The Foundry's Hispanic/Anishinabe Ministry
Ernesto Saldivar, a dentist from Houston, TX, and a member of The Foundry United Methodist Church, is coordinator of the church’s Hispanic/Anishinabe Ministry, which serves a mixture of cultures influenced by Mexico and Central America as well as a Native American population.
He has used the E-zekiel content management platform to create and maintain a Web site for this ministry for the last four or five years. During his experiences, he started with one of the E-zekiel templates and later added his own customizations.
“I made my own banner from scratch,” Ernesto said. “My tweak was totally original. I wasn’t using what E-zekiel did.”
The reason he did this work on his own was also the reason he was pleased with the Tweak service. “I preferred what E-zekiel had but wanted to use my own pictures,” he said. The Tweak process made that possible—and with better results than expected.
“It was a lot easier than what I thought it was going to be,” Ernesto said. His own work with a customized banner had been difficult and time-consuming. The Tweak was only three or four steps, he said.
“I thought I was going to have to supply a lot more information,” he said. Instead, he only had to provide the colors he preferred and the images he wanted to use and select which design to Tweak. “I liked it,” he said. The whole object was to get the pictures, and now that they’re there, participants in the ministry enjoy seeing them on the site.
About the Tweak process, Ernesto said, “It was pretty straight forward. She (the E-zekiel designer) asked questions to figure out what I wanted to do. She did all the work. After she finished, she called me.”
The Tweak interface is easy to use, he said, but he also wants to learn more and plans to participate in a UMC training day in Plano, Texas. He wants to learn a little more and see what other churches are doing. He said he also wants to share what he’s doing and “that E-zekiel and Tweak is the way to go. It’s so much easier.”
