new Maryland churches in metro DC

Got to hang out with Dan Cotter yesterday, who is gearing up to plant a new church in Upcounty Montgomery County, to serve the many people moving into new exurbs like Clarksburg, Germantown, Urbana, and spillovers from Gaithersburg, Rockville, and around that I-270 North corridor. Dan has a great mix of being relationally personable and also able to connect people together to do big things, like the annual FreedomFEST (aka Christ on the Mall) every 4th of July. We brainstormed ideas for empowering normal people to participate more easily in serving others through safe places to gather for spiritual conversations like Open2Talk.

Dan has been bold in getting many websites up and running to serve people for God’s Kingdom, even though he’s not very technical, and on this go around, he’s found a way to do it very cheaply. I’ve encouraged him to write up (on a blog) some articles about what he’s been learning in getting good-looking websites done up quickly and cost-effectively, which would serve the public well and also get him a few leads for consulting gigs on the side. So we spent a good deal of our time talking about search engines and how to make websites findable. See, the thing is, getting a website built doesn’t mean people will come. And the websites he had built in Adobe (formerly Macromedia) Flash look great (like 242.org for churches starting churches), but they’re not search engine friendly, so people won’t visit them except by word of mouth or passing out flyers and/or cards. Next time, I gotta tell him about reading and interpreting his web traffic statistics to see what users are doing on his websites…

Dan went even so far as to post his cell phone number to show his approachability with his new church. Give him a call to say hello! One question we had was: Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church has always been Baptist, but when he went door-to-door to survey people about church names, he had a lot of negative feedback about the Baptist label. So how did Rick (or how would you) respond to people who ask: “What denomination is your church?”

Next week I’ll hang out with Darren Plummer, who is planting a new church in College Park, Maryland, called Mosaic Community Church.