Fundamental Media has launched a new website and is celebrating by giving away an Amazon Kindle 3G!

Enter Here: http://bit.ly/lfYwya

They add new resources constantly and it is all available for free! Below is a video introduction to the site:

Where have you found helpful free resources for church ministry? Let me know in the comments and I will write on about it in the future!

UPDATE: I released a Sermon Manager plugin for WordPress – available at WP for Church!

Ever since WordPress 3.0 was released, I desired to take advantage of custom post types to display sermons on our church website. I created something that is very functional for our church that I’ll be launching soon. (I’m very excited about the makeover our church site is about to get – I’ll be detailing it here when it is live!)

This week I became aware of a new plugin designed to take advantage of custom post types in WordPress. You can find all posts related to its development over at Tobias Labs. Development has been moving swiftly with several releases in the past week.

It is designed to replace the Sermon Browser plugin, which has been widely used by many churches to display sermons on their WordPress powered church websites (according to their website over 2,000 churches). It is very functional. However, the original developer has abandoned it for some time. The new “Sermon Posts” plugin by Tobias Labs is designed to replace and enhance the functionality of the original Sermon Browser plugin. It also has the ability to import from Sermon Browser. This is an awesome feature!

The plugin is currently only for testing purposes. It will require some template editing in order for your sermons to display properly.

The first giveaway featured on MinistryWerx is a huge one. You could win over $25,000 of prizes for church ministry! Here’s a few of the items that you could win:

• a beautiful guitar from Luna guitars.
• a Bible Study library from Logos Bible Software (I love this software!)
• 4 Lifetime Memberships to http://christiancollages.com for Christian Collages and Video content. Each membership valued at $138.
• 5 one year subscriptions to the new Gracewaymedia.com (formerly PowerPointSermons.com) where you can access today’s top worship service media.
• and much, much more….So, how do I enter?

This giveaway is sponsored by Proclaim – it’s a new software application that works on Windows or Macs. Proclaim is designed for presenting media and graphics during church services. There are lots of programs that do this, some free and some quite expensive (our church actually uses Powerpoint), but Proclaim is much different. Proclaim is a cloud based service. That means that different church staff or volunteers can work on Proclaim from any computer and all the changes are synced. For example, a music ministry worker can make sure all of the song slides are ready to go, a pastor or secretary can make sure all the slides are ready for the sermon, and still another person can update the announcements, etc.

This would be a huge help for a church like mine. We’re small and rural. We don’t have a staff member who can take care of all of these details by themselves. We also don’t have a current volunteer who can handle all of this on their own. Proclaim might be a good solution. I signed up for the email list and look forward to trying it out. I can’t find out what they are expecting to charge yet. For this to be a great solution for a small church, it needs to have a very low monthly fee for 2-3 users.

Do you use church presentation software? If so, which one? Will you try out Proclaim?

Facebook Tab Manager for WordPress – plugin home page

Do you currently have a Facebook page for your church? Is this a plugin that you will try?

Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis

This is a huge archive of sermons by John Piper and other speakers at the church. Tabs across the top of the section allow for easy navigation of the sermons by a variety of options: date, Scripture, speaker, series, occasion, topic, and title.

Once clicking on a individual sermon, there is an option to listen or watch along with a few questions for further thought. By clicking on mp3, I was presented with a popup window that displayed a flash video player for listening to the audio. I was surprised to not have a player more suited to audio so that I didn’t have a large black box over on display.

Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California

This is the church where John MacArthur preaches. Their website hosts media from several different ministries & conferences. The home page for the “Media Vault” has a large graphic and search box. You can easily find the latest additions and sort the huge collection by topics, speakers, Scripture passages, or ministry.

Beneath all of the images, there is a simple listing of several messages in a nice clean format:

Clicking on an individual message allows the option of downloading the audio. There is no audio player built in to the site. Some of the files are not available for free download; these pages feature a link to purchase them online.

College Church in Wheaton, Illinois

This was my least favorite of those I’ve reviewed. It is functional with a list of many sermons by year on the right side. You can also search by speaker, keyword, series, or date range. Once selecting a message, it begins loading in the player (which like Bethlehem Baptist is a video player used to play only audio).

Summary

I look forward to providing many more examples of church sermon pages in the future, but these three do provide inspiration and discussion. My favorite was from Grace Church. This is in spite of them not providing any type of media player! The design is clear and clean. Which one is your favorite? What other churches provide a good example for sermon pages?