Mike
Author Archive

Mike

I am a former design engineer who now pastors Cornerstone Community Church in Galax, Virginia. I'm passionate about following Jesus and I love technology. I've been married to Jennifer for 25 years, and we have three awesome kids, Emma, Luke, and Drew.

Faith

Just recently, I stumbled on a new app for reading through the Bible. The Read Scripture app is an awesome way to stay connected to God’s Word. I really like the simplicity of the app.  It is split up into 15 to 20-minute segments that you can go through at your own pace. Most days have a video that explains

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Technology

One of the most popular posts on this blog was one I shared ten years ago about podcasting for churches. Since that time much has changed, and yet I still receive questions on a regular basis about how to create a podcast for sermon audio. I wanted to share the basics of how you can start sharing your sermon audio

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Technology

This looks promising. Sermonary is a new online tool to create, arrange, and present your sermons. I have been using XMind, a mind-mapping tool for several years, but I plan on trying this out.   I already backed this on Kickstarter, and there aren’t a lot of spots left to get early access.  I like that it is an online

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Technology

A growing problem in many families is learning how to monitor your children’s usage of mobile devices. Between cell phones, tablets, laptops, and gaming systems, it seems like our children are constantly being tempted to spend more and more time online. So as a parent, how can we monitor and protect our children? We need to ask ourselves if we are

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Faith

Last night, Jennifer and I were able to go to Boone, North Carolina to see the new documentary Facing Darkness by Samaritan’s Purse. What an incredible movie! It tells the story of the Ebola outbreak in Liberia in 2014 and the medical personnel who contracted the deadly disease. I really didn’t know what to expect from the movie, but it

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Technology

Over the last few years, I’ve recommended and used WordPress as a great solution for websites. WordPress is no longer just for blogs, it’s a great solution for churches and small businesses as well.  You can get started with WordPress.com which is the entry level version that is hosted for you. However, if you really want to explore the power

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Faith

Ministry in small towns and cities is tough. The issues that rural America face are very similar to inner city problems:  job loss, population loss, drug use, and lack of opportunities.  As a pastor, I’ve realized that almost all conferences, magazines, and resources seem geared toward large megachurches in large suburban areas. But the reality is most churches are under

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Technology

When the iPhone 7 was released, I took advantage of a generous trade-in promotion from Verizon to pick up the brand new iPhone 7 Plus.  Now that I’ve had it for a few months, I wanted to share my thoughts about it. Size I was really worried about going to the larger plus-sized phone from my iPhone 6. I’ve never

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Faith

Most churches now realize the importance of offering online giving, but many have not recognized the transition to mobile giving that is now taking place. There is a difference, and you need to understand how it impacts the giving to your church or ministry. Here’s a quick survey that you can do during church. Ask how many people have a checkbook with

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Technology

I’ve been a big fan of PreSonus and their line of StudioLive mixers since we purchased one of the early models for our church. It has been easy to use, and the multi-track recording features have worked great for us. We have an first generation StudioLive 16.4.2 board, so we are at the limits of the board with the number of

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Technology

For the last couple of months, I have started using the Overcast App for listening to Podcasts. I’m wishing I would have made the switch from the native iOS Podcast app much sooner. It’s only available on the iPhone, but it’s a great free app. It does have a few small ads, but you can remove them for a small

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