Two Years Before MySpace.com

In the spring of 2001 while at a local church service, Steve Lacy got a vision for a web tool that would allow the members of Alive Church to get to know each other more quickly and easily. He envisioned a system that would allow the members to capture their experiences, interests and passions and be able to share that information in an online system within the safety of the church body. This information would be available to other members and some tools would exist to connect others within the body with others with common interests, experiences and passions. This was two years before MySpace was launched and nothing like this existed.

Steve set out to build a prototype system and after a few months was able to show the initial system to his senior pastor, Jeff Love and his wife Kathy. They were amazed and felt like this would revolutionize fellowship within the church body.

Steve continued to build some other fellowship tools into the system and in August of 2001, he introduced the system to other christian churches in Tucson Arizona. The response was overwhelming!

The initial system naturally grew to include member management tools since a large percentage of member information was already in the system due to members completing and updating their profiles online.

During the first year or so, the MyFlock system grew to serve over 150 ministries and the word was spreading fast.

The Buy-out

The founding officers of MyFlock.com were then approached by a much larger web service company that was just entering the Christian church web site market. They offered to buy MyFlock and partner with the founding officers to extend their company's initial product to serve ministries world-wide. For about a year, we worked with this much larger company to market their web site product. It didn't take long to learn that the initial vision for fellowship tools within the church body wasn't shared with this new company and the founding MyFlock officers bought back the MyFlock system and existing customers.

Maturity

During this time, the eXtremeYouth.com product was introduced for youth ministries and a web content management system was added to the MyFlock system. We partnered with a graphics design company and introduced dozens of template designs and a fully functional web content management system.

The original MyFlock system continues to mature with new tools and designs every month. Innovative tools you will see nowhere else like:

• A member map that automatically creates a church google map with thumb tacks for every family member (click on the thumb tack and you see a photo of the member and their address info).
• Who's Online dynamic tools to see who's visiting your church site
• An outreach system that allows members to easily invite their friends and neighbors to church
• And much more!!