This year for Christmas, we introduced Kiva.org to our kids. They are old enough now where we want to try and instill some meaning to the “spirit of giving.” Kiva is the perfect Christmas gift to enjoy together while doing just that.

Kiva enables micro loans of $25 at a time from “lenders” like you and me to entrepreneurs in developing countries. It handles all the administrative issues, tracks the loans, provides narrative updates, lets you see and connect with other lenders to the same Kiva loan if you wish, etc. The repayment rates are unbelievable, topping 95% in most cases. Which means that you’ll most probably get your $25 back in several months (each loan has a set repayment schedule too, so you’ll see the progress of the loan as well) where you can take it back or . . . invest in another Kiva loan!

Here’s the Kiva story our kids picked out to invest our $25 from Christmas. By May, before their school is out, they’ll see the success of their loan. And hopefully we can choose another loan to reinvest for the summer and beyond.

You can see details of our our Kiva loan group right now: My Kiva Loan

There are tons of other sample loans available to invest in:

Kiva loans are addictive, makes a visible connection with someone else across the globe and better than writing a check to a faceless charitable organization.

Do you Kiva? Tell us about your Kiva story and leave a comment below.

This Christmas break, I’m sitting down again with Tim Keller and his Counterfeit Gods. It is always refreshing to take in a story or message that’s well told. And that’s what Dr. Keller, lead pastor of Redeemer Pres in NYC does – tell great stories, share some great messages.

As Dr. Keller starts to put out a book a year (I’m eager to find out more about his next book which is apparently on suffering/evil), his unassuming style is being noticed by more and more people. You’ll notice that the buzz about #tk is constant in the Twitterverse. And yet some people can’t get enough of the messages he offers from the pulpit.

If you haven’t been tipped off yet, here’s some good news. Redeemer has released 150 doses of classic Tim Keller. You’ll notice that much of the content that Redeemer has chosen to give away completely free are great to share with friends — especially those that have questions about faith, the Church, and God.

The only issue anyone can have with this huge archive of free sermons from Dr. Tim Keller is that there’s no 1-click to download all 150 mp3 sermons at once.

But if you listen to just one sermon a day during your daily commute, workout, or daily devotion time, you’ll get to spend enough time with Dr. Keller over the next 5 months to the point where you will probably find yourself starting to tell some great stories…share some great messages. Doesn’t that sound like Good News to you?

The Brady Bunch was a classic TV show. Whether your favorite was Greg, Marcia or even Alice there’s something that all ministry leaders can learn from the Brady Bunch show. And all you have to do is watch the first couple of minutes of the show literally. The opening sequence with the 9 talking heads on one screen is the key.

These days, there’s a new generation that’s reaching out across the web to meet online in multi-user video chat to collaborate in real time: meet the Tokbox Bunch.

www.Tokbox.com allows anyone to jump into a video conference chat with NO software downloads or installations. It works across all platforms so all those Mac and PC people can actually make friends.

What you get is a screen of webcam headshots – and you can control each one. Enlarge any one if you’d like to see them better. Mute or hide any participant. You can even shuffle around the order/placement of the boxes on your screen. Text chat is right there in the same window as well.

The best part is that it’s free and it works.

Dave Ingland, a church planter from the left coast recently tweeted a meet-up in a Tokbox room and instantly half a dozen of us joined the conversation. We ended up discussing some of the recent developments with online worship communities such as Andy Stanley’s church and how they are embracing online small group Bible studies. We heard some other online church’s experiences for using video conferencing in their own ministries as well. You always learn something when talking with other peers and leaders in your own field. That’s the point.

The conversations are real. The video allows you to have full expression. It’s live and real-time. One real big upside is that you can easily tweet, call, text, or grab someone and tell them to get in the room by simply visiting the tokbox link. DONE.

www.Tinychat.com is another multi-user video chat service that has taken off as well. Both harness technology for what it’s good for – removing friction of offline problems (physical distance) in an elegant way.

BONUS TIP: And note that the service is perfect for group meetings, but works just as well if you have only 2 people involved. So think of it as Skype without the software or account hassles. You can suddenly make long distance video calls internationally for free.

Have you tried Tinychat.com or Tokbox.com video conferences? What’s your experience?

Over the last couple of months I’ve been working on a little web-app to help me look up Bible references quickly.

I used to have to figure out which site had the translation I’d like to look-up; then go to that site; then input the Scripture reference; then use the drop downs to find the translations, and finally submit.

If I wanted to send the link to a friend via email, facebook, twitter, or even in live worship chat during church online, I’d have to take some additional steps – open up TinyURL.com, bit.ly or some other favorite URL shortcut services out there. Copy the long URL from the Bible site, paste it into the shortcut generator. Submit. Copy the short-cut url, and viola. FINALLY, I had something I could pass on.

This just didn’t seem efficient. I simply thought that there must be a better way.

I couldn’t find anything much better, so I decided to just create it.

So here I am introducing the “BETA” version of www.wordof.gd/_____ No more searching, waiting, submitting, copy/pasting, etc. whenever you are looking up Bible verses online.

This new web app is a 1-Step Bible Look-Up Web App. Basically, find the Scripture reference you want in the translation you want IN ONE LINE — straight from the URL.

Here’s how it works:

Just add ANY Scripture after the main url:

• http://WordOf.GD/+BibleVerseHere and you’re done.

Just TRY IT to understand how this works. Try clicking on some of these:

• http://WordOf.GD/John3:16
• http://WordOf.GD/John3:16-21
• http://WordOf.GD/John3:16ESV
• http://WordOf.GD/John3:16WEB
• http://WordOf.GD/John3:16NASB

If you want a specific Bible translation see how all you have to do is add the abbreviation after the verse? Over 30 different popular translations are supported right now and more to come.

Speaking of abbreviations, it will accomodate most common abbreviations for books of the Bible too. ie. Matt, Mk, Lk, Jn, Gen, Rev, 1cor, 2cor, etc.

One you get the Bible verse, you’ll notice in the header bar, an EMAIL LINK, TWITTER LINK, (and FACEBOOK LINK to come). In addition, a short-cut URL is automatically generated for the specific verse ranges and translations you just looked-up if you want to copy/paste for any other use.

This has been pretty useful for mobile web browsing since connections are not as zippy as on a desktop usually and you want to minimize as many steps as possible.

NOTE: This *IS* a beta version – we’re continuing to update it as we go along and there might be some glitches while we polish it up. If you come across any issue, please leave a comment here or send me a tweet (http://www.twitter.com/kkcoolj) with the details.

Let me know what you think! Please leave a comment below with your thoughts.

One my favorite affordable webhosting companies to refer friends and business associates to is Dreamhost. (If you want a nice discount, use promo code “godvertiser” at http://www.dreamhost.com )

But if you are a 501c3 org or a church with the designation letter from the IRS, then this the tip of the year for you.

It seems that according to our friendly neighborhood church media super hero, DreamHost offers non-profits a fully free webhosting account [HT: Thanks John!]

While you’re jumping for joy, take a look at the deets from DH’s website in their own words:

DreamHost proudly offers free web hosting to non-profit, 501(c)(3) charitable organizations registered in the United States.

Non-profit organizations have dedicated themselves to making the world a better place – all without expecting anything (like a profit) in return! DreamHost recognizes their noble sacrifice and is happy to provide cost-free hosting to these groups which do so much with so little for so many!

This discount applies to a single hosting plan per non-profit, hosted within only one account, for US-based 501(c)(3) organizations. Domain registrations (other than any included with the plan) are not eligible for any discounts.

Now you really don’t have an excuse to get your organization on the web with a hip website.

If you’re a non-profit that going to try and take advantage of this offer, leave a comment below with the website URL you’ll use with the free non-profit hosting account at Dreamhost.

If you’re doing something right with your ministry, you are mobilizing volunteers to get involved in every way possible.

But there are two practical problems with leading volunteers across the different ministries of a church:

First, you need to hold many meetings so that everyone is on the same page (including you!), especially if there are many people involved. A coordinated effort requires a lot of dissemination of information, collaboration and a tons of basic communication.

Second, because you are working with volunteers, not staff, they aren’t always available physically to meet in the same place at the same time.

In the business world, conference call and video conferences are the norm. But for some reason, suggest that people dial in for a ministry meeting via conference call, and people seem perplexed.

The truth is that conference call services used to be expensive, hence affordable only when the costs could be justified by business. While your team’s time and efforts are no less valuable, the cost of conference call services have plummeted. It’s time to embrace this tool in your daily work as a team leader.

Here’s one way to set-up a free conference call dial-in number you can use today:

One of my favorite collaboration tools online is Drop.IO. A neat feature they offer (free too!) is a personal conference call number with each and every free team page/account you set-up.

Once you set-up a new custom collaboration page at www.drop.io, you’ll see a custom conference call dial-in number on the right column. (We’ll explore some of the other neat-o benefits in another future post)

This conference call number is all yours as long as the drop.io page is live (you can change how long the page exists in the settings to up to 1 year after the last visit). It is a reservation-less conference call dial-in number that you can pass out to use whenever you need.

If you want to set-up unique dial-in numbers for each of your ministry leaders for their own teams, just set-up additional drop.io pages for each group. Voila! Every team can collaborate as often as they wish on their own.

BONUS TIP: If you want to have certain calls recorded so that you can distribute them to other people that missed the meeting or would benefit from the contents of your meeting, you can 3-way conference in the “voicemail” number which is listed on the same page. Voicemails are saved and posted as mp3 files to the drop.io page within minutes. You can download them or even use the direct link to the file that’s made available with the recording.

People connect visually before they consume the content they are presented.  If it is engaging even before they come into focus with the words on the page, you have a higher chance of gaining and keeping someone’s attention.

But an all-text flyer with 5 different fonts in 4 different font sizes doesn’t really count.

One of the easiest ways to raise the bar in your ministry’s communications is to use stock photography and other graphics that are of professional quality.  So illustrations, photography and other graphics is something I regularly try to use in all my communications.   What most people don’t know is that there are great resources on the web that are either free or reallllllly cheap (like $1!).

I’m constantly in search of decent royalty-free stock photography / graphics sites.  Of course, some of the sites I use regularly aren’t explicitly Christian sites (like www.sxc.hu).

And now, there is a small crop of Christian stock graphics and image sites out there that are worth bookmarking and searching for the next public document you produce in your church or ministry. . . (more…)

It’s almost here. . .Tim Keller’s next book — Counterfeit Gods.

If you’re like me, you’ve already been to Amazon.com’s pre-order page for the book which gives the best deal ($13.46, 33% off now $11.66!) if you’re comparing prices including S&H.  Especially if you have Amazon Prime free shipping like I do.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/djchuang/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

But waiting for October 20, just isn’t good enough for some.  Here’s something for you guys that are in this bucket — a free pdf download from the soon to be released book: (more…)

Just got confirmation that Guy Kawasaki’s latest, www.alltop.com has selected Godvertiser.com to be featured on their http://CHURCH.alltop.com page.

If you haven’t heard of Alltop, it’s a neat news/blog aggregator that spans hundreds of categories – Guy’s metaphor is a newsstand rack of the best blogs in each section.

Kind of an neat to be up there with Craig Groeshel, John Piper, Mark Driscoll, DJ Chuang, and the other cool kids of Kingdomwork.  The Church Alltop page is a great place to find interesting content to stir things up in your mind about what’s going on with the church and faith today.

Thanks for reading and let me know of the top church marketing / church tech issues you’re facing with right now.

Today, you can grab any Christian Music mp3 download from Amazon for free.

Here’s the details of the free mp3 download offer from Amazon:

1. Click through to the Amazon Free mp3 promotion details page with this link: http://tinyurl.com/freemp3fromamazon
2. Click on the “ENTER CODE” button
3. Use code FIRSTMIL and click the “Apply” button
4. Go find your mp3 and then buy it!  The promo credit balance should be applied automatically.
5. Personally, I browsed through the Top 100 Christian Contemporary Music songs list and picked out Chris Tomlin’s God of This City.  Great song!
   

NOTE: According to Amazonmp3.com fine print, you must redeem the credit by September 6, 2009 11:59 PM PDT

Bonus: Here’s an extra freebie, How Great Is Our God, sung by Kimberly and Alberto Rivera

Super Bonus: You’re not satisfied with TWO free mp3 songs?  Will you be satisfied with 16 MORE Free Christian Music mp3 downloads?