Dean Peters has finally revived Heal Your Church Website in the form of a Wordpress blog. Time to get back into teaching, rebuking, correcting & training in righteous web design.

Welcome back Dean (not that you really went anywhere with all the blogs4God stuff you’ve been doing!)

[tags]Christian, Church Websites[/tags]

We’ve started recording and podcasting the sermons at my church for the 5:00PM & 7:00PM services. We chose these services because of the 4 services, the 8:30, 10:15 & 5:00PM services all (usually) have the same sermon, while the 7:00PM one is often different (the 7:00PM service is a youth service).

The recording is done using a great program that Darren wrote that takes the audio from the mixing desk and records and converts to MP3. It even writes out the ID3 tag data.

The podcast feed is here if you want to subscribe to it, or you can just browse the site and download the MP3 files manually. We haven’t integrated the podcast into the church’s website because we’re just testing this at this stage, but that will hopefully happen in the not-too-distant-future.

Technorati Tags: Podcast, Christian

A plugin to display a bible ‘verse of the day’ on your Wordpress blog

OK, after over a week in pre-release status and with no kicking & screaming about it not working I’ve decided to go live with the new version. For those who missed the pre-release announcement, here are the major changes:

This is a completely new plugin, with a bunch of changes, the most obvious ones are that the program no-longer uses the troublesome cache files and the options are now set in an options page, not as parameters set in the code. This should make life a whole lot easier. Unfortunately this means that there is no support for Wordpress versions less than 1.5. The old version of the plugin could do this because the code was a whole lot simpler. Now that the plugin is simpler to use, the code is more complex, and makes use of a number of nifty Wordpress features that I was completely un-aware of 1^st time around.

There is now also a Verse of the Day Plugin Page which will contain all information about the plugin and will be updated as needed.

So, as always, please download the plugin and let me know how it goes. I’m still open to comments. Bug fixes will get implemented straight away, but new features will probably have to wait ’till next time.

Ok, after much re-coding and mucking about the new version of the Verse of the Day plugin for Wordpress is pretty much done. This is a preview release, so it may still have some bugs, but that’s why I’m releasing it into the wild now.
Consider this a soft release of the new plugin. I’ll announce it properly through all the usual places once I’m sure it’s 100% done. Comments and suggestions are very welcome here, although be aware that any new features will probably be put into the to-do list for next time. Bug fixes will get implemented ASAP.

You can download the new version from this page. I highly recommend that before you use this plugin, you read the instructions page here. (I’m also interested in any suggestions people may have on what should be on that page)

This is a completely new plugin, with a bunch of changes, the most obvious ones are that the program no-longer uses the troublesome cache files and the options are now set in an options page, not as parameters set in the code. This should make life a whole lot easier. Unfortunately this means that there is no support for Wordpress versions less than 1.5. The old version of the plugin could do this because the code was a whole lot simpler. Now that the plugin is simpler to use, the code is more complex, and makes use of a number of nifty Wordpress features that I was completely un-aware of 1st time around.

From a display perspective the plugin hasn’t changed, but the new options page now makes it easier to modify how the verse is displayed.

So please download it, try it out & let me know how it goes.

Geoff Bullock, writer of so many classic worship songs has been re-writing them, re-focusing their words on God’s works rather than our own. Signposts has been posting these rewrites, with the originals for comparison.

In the comments for ‘I will never be‘ (probably my favourite Geoff Bullock song) Geoff explains why he is doing this:

The main reason for the rewrites is to simply take the focus from "what we do for God" to give us a sense of spiritual affirmation and placing it firmly on "what God has done and is doing for us". I am convinced that what I think, do or say about God will always prove my inability to be anything else but grace dependant. However, what God "thinks, does and says" about me is a miracle that can never be fully grasped. It is simply too wonderful. How could we ask this of the Creator of the universe. Thinking about it just spins me out. God.. do we really understand the enormity of those three letters…. God reduces himself to humanity so we can know and say:

"You have walked my path,
You have run my race
So I may never be the same again."

I just cannot say or sing it the other way anymore. I am totally stuffed if I do the walking and running. There’s nothing to celebrate about my actions… but, what God does… can’t stop celebrating.. just blows me away, and I have to ask myself whether we really understand it at all!!!

I think the clearest example of the how the rewrites have changed is in ‘Have faith in God’

Original

Oh Lord you lead me
By the still waters
Quietly restoring my soul
You speak words of wisdom
The promise of glory
The power of the presence of God.

New Version

Oh Lord you lead me
By the still waters
Quietly restoring my soul
You speak words of wisdom
sweet words of comfort
The grace and the mercy of God

Not ‘power & glory’ but ‘grace & mercy’. That’s the focus.

Chris Roberts has come up with a great Wordpress Plugin, using the ESV web services. What it does is take a bible reference and go and get the text of that reference and display it as either a tooltip, or as a block of text under the reference (you can choose either depending on how you use it.

This is a great idea, and kudos to you Chris for taking the time to get this working, and to get it to work as a plugin for everyone. Already linked up by the ESV guys, and I’ll be posting this to blogs4God too.