Dec
2
Written by:
host
12/2/2008 7:00 AM
Iowa (the state where Sally and I live) is a wonderful place, with a strong commitment to education. Many churches here, though, are not large enough to have their own staff person in charge of education ministries. Further, networking in person is often difficult because of the distances people have to travel and because many education staff are part-time (or is that part-pay?) employees. For these and other reasons, I started a listserv that anyone interested in Christian education in Iowa can join. Over the nearly 8 years of its existence, we've grown to about 125 members who can share ideas and pose questions all via email. Our list is among the largest Christian education-specific listservs in the country. ...
A listserv is simply a computerized service that maintains a record of subscribers to a particular group's list. Lists can be set up in two basic ways: one-way (only the moderator of the group can post - much like this particular ezine) or two-way (users can also post and respond.) There are many other ways to customize a listserv, such as setting the responses so that they go either to all subscribers or just to the person who originally posed the question or comment.
Currently, I subscribe to more than 20 listservs and moderate about 6 of them. It's quite easy for anyone to do and requires very little work! A few benefits of using a listserv rather than just an email group are...
- recipient emails can be private
- list members only have to remember one address for the group
- messages are archived and can be viewed on any computer with Internet access
- many of the list services are entirely free
Some of the reasons you might want to create a listserv are...
- to communicate with parents who are interested in a list of upcoming Sunday school topics or what is happening in youth group
- to have the members of a large class have a way to continue dialogue between sessions
- to create a daily or weekly devotional for your members or friends of the church
- to network with other Christian educators, youth directors, or pastors in your state, district, synod, etc.
- to keep an accurate list of all of the members on an administrative board, education committee, or in a church music group
- to have a way of sending special me ssages to visitors and people who wish to know more about your congregation.
In a future email, I'll share a few other tips for having a great listserv. For now, though, why not get started on your own? I'd recommend using Yahoo! Groups for your own list. They have a very full-featured system that is definitely easy to use. Just click here and either log into your Yahoo! account or create a new (free) account.
Start a listserv of your own (part 2)
~ Tim Gossett