Have you considered another way of providing a service to the community by a Church is providing free wireless internet? People need to get close enough to the Church building to use the free interner service and if you are in tourist town, you may find that quickly the Church location will become a "famous" free internet access point. Of course, if you really want to be light of the world, you may have to block access to certain websites.
Free internet is another way to provide a service to the community and enable people to draw closer to Church. Consider the possibility in your local church :)
What a good idea! Do you know of anyone doing this already?
ReplyDeleteBlessings
Tony
No the idea just came to mind yesterday. I think its easy to set up and if people dont like being harrassed by Christians trying to save their souls from eternal damnation or restricting their "free speech" then find some other free wifi ... in some towns you may have to try pretty hard!
ReplyDeleteOur church Madison First Baptist Church located in Madison Tennessee has a offers free computer classes,computer refurbishing, an low cost computer repair to our local community. We have wireless internet in our class rooms, we purposely leave it open for anyone in the area to use. We have had the service going on 4 years and have had no problems. Check us out www.madisoncomputerlc.org,
ReplyDeleteInteresting - do you publicize this in any way? What do you use for security? Is it just a "known" spot somehow? Do you have to worry about signal strength or anything like that? Wondering if this might work for our smaller church and considering it in a way that wouldn't get us sued. :)
ReplyDeleteAll internet connections can limit the websites you can look at or you can use programs for this limitation.
ReplyDeleteIn terms of being sued, thats going to be hard as you are just providing internet but this is of course not legal advice.
Publicity... depends on where your church is and how far your internet access availability is. Not sure what programs exist out there which can disconnect someone after a certain time- this may be a way of limiting the use by each person
Weird - I've just drafted a blog post on this very matter. Needs some tweaking first ...
ReplyDeleteBut I've been trying to convince my techno-phobic pastor for a few years now that we should offer more services to the community and this one would be easy, cheap and would get local tenants on our side.
For those interested in the how then look no further than "Zone CD".