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Here’s the situation:

Like most people, we’ve been experiencing the phenomena of social networks, mobile devices, and personalization technologies that have great potential for churches. When thinking of how best to leverage these applications for the church, many questions arise:

  • What is the church’s strategic role in this area?
  • How do these technologies truly help us to move people closer to Christ?
  • Should we create church Facebook pages or create a private church social network?
  • How would a solution integrate with our web sites and back-end systems?
  • What exposure is there to our private data?
  • How much investment can we realistically make at this time?

It’s our belief that the time is right to leverage technology to support our Member Churches and others. And we want to leverage it with absolute clarity of purpose: To catalyze spiritual transformation. During the past year, we’ve been researching alternatives, engaging strategic partners, uncovering answers, leveraging these technologies for disciple-making (informed by new REVEAL research), and creating prototypes toward the development of a church solution that will facilitate churchwide personalization. For people in your congregation this would be a “myWillow” type page, or a “my own church name” kind of page that’s geared just for them—addressing their unique individual needs on their personal spiritual journey, their interactions and communications with your church, and their engagement with their spiritual relationships. We sum it all up with the working title—The “myChurch” Initiative.

Here’s the opportunity:

We are looking for 100 churches to join with us as Co-Partners on this “myChurch” Initiative starting this Fall. There is no financial obligation (possibly one trip to be part of a group gathering), but your role and commitment would be as outlined below:

  • To take a deep dive into cutting-edge research (including REVEAL, social technologies, and personalization) and provide thoughts toward the vision and strategy of this application
  • To shape the project with your needs in mind, informing us as to the best use of this technology in your situation
  • To provide feedback while working with a custom beta version for your church, one that you could then fully implement if you so choose
  • To help create the final global solution which will be available to all churches

All we need to know now is if you want to be part of this team of churches trying to create something significant that we can all use…and afford! The kickoff web meeting will be in October. We need to limit the number of participants to 100, so let us know right away if you're interested. We will be opening up this opportunity to other churches later this week. Just fill out the form.