Postage and Printer Ink: How My Online Ministry Started and Evolved Over the Years

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It all started with the cost of postage and printer ink. My online ministry, that is. About fifteen years ago I realized that I was spending way too much money on postage and printer ink to produce my monthly snail mail ministry newsletter.

God was blessing my ministry, but that also meant an ever increasing mailing list. Eventually, the cost of sending out the newsletter grew to several hundred dollars a month. It was then that I learned that I could exchange the world of dirt cheap printers dispensing ink more expensive than gold and first class mail hauled by humans in box shaped vehicles for a mass email service that charged only $20 a month.

It was faster, cheaper, and reached far more people with much more content, not to mention that I didn’t have to lick, seal and stamp each email before I sent it out. Suddenly I was sold on the Internet.

Then one day at a men’s conference someone asked me what my webpage address was. It was 2005 and I barely knew what he was talking about. “You have to get a webpage for your ministry. Everyone has one now,” he said. Not wanting to be left behind, I found an old friend who knew all about that kind of stuff and asked him to design one for me.

There’s no stopping progress, or course. Soon people started talking about storing your files online so people can link to them and download them. I had no idea how to do that, so I dutifully signed up for a seminar in Boulder on the topic and suddenly I was gleefully storing files on my website host and linking to them in my monthly newsletter. I was in HTML seventh heaven.

At this point, my online ministry plateaued for about ten years. During this time I primarily focused on doing workshops at about 15 to 17 men’s conferences each year. Gradually, however, I realized that I thoroughly enjoyed writing my monthly newsletter. So I decided to start writing a blog once a month and include a link to it in the newsletter.

At the same time, what I really didn’t enjoy about my ministry was the expensive, time consuming, impersonal, stressful, and exhausting travel it required. Remembering how advantageous it was for my ministry when I made the switch from snail mail to email, I began wondering if I could transition all of my seminar training to an online training site and also begin a three times a week blog.

After doing a lot of research on the topic, and after giving it much prayer and thought, three years ago I felt the Lord shoving me in this direction and I decided to dive in. I knew it would be a huge undertaking, and I was right. Transitioning my ministry onto the Internet has been one of the greatest challenges of my life. It took thousands of hours of working through mind boggling jargon and a lot of trial and error. I liken it to learning three careers at once: programing, marketing and writing.

But the heavy lifting is over. And for those of you who have walked with me through the process, I hope you are enjoying the end product.¹

This post first appeared in NewCommandment.org.

Since 2003 New Commandment Men’s Ministries has helped hundreds of churches throughout North American and around the world recruit teams of men who permanently adopt their widowed and single parents in their congregations for the purpose of donating two hours of service to them one Saturday morning each month. We accomplish this with a free training site called New Commandment Men’s Ministry

Learn how to mobilize your men’s ministry to meet every pressing need in your church here.

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Learn how to form teams of men for every widow, single mom

and fatherless child in your church at NewCommandment.org.

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1. To date, over 70 churches have utilized the online membership training site, Meeting to Meet Needs. It has saved New Commandment Men’s Ministries over $40,000 in travel expenses. 1,000 people a month read my blog and 100 people a day visit New Commandment’s website.