Every successful project requires a clear vision for it to sprout, grow and produce fruit.
As the creator and administrator of this site, I had an extremely clear and massive vision.
I know for a long time Linda Sabatini, CR ONE, and others have talked and sent emails about building a CR community on FACEBOOK.
FB is just too cluttered and unfocused to adequately provide members and friends of Canyon Ridge a community environment.
Those of you that call Canyon Ridge your spiritual home know how special our church is. Everything at CR from the campus, the services, the community outreach, education, care and aid are all exceptional. CR is growing and thriving because - to use a business analogy - it produces a product that people want. Spiritually, CR feeds a diverse and eclectic congregation through powerful and moving services. Everything at Canyon Ridge is exceptional and extraordinary. When you have a community that creates that much of an emotional experience for its followers, you want to talk about it and share it. Social Networking sites have too many distractions to share CR effectively, in my opinion.
My vision for this site was to develop a site that provided links, information, conversation and ideas that were highly desirable to its visitors, and they'd want to come back. The CR website,
canyonridge.org is a well-designed, engaging website, but it is a directory and information site. It is not an interactive site.
PRIMARY PURPOSE OF THIS SITEThe primary purpose of this site is to provide an interactive community environment for Friends of Canyon Ridge. Here we can share things we learn about the church, announce events, create a calendar, explain church outreach with more depth, and share personal experiences from around the Ridge. There are no limits to the topics and ideas that can become part of this site.
As part of this community, I want to create a job bank - visitors to this site that have employment to offer can submit the information and we will post it to the site. People that are looking for work can offer links to their resumes, post qualifications and/or offer their services to this community.
Serve the needy. I envisioned people being able to come to this site and express their needs - whatever they may be. Maybe they need help paying a bill, food for their kids, help with an elderly family member, assistance moving, or just someone to connect with. My hope is that they will find what they are looking for at this site or follow a link to CR and get it there.
If you want to be proactive on the "D" in WWJD, you need knowledge. Providing an easily accessable online community allows people to share, ask and offer what they have or are willing to give. The scope of services and links provided by this site are only limited to the imaginations of its participants. The more people that participate in this site, the more our collective consciousness and understanding of our community beyond the CR parking lot will become evident.
GLOBAL PURPOSE OF THIS SITEFor many of us, when we are not in church, we spend a tremendous amount of time sitting in front of a computer. Email and websites are part of our everyday routine. For some, the thought of losing their email account would be a personal disaster. Electronic communication will only increase with time, not decrease.
More and more people are turning to the Internet to seek information that is important to their lives. However, there are very few interactive online Christian communities. Atheists have become very aggressive online and the message of our Savior is being ignored or discredited by the media. Yet there are thousands and thousands of people that are searching for exactly what a Christian life can provide for them, but they don't know how to find it.
The news media always focuses on the worst side of Chritianity -
the judgemental Bible-beaters that run around condemning anyone and everyone that does not listen to their screeching sermons and doomsday proselitizing.
Over the last five years, Atheism has DOUBLE in this country. People that identify themselves with a church has DECREASED by 20%. The flow of minds
away from faith is greater than those coming to faith. CR may be growing by leaps and bounds, but the world as a whole is sliding farther and farther from Christianity. Islamn is taking over Europe right now.
I saw a news report that deduced the decrease in Christianity or those that identify with Christianity had a lot to do with sloppy and unfocused leadership. The Catholic Church, headed by Pope Benedict XVI almost seems invisible in our world today. Pope Bendict XVI is an evagelical wallflower. He's an intelligent and demure man, but not very inspirational.
In the Protestant/Christian camp, many great, highly visible leaders have fallen. Some to scandal, others have passed on to their final reward. We, as Christians, have very few, true inspirational leaders and Joel Osteen's Prosperity Gospel isn't substantive enough for those that really want to live a Christian lifestyle.
This site is registered with Google's search engine and is listed as one of their sites. Over time, content will grow on this site and it will be found by seekers, worldwide. I know this for a fact. I have built 70+ blog sites since March 11, 2009. There are keywords I tested in Google that relate to a few of my sites. On one of my sites, if you can remember the name of the site, but not the web address and you type it into Google, the entire first page that comes up in the search is ME. I did that in just over three weeks. So I know producing content will create more chances of being found. I also know a few tricks that I can share with our authors.
I created this site on Easter Sunday - from zero to its current content. I am a prolific writer and I'm well aware of the talents God has given me and I plan on using them to the fullest to help people find Christ.
On Good Friday, working from 7 pm on Friday continuously until noon on Saturday, I created a companion site about prayer called,
Prayers For Today, which you can access through the sidebar of this site.
On the blog network produced by
Amazon, on the Christian Community site,
revelife.com, I have been producing a daily feature called
Proverb A Day. Also accessible through the sidebar.
For a year, I have wanted to take the 31 chapters of Proverbs and read a chapter a day, coinciding with the date of the month. Life's distractions kept steering me away from my goal. So when I began blogging in March, I created a Username:
youRloved on the
revelife.com site and began blogging Proverbs. Creating the blog created a sense of obligation or duty on my part to continue what I started, and with a few exceptions and a recent break, I have been relatively consistant at analyzing a single verse each day from the Book of Proverbs, and I'm starting to develop a following. A feed from that site is also in the sidebar on this site.
Many of my other sites will have links to these two sites, providing pathways for seekers to find us. In fact, part of my Intenet marketing strategy is to interconnect a massive network of self-produced content that creates links from one site to the next, all created by me.
As traffic grows on my business site, retail site or any of my information and education blogs, more people will come here. So I'm preparing for a big crowd some day.
Since the global Christian community is losing its highly visible voices, we need to think exactly like the first Christians. They didn't have TV or podcasts or billboards, they had voices. They planted the early seeds of Christianity one soul at a time. Christianity was born and raised from humble grassroots efforts by believers. My attitude is that we need to turn back the clock and become more like the early Christians and do whatever our talents allow us to do and become foot-soldiers in the war against our faith. But we need to do it the way Jesus did, in a loving and gentle tone.
If hard-line Bible theology is your bailiwick, you don't need to be here. Or maybe you do... and you could learn something about
Love one another and move away from
Judge one another.
My dream will be realized the day that we receive an email or a post or a call that says,
"Thank you for helping me find Jesus."So I challenge you, for that is what Christ did - challenged us. And He continues to do it today. He challenges us every day through The Word to be different, to be better, to give and serve more.
You may not have any idea how you can contribute to this community, right now. I'd suggest you click on the button in the sidebar right after you read this post and become a Follower of this site. You may also want to subscribe to the RSS feed. Then, just hang out.
Give some thought to
becoming an author, which will give you privileges to create posts, rather than just provide comments to posts.
Tell others at CR and in your lives outside of CR about this site. In the sidebar, you'll find a link that will show you ways to share this site, our companion site and Proverb A day. Easy to email or tweet (for you
twitter users) compressed URL's are provided. If all you do is help someone get to any of these sites, you will have introduced them to an extension of The Word, a glorious community of Christians in Las Vegas, and a place to petition the LORD online and maybe have others join them in prayer.
You have to think about and find what it is you can "D" from WWJD.
Bless you... and my the Grace of our LORD Jesus Christ be with you always.
In love and action,
Roger Blazic
Author's Note: I purposely did not provide links to other content in this post because I did not want those of you that share ADD with me to be off somewhere else and miss the message. However, everything mentioned in this post is available at some point in the sidebar on this site.
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