresh, will they come again?

This is a little animation I made to mark the occasion. A little late, but I just ran out of time last week.

Welcome from Tim Hyde on Vimeo.

If you are interested you can get a royalty-free HD version through pond5.

The Welcome

Tim — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 13:13:47 +0000

It has been such a long time since I posted on my blog. I’ve been on holiday and since I’ve been back, I’ve had blogger’s block. So I thought I’d break the blog silence with this image for Sunday’s lectionary reading in Matthew 10:40-42.

True hospitality is such a great thing. It isn’t hard – just a cup of water for “one of these little ones”. Well, OK so these days a big mug of coffee might be more appropriate, but it isn’t rocket science. We’ve been running a community cafe initiative at church over the past couple of weeks which is simply about giving folk a cup of coffee for free! Pure and simple hospitality. It is amazing the people we have met and the conversations we have had.

Virtual virtues

Tim — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 11:43:30 +0000

This year’s Churches Advertising Network, Christmas campaign moves into the virtual world of Second Life. Previous campaigns have been high impact and sometimes controversial. This one promises to be no different.

The general idea is to ask the question – “Want a second go at life?” There is a poster, a series of radio ads, a website and an island in Second Life. If you think this is all a bit crazy, they are not the first to venture into the virtual world of Second Life. LifeChurch.tv planted a church there a while ago, so that all those trying to escape real life, can’t escape church.

You can probably use the posters as stand alone, provided you have a target audience that actually knows what Second Life is. But while the whole concept is kind of innovative, I don’t think it has as wider appeal as previous campaigns. The empty pint glass last year would probably speak to just about everybody in our local pub. But Second Life – what’s that? Somewhere you can be virtually good?