Hello all,

I’m fairly new to Affinity - I first heard about it from Jonathan Stephens who spoke at the Association of Irish Evangelicals Conference (AIEC) last year.

I quite like the style and layout of the site but content is always the key thing for me. Forgive me if the following areas have already been addressed - just giving my sixpence ha’pennys worth on the sort of thing I would like to see in the future - given that I haven’t managed to find any bugs as yet.

1. I would like to see an audio dimension. Perhaps it would be good to have a set of basic evangelistic messages that we could point people to or link to.
On the long term - something along the lines of the audio section of the All Souls Langham place site would be excellent. You could make use of a variety of speakers around the UK.

2. Another dream of mine is a large library of the older hymns (no copyright issues - and I admit I prefer them anyway ) where you could download a sung mp3 file as opposed to a midi file. The quality of the singers wouldn’t be important to me - just the sort of thing you hear in an average church on a Sunday morning.  I quite enjoy hymns on Sunday Half Hour on radio 2 - (not necessarily the bits in between ! . But it would be good to be able to choose the hymns.

3. A little bit of Christian news over the past week/month. This could be in text or in audio format. I quite enjoy listening to radio shows such as Any Questions of Radio 4 where a few well-known names reflect on the week’s events.

4. Perhaps a guide to radio and TV that might be of interest to believers in the coming week.

Finally, let me say how pleased I am to see this site up and running. I recently created a site for our own fellowship and I am eager to find good quality sites to link to in Ireland and the UK. I think that this site will be a tremendous asset.

The Anglican Diocese of Sydney website does some of these quite well.

1. Audio

http://sydneyanglicans.net/indepth/mp3_library/ collections of sermons from various churches in the diocese, and also organisations such as Moore Theological College and the Australian Fellowship of Evangelical Students.

3. News

http://www.sydneyanglicans.net/aroundtheweb/ - lists news items that may be of interest

Maybe the Affinity website could do something similar to both of these.

Thanks for the links Ben - very helpful. It would be wonderful to have such a thing here although you do have to do bit of digging to find the audio on the sydneyanglicans site.

Another thing that crossed by mind is downloadable logos and instructions for linking to this Web site.  A church might not be a member of Affinity yet might want to link to the site. It might be good to provide a bit of guidance on the proper use of logos etc to link to the site. I recently asked bethinking.org about this and had a very prompt reply with the logo attached. I think that it is good to be able to showcase the best of the wider world of evangelicalism to those who visit a church Web site. Let’s face it - there is a lot to be embarressed about. We need to point to all that is good.

Re: Audio Downloads.

Apparently, online sermons have helped Bridge Chapel, Liverpool (FIEC) to increase church attendance.

iPod link tunes in for churches; Liverpool Daily Post; 28/12/2006

CHURCHES across Merseyside are using the latest technology to connect with their congregations.

The use of internet downloads and podcasts has also encouraged more people to actually attend services, say church leaders.

Steve Evans, who runs the podcast service at Bridge Chapel Christian church in Liverpool, says the online sermons have led to a surge in worshippers attending in person....