I've been asked to describe our vision a lot recently. To be perfectly honest, the vision has evolved. I've had the good fortune of meeting some incredible thinkers and visionaries these past few weeks. Both in the entrepreneurial world of Silicon Valley, and the Christian world of non-profit and ministry. Each has had an impact on what I think MyChurch can become.

So I wanted to start chronicling our vision, with the disclaimer that its a WIP. To the MyChurch team, this is a journey that we just started to embark on. Forgive my young, perhaps naive, romanticism here - but we want to change the world. I admit that sounds corny, cliche, cheesy. But we plan on doing it, and we're looking for people to join us on this ride...

Weirdly enough, I've never written down a vision. I'm not a business plan kind of guy. Ideas flow dynamically, and thus its appropriate to document it via blog. I had an email discussion with Nate Klaiber today and I revealed a lot more than what I intended. With his permission, I've copied our correspondence here.

Design and usability critiques aside - I feel like it is lacking a real niche. Now, I know it is geared to churches (from what I have seen) - but I just don't know how many people would actually USE it. Our church barely keeps up with their own website, adding this into the mix probably wouldn't help much (thats more of a sad state of our church than a criticism of your website). Unfortunately, there are many churches like ours - simply not caring to move into a digital age (to some degree). Much of this is due to misunderstanding.

Personally (my own opinion - and I am taking this from my home church experience), I don't know how much it will REALLY be used (Return visitors, activity on the site, updated to the calendar, sermon archive, etc).

1. The group blog SEEMS nice, but there are so many other blogging avenues out there directly (and right on some church's personal page) - would they update it in 2 spots consistently? Maybe consider adding a feed reader for their church blog or activity - so they don't have to syndicate it themselves. If they arent using a personal site, find a way to still syndicate other blogs (blogger, wordpress, etc) - this way they won't have to duplicate their time.

2. The classifieds board is something that is already out like a wildfire. There are SO MANY church networking sites, and classifieds (nnym, youthspecialties, youthpastor, etc - these are just youth ministry related) - will they (again) want to manage this in several places? There are tons of forums out there as well. Maybe consider syndicating this as well, or at least allow for a mass upload of sorts. Do you currently allow them to control the privacy of these things? What about using microformats? There are a couple ways this could be handled to reduce the amount of time they have to spend getting into a new website.

3. Sermon library. Again, there are so many sites with free resources and suggested sermons - maybe its possible to seek these out and syndicate them as well? Not just the other sites - but the church homepages as well. What formats can be archived? Audio? Powerpoint? Plain Text? HTML? Video? Etc?

4. Church event calendar. Our church purchased a packaged software for their calendar - and they use that to keep the website up to date. Again, it is sometimes a struggle to get them to update this as well. The package doesn't even have RSS built in - making syndication a tough option.

So - the biggest thing I notice is that there is a large disconnect between everything - and it would take time to duplicate all of their efforts - time many people aren't willing to spend. If you want to be the central hub (since you are starting small), you will have to find ways to really bring the community together. Its scattered - but many have their tools and no reason to leave them? Thinking of our teenagers, they probably wouldn't join because they are already connected to all of their friends (inside and outside of the church) through xanga, facebook, and myspace. If there is no real benefit (finding more friends), then they probably wouldn't actively use it.

To me - it seems to close to other social networking sites out there - that it will be hard to really bring people in and actively get them to use things (especially disconnecting them from their main church website which houses much of the information).

These are just some rough thoughts, and I don't want to sound overly critical. I think there are other ideas that could help bring it to a more defined goal, niche, and application - but you may be finding that it is used by people now. It all depends on your business goals, which I know nothing about.

Thank you for sharing your thoughts… and I’m sure you have much more to say!

Let me give a better introduction to MyChurch by telling you what its not, and I’ll also try to address some of your points.

In my opinion, other social networking sites allow their members to meet new people. They’re conducive to creating new friendships. Especially in the case of Facebook:

1) Gather strangers from all over the country

2) Stick them into one dense area (the dorms, much less the campus)

3) Give them high-speed internet and wifi

4) Put them in situations where their livelihood depends on their peers, and then change those situations around every semester or quarter

Dynamic and in-flux environments like high school and college are breeding grounds for social networking – no wonder Facebook and Myspace are such hits! In the case of church communities, people already more or less know each other. Perhaps not well (like in my case where my church is 800+ people). So MyChurch’s goal is to strengthen these pre-existing relationships. MyChurch users aren’t out to meet strangers, and we purposely haven’t built an open community where this can happen easily (like forums, chatrooms, etc)

I think this is key in explaining our business goal. We eventually want to be THE web solution for churches. Of course we won’t get the Saddlebacks and Willow Creeks, but we can appeal to the long tail of small churches (200 or less people). The complete web solution means a public-facing website (we can allow for customization and private labeling), social networking aspects for community, and even some back-end church management software tools.

You say that your church isn’t using its own website. I think that’s true for the vast majority of church websites. What if each user has a “selfish” motivation for logging onto their church website – internal messaging w/ friends, blogging, picture sharing, etc? Then the community motivation follows since they’re on the same platform – adding to the church’s photo gallery, commenting on sermons, using the evite feature for church events…

In the surveys we took of Christians familiar with myspace/facebook, 95% of them don’t regularly check their church’s website because there’s nothing for them to do. I don’t think this is a sad state of church folks – I think internet users want some interactive and selfish reasons to visit the church website. While most young folks can’t imagine a non-Web 2.0 world, most church websites are woefully stuck in Web 1.0 (I have not seen your church’s website, and I don’t want to judge :) - I’m just talking in broad strokes here)

Allow me to attempt to address your bullet points:

1) MyChurch.org blogs can both read feeds and send feeds out. Our feeds are also on the priority queue at Technorati like the other major blog platforms

2) There are plenty of classified boards out there, yes. We’re not trying to compete with Craigslist. We’re trying to provide more of a “resource-sharing board” – where every member posting and receiving from the board is from the same church. In this regard, privacy is probably a good idea that we should implement for it. What are microformats?

3) The scope of the sermon library again is not to compete with the global big boys. We could easily aggregate from multiple sources, but we don’t want to be Content King here. The sermons are for the congregants of the church to comment on and spread. Sites like Sermoncloud are great for pastors and Bible study leaders. But will your average Joe use it? Here again, we want to combine the selfish with the community. If the average Joe is doing his social networking with his fellow congregants and friends, he’s more likely to write a casual comment on last Sunday’s sermon, review a sermon he missed, or send a sermon to a friend. This can only happen if the content is on the same platform as where he would normally hang out.

a. On a sidenote, I just overheard a TV commercial for the Simpsons advertising their show’s myspace page. Why not advertise their official homepage? Because the content on myspace is more readily available and integrated with the platform where their viewers already are...

4) Church event calendars are overpriced in my opinion. We plan to provide an RSS feed for events, and we plan to allows users to syndicate events to places like Myspace, Craigslist, Eventful, ZEvents, etc. What about a nice widget that takes the RSS feed and places it on someone’s blog. If the problem is updating, we allow for any member of the church to contribute to the church calendar. Rather than relying on an admin or the church “web guy”, we feel Web 2.0 really allows user participation to take over some of these tasks.

I agree with you on the disconnect. I’m looking for ideas and suggestions on how to bridge that. But we do want to be as integrated as possible with the other platforms out there. And I know it starts with syndication.

Nate, I wrote much more than what I wanted to say, but lets keep the discussion going :) Thanks for your constructive criticism and I hope you can give MyChurch a try. I listen to users who take the time to share thoughts like this, and I want to build something that would actually help them.