We lowered the requirement to get your church activated from 10 down to 5.  In doing so, we just welcomed hundreds of new churches into our system (there are more than 36,000 churches on MyChurch now!)

Why did we do this?  We saw a lot of churches wanting to get started.  10 was a daunting and tall order to fulfill.  Getting 5 members is a little more attainable, and something that a single person can easily achieve.  Once 5 members are part of a church, they can upload media, share prayer requests, and post announcements.

You might be wondering why we even have a minimum limit in the first place.  Afterall: 

If 2 people make up a church body, why do we require 5?  We get that question a lot...

The fact is we get hundreds of requests for new churches to be added into our database each week.  That's way too many for our small team to review and respond to quickly.  To help us prioritize, we look at the new churches with the most members.  Explicitly stating a minimum threshold lets us imply an agreement with the new church: "If you get 5 members, you're at the top of the list to get reviewed and activated."

So, with all that background... Welcome new churches!

There are now over 300,000 registered members on MyChurch.org.  And over 200,000 Facebook users who have installed the MyChurch app. Combined, these members are part of 36,000 different churches!

We will soon see the number of users on the Facebook app surpass that of the site.  And that is perfectly OK with us.  We want to empower churchgoers to be connected with their local (or global) church community - whether that's on Facebook.com or on MyChurch.org.  

We realize mychurch.org (the "destination site") might not be a good fit for a lot of folks.  So we want to allow churches to use our tools in places like Facebook where more of their youth might be hanging out.

Your home page feed will show more and more of your church's activity.  One example of that is videos:

When there's a new video posted to your church page, or when there are new comments on a church video - your feed gets updated to show the video thumbnail as well as the recent discussion.  You can also play the video right from your home page feed.

The idea is to encourage discussion and distribution of your church's media content.  We started with videos, and will soon add feed inclusion of audio, documents, and pictures.  Your feed will be a lot more colorful!

And if you're not part of a church that uploads a lot of multimedia yet, don't feel left out!  Comments from friends on videos that are not from your church also get posted on your feed.  And you're encouraged to leave comments on any video you come across. 

In fact, we'll soon have a page dedicated to recently active church videos under the Explore tab.  And you'll soon be able to star your favorite videos as well.  

One of the things we love about working with Facebook is that they have truly pioneered an era of authenticity online.

Before Facebook came along, most internet users had a "handle" they would use for message boards, chatrooms, etc.  Most folks wouldn't think of using their real names online a few years ago.  Being anonymous or pseduo-anonymous was the acceptable thing to do...

But most everyone is comfortable using their real names on Facebook.  In fact, you're forced to use "John Doe" on Facebook, and not "johnnyboy328".  Because Facebook has strong privacy settings, Facebook users feel safe displaying their real full names.

We like that model and want to encourage MyChurch users to display their real names as well.  So starting next week, we are taking the liberty of using your name as your display name.

Of course - we're also very cognizant of privacy concerns.  So 2 safety nets for those who want to remain known as johnnyboy328 or otherwise stay pseudo-anonymous:

1) You can always change your display name (back to your online nickname) by going to your account settings

2) We are also changing your default profile view to be that of "friends and church only" - meaning only the people you're connected with can see your profile.  You can make this even tighter by changing it to "friends only"  Or if you liked it the way it was before, you can change the setting back to "Anyone" to let the public see you.

Please remember we are making these changes for the good of the community - more authenticity and privacy.  Afterall, Church (with a capital C), thrives better with genuinity instead of anonymity.  And when members feel safe and comfortable with privacy.  

Just to repeat - you can change your settings back to what you had before if you are more comfortable with your nickname.  We apologize in advance if this ruins your day or makes you want to leave MyChurch for Myspace :)

Update: We've went back and bolded the parts of this post that a couple folks seem to be missing.  We're also deleting comments that miss this point: we are not forcing you to change your profile name or privacy.  The only thing that is changing are defaults.  And the new defaults will make privacy safer.  If you don't like the upcoming changes, it will take you less than 20 seconds to have everything back the way it was before.

We took the liberty of adding members' birthdays to your church calendar.  You can now see who in your church is celebrating a birthday this month.  Here's an example of how this might look:

We are also working on integrating Google Calendars for your church calendar.  Question for readers: does your church use Google Calendars?  (even if you don't, your church calendar will be much easier to use once we incorporate Google Calendar's richer and more robust feature set)

If you've visited your church's calendar or groups in the past couple weeks, you've seen the notice that these features will be for upgraded churches only soon.  That will officially happen next week, and upgraded churches will see 2 extra tabs:

And basic churches will just have the 3 (About, Community, Media).  We're making Calendars and Groups a much richer and easier-to-use experience for our clients, so feel free to consider upgrading your church if you haven't done so before :)

We also heard the feedback of having your friends' birthday notices show up in your feed.  So we put those back in.  Thanks for all the feedback - it was clearly unananimous that seeing birthdays of your friends is an important part of your homepage.