Help rename LGBC.ORG

I've wanted for quite some time to replace our LGBC.ORG web address with an address that's more connected with our ministry. Our current address is an acronym for Lititz Grace Brethren Church, and while it's still one of many nicknames people use to refer to the body of believers that meet at 501 W Lincoln Ave, I think it's finally becoming less prevalent. As a result, I'm looking to get a new web address. Unfortunately, most, if not all of the logical ones are already taken, so I need your creative help. I welcome your suggestions and thank you in advance.

What happened to Pastor Scott's blog?

If you are a regular reader of Pastor Scott's blog, Folks, Listen!, you noticed that we experienced some technical difficulties over the past few days. I'm not entirely sure what went down. What I do know is that we were unable to publish posts or make changes to the blog. But the change was part of a bigger issue that I've been navigating.

The host of lgbc.org recently contacted me to inform that the church website had reached a size of some 2 gigabytes of data. That's compared with the 250 megabyte limit of our current web host plan. In other words, our website was way over our limit. Working with Elaine, we've been trimming the church site of out of date information and other superfluous files, but even that didn't remove enough data to get us to the 250 megabyte level. It was then that I realized the Folks, Listen! blog was in the mix too.

When Pastor Scott launched Folks, Listen!, I was of the mindset that as the Senior Pastor's blog, it should be on the church's main website. But I'm no longer convinced that having it at that location generated any new traffic to the church website. So, with the blog taking up additional disk space, and with blogging services offering to host a blog for free, it seemed logical to move.

The move occurred much faster than I had planned, which didn't give us the option of advanced warning. If you can't find Pastor Scott's blog after all of this, here are the links.

New Homepage Coming

As I mentioned a while back, our webpage (www.lgbc.org) has been in need of a makeover as it's been at least some two years since we last revised it. The work's progressing, actually almost finished, and I expect we'll have a new homepage up in the next week.

Actually, the new design is the work of Bryan. We're putting his eye and creativity for graphic layout to work for us or back to work for us. If you look at the past 8-10 years, I'm not sure we've ever figured out who's best suited to do our website. Bryan ran it until around the year 2000 or so, when I picked it up. I've run it (with Elaine's help the past two years) since 2000 and now it's sorta going back to Bryan, if only temporarily.

Fortunately, I think each time it's changed hands, we've only taken steps forward, building on what the other has accomplished. From the draft I've seen, that trend continues with this latest change.

And don't worry, while a new homepage will be nice, a new menu layout for all of our pages is not far behind. We've recognized for sometime that the menu structure is lacking.