If your church burnt down tomorrow, would anyone in your community care, or even notice?
It's a blunt but poignant question.
I've been recently convicted of the need for me, my church, in fact all our churches to be actively, deliberately and passionately involved in our communities.
Our communities need to hear about Jesus, and we are the ones who need to tell them. Michael Kellahan started a discussion on how we can be doing this called "Small ideas, big impact"
I've added to the discussion at my own blogsite with "30 ideas for community outreach" .
Once we are being active in our communities, then people will start talking about us.
And it's good to know what people are saying, because we might learn ways to improve how we serve our communities, or discover new ideas for engagement.
Google Alerts is a free service offered by Google to keep track of what people are saying online. Six types of alerts are offered, the first four are, I think, of most value to our ministries:
"¢ A ‘News’ alert is an email aggregate of the latest news articles that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top ten results of your Google News search.
"¢ A ‘Web’ alert is an email aggregate of the latest web pages that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top twenty results of your Google Web search.
"¢ A ‘Blogs’ alert is an email aggregate of the latest blog posts that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top ten results of your Google Blog search.
"¢ A ‘Comprehensive’ alert is an aggregate of the latest results from multiple sources (News, Web and Blogs) into a single email to provide maximum coverage on the topic of your choice.
Setting up alerts is very easy and takes just a couple of minutes. Here's how:
1. Visit the Google Alerts homepage
2. Add the search term/s you would like to keep track of, for example, "Church by the Bridge" or "http://www.cbtb.org.au".
3. Select the type of alerts you would like to receive (e.g. comprehensive).
4. Select how often you'd like to receive alerts (e.g. as they happen, a daily summary, or a weekly summary).
5. Select where you would like the alerts delivered - either to an email address, or to your feed reader.
I have created alerts so that whenever Church by the Bridge or the Church by the Bridge website is mentioned (and Google picks it up), I'll receive an email with the details at the end of the day. You could also create alerts to receive updates when the suburbs in your parish are discussed, or particular ministries within your church.
Can you think of any others ways Google Alerts might be used in our ministries?
