 Alright. Okay, good morning. Welcome everyone to the course BC 314 on media and technology in ministry. We are in this section, we'll be talking about technology platforms or software platforms that different platforms that we can use for church and ministry work. And I'm just giving us an overview of how we are using different platforms and many of these are open source platforms. And hopefully, you know, it'll be useful. You may have an opportunity to use these as well. Let's pray. We get started and then I'll share a few things today that might be useful. Okay. Yeah, may come in. Can you pray? If you just pray with us, please. I will pray. Yeah, Father Lord, thank you for this wonderful time, Lord. Thank you for the subject, Lord. Lord, help everyone join on time, Lord. Lord, give us a good kind to it, Lord. Lord, pray for your pray that you give us a good knowledge and understanding about the subject, Lord. In Jesus' name, we pray. Amen. Amen. Thank you. All right. So yesterday, when you were talking about software systems, technology platforms that we could use, I shared first of all about the church management system and how we can do a lot of different things. And that is used to manage data of people, whether it's congregation members or donors or partners, things like that. You're managing their data. Then I also shared about the human resource management software. The product that we are using is a free open source product, orange HRM. And we use that to, that is to manage internally, right, to manage your staff, your consultants, people are working for the church or Christian ministry. You can use that. We use it, you know, to report our time, our work to apply for leaves for performance review. It can be used for performance review. And we're also getting going to use it for expenses and reimbursements. So that means if people are spending money on behalf of the church, they make some purchases which are approved, then they can submit their expense claim and they get reimbursed for those expenses because they've bought something for the church or the ministry. That's been approved of. So like that, you know, the human resource management software is used internally to manage your staff, your work, people are working for the organization. And it's always good. So if you look at it right now, because, you know, I guess because partly because of the pandemic, the last ever since the pandemic started, that's early 2020 is when we went into lockdown. So, or two years almost, you know, we didn't come to the office, we the office was closed. Everybody's working from home, only for, you know, brief moments and then I think office opened up fully, more or less fully from earlier this year. So we actually didn't get a chance to meet all our staff and physically meet and plus people are in different, different places and we also have people who are working from different parts of India as consultants doing work. So we're not meeting each other. We have to, you know, somehow we have to still manage people, you know, people at their work and so on. And so that's why having a software system like the human resource management system can we can we can manage all our staff and consultants from anywhere. Right. So, you know, there are more than I think, I don't know the exact number but more than 60 to 70 people who get paid every month. There are sort of half of them are staff, that is, they get salaries, and another half are consultants they get paid hourly. So whatever hours they work, they get paid. So, you know, we have about 60 to 70 people every month, they have to be paid. And it happens through this HRM portal, as they report the times, everything time sheet they work everything is processed every month, and they are paid. So it's possible to do it even though you know we're all in different places around the country. It's possible to manage that. Okay. So now I'm going to today. I hope we'll cover one or two other systems. The next system I want to talk about is content management system, content management system, which is what we use to build our websites. So, our websites. So right now we, when I say we all people's church has about has six websites that it is managing and it is building. Okay, some of these are more, more developed than other some are still being developed. But each website is serving a particular purpose. And we have to make a decision on, you know, how to build these websites now there are many ways that you can build a website at a very basic level you could you just use, you know, plain HTML pages, you can have a website with that HTML JavaScript technology but there are what I refer to as content management systems, and many of these are free open source system software systems that people generally use today to build websites. The advantage with that is you don't need to know a lot of programming or you don't need to. I mean, yeah, you do need to know a little bit of the programming, but you don't need to do a lot of the programming. You just do a little bit, but the system is more or less packaged built for you. So you kind of just set it up the way you want it. You know, what pages do you want? What are the menus you want on your website and those kind of things. So it lets you manage things easy. So the goal is more on you providing the content rather than trying to build the system. So it saves people a lot of time. Now, there are many good content management systems, but the one that we are using is Joomla, and I will show you, I will put the website as well in the document when I give to you at the end. It's a very good content management system, a very robust used worldwide. So we are using that. We decided to use that same system for all of our websites because then, you know, it's very easy to manage. You just need people to understand it and they can configure it or set it up for all the different websites. Now Joomla is an open source product. You can download it. And then it has many extensions. That means you can add various features to it and the extensions are paid purchases. You buy it once for some amount and then you plug it in to the core product. The core product is free. Joomla comes with certain features, more than enough to set up a website. But if you want additional plugins, you can buy or they call it plugins or extensions. You can buy it, put it into the system and you can build your system. So it's a very easy thing to do. If you have people, volunteers in your church or IT people who are willing to help, you just tell them, hey, download Joomla. We're going to set up our website using Joomla. They need to know basic PHP, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, the databases, MySQL. So they know that. They can, most developers today, IT people today are familiar with these programming languages. So they'll be able to set it up for you. You just tell them what you want. You know, what do you want on the website and they will be able to set it up very easily for you. So the work can happen very fast. So that's one advantage. And, you know, we are updating our web, many of our websites are being updated on a daily basis, daily basis. So that makes that work very easy. Content is being put out every day. For example, every day we have a daily devotional video. It's called Living Supernaturally. Five minute video, devotional video is being updated into our websites every day. And so, you know, and then our weekly sermons are being updated. And so, sorry, I'm just writing something down. Okay. So that that also happens. And so these big daily updates, a lot of things, you know, it's very easy to manage it when they're using a content management system. So today I just want to give you an idea about it. And some of the things is when you are building a website and when you are putting content out there. One, one important thing is that it should be searchable. See, it's one thing to put content out there, but the fact is there are millions. I would maybe, I guess, millions of websites, or if you look at it from a Christian church, at least there will be hundreds of thousands of church websites all over the world. And everybody is putting some content out there. You know, nowadays, it's very common for churches and ministries to put out their sermons and maybe their books and whatever resources. So hundreds of thousands all over the world. So if you put out content, it has to be visible. That means it has to come up when people are searching for certain content. What you put out has to be searchable. And it should come up when people search so that they find it and then they can come and use the content. So that making content searchable, again, it becomes easier when you use a content management system. It makes it easier to do that. And I will just share some thoughts on it. So let me share my screen and share a few things here. So first of all, let's look at the product that we were talking about. We're talking about Joomla. This is the content management product that we were talking about, right, Joomla. And it's a flexible platform. It enables us to create our websites. It's a free open source product. So you can just download it and either you can host it or there are website service providers who will host it for you. And it's being used all over the world by people. And some of its features, like I mentioned, it's search engine friendly. So whatever you do, you can set it up in a way that's searchable. And nowadays, very important, people access the internet a lot from their mobile phone. So the website should be mobile friendly. It should render properly on mobile phone. So even though we designed something for a laptop, so right now I'm looking at things from my laptop. But many people access websites from their phone. So it should be mobile friendly. It should give you a lot of flexibility if needed. You can present your website in different languages. Of course, do a lot of designs. You can extend it, add a lot of additional features easily and give different users, especially those who are managing the website, different levels of access. So they can access it and so on. So this is a product we're using. This is what I would also recommend for you if you're thinking about setting up a website for your church or your ministry. And this is not the only content management system. There are others like there's another product called Drupal, which is also well known or used commonly. There is of course Wordpress, which is also used for website development or content management. But this was our choice simply because we felt it was, from our perspective, it was the best option for us. So all our websites, our APC website, church website, our Bible college website, let me open these in different tabs. Our Bible college website also uses Joomla. Our church website uses Joomla. We have other websites that we are working on that we are building it into. So basically everything is running on Joomla. So when you're creating your website, obviously the first thing you want to think about is what are the main menus you want to have? Typically you'll have something called home so that people click on it. They come back to the home page. You will have something called about us. It's where you can give some information about yourself, about the church. So we have things about the church. Then you can have things about the ministries that you're doing. You can have things about events that are coming up or you can have things about resources that you're making available. And in our case, we are highlighting our books and missions here and then other websites that we maintain. And of course we also have a Hindi version of the website. So typically you'd have your home, you have about us, you'd have ministries, resources and contact. You know, your church office, your church locations and so on. So you tell somebody, you know, I want all this to be set up for me. They will be able to do it very easily. Then you can decide, you know, how you want your page to look like. So I'm not saying this has everybody has to do it like this. I'm just saying this is how we did it. That, you know, we have the highlight of our sermon because that's something many people would want to come for the highlight our daily devotion. So people can just come here and listen to the daily devotion. Of course, the devotional is available on the church app. It's available on social media and YouTube and Facebook. But here's another place. Right. And these are the events that are coming up. So this is what is, you know, coming up. We put out testimonies so people can see that, okay, God is working, God is doing something. We highlight other things like that are free Christian books. Generally people want to know these are commonly things that people want to know, you know, so we highlight that here. And, you know, so some things about the church as well. So you can decide how you want to lay things out and make make things available like that. So all of this, you know, so this is our website is going to highlight some things here. See, one of the things is sermons. Now sermons are very important part of a church, especially. Right. What we've done is all our sermons from 2004. So, you know, so you say sermons from 2004. So we're talking about 18 years of sermons are available through this website. You know, so all our Sunday sermons since 2004. And of course they're listed chronologically here so they can come in. They can listen, they can watch download notes everything so people can make use, you know, if they missed a sermon they want to go back and listen to a sermon they can come in. And so this is all from 2004 it's available here. But of course, you want people to be able to quickly access filter this so they can filter by the person who preached, or they can filter by series. You know, what was the series that is used or which year they can go back and they can filter by any one of these things. So that's, you know, one way so they can either just go chronologically and listen they can you can do anything listen watch the sermon. The other thing we've also done is we've given a page where we list the sermon series very easily. Right so somebody could come to this page and they can say oh these are all the sermons series that were done. I want to listen to something here you know if somebody wants to listen about the holiness of God, or the mighty name of Jesus or the presence of God they can click on any of these. And it will take them to this page where just the sermons on that series are listed. They can download it and use it. Right. So this is something you can easily do it's almost like a library of sermons people can come. And so this is a big advantage here of using of using a content management system. And all of this can be managed very easily through the administration of this system. Similarly the daily devotionals right so we have our daily devotional, which is available. So every day is devotional. It's being released here. Similarly we have these series available, you know, because these all these devotions are done on weekly themes. And if somebody wants to go and look at it. Okay what are all the topics. So these are all the themes of somebody feels like today, you know, I want to listen to something about about Jesus or about the attitude or believers authority, or I want to listen about resolving conflicts. So they can come and they can click here and they will get, you know, the seven devotionals on the seven devotionals from Monday to Sunday to Saturday are on resolving conflicts. How do you resolve conflicts. So they can actually go through this devotional as and when they feel right. So again, all the devotions are listed by the teams, and anybody can come and choose a theme, and they can listen listen to the devotionals, which are very short five minute devotionals on on the on that team. So, so, again, all of this is managed very easily. Another thing is about the books. Again, here, the books. So the books are listed here. And many of these books, of course, they're all in PDF form. We will slowly bring out other formats, but many of these books are also available as audio books so you can download the whole book as an audio book as mp3 and if people don't want to read the PDF they can listen to the book in audio form so audio books are also available. And, and books will come out in other formats as well. So the books are listed here very, you know, easily for them. Now all this is searchable. It means, you know, we've put it here, but if somebody searches, you know, and I think I've shown this to you, but let's say if somebody searches for sermons on, yeah, maybe let's say women in the workplace, I don't know if it'll show up. So these are sermons by other people. But, okay, we don't have it. I don't think we have a sermons on women in the workplace. Okay, so here's our book, Women in the Workplace. So our book, Women in the Workplace on Google has shown up. Anyway, let me just, let's see if sermons on or have something that will pick up from our website. So I'm doing a Google search. Of course, I've done it purposely on the name of that sermon that it into Heart of God and you see the first in the search is our sermon. Now, I just think about this, there are about 8,087,000 results that match with this search string on the redemptive Heart of God. But that particular sermon from APC is listed first. Now, of course, it's because Google search also looks at your location, you know, where are you from? And it kind of brings all these together from different locations. So obviously it recognizes, you know, it will know that I'm doing this from India and so on. But that sermon series that we have put out on our website is listed first. So, you know, if somebody searches sermons on receiving, yeah, receiving God's guidance. So there is a sermon here on receiving God's guidance, sermon central, that's, you know, a repository, online repository of sermons. But then here you see the sermon from APC listed number two. Right. So, of course, I'm searching by these names, but the sermons, but what the point I want to make is the sermons that we have made available through our church website. Here, sermon series, right, is searchable. And so it shows up in Google search so people can, you know, we'll find it online when they do search by certain topics. And if that topic is available on our website, and if it's ranked high, it will show up on the early pages. And they can then, you know, when they click on it, of course, they'll come and they will be able to, you know, listen to these sermons, etc. So making what you put out searchable is very important so that people can come and see. So similarly, you know, when people search for daily devotions, they search for books. A lot of our content is searchable and they will find it and they will come and use it. And I will show you, when we look at the search results, we can see people from around the world coming to our website and using the content. Let's look at the back end, that is the administrator side of things. Similarly, about the Bible College, we will talk about it later. But what does the back end look like? So, you know, as an administrator, you log in. And so this is the administrator side. So this is where, you know, we are able to manage these things. I just want to show you a few things here. So we have a pre-set extension. This is where all our messages and series sermons are managed. So this is the back end to what you saw on the website. So this is where these things are uploaded and, you know, the details are given. So these are all the recent ones. So this is where we manage them. And, you know, you can manage, you upload the message and you give it all the details. So it's easy. You don't have to do a lot of programming. You can just upload it here. You can set up the series here. You know, these are all the series that we have been, you saw on the series page of the website. It's all these sermons series. So these are the series and these are actually managed through this pre-set component, where we set up the series, give it some information and, you know, all of that. So all of this is being managed very easily, you know, from the back end. Similarly about the books. So this is the control panel for the books. This is where all the books are managed. And it's giving you, you know, tells us, you know, how these books are being downloaded. So about 500, almost 540,000 times these books have been downloaded and so on. And then you can go in and you can see books by various categories. Of course, this is German and so on. Let's see if we look at these books in English. So these are the English books and you can see, you know, each book, how many times it was downloaded. People have downloaded these books and you can see them. So Holy Spirit, 2000, 2009 and so on. And some of these are not publicly available. So these are, you have to look at only these numbers. Yeah. So, you know, you can see this book is downloaded quite often around 8,000 downloads. So this is where we manage the books. And the books is what we are seeing here, you know, these English books. Right. So all these books, these are actually managed by here, this page. And you can manage how you laid out and you can see what is happening, how many downloads and so on. Right. So setting up, you know, so this is the, you know, the back end. This is where an IT person would work. He would use, your IT person, he or she would use this back end to set up the website for you. And you can just tell them, you know, this is what I want. This is what I want to make available. And they would use the back end. So you see the back end is pretty straightforward. It's a web page and you can upload things and you can manage things here from the back end as well. Right. Okay. So I just wanted to give you a quick exposure to that. So this is how our website is set up. Now similarly, Bible College website very much similar. There's a back end to it. And then you can tell the, you know, your person saying, look, this is what we want. And it'll show up. And again, everything is made searchable. So for instance, if we say online Bible College, you know, so there are research for online Bible College. Of course, there are so many more than 14 million, I guess, Bible College. You see a lot of these advertisements here from different foreign Bible colleges. And then you see APC Bible College on page one, you know, it's listed here. So our Bible College website is searchable. Or if people search online Bible colleges in India, then ours is listed right on top after University of Mysore and so on. But these two are ads. So these are paid positions, but this is APC Bible College ranked right up high. So you can make your Bible College searchable. You can make it searchable. And people search by various criteria. I don't know if we will show up here for free Bible College. It does come up here as APC Bible College. If people search for free Bible colleges in India, our e-learning, we offer for free. So they come. So the Bible College website is searchable and, you know, by different criteria as well. And it's all done the same way. It's using Joomla, the backend, and you add the titles and so on. And it makes the whole website searchable. People can come and, you know, look at the website. All right. So today what we've done is or what I would have very briefly shared with us is about Joomla, which is a content management system. Which we use to set up our website. And we can also make, sorry, we can make resources available through our website in a very, in a well managed way. That is your sermons, your books, your blogs, you know, you can add a blog to this so that you can, you know, post articles, so many things. Many things can be done. I've just showed you very briefly a few of the things that can be done. And very importantly, you can make your content searchable. So when you use the content management system, you know, you're put in the right tags, put in the right keywords and so on. And then your content becomes searchable so that when people search on Google or some other search engines, they will be able to find what you have put out and they will come to it and make use of it. Okay. So keep this in mind, especially when you are planning to set up a website for your church or your ministry. Think about using a content management system, something like Joomla. You can use Joomla. It's free. Tell your IT person or any volunteer to set it up on Joomla. And you can tell them, you know, what you want and you can tell them, look, I want to make all the sermons available. I want to make, you know, maybe you're planning to write books or maybe you're planning to write articles, blogs. You can just set up a blog as well. They can do it easily for you. And they can manage it for you. Okay. So we'll pause here for today. We will pick this up again next week. I will talk to you more about other software systems and other products that you can use for your church, for your ministry. But a website and a content management system for a website is I think I would say very important or very crucial for any church or ministry. And we can be thankful that these days we do have, you know, very easy ways to set it up and to be up and running. Okay. Any, any questions, any thoughts? Okay. So let's, let's pause here for today. I mean, there's a lot more we could talk about, but then I just want to introduce these things to you so you could make use of them. We will continue this next week. And I will give you a little document with just the names of all these products that we're talking about so that in the future. And when you have an opportunity, you can use that as a list. You can look and say, hey, I want to use this product. And then you'll be, you'll be ready to do it. You'll know what to use for different needs. Okay. All right. Let's close in prayer and then we'll dismiss. May I ask maybe Thomas, if you, if it's okay, you could pray and dismiss us. Sure. Father in Jesus' name, we thank you for this day, Lord. Thank you for the learnings what we have learned today. Father, we love you and praise you. Father, let all what we learn that we be useful for the kingdom of God's advancement. We thank you for this time. We bless you, daddy. We give you glory and corner in Jesus' name. Amen. Amen. Thank you, everyone. Enjoy the rest of the day. Enjoy the afternoon and the weekend. Have a blessed weekend. I'll see you all next week. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.