I can remember being all excited at the getting the vision for PASSION and designing logos and a pictorial vision statement with our vision, goals and supporting verses.

It is an exciting time when things are new. They are so full of potential and can become anything. The sky is the limit!

Looking back to November 1998 I have fond memories. Hours and hours spent in prayer. Hours spent day dreaming. Hours out in the streets spent talking with people in the hope they would come to Christ.

I think it is good to sit back and reflect on your beginnings. Things like logos, vision statements and the way you did things can be a bit dated, but it can also inspire you to press on in the future.

Looking backwards to when you first began can fuel your moving forward.

God Bless,

Dave

In total I have over 73,000 unique visitors to the PASSION Website. That is up about 10,000 from 2010. And about the same crowd that turned up on day one of the Boxing Day Cricket Test!

The top articles (not blog posts) people have read are…

• What the Bible says about salvation (3703 views)
• Principles of Christian Leadership (2782 views)
• Being a true disciple of Christ (2735 views)
• Seeing yourself through the lens of Scripture (2671 views)
• Why do we need the Holy Spirit (1922 views)

The top two individual blog posts were about the Tour de France…

• Tour de France update (3601 views)
• Cadel Evans versus the clock (3472 views)

The top downloads of 2011 were…

• MP3: Behold I stand at the door – Revelation 3:20 (736 downloads)
• PDF: Free Discipleship Booklet (711 downloads)

I am pretty happy with those numbers. The main thing for me is that I feel like I am doing what God asks me to do and that people are finding my articles and blog posts helpful.

If you are a regular reader, thanks for stopping by in 2011. I will continue to share my reflections on faith and life in in 2012.

God Bless,

Dave

I have had several goes at FriendFeed over the last two years and to be honest I am still working out how I will use it.

For me it seems to be somewhere between Twitter and Facebook. You can do short status updates, share photos and make comments. There are also no games, advertising or constant changes!

The thing I like about it is you can use more than 140 characters and you can upload photos directly to it. You can also update your Facebook and Twitter accounts from there too.

If you are interested in connecting via FriendFeed, you can find me here www.friendfeed.com/davequinn316. If you don’t want to set up an account you can sign in with Facebook or Twitter.

God Bless,

Dave

Over the last few days I have been making some updates and changes to my website and blog. I have been thinking about doing this for a while now and over the weekend it happened.

The main change is that I have combined my website and blog into one WordPress blog. All of the pages of my website have been brought across and are available at www.passionaustralia.org/blog.

Across the top of the pages you have links to the pages like about, salvation, discipleship, articles, audio, Bible readings and contact. Down on the side menus you still have all the things like categories, archives, website links, today’s Bible verse and my latest tweet.

One cool new thing (I think) is a “pages or sitemap” section on the righ hand menu. I put this in so you can view all of the longer articles on the blog that are a bit long for a standard blog post.

The final change is the change of theme. I wanted to make it a bit more personal for me and fit in with where I live, so I included an image of me mountain biking through the trails of Merredin.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the changes. If you follow via RSS Feed I hope you can stop on by.

God Bless,

Dave

The top five individual pages (not including hits by robots) were as follows…

1. What the Bible says about salvation – 394
2. Princliples of Christian Leadership – 330
3. Seeing yourself through the lense of Scripture – 287
4. Being a True Disciple of Christ – 235
5. Why we need the Holy Spirit – 195

The top MP3 message was “Behold I stand at the door” from Revelation 3:20 and the top PDF was our “Free Discipleship Booklet“.

I think it is important to check and see what people are visiting on your website every month or so. It really helps you in planning what resources to add and seeing which things are popular.

God Bless,

Dave

Just to let you know that I have set up a mobile friendly version of The PASSION Blog.

Here’s the link to phone friendly version.

God Bless,

Dave

For my work with PASSION I am also check the web statistics several times per month to see what people are viewing and what search terms people use to find my website. At different times there are spikes in topics and pages. However there are also some regular things that make the top list of pages each month.

Here are some of the things people want to know about online from a Bible/Christian perspective…

1. Salvation – people want to know what the Bible says about salvation and how they go about it. I find hundreds of people each month visit my salvation pages to see what God says on this issue.

2. True Disciple – Another very popular article is being a true disciple of Christ. It seems Christians want to know what it is to really follow Christ and how they live this life out each day.

3. New Christians – one page that has hundreds of visitors each month is my tips for new Christians page. This seems to be a combination of new Christians and people wanting resources for their friends. This is shown in the search terms.

4. Self Esteem – many people come to my website to find help for self esteem issues. They want to know who God says they are and see themselves through the lens of Scripture.

5. Bible Readings – the last page that receives a lot of traffic each month is my Bible readings page. People search for things like “Bible reading plans” or “Easter Bible reading plan”.

Prayerfully looking at and evaluating your website traffic can really help you to know what people are interested in online. It can also help guide the things you do in future to keep bringing people back and being a continued blessing to them.

God Bless,

Dave

Yesterday we uploaded the audio for our discipleship program. The booklet “A New Beginning: Setting a solid foundation for your new life in Christ” was released earlier in the year. So far it has been downloaded more than 2500 times.

Recently we felt God prompting us to record the audio for each section of the study. We did that over the last week and have now uploaded in eight short MP3 files. The files are about 10 minutes in length and are about 1.2 megabytes each, so most people should be able to listen to them online or download them to their computer.

The study includes a salvation message and then seven short studies to help new Christians get a good start to their new faith. It touches on areas like assurance of salvation, the Bible, prayer, church, serving God, sharing your faith and the role the Holy Spirit plays in helping us to live the Christians life.

If you would like to use the study for yourself or for some of your friends/church you are more than welcome to download the materials. They are free for personal or church use, but should not be placed on another website for download.

I hope you find them useful. You can find the materials here http://www.passionaustralia.org/newbeginnings.html

God Bless,

Dave

1. On a single verse post – sometimes I might have been reflecting on a particular Bible verse. I might have read it recently and have been mulling it over and what it means to me. I think just try to put my thoughts down in a post in a way that will encourage and bless people. Here is an example – “Clothe yourselves right“.

2. On a passage post – at other times I might have a read an interesting passage in my daily readings. Generally I will use the heading for the section in the Bible and try to pull out three or four points from the passage. In a sense I try to give each paragraph a heading and then explain each one. Here’s an example – “Jesus’ teaching about money and possessions“.

3. On a Bible theme post – my final way I come up with ideas for blog posts is by looking in my concordance and seeing what the Bible says on a particular subject. I did this recently for the post titled, “What does the Bible say about Angels“. By the end of the post you get an overview of what the Bible says on that subject.

So there you go, that is three ways with how I come up with ideas for my Bible posts. I thought I would share them for any aspiring bloggers out there. Just as a matter of interest – number 2 and 3 are how I go about writing sermons too.

God Bless,

Dave

I just added a new article/message to my main website. It is titled, “How to be a living sacrifice”.

The article is based on Romans 12:1 and looks at seven things from Romans 12 that helps us to see what being a living sacrifice is all about.

You can find it here – http://www.passionaustralia.org/livingsacrifice.html

God Bless,

Dave