Helpful Web Sites for the Pastor

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Helpful Web Sites for the Pastor
by David Montoya
from Texas Baptist Leadership, August 1999 page 13. Baptist General Convention of Texas Publication

First, I want to thank all of you who sent me information about the web sites which you have found helpful to your ministry. Second, I want to make this disclaimer. The web is an evolving, rapidly changing environment. just as people in our church are moving and changing addresses more and more, website addresses change constantly. I make this disclaimer because as soon as this article is published, some of the addresses will probably have changed and I don't want you to think I am a dunce by giving out bad URLs (web site addresses). I will not be able to fist all the sites which you so graciously sent to me, but I will highlight some of what I believe are the most useful.

The following were sent to me by Rick Willis. I will list the URL (the address) and then offer my comments on the site. The first site is found at www.barna.org. This site is home for the George Barna research group. It is a site which contains valuable facts and trends information. I believe it is a great site to find sermon illustrations and articles of interest to pastors and staff members about what we could be facing in the future. The next site Rick recommended was www.bible.org. This site contains a lot of useful information for church administration as well as a pretty good illustration section. It is well worth a minister's perusal. Another site which came up a lot was Christianity Today's site. its address is www.christianity.net. I found this to be a very commercial site in which you really have to dig to find much useful material. Since it is a popular site, I must assume that others found this site to be more useful than I did.

Two other sites recommended by Rick which I found interesting were www.harpers.org, which is the web site for Harpers magazine and www.m-w.com, a web site which contains Webster's Dictionary. These sites prove very useful for researching words and finding interesting illustrations. I use a lot of different magazine sites in my work. You can usually get the URL from the magazine, but if it is not fisted, try using a search engine with the magazine's name.

Oh, for those of you who use the lectionary and are desperate for sermon material on Saturday night, there is the site www.desperatepreachcr.com, which is more than willing to come to your rescue. This site has all kinds of sermon resources.

Another interesting site which I received from Bob Price is www.dogpile.com. This site is another search engine, which searches other search engines. I found it very useful the first time and I would recommend it to anyone to add to their favorites. For those of you who are still in the process of acquiring software tools for ministry you need to check out www.writing.bcrkeley.edu/chorus/bible, which evaluates Bible software. If you are thinking of buying this type of software, this site would be one you need to view.

I believe the key to using the web as a toot for ministry is finding what you can use and then saving it for easy access. When you find web sites which you believe will be helpful, you should save these sites under favorites. This will help you develop your own method of study and preparation from the web. How do you do this? Find the favorites icon on your browser. When you click the favorites icon, you will be asked if you want to save the web site. Click save and you will have the web site address stored in a file on your web browser. A word to the wise here; do some planning. You can create folders to manage the information you find on the web. This helps to organize your favorites. I am an intuitive so I find all kinds of sites I would like to explore. if I saved them all without creating folders for different categories, I would have an unusable mess. What I have done is create folders in which I store related URLs. I have a folder for Baptist Resources in which I store Baptist resources I have found. I also have one for world religions, one for theological studies, one for humor, etc.. This allows me to return to helpful sites quickly and makes my browser a lot easier to use. There is a lot of information out there on the web and to borrow an old cliché, "it is all grist for the preacher's mill."