Yup, Kristen has got her blog going again. I know she plans on talking more about our families shift to an organic lifestyle, gardening, shell hunting, and fun stuff for our kids.

Kristen was a pretty successful mom-blogger when that fad was hot. She got burnt out with all the free product people sent us to review so I think she’s going to avoid that this time around.

She and I sat down yesterday  to talk about a new look for her blog… let me know what you think. We were looking to create something fresh, open, and elegant. (Yes, the shell is one she found in a neighborhood in Haiti. Only Kristen could find a shell in a path a mile from the ocean amidst all that garbage!)

Most people read my blog via RSS or Facebook these days. (Roughly 50%) So if you are one of those people you won’t notice a few of these changes to my blog. Here’s a few updates, nothing death defying.

1. Added an FAQ and Free Downloads page under the “About me” tab. I love that people are using my contact page more and more. But I thought I’d just put the most obvious stuff there.
2. Swapped out the Feedburner email form for a better looking daily email from Mailchimp. Here’s a look at the archive. If you want to switch, simply opt out of the Feedburner email next time it comes and fill out the form in the right sidebar.
3. Also new to the sidebar, I’m feeding my Delicious account. So if you want to see what I’m bookmarking in the adolescent research and youth ministry categories, that’s right there.
4. It seems like people have figured out all of the Twitter and Facebook sharing, liking, and retweeting stuff at the bottom of every post. Thanks for that.
5. A few people have emailed that they missed the monster. I’ve taken note of that, so you’ve been seeing him appear in some more content lately.

I’m always adding and playing with stuff on my blog. This is kind of my test site for all the other sites I manage. So if something looks funky from time-to-time, now you know why.

The last two years has brought a dramatic shift on the axis of the blogging community. With the wide adoption of social media consumption there are a lot fewer daily bloggers and a lot more micro-bloggers.

The net result is a world full of newbies posting things online.

With this huge shift comes a need to re-educate folks on etiquette.

1. Observe the basic rules of the online world. Understand that there is no privacy. And anything you post can/will be used against you in the court of public opinion.
2. Properly cite your sources. Provide a link to your source. If you are quoting a blogger, mention their name and link their name to the blog post your are quoting. (At the very least, link to their Facebook or Twitter account.) Make sure you spell their name correctly… I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been quoted on a site with my name spelled incorrectly. How rude.
3. Understand the relationship between blogger and reader is reciprocal. The blogger gives you something to read and think about. If you take the time to read it, the reader should either respond with a comment, “like” the post so your friends can see you like it, retweet it, bookmark it, or share it on your favorite RSS reader.
4. Give credit where credit is due. Were you inspired to write something from another blogger? Than give a hat tip in your post. (You see this as HT to name. It’s also fine to say, “Adam McLane recently wrote about ____.”) Bloggers know what they’ve written about recently. Trust me, it’s rude to see people using your ideas without giving you credit.
5. Be careful when using proper nouns. That may sound silly, but you have to be conscious that your online rant may impact someone’s online reputation. (Or business or organization) I’m not saying it’s rude to call someone out… just be careful about it.
6. Don’t steal images. Just because you found something on Google images or Flickr doesn’t mean it is free for you to use!

Use your own images.

Create your own.

Use images published under a Creative Commons license, properly cited and linking back, from Flickr. (Share and share alike. If you use CC images, make sure to post some as well!) Just make sure to read the usage rights… typically using an image for commercial purposes is a no-no.

Buy stock photography from iStockphoto or something similar.

Just like in a sport– there aren’t always dramatic consequences when you breach etiquette. But there are social ramifications! Trust me, people are watching what you do online. They are making judgements about your abilities and character. Just like you try to act polite and use proper etiquette in the physical world… you are responsible for your own actions online.

Have an etiquette question? Leave a comment and I will add to the list as needed.

Note: I’m on vacation this week. My family has a rule for daddy– It’s not a vacation if daddy brings a computer. Each day this week I’m highlighting my favorite post from the adammclane.com archives. These are oldies but goodies.

“Who Are You Anyway?”

Confession #1: I’ve gotten wrapped up in being called a leader. I fall into the mistake of thinking people want to know what I think. Instead, a true leader defers to the ultimate source of wisdom, thinking, and counsel. The most appropriate thing I can do as a leader is point someone to ultimate truth found in the Bible. And I recognize that sometimes I do that and sometimes I depend on my own talent, experiences, and personal preferences. I used to be so good at saying, “This is what the Bible says: _______. And this is what I would do if I were in your position: ______________.” It seems that the more people want to recognize me as a “leader” the more I want to emphasize the latter instead of the former. The result is that I’m not always the best leader I can be. Ironic, eh?

Confession #2: I get wrapped up in being called a pastor. I’ve never been comfortable with that title. But as the year’s have gone by I’ve gotten much less diligent in blushing it off when people call me “Pastor Adam.” I don’t know if it’s that I’ve gotten comfortable with what God has done and others recognize that in me or if I just like being called a pastor? Now, it’s true. That is what/who I am. And I am not ashamed of the title. I am not ashamed of my position. And I am not ashamed of my church. It’s not about shame. I recognize that its a sign of respect for my position yet I’ve always been uncomfortable with being labeled any title. Since I entered full-time ministry I’ve always self-reflected and laughed at God’s slapping me… ME… with the title of pastor. Sure… since I was little… even before I was a Christian… I always knew I’d be in ministry. But I also know who I am. I am biblically qualified to be a pastor and yet I know who I am.

• Above reproach? As far as I know
• A one woman man? Heck yes!
• Temperate? I do my very best to not lose it
• Self-controlled? To the best of my knowledge
• Respectable? You tell me
• Hospitable? Check
• Able to teach? Check
• Not given to drunkenness? Been good on that one since early teens
• Not violent but gentle? By the grace of God
• Not quarrelsome? Not my thing
• Not a lover of money? How could I be?
• Manage his family well? Could always do better
• Not a recent convert? Check
• Good reputation? Let me know, OK?

Confession #3: I want to get more wrapped up in my identity as a daddy and husband than as “Pastor Adam.” Closing in on 6 years of working in churches full time and I know well why some denominations don’t let their pastors marry. The demands on the position are over-the-top hard to balance with a family. People think nothing of about calling me late at night or early in the morning to talk to me or ask me to do something. And I’m always tempted to work every day and most nights for youth group, small groups, meetings, and other stuff that lands on my schedule. I really don’t think this is biblical and I should be more disciplined about saying “Can we talk or do this tomorrow?” In the past 6 years we’ve had countless family meals interrupted, countless dates disrupted, dozens of movies put on pause, play time put on pause for other people so many times my kids hate it when I take a call, times with daddy missed for this and that. Spending quality time with other people’s kids while missing the same with my own. Honestly, I hardly ever noticed. But my wife and kids did. It’s tough being married with kids and being married with kids to a church. Only recently have I been doing some studying in the New Testament and I realized… “Wait a minute! These guys weren’t nearly as available as I am and God still thought they rocked as pastors and leaders.”

Read the rest

This is one of those blogs posts that has stuck with me. For the last two years I’ve been unwinding myself from being “Pastor Adam” to going back to being “just Adam.”

I’m thankful for my new life and friendships. And I’m thankful that most of those people know me as Adam and not Pastor Adam. I still don’t know/think that I’m done with being on church staff… but I do know that if there is a next time, I won’t let people call me Pastor Adam. You can have a title with your job. But you can’t ever allow yourself to be that title more than you are yourself.

Note: I’m on vacation this week. My family has a rule for daddy– It’s not a vacation if daddy brings a computer. Each day this week I’m highlighting my favorite post from the adammclane.com archives. These are oldies but goodies.

Why Ethnography is Important

Missionaries know it. Businesses know it. Documentarians film it. Marketers make money from it. But what is it? It is ethnography.

Ethnography ????? ethnos = people and ??????? graphein = writing) is the genre of writing that presents varying degrees of qualitative and quantitativefieldwork. Ethnography presents the results of a holistic research method founded on the idea that a system’s properties cannot
necessarily be accurately understood independently of each other.

It doesn’t matter if you are a youth pastor in a community. An insurance salesman. A high school math teacher. Or a physician. If you want to succeed in a community,  you need to take the time to understand how the community works. Understanding ethnography helps you understand how the people think, how the politics of both elected and unelected people control things, and understand how cultural phenomenon dictate community behavior. (Holidays, local business practices, etc)

Here’s the thing. Most doctors, pastors, insurance salesmen, and high school math teachers that fail, do so for cultural reasons and not because they are bad doctors, pastors, salesmen, or teachers. They fail because they failed to grasp the culture they are working in. Yet they blame themselves, their training, or even the people they want to sell to, provide services for, or teach for their failure!

Success at Romeo depends not just on us teaching doctrine and working hard. It depends heavily on us adapting and developing methods to reach our community by first understanding how the community works. Stick with me. Read the rest

Looking through blog posts in 2007, I can see my blog taking a big turn. For years I just blogged about what was going on in my daily life. Occasionally, I tossed in a thought or a principle. But in 2007, posts like this one started to creep up as I found a more comfortable voice.

The biggest advice I have for anyone who wants to get started in blogging is… write, a lot!

Note: I’m on vacation this week. My family has a rule for daddy– It’s not a vacation if daddy brings a computer. Each day this week I’m highlighting my favorite post from the adammclane.com archives. These are oldies but goodies.

The (C)old House

One thing I don’t like about an old house is that it is very hard to keep it warm. It’s a combination of a lack of insulation and inadequate duct work. If I had to do this house over again I would have installed radiated heat… but instead we have a blended system of forced air and electric heat. The result is that some areas are warmish while other areas are constantly drafty.

It’s been a joke of visitors that our house is always cold. People say “We’re going to Adam’s house, we need to dress warm.” Or my personal favorite is a friend of mine who says “We McLane their house sometimes.” (Now we’re a verb?) Why? Um, pretty simple… we can’t afford to keep our old house at 72 degrees. Even at 65 during the day and 58 at night, we’re a little worried about energy costs this winter.

Read the rest

As much as we love San Diego, we still miss our house in Romeo. It’s a great place to live and I’m happy to hear that someone is finally living there again. I just hope they figure out a good way to heat it before winter!

Note: I’m on vacation this week. My family has a rule for daddy– It’s not a vacation if daddy brings a computer. Each day this week I’m highlighting my favorite post from the adammclane.com archives. These are oldies but goodies.

Check Out YMX!

Hey, a buddy of mine and I launched a website lately for youth workers to connect up. This is filling the forum void left behind since YS closed their forums back in June.

Anyway, check it out at ymexchange.com

link

This changed everything. As I look back on the last several years, no event changed my life more than creating Youth Ministry Exchange.

For years the youth ministry world was pretty self-contained. There were a limited number of players and it seemed impossible to get your foot in the door anywhere.

So we created a new door.

Within a month we created massive traffic for our new business. We had some sense that what we were creating was important– but the truth is we had no idea what we were doing. We were even afraid to call it a business. We didn’t have any of the legal stuff done. We never had a business plan. We never spent $1 on marketing. And the two original owners have STILL never met. 3.5 years later I was sitting in an office at Zondervan signing paperwork and waiting for a bank transfer as we sold Youth Ministry Exchange, LLC to Youth Specialties. It’s mind boggling.

How in the world does a guy go from being a no-name youth pastor at a church of 150 to shaking hands and receiving a check from the CEO of a major publishing company in 3.5 years? Simple: Looking at closed doors and building an open one to walk through.

Investing $72 in an idea changed my life.

Want my advice? If you have an idea that you are absolutely passionate about… do it. Do it now. The idea and the opportunity are never going to get better than they are today. But invest less than $100. If it’s a good idea it won’t make a difference if you invest $100 trying it out or $100,000. (Donald Trump may be good, but that guy has led his company into bankruptcy three times! Never finance an idea with debt. Pure and simple.)

Note: I’m on vacation this week. My family has a rule for daddy– It’s not a vacation if daddy brings a computer. Each day this week I’m highlighting my favorite post from the adammclane.com archives. These are oldies but goodies.

Yes, I am Wasting My Life

August 31st 2004

Again this month we are short financially. Grad school came calling. Preschool came calling. Uncle Sam gets his cut in a few days. A combination of expected and unexpected expenses draws a little more money from savings to checking in a constant game of robbing Peter to pay Paul. Life’s expenses are again expensive. Each time this happens to me I start to reminisce about what life could have been like for Kristen and Megan and Paul. Had we stayed on the path of corporate success in Chicago we wouldn’t have this to worry about. The bills always got paid in full. There was always a little extra at the end of the month. We could always surprise someone with a special gift. Vacation? No problem. New tires? How about the best? New clothes? Why not. Yet in the same moments I recall the emptiness I had as I laid in bed at night, longing for my life to be wasted for something more important than getting richer… or more precisely, helping rich people get richer.

Read the rest

It’s 2010. I am still here. I am still wasting my life. And I still love every minute of it.

Photo by ElitePete via Flickr (creative commons)

My sincere apologies to anyone who may have had problems.

I still have no clue how my sites were hacked or for what purpose. Since tens of thousands of other sites were hacked at the same time it seems as though someone just sought to disrupt and exploit the internet in general instead of specific sites. There is a hypothesis that the sites were infected at the server level, meaning they wouldn’t have attacked me personally, just any site on a shared server.

I maintain my WordPress sites in the recommended way. All of my WordPress sites are running the latest version, 2.9.2. All of my plug-ins are updated. All of my passwords are “strong.” In other words, I’ve done everything possible to prevent something like this from happening.

All that to say, I’m back to normal. (Or as normal as I get) And thanks for your patience.

If you want to read about the nasty bug my sites had, the solution, and the discussion, here are some links:

Thank you to the amazing WordPress community and especially David at Sucuri.net for writing some code to fix the problem.

You now have the ability to post your comment at adammclane.com onto your Facebook profile. It’s completely optional, and as you can see in the image above, if you do link your comments to your Facebook profile you’ll have the chance to control how you’d like that to look.

Over the past year or so I’ve noticed that a big chunk of the discussion for each post has happened on Facebook. That’s fantastic, but makes it hard for me to keep track of. This is an attempt to try to bridge the blog and Facebook comments together so more people can join the conversation easier.

Ready to give it a try?

To test it out, simply leave a comment on this post. When you are done click on the Facebook Connect button.

Facebook will ask you to verify that you’d like to connect, agree to that and you’re done!

From now on when you come to the blog, if you are logged into Facebook, you’ll see your Facebook badge in the upper right hand corner of my blog. When you see that, you’re already logged in and ready to leave a comment– and share the discussion with your friends!

Easy, right? Thanks for giving it a try!