Northwest Baptist Church

Well, we finally did it! Say good bye to our decades old website and hello to our new internet presence. It has been a long road with a lot of hard work and prayer going into this project. I cannot thank you guys enough for your love, support, and words of encouragement. Special thanks goes to the following individuals, without whom I am not even sure this would be a reality:

• Pastor Tom – Words alone cannot express my gratitude for your tireless leadership and friendship. I also want to thank you for your spiritual leadership and prayer. You are always there for us and I know that a great many members of this church are eternally grateful for you,  your family, and all that you do. It was so great being able to love on you guys some during our last Church-wide fellowship and show our appreciation. May God bless you always! .
• The Website Team (Mike Ezzell, Mike David, and Ryan Soderberg) – Thank you for so graciously giving up your time and efforts to make this website re-launch a reality. Thanks for the laughs and listening to the rantings and ravings of a mad man during our meetings . Most of all I want to thank you for being there with your ideas, suggestions, and your help in pulling all of this together.
• The Leadership Team – For providing all the great content and suggestions. To Matt Lee especially for helping me get the last bits together so we could launch this site .
• Bonnie Hoekstra – For diligently sending the Sermon files each and every week while this project was still in progress. Thank you for all you do!
• My Family – Thank you all for your loving support and the sacrifices you had to make so I could spend time on this project of love. I love you all and appreciate you so much. I would also like to take this time to thank my wife, Caroline, for putting up with me. I love you honey! We all know that this was all for Him.

I also want to thank the Lord for Tim Hyde, the author of this church WordPress theme, for everything that he does with the whole WordPress-Driven Church initiative; his articles, thoughts, self-less contribution to the greater Open Source community, and most importantly his time . I may not know you at all personally, but You Rock Tim!

Finally, I have to thank our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ for He is the One that sustains me.

What’s Next?

Well now that I got all of that out of the way you may wonder what’s next for this website. There are a lot of plans in the works, but I will name a few things that people may find interesting:

• Enhanced Worship Section – Be on the look out for videos, photos, and a lot more structure and content for this section. I am sure we can utilize all the great media that Matt and company have been generating as of late. Thanks guys.
• Resources – There are a few things that are missing from our Resources section such as:
  • Calendar – In the future we’ll be looking at integrating the events postings with some sort of online Calendar that may also be displayed in one of the sidebars or somewhere on the main page.
  • Sermons Archive/Page - Down the road we may put a more complete listing of all past Sermons on this page for your listening pleasure .
  • The Compass – Shortly we will add present and past issues of our church newsletter to this section for your reading pleasure . Look for this in the next couple weeks.
  • Church Photo Gallery – Be on the look out for more photos on all pages/sections, but especially keep an eye out for the publishing of our church photo gallery. We have tons of pictures in the church flickr account that would be nice to have on the website, both on a separate photo gallery page and as an RSS feed of the most recent pictures tucked away in one of the sidebars.
• Sermon-based Small Group Study Resources – Starting January 2010, as we head into our new Sermon-based Small Group studies program for our LIFE Groups be on the look out for  information on where and how to access those resources on this website.

Well, that’s all I have for now. Thank you all again for making this website re-launch a reality and we look forward to utilizing this great communication tool to further His kingdom. I still can’t believe it’s here! God is so good!

In Christ,

Dan Baber