Here is the story of how God has been working for me and for my church, St. Paul’s. Kind of a long story . . .
We were talking in Bible study, and I told my group that I don’t “hear” God speaking to me the way some people do. But as I write this I believe I’ve just had a message from God.
It began in August with a webinar on “E-giving for Churches” recommended by the Conference. Pastor Dave was at RedBird Mission, so I agreed to watch online. I didn’t learn much about e-giving that I didn’t already know, but the one thing I took away from the event was that our website is old-fashioned compared to modern-day standards.
This brought me to look at a number of church websites, both in our Conference and across the country. I realized that WordPress sites are the norm now. WordPress is a specific platform and content management system for creating and maintaining websites. It’s almost nothing like the html that I learned and that I use on our old website.
The next thing that happened is that our Disciple FastTrack Bible Study ended with a survey of our spiritual gifts. We considered our own spiritual gifts and set a goal for serving God and St. Paul’s in the coming year. Since my top gift was “Serving” and second was “Administration” I decided that the best thing I could do for the church this year was to try to bring the website up to modern-day standards, and part of that would be converting it to WordPress.
I spent some time online, researching WordPress courses, both free and paid. I had just about decided to pay for a course that seemed to be well rated, but thought I should wait till we got back from vacation to sign up.
Within a week of making that decision, I received an email from United Methodist Communications offering a grant for training and a year of free hosting to upgrade to a WordPress site with United Methodist branding. It was exactly what I was looking for at the perfect time! I applied and got the grant!
I feel like God has spoken to me. I finished the course and am now working on the website. To visit the still-under-construction site, click here. Some of the buttons work, so feel free to explore.
Thank you, Lord!
