Some good points there.

When a small church has a single person on payroll (the pastor) time for these things like blogging can be short, and harder to justify. With volunteers preferring to concentrate on worship/children’s work, the pastor can be left with a significant amount of administration.

Having lived, worked, written about and lectured on smaller churches most of life I don’t believe the real issue is money or resources. The issue is vision. Let’s be honest though, not all communities need websites. I once ministered in a rural KY community. The population of the entire county was 5000. Technology was just not part of life.

I now live in a town of 7000 with three international corporations. The community if full of upper middle class executives, yet only two churches have websites. Why? Technology is a way of life for the people of our community. The other churches are missing out. Not because of money, not because of resources but because they don’t understand how to communicate with people that are outside their building. Most of the ministers are aging and just don’t get technology. They are stuck in a time vacuum with no vision for the future. While we are only a church of 230-250 we have a decent website with no budget. Just a vision for what we can become. We are currently reworking the website for the fall to include content regularly seen on larger church website. In the next several months we will begin to include online devotions, online sermons, online Bible studies, blogs and the like. Yeah normal stuff, but what is cool is that from our church of 230 at least 60 folks will be working to make it happen. That comes from vision not money.

I more or less agree with The Bing.

I know this is a bit of an over-generalization, but there are basically 2 kinds of small churches.

1) There are old, mainline churches that are plateaued or declining. They're primarily made up of older people, who are less tech savy. And they are not all that interested in reaching their communities.

2) There are new church plants that are growing and obviously trying to reach their communities. They tend to be made up of younger, more tech-savy people.

Churches in the first category probably not only think they don't have enough money for a website, eNewsleter, etc. They probably don't have the vision for them and wouldn't know how to use them effectively if someone developed them for free.

Churches in the second category know how critical a website and eNewsletter they are to succeeding that they would probabably pay the small amount of money to get online before they would pay their pastor.

- Paul

And the key element to these 'free' technologies?

Most of them are Open Source.

For all the churches talk of community and sharing you'd think this would be the logical choice for technology needs, but somehow consumer culture is still a large part of the organisation of the church

I completely agree. Especially when it comes to utilizing many of the social networking opportunities that web 2.0 provides. Things like blogs, facebook, twitter, and such are all free and can help connect people in small groups, bible studies and small churches. I have implimented and encouraged many of these things in our church and small group ministry and seen people enjoy the new found connections and the ease at which the tech was used.