Church Marketing Sucks

For the past month and a half we’ve been looking at the web 2.0 trend and what it could mean for your church. We’ve looked at the highs and lows, the possibilities and the dangers and whether or not any of it means anything for telling more people about Jesus.

I find it some what ironic that our series is sandwiched between two articles in high profile media outlets. The first appeared in Newsweek as we were starting our series and covered the web 2.0 trend in general. The second appeared today in the Wall Street Journal and covered how churches are using technology, specifically community driven sites like MySpace and Flicker, some of the same examples we used. I’m not sure if that means we’re with it, or out of it or not sure what ‘it’ is anyway.

At any rate, here’s the complete series in case you missed it:

• What Web 2.0 Means for Your Church – A general overview of the trend and potential problems and possibilities.
• How Your Church Can Use Flickr – A closer look at photo-sharing sites like Flickr and specific examples of churches putting them to use.
• How Your Church Can Use MySpace – A closer look at the headline-grabbing MySpace, the potential for churches and possible dangers and the Christian copycat sites.
• How Your Church Can Use Video – Diving into the explosive online video world and seeing if there’s room for churches.
• How Your Church Can Use Squidoo – Checking out another web 2.0 tool and how it can work for churches. As a bonus we tried it out and ended up the lens of the day.
• How Your Church Can Ditch Expensive Software – One of the advantages of web 2.0 technology is web-based software which could mean the end for expensive legacy software.
• Church Friendly Web 2.0 – A look at several Christian web 2.0 projects, including a mission project manager, a community prayer site and an online Bible.
• How Your Church Can Ignore Web 2.0 – Finally, not everyone is wild about web 2.0 and we look at some of the reasons why.

We don’t know everything about web 2.0, but it’s a start. Then again, it will all change by next week.