A new Church Presentation software is coming out soon from the makers of Logos bible software. The name of the presentation software is Proclaim and it sounds really interesting.

Basically it will operate from the cloud, allowing multiple people to work on the same presentation throughout the week from both Mac’s and PC’s. For more details on the program itself, click the following link.

What is ALSO exciting is to mark this release, Proclaim is offering $25,000 worth of give away prizes! All you need to do is go and watch the video on their website to find out how to enter. There are some great prizes on offer which could really benefit your church worship ministry. Why not check it out?

Disclaimer: This blog entry is part of my entry to the competition. HOWEVER, what i have written accurately reflects my own thoughts on this product and competition.

Journey - ManojVasanth on Flickr

One of the things that has struck me over the years since my own adolescence is the severe lack of ‘rites of passage’ in Western, and in my situation Australian, culture. For eons before now, cultures have welcomed children into adulthood with some form of ceremony, celebration or task. Whether it be the Jewish bar mitzvah or the African Masai lion challenge, cultures have historically had ‘something’ to welcome children into adulthood.

One of the chapters in the book I am writing is all about rites of passage. At the moment this is very much in research and experiment stage, but I firmly believe that youth ministries need to reclaim the idea of rites of passage if we are going to successfully transfer youth into adult church. With youth groups often looking very little like ‘church’, we have to find ways of bridging the gap and transitioning our teens through this difficult phase. I firmly believe that rites of passage is an important aspect in this journey.

Rather than just believing this in theory, this weekend at Inglewood we’ll be putting this idea into practice. Next year our youth group will be changing a little, meaning the current youth who will basically all be in year 11 will ‘move up’ to the next phase. Rather than just doing this, we are taking the time this weekend to really celebrate these teenagers and say to them ‘you are no longer children in this church, you are adults’.

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As a pastor there doesn’t tend to be a shortage of training opportunities or conferences to attend, however there can often be a shortage of worthwhile training and conferences. I don’t say this to disparage the work that people put into pulling of a great conference (I have been to many) or training night, it is just my own reflections.

Tonight, however, I was lucky enough to start a training course that I can already tell will be worth its weight in gold, and then some. As many of you will know I am undertaking the difficult task of planting a church. This task is something God has completely sold me on (I changed my life’s course because of it), even though it has kind of come out of the blue in my mind. The more I look at it, however, the more I see how God has been moulding me for this for years.

Tonight I went along to a training session on Church Planting run by Dynamic Church Planting International. Now, i’ll be a little honest with you for a minute. About 2 months ago when I first heard about this training, as a Gen Y person my immediate reaction was to check their website. The first thing that struck me was the logo and my impression was…it isnt exactly modern. This blog however is not about the logo but about the, I suppose you could say pleasant surprise I received when i went to the training as it is already marvellous. Now I am not entirely surprised because this course was recommended to me by a very sage Christian leader and it is being run by his Senior Pastor, another sage Christian leader in Perth. This alone made me expect more than the logo and general design inspired me to.

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