Churches are increasingly fighting with online media for attention of their members and seekers, and many have decided to use new technology to broaden their reach. Reliance on tech comes with its risks, however, as Christianity Today warns churches are in danger of replacing technology for the one-on-one relationships so vital for growing Christ-followers. Instead, they advise, tech innovations should supplement personal connections by making communication easier, anywhere at anytime.

Here's a look at the latest church-related online innovations, the challenges of using each, and whether your church should incorporate them into your communication strategy.

Probably the most well-known innovators in online-exclusive content is LifeChurch.tv. This Oklahoma-based, multi-campus church streams 9-12 live services on its Church Online website each day, including live chatting with dedicated pastors and links to resources for seekers and new believers. Many other churches are beginning to live stream their services as the technology becomes easier and less expensive.

Not many churches have the resources or staff to have an "online campus," but you can always start small and see where it leads. Podcasting sermons is a good place to start (it's free and functionality is built into each iMinistries website). Live streaming of services is becoming more doable, even for smaller churches (free ways to broadcast services online).

We recently shared a story of a church in England which addresses questions via Twitter during services. This type of in-the-moment engagement is becoming more popular -- especially in larger churches -- to make congregants feel more a part of the service. Some churches ask congregants to text sentences of praise during service to a designated number and then display the text messages as a form of worship.

While instant engagement can be beneficial, pastor and author Josh Harris argues that it tends to cause listeners to think about what they're going to tweet instead of what God is saying to them through the sermon. Whether you should depart from the typical three-point sermon to such a drastically modern approach probably depends on your congregants and your pastor.

We all know Yelp as a format for restaurant reviews, but they also allow users to review churches. Users can search for churches in their area and give them a 1-5 star rating, including a detailed written description. ChurchRater.com is a website dedicated solely to church evaluation and was created to help people moving into a community find a church that's right for them.

Unfortunately, you don't have much of a choice. Users can add and rate churches without the your consent, and, as with any ratings website, criticisms often outweigh praises. While checking what past visitors have to say about your church may be helpful in some cases, it's important to remember a few bad reviews are not universally representative. Keeping that in mind, you probably shouldn't build your communication strategy around addressing these reviews.

As the use of mobile devices like smartphones and tablets explode, many churches are racing to create custom church apps to connect with their congregants. Tech savvy churches like Mars Hill in Seattle have apps that stream sermon video and audio, display blog entries, show campus locations and directions, and allow for giving donations.

Apps are necessary if you have tons of online content and desire an easier way to display it on a mobile device. A mobile-optimized website (like an iMinistries CMS website) will often fulfill that need. Since custom app creation can be a costly enterprise, you should be sure your communications strategy warrants such an expense. (Note: if you have an iMinistries website, we are an alliance partner with The Church App that integrates with your website).

Our latest release

On the night of August 29th, we put a new release in place. Usually we like to give you a list of all the exciting things you can do with the new release. Usually our releases have new features, tweaks and things our customers have asked for. Unfortunately this isn’t one of those releases. Sure, there are a few things in here that you might enjoy, but mostly this release was something we needed to do.

We got a little behind. We built our system over 7 years ago and have made a lot of incremental improvements since. But, the technology underneath our system has been growing up around us.

A couple weeks ago the Firefox group released version 6 of their browser. Upon testing the system we noticed that the editor that is used to build most of your pages didn’t work in Firefox. It was already having some issues in Chrome and Safari so we needed to upgrade. But to upgrade that component meant we needed to upgrade other things.

So we put our heads down and worked hard to upgrade our platform from the 7-year-old .Net 1.1 Framework to the .Net 4 Framework. To do this, we had to touch just about every one of the over 200 web pages that make up our complete Content Management System.

This is probably the biggest release we’ve ever done to our system, even without any major feature announcements. I know that it didn’t do a lot of things for you, but it was hard work for us and we’re feeling very proud of it.

As you can imagine, this isn’t the kind of thing you do without a large share of potential problems. So, we spent a lot of time over the past two weeks trying everything. We ran the whole system through its paces. And we’re glad we did. We found some issues that were introduced thanks to our changes. We found some issues that have been around for some time. We kept testing until we felt like we’d caught everything we could.

But it’s almost impossible to find everything. You guys do things with the system that we have trouble anticipating. So all day today we watched carefully. We watched for tickets in our support site. We watched for errors in our error log. (Did you know that every time you or one of your users receives an error message we track that and do our best to incorporate fixes?)

Well, I’m happy to say that we think we’ve got most of the bugs fixed and that we did it all without your website being down for more than 30 total minutes. We had 5 minutes of time today (around 2 pm Central) where sites weren’t working unexpectedly. We had about 3 minutes where Ministry home pages weren’t working. We had a few issues with emails not being sent out of the system. But as of right now, we are tracking down only 2 last issues and hope to have them fixed by tomorrow.

So what?

What’s in it for you? Well, we’re using Microsoft’s latest web technology to power your site. That should mean faster sites. That should mean fewer bugs. Hopefully that means a better experience for you and your visitors.

But there are a few improvements baked into the new stuff. These include:

• Our new editor is really pretty slick.
  1. It should work in every major browser.
  2. You can now click a button to open in full screen mode.
  3. The image manager is greatly improved including an image editor.
• We added the ability to upload thumbnails with your Ministry and feature a ministry as a highlight.

Now what?

We’ll be working on our normal round of improvements coming up to the system. Plus, we’re already working on our next major release. Internally we’re calling it “iMinistries 2.0” and I can’t express just how excited we are about it. We’re building the whole site again from the ground up to be faster, cleaner and more flexible than ever. Some of the highlights of what we’ve already done include much greater design flexibility, total integration with social media sites like Facebook and Twitter and version control. When we’re ready, we’ll provide some sneak peeks.

Thank You

As much as I’m expressing our pride in what has been done, we’re not proud that any of you found bugs or had issues today. We are sorry for that. As usual, our customers have been gracious and understanding. Thank you for that. And, thank you for your continued business.