neurological dryer lint

so recently i got asked by some lifespring staff to get some folks from the church together to discuss their current website and how it could be improved, 'modernized', whatever you want to call it... now keep in mind that the current site looks pretty slick as is, but it's also simply a brochure for lifespring, and web 2.0 has introduced a ton of capability that is very valuable for a community-driven organization like a church. what we really want to do is extend the church community onto the web, allow us to interact and share our lives there as well as in the building, especially because we are heavily investing in the multi-site thing as well as small groups - and so the number of physical locations where we exist is growing steadily.

we had our first meeting this morning and i'm pretty excited... initially a fear that (1) there wouldn't be enough people to "do it right" and (2) nobody would really care had me trying to limit the scope to simply adding more content to the site - stuff to appeal to folks trying to plug into a church... in essence, making a shinier brochure. but the other folks in the meeting put that to rest pretty quickly - and just go buck wild crazy, and build our dream site.

we came up with a list of features that was fairly obvious for anyone who's used the web in the past three years - sub-sites for each of the three locations (north college hill, western hills, and harrison); subscribable content - message podcasts, video, event calender feeds; staff blogs; individual sites for small groups; easy subscriptions to existing mailing lists; and a ugive-esque database of volunteer needs and opportunities that individuals and groups from the church can sign up to attack.

i'd love feedback from everyone - examples of churches that are doing this now, free services (like youtube/odeo) that could be used instead of rolling our own; aspects of any of the aforementioned features that should be done in a particular way; or other features that'd fit well with this kind of theme.

i know we're certainly not the first to attempt this and we aren't trying to win any competitions here - just create a system that serves the lifespring community and people that are checking it out. so whatcha got?