Michigan Camp Meeting 2018: As a Witness, Matthew 24:14

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Michigan Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

Update to Adventist Connect

Darryl Hosford

Update to Adventist Connect - Part 1

Jesus, we thank you for the chance to visit together.

We want to have the church be successful, and we want to have that success extend into the cyber world as well.

So we ask for wisdom, we ask for your Holy Spirit to enlighten us as to what we could do to make our websites meaningful, not only to our church members, but to the general public as well.

Ask your spirit to be with us and you'll enliven my mind that I could help each person in a special way.

Well, this is a seminar in which you will get to drive some of the discussion and some of the things we cover.

I do have an outline and I'll start with that, but at any point, we're a small enough group, at any point during the brief notes that I already have, you have a question, just feel free to interrupt me.

This will be more of an interactive class.

So the first thing I put on is kind of a no-brainer for those of you who are here, and I don't know how to stand so that you could see the screen as well, but I think it's important to think, as we talk about upgrading your website, it's valuable to think about why you should have a website.

And you could give me, let's go through these 4 points and you could give me some additional ones from your church perspective.

But I believe that the communication about who we as a church are, who your church is, and what you are doing is valuable.

Because we would like people from the community to come to the website and say, yeah, I want to be a part of that.

I'm interested in learning about who Seventh-day Adventists are in my local community.

So we want to present an accurate picture of why someone would be blessed coming to your church.

That probably means don't try to be bigger online than you are in real person.

Have it match, be authentic, online and offline.

Well, your bulletin, we're gonna show how to put the bulletin online.

That is a good representation of what you do each week.

And if you do nothing else, I would like to see every church in the Michigan Conference put their bulletin online every week.

That's kind of, you know, I'm glad you're saying yes, amen, because that's a minimum.

You get the file from whoever makes your bulletin.

We've been kind of talking about what the community would like to see.

Well, what about communicating to the church members?

There's many times I'll go to our local church website in Fairplane, and Friday night I'll scan the bulletin just to make sure my memory didn't fail me and see whether I'm on the platform, you know, whether I'm gonna call for offering or something like that, because they put me in these rotations and sometimes I forget.

And I will regularly go and refer to the bulletin that they put up on Thursday, the week before, Thursday before Sabbath, to see if I've forgotten something just to make sure I'm on time and I'm in the place and I'm prepared.

You might have another in-reach item might be communicating about, you know, upcoming social events that people would need to refer to, keeping your calendar up to date.

Those are benefits for the actual church members, not just the seeking community.

And I would love, this is another passion of mine, is to present media for the members that are away, or for the interested by-passer, the interested public.

It's more difficult than running a website.

But many times, many churches I find, and Mickey, I don't know if you'll agree, but many churches are already recording them, at least in audio.

Our church gives out DVDs to people who want them.

So if you're already recording the service, I would encourage you to consider putting it online.

With the Adventist Church Connect 3.0 system, there is no charge for uploading media.

If you went over 10 gigabytes, and I don't mean to be too technical, but that's a size of space online, how much the file takes up.

Well, you would be kind of charged a little fee if you went over that threshold.

And with the 3.0 system, there's no charge.

You can put audio, you can put video and you're not, at least as of right now I don't control what the NAD does but there's no charge Unless you were given advance notice and something changed that I don't understand.

I do start charging, is there a way to delete old files?

There is, but the web is kind of advancing to a point where we're getting away from worrying about file space and more about file usage.

How long are these video files stored or archived on the site?

Well, with the transition from 2.0 to 3.0, we're making everyone's kind of start over.

You could move the file from the 2.0 to the 3.0, Or you could just start from now forward with the 3.0, but they're going to be stored indefinitely.

With the caveat, all of you should smile when I say indefinitely, How long did our VCRs last?

And now how long does the CD's going to last?

But for the practical purpose, we do not delete the media for you.

Who knows what virtual reality will be 10 years from now.

Well, something that did, you can figure out yourself, just whatever.

Okay, so any thoughts that you had about why you want to have a website.

I want to speak just a minute about Why any of us who have a 2.0 website have to go through this pain?

Because it is a pain to put things over again.

I can be brave enough to acknowledge it's painful to start over and to have to face it again.

The server technology that was used for the 2.0 system does not easily upgrade to the modern standards.

And we made the strategic choice, instead of spending 2 years of work, to just go to the best, and start a brand new system from the ground up.

That meant that it's very difficult to transfer the information from the old site to the new site unless you copy and paste it.

The technology of the old system, it's a PHP version, that is no longer being supported as of January 1st or December 31st, however you want to look at that, of 2018, the end of this year, they will stop making security updates for that older software.

Well, the version 2 system was written in that older software and 4 versions down the road is what we wrote the new software in and we're planning to keep that up to date.

We've kept the old system without this kind of hard break for the last 12 years.

And now we've made a hard break and said the 3.0 system is needing to just start fresh.

An advantage of starting fresh is that you really get to go through the website and clean up some of the old things that really no longer need to be there.

And we find that if you just port everything over, it just continues to stay.

So this, even though it's painful, might be seen as a house cleaning item that's just beneficial every once in a while.

Mickey, when you were doing the conference site, did you find any examples like that where you improved?

And So we had material clear back to 2010 that were, that were to be put out there right away.

And it just piled up and piled up and piled up and we never cleaned those off.

And so yes, I only brought over those things which were current and we're doing that and I would like to explain something if I can our we we wrestled with what is our communication that number 1 that you had previously, what is our box?

And our box is, number 1, we try to provide information for our church members, and that is our number 1 goal, is our members.

Number 2 is our pastors and workers, school teachers and all of that.

Those 2 are just almost interchangeably and reaching out to the community we figured was the role of the local church and so the local church is what we expect to reach out to our community so that's number 3 on our list so we we kept that in mind in everything we do We don't want to send anybody away, but we want to make sure our church members can find the information they need and our pastors can find what they need, and then do it in the framework of what would make it acceptable in the community.

I'd like to have each of you think about that for your local churches to say, what are we going to do?

That's really, really good for those of you who are starting fresh.

And it's not so great for those of you who have used the old system.

Unfortunately, and you may cover this, Crystal said, Mickey, forget everything you know about the old system because the new 1 is just new software you have to learn.

Update to Adventist Connect - Part 2

Jesus, thank you for being with us in this second segment.

We ask your presence with us in Jesus' name.

So we're continuing on with the hands-on demonstration of the Adventist Church Connect 3.0 system.

We'll just continue on with your questions and showing you how to do things you're interested in doing.

The first thing I'd like to do, and I should have asked everyone's names, of course I know you Andrea, but what's your name sir?

Ron would like to be able to know how to put on the PDF of the church bulletin and have that updated every week.

That's 1 of the things in the first session we talked about, it'd be really good if every week you put your church bulletin online.

And this applies for anything you wanna upload.

Could be a PDF, it could be lots of things.

We actually archive them because we have people come to us saying, when does Pastor Sandoval preach that so we keep it dated and back?

And they just, it looks like they don't keep them forever, but just put the newest 1 at the top.

Well, we're gonna do it right now and show you.

So I pulled off 1 of my church's PDFs, and we're going to make it like it's your churches this week, and you just keep doing it.

So here we are on the page called Camp Meeting because that's the page we created in this demo site for this training.

And you can type whatever you'd like to type.

You can easily add a weekly bulletin to any page and let's say, 2018, 6, was 16 the Sabbath, I think?

However you would want to note the link text, Type the link text in.

You could be more English by saying June 16, 2018.

However you, it doesn't matter how you want to link it.

Okay, so this is how you make a link across the 3.0 system.

You highlight the text and you can do these things with the text.

You can make it a bullet list, a numbered list, you can bold it, italicize it, and this little symbol is a link.

So I'm gonna click that, I'm gonna click that link, you can say, well, I wanna put up a file for that.

I don't want to link to CNN or some other place, but notice this little cloud upload icon.

So I'm going to click that, and it's going to say, where do you want to pull the link from.

I can pull from my device, from Facebook, from Flickr, Google Photos, Instagram, iCloud Drive, Box, Dropbox, Gmail, or Google Drive.

Wherever you have that image or that file, you can link to it from all of those places.

Most of you are gonna just pull it off of your computer, which is the top default, okay?

So I can select files by clicking the plus or I could drag and drop.

Everything you can do is drag and drop almost.

Can't think of a place where it's not drag and drop.

So I could take my bulletin file and just drag it onto this window, or I can click the plus and find that here's the bulletin that I pulled down from my church.

This is the PDF file that the bulletin secretary creates and then she or someone else uploads that to the website.

I don't know who does it, but this is how you do it.

I'm gonna go through the steps from the start.

Either drag or drop or click to upload, select the file, and click choose.

So here is the file, and you could have selected more than 1, but it's easier to understand if you just select 1.

So here's the file and I'm going to click upload.

And now in that time it's uploaded and this is the address for that file.

And I have to push the checkbox to say yes, that's what I want.

This checkbox is kind of like the confirm.

If you do all of the steps and you don't confirm it, you won't have a link at the end of the day.

So you've got to click the checkbox to say, yep, that's what I want.

If I publish the page, here is that page and the top 1 is what I linked and there's the link.

So if I click it, it goes straight into the PDF.

See, I use my computer and I use a church computer.

Now, if I were to have my computer, I wouldn't be able to put that PDF in without having the 1 that's actually got the words in it.

There's no other way of putting a PDF file in without making it.

She could email it to you and that would get it on your computer.

She could save it to any 1 of those other services like Dropbox or Google Drive or Facebook or you know, those services on the side, you could pull it from those.

But I think, now there is another place, but you're still gonna have to have the file.

No matter how you do it, you're gonna have to have the file to start the process somehow.

And I think that's your, or no, somebody's question was media.

And you could, for some churches, and I'm thinking PMC right now, maybe bigger church, where they'll have, for Pastor Dwight, they'll have a high quality stream, a low quality stream, an audio file, a PDF of the questionnaire that related to that sermon, and maybe a PDF of the bulletin that relates to that week.

And all of those things can be put in as 1 Sabbath media element, with each item being a different asset.

It kind of goes over your head, but that's another place where you could do it.

This is the way that is really straightforward, kind of the way my mind works to say, bulletin page and you list them and go to the 1 you want.

But there's more than 1 way to get to Rome.

If I didn't totally confuse you, you're lucky.

You may say, well, how do I get rid of that file?

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