David teaching Firm Foundations at CrossWay Church.

David has started teaching a third Firm Foundations: Creation to Christ class at CrossWay Church in Central Florida.  We’re calling the class Foundations 101.

You never know how many are going to show up for a new class, especially when it has been offered a few times before.  God seems to be continuing to draw people to CrossWay Church who have a limited understanding of the full Story of God.

Others take the class because they have children or grandchildren and are starting to understand their responsibility before God to shepherd them spiritually instead of only providing for their physical needs.

One thing David did differently this time in addition to announcements in services and on CrossWay Church social media channels was to advertise on Facebook.  This last Sunday at least a few people mentioned that they had come based on the Facebook Ads.

Praise God for at least 29 who participated in the first class on May 6.  There were many there who David had never seen before. And there were others who had said they were coming and did not make it for the first class.

Please pray that many would continue in the class, understand and believe the Story of God and be equipped to tell others.

Baptism photos following the last Firm Foundations class >>

Like Firm Foundations on Facebook >>

NTM-USA website powered by Site Stacker

Duplicate content is an issue on the Site Stacker content management system by WMtek.

Pray for David and the NTM Communications team as they process this issue and make decisions about how to approach it.

For example, the Mission News content “Now It’s Time To Teach” can be accessed by the following URLs:

From HOME: http://usa.ntm.org/content/home/40686/now_it_s_time_to_teach

From Mission News: http://usa.ntm.org/content/mission-news/40686/now_it_s_time_to_teach

From Current News: http://usa.ntm.org/content/current-news/40686/now_it_s_time_to_teach

From Prayer: http://usa.ntm.org/content/prayer/40686/now_it_s_time_to_teach

From Asia-Pacific: http://usa.ntm.org/content/asia-pacific/40686/now_it_s_time_to_teach

From Papua New Guinea: http://usa.ntm.org/content/papua-new-guinea/40686/now_it_s_time_to_teach

From Mengen People: http://usa.ntm.org/content/mengen-people-group/40686/now_it_s_time_to_teach

Under Google Quality Guidelines they state: “Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.”

Under Google Duplicate Content Webmaster Tools they state, “Duplicate content on a site is not grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results.”

In an article by SEOmoz titled “Duplication Content – SEO Best Practices” they list three of the biggest issues with duplicate content:

1.  Search engines don’t know which version(s) to include/exclude.
2. Search engines don’t know whether to direct the link metrics (trust, authority, anchor text, link juice, etc.) to one page, or keep it separated between multiple versions.
3. Search engines don’t know which version(s) to rank for query results.

From a social sharing and commenting perspective, it takes all the interaction with site visitors and spreads it out among seven pages so even an article with significant visitor interaction is likely to show very little user engagement per page view.

Please pray for wisdom for David and the other members of the NTM Communications team as they work through this issue and similar issues on a daily basis.

References:

Problems with providing duplicate content and ways to fix it:

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/duplicate-content

Google on duplicate content

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66359

Google information about canonization

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139066

Google Webmaster Guidelines

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769

This is what the New Tribes Mission Facebook page looks like.

One of David’s many communications privileges is to moderate the main Facebook page for New Tribes Mission. In case you’re not familiar with what moderating a page looks like, here’s a brief look.

Because David is already managing content on NTM.org, is following what is being posted on the nearly 500 missionary blogs he supports and oversees the photos being posted with articles, he is aware of some of the best content available to share with people who “Like” the New Tribes Mission Facebook page.

Making a post is a lot like surfing. You have to study when the people who “Like” your page are on Facebook and are most likely to respond to anything you share with them. Just before that demographic activity peaks, you want to post so that the activity allows that information to be seen and interacted with by the most number of people.

You also have to gauge how often you have high quality information to share and how often people who “Like” your page want to hear from you.

Facebook has an algorithm of many factors to determine what each user sees on their individual news feeds and how long they will see it, so getting a large number of people to interact with a post is vital for the post to be seen.

The posts David makes are identified as “New Tribes Mission.” As you can see below, after he makes a post he keeps track of how people are responding and helps answer questions or moderates the comments to make the page most constructive for the majority of visitors.

Here’s an example of a Facebook post David recently made:

Here’s another post David made:

Sometimes it appears that there isn’t that great of response, but the statistics of real success are not always visible on the page. David measures the engagement of each post by using a third-party link tracking service to find out exactly how many people left the Facebook post to take the desired action.

Here’s a better idea of the real response:

Even though only 31 people "Liked" the post, 249 clicked on the link to visit the page.

The statistic on the NTMbooks.com page reveal that, in the first 24 hours after making this post 61 clothing items were purchased for a total of $377.

36,000 people have been reached by the New Tribes Mission Facebook page in one week.

It’s not about the money, and most posts are not about great deals in the NTM Bookstore. It is about providing opportunities for people to participate in making disciples of all nations until the job is done.

We continue to need financial partners to help us continue with our communications role on the church planting team. Learn more about becoming a financial partner.

Kristia has been teaching two different ladies. With one of the ladies, Kristia taught from Creation through the Crucifixion, carefully talking through the significance of each event. While verbally agreeing, this lady has not shown signs of appropriating the Gospel and is pursuing friendship without further teaching.

Today Kristia will be meeting another lady she has taught from Creation to the beginning ministry of Jesus Christ. The second lady is much more interested and is showing signs of understanding the Gospel.

Please pray for both of these ladies to respond to the Gospel in repentance and faith.

Since beginning to serve as an elder/pastor of CrossWay Church a year ago, David has pulled back from regular one-on-one discipleship and focused more on shepherding. Revising the membership handbook, membership process and guidelines for working with children have been some of the recent elder team projects.

Membership renewal and other shepherding tasks frequently involve meeting with people days, evenings and before and after services. Please pray for wisdom for David as he helps people understand biblical faith and grow in maturity.

For nearly 50 consecutive Sundays David has been teaching a Firm Foundations: Creation to Christ class. The other class being offered twice a year is Basic Doctrines of the Christian Faith based on Wayne Grudem’s Systematic Theology.

As David draws close to completing this second round of Firm Foundations in one year, he is excited to be meeting with two participants this week who have asked to share their testimonies with him as part of the CrossWay membership process.

Please pray for us as we seek to make disciples who make disciples in our local church and community while continuing to serve full-time with New Tribes Mission in the global mission of planting mature churches among unreached people groups.

The fields are still white for harvest.

Do you think that God depends on my “fiduciary responsibility” in order to accomplish His will?

I can only recall one place where God says “put me to the test” and that has to do with giving our finances away. Everything we posses belongs to God anyway.

Here’s biblical “fiduciary responsibility”: Obey what God is telling us to do first and trust God to pay for what He has instructed us to do.

Check this out — God provides for His servant through an unemployed single mom and her son. God’s ability to provide is without limit.

1 Kings 17:8-16

David at his desk at the NTM Home Office.

As one of the pastors of CrossWay Church in Central Florida, biblical membership is one of the issues we had to wrestle with this last year. These are some thoughts on the subject posted on the 9Marks website by Pastor Matt Chandler from the Village Church in Dallas, Texas.

Is Church Membership Biblical? from 9Marks.org

Our co-workers live in isolated villages among unreached people groups. We're helping them communicate effectively.

Helping missionaries communicate effectively has been one of our passions for over a decade. A co-worker conveyed recently his conversation with another missionary.  The missionary had remarked to the department leader that he was not aware of the department’s services anymore.  He said, “I looked online and could not find anything about you so I assumed your department no longer existed.”

Being online is the expectation of the world we live in and if you’re not online you don’t exist.

How does that work for missionaries who live among unreached people groups, isolated from the outside world for months at a time and living in developing countries for years at a time?  What happens to their support and prayer teams if they are not able to communicate effectively during that time?

It is ironic that, while David plays a vital role in connecting missionaries with their ministry partners, many churches do not consider David’s role in church planting important enough to support.  At the same time, those same churches use technology extensively and often hire or have staff to assist them.

New Tribes Mission has over 1,800 missionaries on overseas assignments working among over 300 unreached people groups.  If your church had over 1,800 employees working with over 300 outreaches, do you think there would need to be a support team to assist the church staff in communicating opportunities for involvement to church members?

Consider becoming a financial partner.

Our co-workers are face-to-face with unreached people groups. We help them communicate effectively.

Since the latest release of missionary blogs for New Tribes Mission members in mid-January missionaries have made well over 200 blog posts. New Tribes missionaries are making these posts from missionary training or partnership development scattered across North America and Europe to steaming cities in Africa or the jungles of Southeast Asia and Latin America.

This latest communication tool improvement started in October and the need for a major overhaul quickly became apparent. You might wonder, when a blog platform is working so well in 2009, why it would be such a huge project again by the end of 2011.

The internet and all its components are constantly changing. Software that runs web servers are having to be constantly updated to stop hackers from exploiting vulnerabilities. Internet browser software is being continually changed and upgraded to prevent the same vulnerabilities and improve features. User expectations are rapidly increasing, fueled by multi-billion dollar companies like Facebook, Google and Microsoft.

All these factors means that a system that is working perfectly today will need adjustments within weeks, significant changes within months and a major overhaul within a couple years.

David has been working on a major overhaul of missionary blogs for New Tribes missionaries since October 2011, but has been working on this project almost non-stop since December 26. By January 13 he and a few co-workers were able to move all 500 blogs from a very outdated version of WordPress up to the latest version.

Almost all the customized features had to be rewritten or replaced. Since this involves a significant amount of programming David has been managing hired programmers to assist him with this project. This involves constant testing, writing technical descriptions and testing some more.

Yesterday the last major issues were resolved and David was able to create a dozen new blogs for missionaries who were requesting them and has been able to answer dozens of requests for support that were waiting since mid-January.

David’s next step is to write instructions and create a few tutorial videos for the new blog features and place them on the missionary blog help desk that he manages.

To see what New Tribes missionaries are posting in real time, visit: blogs.ntm.org