Oshawa Community Church in Ontario, Canada is a non-denominational church with an average of 400 in attendance each Sunday. Their custom church website design includes graphic navigation, an editable events area on the homepage, Sermon Connect Sermon Flow complete with podcasting and blogging, e-invite, online giving, and many other tools and features!
This month we wanted to take a look at this ministry, what they are doing, how their church website has helped, and more. Check out our interview with Pastor Les Lamb:
What are you major ministries? What are your goals?
We’ve worked really hard in every area over the last 2 years. I think we’re at the point where all our ministries are major, so it’s hard to choose. We just merged our jr. youth, youth and young adults under one ministry umbrella, with their own website.
Small groups are important, too. We do them on a trimester system, 3 months on, 1 month off. In 2008, we had 120 groups for people from age 3 right up to adults.
Our Children’s ministry was also overhauled this year. We brought in Wacky World Studios to redesign our kids space, and it’s incredible. Our Grand Opening was in October. Our kid’s church attendance doubled and has stayed that way since.
We’re also active in missions, and we run a local church internship program for young adults. After tending to our structures and systems for the last couple of years, we feel ready to expand. We would like to add another service, either on site or at a campus facility in the near future. We want to strengthen our prayer and evangelism base. And we’re looking for more ways to reach out to our community.
Tell us about your website. What are your favorite features? What have you found to be most helpful? How has the site aided your ministry?
Our main site has really worked well for us. This site enables us to do so much more than our old one. Things like flash video, podcasting, blogs and comments have helped the most, because they help get the message out, encourage interaction, and drive more traffic our way. But what matters most to us is that more people actually visit our church because of our website than ever before.
What kind of feedback have you received from your community, congregation, and leadership regarding the website and other marketing through faithHighway?
Everyone loves it. Here are some of the actual comments I received by email after we went live
• “Hey Guys, CONGRATS on your FANTASTIC new webpage!!! It looks awesome, current and is very informative. I know this will make a huge difference for you.”
• “WOW Pastor Les, the interactive site is unbelievable. Your use of it is impressive.”
• “Your website looks awesome Pastor Les! I think the podcasts will be an incredible addition to all you do in the downtown Oshawa area.”
What other things are you doing that are helping make an impact throughout your community?
Well, some of our small groups are doing things like street evangelism & acts of kindness. Our interns are also active in the community, serving in different capacities: whether it’s feeding the hungry, sharing Christ, or assisting our youth group by speaking or serving at the local high school outreaches they do.
This Christmas we are partnering with a food bank we support. We asked them for a list of 100 needy families, and with their help, we are providing a turkey, a Bible, a Jesus movie DVD & microwave popcorn for a movie night. We were also called upon by a downtown Secondary School for Adults to provide food, supplies and gifts to make Christmas hampers for their school population. You can read about that here/a>.
faithHighway is excited to be working this, and many other, great ministries. We would love to hear about your church too! Feel free to email your own answers to these questions about your ministry. Be sure to include your church name, location, denomination, and size, as well as what your experience working with faithHighway was like, and in the next few months, you might just see your ministry being featured here! Email us at feedback@faithHighway.com.
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[...] blog, you’ll have seen Oshawa Community Church before. We’ve featured their church here (http://mediaoutreach.com/2009/01/featured-client-oshawa-community-church/) and also recently sat down with Pastor Les in a new section we call the Intersection and talked [...]