Discover how to leverage technology in your church

So you’re thinking of doing a complete redesign of your church website.  The theme is dated, the info is out of date, and those 4000kb background images were never good ideas.  That’s right.  It’s time to burn the whole thing down and start over from scratch.

While the copyright law in the US provides several rights exclusively to the rights holders of a creative work, the law nonetheless allows use of works, even those covered by copyright, in specific ways. To protect the ability of artists to reference one another’s work, teachers to educate, and critics and commentators to reference artistic works, the copyright law provides a series of principles collectively known as Fair Use.

This article is intended to familiarize you with the basics of copyright as it relates to churches.  Because copyright is a legal issue and the intricacies of your situation might make a significant difference in your rights and responsibilities, you should consult a lawyer who is familiar with your circumstance before following any legal guidance.

Copyright is a set of laws designed to help artists and others who produce creative works to be able to benefit from their work and to control its use.

Within any culture there’s a certain orthodox set of ideas that aren’t allowed to be challenged or compromised except at great peril.  Some of those are held in common across most, if not all, cultures, such as the idea that killing without justification is wrong.  Others of them are unique to a particular culture, place and time.  In ancient Rome, for example, one of the guiding principles was that of polytheism.  It was perfectly acceptable for someone to worship whatever god they chose to follow, as long as they didn’t make any claims to be the only god.  Obviously Judaism and early Christianity ran afoul of this principle, and as a result they found themselves on the margins of Roman society pretty quickly. 

In the western world today, we also have a set of guiding principles. 

Part two of a two-part series on Incremental Change vs. Transformational Change by Rev. Bill Johnson.

Part one of a two-part series on Incremental Change vs. Transformational Change by Rev. Bill Johnson.

An author I once read (and have now forgotten the name of) shared a story about incremental change. Take a photo. It’s a good photo, and probably one you’ll look back at often, but it’s just a photo. Take a second photo of the same subject moments later. Now, switch back and forth between the two photos. You will see that a few things have changed, and the experience will begin to feel a bit like one of those “Spot the Difference” puzzles you find in the Sunday newspapers. It’s a change, but it’s really just a notch forward. Two pictures aren’t really all that much different than one picture. This is incremental change.

I’m not sure anyone likes passwords.  They’re clumsy, hard to remember and increasingly easy to crack. There are a few things you can do, however, to make your passwords easier to remember and more secure.

There was some big news last month, and it had nothing to do with the US presidential election or the Olympics. Because of this, it largely went unnoticed by major media channels, but it’s something we should all be aware of.

Perhaps no game has been more anticipated (and more divisive) in the gaming community than the recent release of No Man’s Sky. Hyped as a nearly infinite universe, it enabled players to explore the breadth of its over 18 quintillion stars, each with its own planets, moons, plants, animals, and ecosystems. The player is cast in the role of a survivor of a starship crash and must repair his or her ship and make a way boldly forth into the unknown. 

As we find ourselves in the middle of an election season, you don’t have to go very far to find people expressing their opinions on a variety of topics.  This has always been true, of course, but in the last several decades a new forum has arisen, allowing people to have unprecedented reach as they express themselves about things they’re passionate about, and they don’t always agree.