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Creative Church is Live!

After months of behind-the-scenes designing, coding, tweaking, and heart-stopping technical glitches CreativeChurch.com is finally live.

Creative Church Website

As you may know I started this blog (RyanWakefield.com) in 2011 as a way to capture many of the ideas I was learning from the churches I was working with across the nation, and that’s been an amazing part of my job at AG Financial Solutions. Now I can relate to the saying that “it’s not always fun to write, but it is always fun to have written.”

Now for the update. Recently, I took an opportunity to help with the launch of Creative Church. I believe this is going to be another tremendous way to be a part of resourcing and inspiring local churches across the country. Unfortunately that also means that I will be pausing my personal blogging and I will be using that time to focus on making Creative Church a friend to creatives. I hope you’ll join with me in that journey.

At Creative Church we want boundaries to be pushed. We want comfort zones to be stretched. Because growth happens at the edges, and revolutions are not founded on the status quo. Check out our first blog series is called “Creative Proverbs” and features words of wisdom from church creative leaders from across the nation. We asked them, “What if you had five minutes to share one proverb with church creatives? What would you say?”

Your church doesn’t have to be on Pinterest. But your church does need to consider a communications strategy that includes the fastest growing website in history.

“In February (2012) Pinterest drove more traffic to websites than Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, and YouTube combined.” – Fortune

My goal in this coaching video is to help you evaluate and improve your current strategy.  The video is segmented into three parts:

Part 1 – For leaders, creatives and pastors who probably will never use Pinterest
Part 2 – For churches who are ready to make their website Pin friendly
Part 3 – For churches who are looking for ideas to engage the Pinterest community

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This is post #3 in a short series on church branding. In this post we’ll look at how to get started.

Now that we’ve set the framework of branding and marketing within the church context I want to help you get started.  First in order to build a great church brand you want to start with building a great product.  It’s a mistake to try to brand a lie. You’ll repel people if you misrepresent your church to lure them into coming. Don’t start your relationship on misinformation. I’m not saying you need to be perfect before you get started, just get moving in the right direction. The bottom line: don’t promote if you don’t have a worthwhile product.

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At my home church, we’ve been going through a series on Nehemiah called “Built to Last.”  The preaching team has done an amazing job walking us through this book and the messages are worth a listen.

I’m stuck about how the book demonstrates the leadership discernment of Nehemiah.  It’s fun to view the book through the lens of Nehemiah’s spidey sense.

Spidey sense is that strong sense of something being wrong, dangerous, suspicious, a security situation.  Not only does Nehemiah have a supernatural sense of what is wrong, but he almost intuitively knows what he should do next.

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