I’ve used YouVersion.com on the computer and a few times have even used the mobile version, m.youversion.com. So I’m very excited to see that lifechurch.tv has released their YouVersion Bible App for the Blackberry. While in it’s infancy at version .1, you just know more and great things will come down the road. If you have an iPhone check out the free iPhone app, of if you just have mobile web access use m.youversion.com. From their site:

* Use the reader to study any part of Scripture—the entire Bible is at your fingertips.
* Take your pick from 35 different translations available in 19 different languages.
* Search the entire Bible for a word, phrase, or verse, and you’ll get your results in seconds.
* The One-Year Reading Plan provides daily selections to keep you on track when you’re on the go.
* Learn from others by checking out recent contribs.

I’m never really sure what to make of movies like this, but for some reason I’m going to have to check this one out. I’m sure many will say that you shouldn’t go and support movies like this and my thought on that is that this movie will probably start more conversations and get more people thinking about their faith than most of those “Christian” movies.

http://www.imdb.com/video/screenplay/vi3857252633/

As is pretty obvious by this blog I love God and technology and love finding new ways that technology can help share God with people.  Following the Google blog and some of the cool things they have coming out always seems to be cutting edge.  Today I noticed the Google Audio Indexing which from their own description is:

a tool that transcribes and indexes the spoken content on YouTube’s Politicians channels

Now I know currently it’s only for the political videos but I hope that at some time this will be available for any videos that you choose to have it index.  Think about having your weekly sermons uploaded to Google video, transcribed and indexed.  This can become an amazing teaching tool.

Combine this with the fact that Google Video is becoming part of Google Apps Premier Edition as well as Google Apps Education Edition which is free for non-profits with a 501c3 and this will be another huge score for churches and other non-profits to get more of their content searchable and useable on the web.

Was excited to see while looking around the other day that there will be a DVD study that will go along with Francis Chan’s book Crazy Love.  This is one of my favorite books and can’t wait to lead our small group through this study!

As is with most things recently the best way to find out about great offers and promotions for churches is through the CITRT IRC chatroom.  The latest was as I was searching for a Email marketing program such as Constant Contact, iContact, or similar.  As I found who others we’re using, Vertical Response was mentioned, and then that was followed up with the fact that they are free for non-profits.  This is almost completely true, they give 10,000 free emails a month to non-profits, and then 15% discount on everything else. I’ve sent about 2,500 emails with them since Friday with no problems, they are easy to use, have open, bounce, and click-through tracking.  I love free things and think you will too, try Vertical Response .

The last few weeks have been crazy with our church’s spiritual campaign called Imagine getting ready to kick-off.  It’s going to be an awesome 9 weeks as we look at what it’s like to have a fully devoted life. One of our intro videos tells it best.

This weekend it all starts, if you’re anywhere near the Bradenton/Sarasota, Florida area you’ll want to check this out and get involved.  As part of Imagine, we’ll learn what could happen if we share our Testimony of what God’s done in our lives, gave God the Time he deserves, used our Talents to glorify Him, and invested our Treasures to share His love. Some teasers of things to come during Imagine, HUGE tailgate party, an American Idol singer, and….an amazing night with Shane and Shane in concert!

There has been numerous times that I or others have made comment that the CITRT group should have a prayer group of some sorts. After scrolling through my blog, I came across an old post, April 18th, 2006, to be exact, on people2pray.com. So I created a group for the Church IT people, please join in as we come together to lift each other up in prayer and in knowledge.

Sign-up here

The annual Shelby Conference is coming up in two short weeks in Orlando, Florida. It will be June 17-20th with lots of great learning and networking opportunities. I’m looking forward to this conference as time to be able to dig in deep into our church database and to be able to pull out the information that we want, when we want it. Another favorite part of conferences is being able to network with other attendees. I’d love to meet up with any other Church IT guys and talk the talk. I’ll also be attending the Pre-ISC IT Roundtable for Directors and Network Admins, if you haven’t signed up for this yet sign up yet let me know so we can plan ahead.

Even if you are not going to ISC if you use Shelby leave me a comment, i’d love to know who else there is tackling Shelby IT and usability challenges.

Following up on yesterday’s post in which I started the conversation off of just the categories of software that we use in the church world.  Now to fill those categories in with actual products of what’s being used and also what’s available but not being currently implemented.

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As most ideas start with me lately, we we’re talking in the IRC chatroom the other day about open source and free software and such.  I threw out the question I wonder if there are any church’s that are running completely open source?  I can’t imagine wanting to do this, trying to do this, or this being even worthwhile.  So I’m posting this not as a should you or shouldn’t you have an open source church but could you.  So the idea is to compile a list of the good, bad, and ugly of different software to fill the software shoes of your church.  I have a feeling this may not be a possibility to be completely open source as if you go to Linux as your OS I think you’ll eliminate alot of the the other opensource software that you could use as they are based on Windows or Mac.  This will be an interactive series as it will take everyone’s input to make this a worthwhile list.  First we’ll need to compile the list of areas where software is needed, program types so to say.  I’ll start this off below but please add other program types that software is needed:

• Server/Desktop Operating System
• Word Processing
• Presentation
• Church Database System
• Email/Communication
• Website creation/management
• Financials
• Video/Graphic creation/editing
• Helpdesk
• Bible study
• ????

So what other areas are needed?