This post has been sitting in my drafts folder for a while.

Leaving aside theological (and other) considerations, who will feed your pets when Jesus returns?

Found via: Faith and Theology

This is just a quick note to apologise to anyone interested, in that I have not updated this site for some time.

We have now moved home and have started attending a new church. Slowly we will be easing our way into church life, but because the church is a little larger, it is unlikely to be within web development.

Therefore there might not be too many more posts on this site on a web theme, but perhaps I will get some time to post other things if possible. (I am probably going to go through my unpublished drafts so there may be some random posts here).

The other news, was that my wife gave birth in December so that has rather occupied us as well!

Thank you if you have made comments or been a reader here. I really appreciate it.

Note: this post is only likely to be relevant to those under the jurisdiction of HM Revenue & Customs here in the UK.

Charities in the UK can claim back tax at the basic rate on donations they receive from tax-payers subject to certain conditions (signed declaration etc.) In the last few years, the basic rate of tax has been 22%. This means that for each 78p donated, the charity can make a claim for 22p from the government.

From 6 April 2008 onwards, the basic rate of tax has reduced from 22% to 20%, thus people are paying less tax within this band than they were previously. This means however, that for each 78p donated though, the charity can only reclaim 19.5p.

Because of the change, and to ensure that charities are not put into difficulty by this, there is a transitional relief scheme which allows charities to claim the difference between the 19.5p and the 22p until 5 April 2011 (3 years).

The charities do not need to claim this, but it will be done automatically as part of their gift-aid claim.

Worked example:

Before 05 April 2008: donor decided to give 10% of their gross income to charity, since they earned £20k per year, and the basic rate was 22%, they gave 10% x £20k x 78% = £1,560, knowing the charity could reclaim the £440 pounds which meant they donated 10% of their £20k salary (£2k).

After 06 April 2008: donor continues to donate £1,560 not realising that the tax rates have changed and the charity can reclaim £1,560 / 0.80 = £1,950, which means that the donor is no longer donating 10% of their income as they intended. Fortunately, the charity also receives gift-aid transitional relief automatically until the 2010/11 tax year and the charity receives the extra £50.

Special note: because the tax payer is now paying tax at 20% rather than 22% they might actually be making a saving overall. The amount of saving depends on their salary because there is no longer a 10% lower tax rate.

Someone earning £20k will be £69.90 better off and someone earning £35k would be £369.90 better off. Whereas some earning £11,482 (national minimum wage for over 22 working full time for 40 hours per week) would be £100.46 worse off and once the transitional relief ends this person would need to increase their gift to maintain a 10% gross salary donation without any reduction overall in tax.

(Perhaps now we can see why people are questioning Gordon Brown’s poverty-fighting credentials when the tax changes he has introduced only help those on middle-incomes and make things harder for those on lower incomes).

Summary:

Charities including churches need to move towards educating their members who give regularly to realise that come April 2011 they will need to have increased their donations to at least maintain the level of their donations, though not all will receive the benefit of the corresponding lowering of the basic tax rate.

Inland Revenue page on gift-aid transitional relief

Facebook have introduced ‘pages’ for organisations, so rather than multiple groups or closed networks any organisation can set up a page including churches that they can use to promote themselves.

Having set up a Facebook group for our church, and managing to recruit some church members to join up (13 members at the last count), I thought it would be good to have something a little more official. On the face of it, pages look quite similar to groups but with some small differences, such as fans instead of members.

Another more frustrating difference was that there was no mechanism for me to invite people to join. I had to go back to the Facebook group and message all members to let them know about the page. I think Facebook want you to run an advertising campaign to gain ‘fans’.

One advantage over groups is the ability to have applications, but at present it seems that most applications are not compatible yet for pages, application developers need to revise their work.

It seems likely that these pages will be indexed by search engines, looking at the church’s page without logging in gives quite a but of info (but not who the fans are).

You can create a Facebook page for your church by going to the business section of Facebook.

Help via: Dave Walker gives his take on ‘Facebook pages’.

After I heard the announcement of pages, I couldn’t work out how to add one, so dismissed it as something launched for North Americans. Seeing Dave become a fan of his church in my Facebook mini-feed encouraged me to look harder.

One purpose of a church website is to allow people to easily contact the church with queries, especially if they have had no previous contact.

We might prefer potential guests to use the phone, but people find email useful simple queries that they can submit anytime. And as churches, we want to encourage a connection every way we can.

When you list the email address on the church website though, there is a problem. This is because, spammers can then see it and add it to their databases. They can do this either manually or more likely in an automated fashion. When a church contact email receives many spam, it becomes harder to deal with and busy staff can mean that false positives are not checked on a regular basis.

A List Apart has an article called Graceful E-Mail Obfuscation, which looks at the history of techniques to fox spammers and what can be done now.

The article particularly looks at the issue of user-friendliness, because adding ‘REMOVE-ME’ to an email address is at best inconvenient for a user. And as churches, we do want to encourage people to contact us as much as possible.

Previously I looked at how to add simple maps to your church website, but for a wordpress site this was complicated, because of the artificiall nature of the directory structure if the site is using re-written URLs. Basically a plugin was required.

Now Google has provided another mechanism for including maps that can be inserted simply by embedding them in pages. All that is needed is to copy some HTML code and paste into your church’s webpage.

You need to login to your account on Google and click on ‘Maps’, then ‘My Maps’ to get started. When you are happy with the map, you can click the ‘emded this in a webpage link’ on the right hand side. If your map is of a church in the UK, then I recommend signing into Google from Google UK, as I had problems otherwise.

You can add other features easily to the map, such as other important points nearby to the church. For example, car parks and travel facilities (trains, buses etc.). This become clickable, and can contain other helpful information.

You can see it in action on my church’s website.

Over the last few months I have been somewhat distracted by Facebook, and unlike almost all the other social networking sites I have tried, I have found non-techie friends are using it.

Facebook difference

Many people are raving about it, and I can understand why as I have caught up with people I haven’t spoken to for many years. Unlike email, there is a instantness of communication with people and no spam. Which means that short conversations can happen quickly, but without the intensity of instant messaging.

Also, unlike other social community websites, the privacy settings allow for close control of profile and information.

I had been using on-line photo sharing websites, but these don’t come close to Facebook in the social aspect of being able to tag friends and share photos with restricted groups of people.

But what about the church?

I have tried, unsuccessfully to coax church members onto mychurch.org (one member plus me to date).

I thought the reason for this failure was because people didn’t want to sign up for another on-line service that they might not use, and they couldn’t see a use for it.

However, after setting up a church group on Facebook, we already have 10 members. This is because church members were already users of Facebook, so joining a group was easy.

Using Facebook for your church

The other benefit is that non-Christian friends on Facebook can see what groups you join and so can see easily your affiliations. So rather than a closed Christian networking site, Facebook is a social networking site that better reflects your friendships and not just your Christian clique. It is obviously no substitute for sharing your faith in person, but allows you to create a profile that reflects your faith and to share this with your other friends.

With group events pages, we can better manage what is happening rather than a storm of emails and phone calls trying to arrange event.

How are other churches using Facebook?

Let me know in the comments how your church is using Facebook or other social networking sites.

Last week we acquired a Nintendo Wii and connected to our wireless home network (it was surprisingly easy to do). And since then we have been using to the Internet Channel (powered by Opera) for ‘incidental surfing’. Such as checking the cricket score, tv-guide etc. rather than booting up the PC. It works fantastically (here is a press release and more info from Opera).

Then we looked at the church website to see if that worked and it looked fine. However there were two problems;

• PDF files: PDF files cannot be viewed at present, so the weekly bulletins can only be viewed as HTML (if available). This follows the suggestion in the comments to a previous post that having an HTML version is essential, not optional.
• eBible plugin: this plugin does not work, the ‘pop-up’ is permanently open, making other text unreadable. (The comments to the plugin post on eBible.com are closed however, so I’ll have to find another way to report the problem).

It might be hard to imagine someone sitting on their settee on a Saturday afternoon looking for a church, but just in case, it is worth checking that your church’s website is accessible and readable on a Wii.

Previously: Changing your web viewing glasses

A WordPress plugin has been released to bring bible verses in blog posts to life, by linking them to eBible.com and also showing the verse as a ‘tooltip’ via the title tag.

There is a demo blog which shows the plugin in action.

Like other plugins, you drop it into the wordpress plugin folder, but before it works you need to complete the options screen. Most importantly is the eBible.com API key that you need. You can get a free one here.

The option screen is as follows;

To download the plugin, go to the WordPress plugin site.

I have finally got round to embedding a google map of the location of the church on our church website. This is a much better solution than just scanning a map from a roadatlas and uploading it (which breaks copyright law) or linking visitors to external sites, which may mean you lose those visitors.

I used the wordpress plugin called GeoPress. It is simple to set up once you have signed into Google and obtained an API key (Google Maps API registration). (Note: enter your blog url as the GoogleMaps URL).

Then you can add maps to any posts or pages, but most importantly for church website, to the map and directions page.

Related: Easy Google maps embeded on your church website, without the need to use a WordPress plugin.