Preview 4: The Results

In our last newsletter we discovered The Virtual Brainstorming how it will allow you to begin to network with others in ministry like never before. But if I may for a moment, I would like to begin this preview of The Results area with a quick thought about what it means to program a weekly service in a contemporary church. If you play a role in the planning of the weekly services at your church, you understand the pressures we experience each week. Here at MinistryHub.com we state the obvious; Sunday Comes Every Seven Days. At Willow Creek Community Church they call it Getting Beyond The 52, meaning that once your Sunday service is finished, and you've taken time off to rest, eat, sleep and see your families, we each have roughly 52 hours to do it all over again before Sunday comes once more. As I stated in the last newsletter, when we started MinistryHub.com we took a survey to see how churches were spending their time, and what we found was that many of those churches were spending 20+ of those 52 hours searching for the right idea. I, obviously, am all for using the arts to create compelling services, but I believe the effect of this weekly time crunch and the pressures that it brings has created a consumer mentality out of all of us. After all, we need those ideas to keep the ball rolling, right? So to accommodate this need, many, if not the majority of websites in existence, help us consume more and more product, to meet our needs, our individual needs. I believe though that we have all been called foremost into ministry, not only to be consumers, we do have to do our job after all, but more so to be ministers to help others. Although we work to build and strengthen our individual churches, we should also be able to build and strengthen The Church. I say all of this to reinforce the thought that when you participate in a Virtual Brainstorming Session and make suggestions, you are not only helping yourself and your team, but you are helping many others in ministry as well. For when you submit ideas, and those ideas then get stored for that topic and they continue to grow, it's here, in The Results area, that we can all experience the full force of MinistryHub.com!

If you have entered The Results area of MinistryHub.com, then you have selected your topic in The Hub, participated in a Virtual Brainstorming Session where you suggested ideas, ranked those suggestions and then paired elements together that you believe would work well together, closed out your session and have now moved on to The Results. For each of the 4 categories; Music, Videos, Drama, Other Ideas, you can set the display settings to My Groups Ideas, showing the ideas you and your group just brainstormed, or you can select All Ideas For Topic, where you can view every idea that has ever been selected for that topic. This display of ideas can then be sorted by; Ranked, this is a cumulative average of the overall rankings of each element. Popularity; is the ranking average in addition to how many times each element has been suggested, and last is a simple alphabetical sorting.

Towards the bottom of The Results is an area for other product related to your selected topic. It's here you will find graphics, books and other products, as well as a Print Friendly Option that allows you to select what categories and how you want the printed document to be displayed. This way you can print every idea you find and then bring that list into your own team brainstorming sessions, because we all know that those meetings are usually only as good as what you bring into them.

Once you have found the right idea, just select and click the title and you will then be taken into The Store, where you will then have several option that you can then make, but we'll dig into that in our next newsletter.

I'm curious what are your thoughts, about what was said earlier, about us being a consumer vs. a minister? Let us know your thoughts.

Tim Yates, MinistryHub.com