If you are falling short on ideas to attract new people to the church (during the week) you might want to look to what people are doing online.

• Digital Photography
• Social Networking
• Genealogy

In fact, the main group that is extremely active online and are into social networking today are the retiring Baby Boomers. What a great audience to attract to your church. Many of them missed the computer age, or maybe worked in a place with a computer at a "dumb terminal" and only learned what the specific work programs required and nothing more. What a great target audience to attract. Of course there are the seniors who are the biggest buyers of laptops and want to find their old friends...dead or alive! Hey, I am not joking here.

As some of you are aware, we at Central United Church in Sarnia, Ont. have built a computer room with a digital photography studio. (See video above.)

This fall we plan on getting a co-op student to assist with various projects each morning from Monday to Friday.

On Fridays we are running computer training courses where the student will not only be able to help out, but will probably learn a few extra computer tips as well.

On Mondays we have a retired history teacher who is going to run a FREE live/online Genealogy class for the public. People can drop by the Computer Room from 9:00 a.m. to noon and get professional help in researching their family history on the Internet. Thus the student will be there to assist people with computer skills, etc.

On Thursdays we have a retired professional photographer who will be on hand from 9:00 a.m. to noon to help anyone who would like to learn digital photography, portrait photo shots, getting photos from the camera to a CD or website or email. Also, we are offering to show the public how to scan their 35 mm slides and burn them to CDs or upload to the Internet. All this is free.

As you can see the ideas are flowing just from getting some old donated computers and a spare room in the church.

One concern we have is that we have to get this idea of the co-op student past the barrage of church committees who want a written summation report and so on. Why so many committees in churches these days? No wonder progress is VERY slow sometimes.

Wish us luck on the co-op student. We also have our own Wikipedia site wherein this coop student will be digitizing church records and photos for a historical archive online.


Gregory West is tech columnist, reviewer, and Lambton College Mac instructor. As well as webmaster and PC instructor at Central United Church. He blogs at http://gregorywest.wordpress.com.