I’m trying out the idea of planning my year quarter by quarter, rather than looking at yearlong goals.  One of my big goals is to grow the ministry of Covenant-First Presbyterian to 200 active and engaged worshippers.   Since so many people first encounter our church through web content, I’ve decided to beef up our online content strategy, integrating different platforms so that we can extend our reach.  So this is what we’ve done thus far:

Blogging

2017 marked my return to blogging in earnest, and some of these new posts have garnered some nice attention.  Here are the top five posts from January-March of 2017

• The Sermon About Immigrants I Didn’t Expect to Preach
• 3 Biblical Truths that Will Help You Grow in Self-Control
• 4 Lessons About Leader Training
• What Should You Do in Worship? Here’s 8 Actions for You
• Are You Stuck? Here’s a word of hope

I’m doing my best to use blogging as a way of extending the teaching ministry of the church.  So many of the blog posts are either extracted from our Sunday or Wednesday sermons.  Also, since I do other teaching opportunities throughout the year, I’ve been using the blog to prep some of that teaching work.

The blog had been pretty dormant last year, but even so we were getting about 10-12 page views a week.  Since we’ve been back, our views have jumped to over 100 a week, with visitors from the UK, China, Singapore, Niger, and Chile (to name a few countries).

YouTube

We started experimenting with YouTube last year. Right now, we’re doing our best to put up sermon audio from Sunday and Wednesday worship services, though our delivery is still a bit erratic.  Even so, we’ve had over 500 views of our videos this quarter – not too bad for a church just getting started.

Our top videos for the quarter were:

• “The Christmas Spirit: Light” Sermon from Christmas Eve 2016
•  Transhumanism – (Wednesday topic of the week for Feb 22)
• Fruitful Disciplines: The Practice of Self Control
• Craft Beer (Wednesday topic of the week for Jan 27)
• The Purpose of the Church: Worship the Triune God

Looking forward to where we go in second quarter!

Russell

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