IN THIS ISSUE:
1. REASON FOR THIS NEWSLETTER
2. CHURCH GROWTH
3. LEADERSHIP
4. CHURCH INTERNET WEB SITE
5. BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS
6. SUBSCRIBE/UNSUBSCRIBE

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1. REASON FOR THIS NEWSLETTER
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The webminister newsletter celebrates its first anniversary with this issue and is still dedicated to the principles of church growth, Christian leadership, and the use of the Internet as a ministry of the church. While starting out with about 300 subscribers, the newsletter has grown to over 3000.

The philosophy behind the newsletter is to limit its size to four pages of scholarly footnoted material which could be read in less than five minutes with references for further reading, following a set format. Each bite sized section is designed with an intended purpose, i.e.; "reason for" -- editorial in nature; "church growth" -- what various surveys and church growth specialist advocate; "leadership" -- principles to guide leadership in making church decisions; "Internet" -- what changes and helps are available to the church developing this ministry; and "in print books" for further knowledge input.

The webminister has received many e-mails which havedeveloped into friendships. In this ministry, many questions have been answered by e-mail on church growth, leadership, and the Internet. The identity of the webminister is found in the second issue of December 1999 newsletter. Past newsletter issues are located at http://webminister.com/mailing/home.htm.

Thank you for your time and interest in proclaiming the Great Commission. We can all make a difference for the Lord.

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2. CHURCH GROWTH
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The last three issues of this newsletter have discussed the use of the Sunday school similar in many respects to small groups in evangelism. Flavil Yeakley wrote an article entitled "Adult Bible Classes and Church Growth" based on a survey of over 300 churches of Christ congregations of all sizes. This was published in "Church Growth" magazine. http://webminister.com/growth01/plan0226.htm .

Flavil Yeakley presents five differences between growing and declining congregations.
1. "Growing congregations get a larger percentage of their evangelistic church growth through their Bible School."
2. "Growing congregations tend to have a more balanced program that places as much emphasis on the adult classes as on the other classes, but declining congregations tend to put most of the emphasis on the younger age groups and neglect the adults."
3. "Growing congregations tend to have smaller adult classes – more in the 30 to 60 member range – while declinging churches typically have larger adult classes."
4. "Growing congregations tend to have a Bible School curriculum – especially at the adult level – that is more challenging and that has a stronger Biblical emphasis than what is observed in declining congregations." (more on this point in future issues when covering some of Dr. "Bill" Patterson's writing.)
5. "Growing congregations tend to provide more organized small group activity through the adult Bible classes (or through some other means) while declining congregations tend to do little to encourage small group activity."

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3. LEADERSHIP
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Arthur Flake in "Building a Standard Sunday School" (1922) presents his fourth principle for Sunday school growth as "Enlarge the Organization." Principle two was teach the teachers to teach and leadership to provide the training and the space needed. Principle three was to provide the space for the class. Now, the effort is to visit, invite, and grow the new class. New classes can start with one or two students and the church's responsibility is to help enroll other children or adults for that age group.

Andy Anderson in "The Growth Spiral" (1993) includes the fourth principle as training more teachers and workers and providing more space. Instead of once a year for expanding the organization, Anderson advocates every quarter. During the worship service this includes teacher, worker, and student recognition; achievement certificates; teacher awards; and attendance awards.

Anderson advocates continuing motivation with "weekly worker's planning meetings." These meetings can be divided into teachers and workers of primary through teen-ager as one group, and teachers and workers of adults as another group. These meetings should develop fellowship, better leaders, team spirit, and commitment to evangelism and responsibility. They should emphasize prayer life, the needs of the people, and preparation for the next Sunday and quarter. Also they should discuss the number of prospect calls and outreach goals with workable plans and implementation. They should evaluate the progress and the growth that is taking place. Anderson sees two problems with workers' meetings: 1) in many cases the leadership does not know what to do in workers' meetings, and 2) some meetings are ineffective because the workers have no idea what to do when they attend the sessions. Cf. page 75 - 76 for a effective approach to the workers' meeting.

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4. CHURCH INTERNET WEB SITE
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Want more hits on your web site? The answer is to find how various search engines are designed and what criteria is used in ranking search results. More than 1000 search engines exist, but about 200 carry over 99% of the searches. One should read the "how to search" or "searching tips," not with the idea of your searching, but how someone else searches for what is on your web site. In other words, build or rebuild the web site's home page and submit it to a number of search engines, wait a month, and then search those search engines for your web site. Then repeat the process again.

For example with http://lycos.com, a search of the word "webminister" revealed 3200 web pages using that word and 7 of the first 10 are to http://webminister.com, including the first entry. After two years of testing the results, making changes every 6 to 8 weeks, webminister is the first, and in some cases, the only listing in the top ten! Remember graphic images can not be indexed -- only text. If your church name, address, phone numbers are graphics, the church's web site can not be adequately indexed.

http://msn.com, http://netscape.com, and http://aol.com may have their own or other search engines on their web sites. These three sites are important because they are the default start up page on three of the most visited web sites each week (over 20,000,000 different people). The biggest granddaddy of them all is http://yahoo.com with over 10,000,000 a week.

A few of the larger sites are http://altavista.com, http://excite.com, http://google.com, http://goto.com, http://hotbot.com

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5. BOOK RECOMMENDATION
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Frank Proctor's "Growing Through an Effective Church School" presents a "how to" approach for growing an effective church school. Proctor starts out reviewing the history of the Sunday school movement from Robert Raikes in England over two hundred years ago to the present. Chapter two discusses the restoration of education and evangelism and the real purpose of a church school. The last chapter presents the organizing of an effective program. The rest of the chapters discuss the unique problems of various age groups and how to relate to them.

Also, Proctor presents a series of roadblocks, detours, and barriers of growth. He continues to remind us of the church's mission of evangelism in growing a larger educational program.

"Growing Through an Effective Church School" can be bought from Barnes and Noble with a discount for $9.99 (paperback) plus shipping and handling.

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6. SUBSCRIBE/UNSUBSCRIBE
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Visit http://webminister.com and its links.

I need your comments, so e-mail me at webminister@webminister.com.

Let me know if you want to "unsubscribe."

In His Service,