Faith or Fantasy Downloads

Free Downloads are available from the faith and fantasy conference

A few weeks ago South Manchester Family Church hosted a Zacherias Trust conference called Faith and Fantasy. If you were unable to attend you can download the talks for free from the Zacherias Trust website.

Changes to Our Website

You might have noticed one or two changes to our website this week.

The main change is that we have stretched out the ‘Media’ section of our homepage to make it easier for you to see and hear the latest videos and preaches right from the home page. There will always be easy access to our ‘welcome’ video from the top of that list so visitors can quickly find out who we are and what we’re about.

Additionally, we have rolled the ‘Coming Up’ and ‘CCM Life’ sections together into one. This means that all our forthcoming events and news will now appear there.

Remember, all previous entries (including all past preaches etc) are available by clicking the grey header.

As always, your thoughts and comments are greatly appreciated!

Keeping up-to-date with CCM via email

Your can keep in touch with what’s going on at CCM by automatic email update.

Each time new information is added to the website, you will be sent an email with the contents of the update.

To get news about upcoming events by email, enter your email address and click ‘Submit’:

To get the Blog by email, enter your email address and click ‘Submit’:

And for just Colin’s Blog by email, enter your email address and click ‘Submit’:

This service is powered by www.feedmyinbox.com

Keeping up-to-date with CCM via RSS

We have designed our website around 'RSS feeds' - a way of publishing content on the internet that makes it really easy to share.

Thanks to RSS. every update on CCM’s website can come direct to you without you even needing to browse the web to find it. This means you’ll never miss an update and you’ll find out about news as soon as it happens.

A good explanation of RSS is available on the BBC’s website.

You’ll need to download a piece of software known as an RSS, news or feed reader, or your browser may already have one built in (search the Help section in your browser for RSS).

When it asks you for the address of the feeds you want to subscribe to, either hover over the little yellow feed symbol (the three concentric arcs), right click and copy the link location, or cut and paste from the list below:

For the CCM Life feed (with news and upcoming events) - http://www.ccm.org.uk/ccm_life/ccm_life_feed/
For the Media feed (with preaches and videos) - http://www.ccm.org.uk/media/media_feed/
For the Church Blog - http://www.ccm.org.uk/blog/blog_feed/
For Colin’s blog - http://www.ccm.org.uk/colin_baron/blog_feed/

If this all seems a little complex, why not sign up to receive updates via email?

Our New Website

So here we are - the new CCM website.

The internet has been a part of my life for almost fifteen years now. I remember first ‘browsing the web’ (for that’s what we called it back then) at university in 1995 (anyone else remember Netscape Navigator?), and how things have changed since then. Email, social networking, file-sharing – all things the web made possible – have revolutionised the way we all live and work.

Churches, as usual about 10 years behind the curve, are starting to get the hang of the internet now. Well, one or two are. But it’s clear from the bulk of church websites out there that deep down, most are still thinking, ‘We’re in the people business! Why should we bother with the internet?‘

Some are little more than a cheerless statement of faith and a library of downloadable preaches. Not much of an advertisement for Jesus who came ‘full of grace and truth’. Others make theirs sound like the world’s best church in every respect. So when you decide to show up on a Sunday you feel like asking for your money back. The most common problem though is the onward march of time: the vast majority of church websites are simply out of date.

We’ve decided that it is worth bothering with the internet, precisely because we’re in the people business. Very simply, we hope ccm.org.uk will give you a glimpse into what it’s like to belong to Christ Church Manchester, a Newfrontiers church on the east side of Manchester.

For members, you can keep up to date with what happened each weekend, find out what’s coming up and hear thoughts from Colin and others on the blog.

For visitors, we hope that you’ll get a sense from the home page, the media and the blog, what God’s up to here in east Manchester. And if you’re looking for a church, or you’re looking for a place to ask questions about God and Jesus, we hope you might think of trying us.

We’ve decided not to post lengthy articles about every tiny detail of life at CCM, but instead to keep it simple and, hopefully, factual. We’ve decided to base it around RSS-feeds which means that it’s easy to update, anyone can add comments and that users can subscribe to any one of our individual feeds (Coming Up, Media, Life, or Blog) so you can get updates sent automatically to your RSS reader. And we’re trying hard to get the balance right between what we hope you will find if or when you come along.

Throughout the development process we have worked closely with David and Matt of Box-head, a design company based in Leeds. David and Matt are both members at Mosaic church in Leeds and have been great partners in the process. We recommend them highly for your new church website.