Month: July 2007

  • Managing a virtual community

    Designing_online_community
    Or congregation for that matter.

    I’m trying to sort out the meaning of three things I’ve read this week. All three have to do with the big question, "What is community?" and "How do you help people form balance in an online community?" From a 10,000 foot perspective the question doesn’t really become "What is it?" or "How do people find balance?" It becomes "How do I manage to maintain an community in a healthy, productive way to become something enduring and profitable?"

    Here are the three articles/posts I’ve read that have me trying to connect the dots.
    Virtual Reality = Virtual Community = Virtual Relationships by David Garrison
    Jobs of the future, #1: Online Community Organizer by Seth Godin
    Second Life and Multiverse by Bobby Grunewald

    On one side of the discussion Garrison, a youth pastor, is questioning the value of virtual relationships in comparison to online relationships.     He says that online communities are morally neutral, yet are often being used in unhealthy ways. That’s a good point but I wouldn’t go so far as to say that all online relationships are somehow more or less dysfunctional that real world ones. My experience in more than 13 years of using online community is that it’s just as possible to form real relationships online as offline. You can be just as fake in real life, you can block people out of your life just as effectively, and dysfunctions in your personality will always evidence themselves in all areas of our lives.

    Lifechurch
    From the perspective of Lifechurch.tv, Grunewald lives out an attitude that online relationships are not only "real," but they can also be redemptive to reaching people for Christ.      That’s why Lifechurch.tv, one of the most innovative churches on the planet, operates a campus on Second Life. As the article mentions, a lot of "virtual people" who experience church at their internet campus, eventually reach out and make one-on-one connections with a local church or even one of their locations. In my experience with online communities this is a natural outgrowth. A sign of a healthy online communities is the "meet-up." Converting online friends into offline friendship has been an amazing experience for me. Online communication has some limitations as it fails to capture many of the nuances of language. After all, how much of our communication is non-verbal? How much depends on you knowing me personally so that when you read my words your brain says, "I can see Adam saying that, I know what he means despite his ability to articulate it clearly in writing." And in my role with Youth Ministry Exchange I can verify that nearly 100% of disagreements that occur in that online community have to do with misunderstood context and things that wouldn’t have caused conflict when combined with non-verbal communication.

    Sethgodin
    I had all of this swirling around the grey matter (Is it good? Is it moral? Can it last? Is it enduring and helping the trade?) between my ears when I read Seth’s Godin’s post.     In Seth’s opinion, forming, managing, and growing trade-based online communities is one of the big jobs of the future. See, it’s one thing when you feel like the only guy on the block who thinks your idea is worthwhile. It’s another thing when one of the premier business minds out there says the same thing. (Hey, when is this guy going to appear at the Leadership Summit?) See, I think places like YMX are valuable to people in Youth Ministry… but I am just one person and a nobody. When other people start saying that trade-based online communities are important now and will be super important in the future, I start to believe it!

    Ymx_nofullname
    I know online communities are important.     (Why else would I operate one?) And I know they can be redemptive. (Why else would we have joined the Gospelcom Alliance?) The hard part of managing an online community is this: Creating an online place where everyone feels valued, feels like they can contribute, and is still narrowly focused enough to effect growth and change in a specific sub-culture or trade. Put that in a bottle and you will make millions.

    Questions: When it comes to online communities from YMX, to Facebook, to the now dead and dying MySpace, what is the community value? How does an online community keep out of the grave? How does it keep going and become something enduring for an entire tribe of people?And how do I manage a community for long-term and not short term profit in the way MySpace did?

  • 3 RSS Feeds for Free Youth Ministry Stuff

    Freemonday_logo_draft
    I’ve gotten a couple of comments in the last two weeks saying things like "Why is Youth Ministry Exchange giving stuff away when other companies/sites already do that?" I’ve got a lot of sarcastic responses to that question but the simple truth is this… We think you can’t help youth workers enough with free stuff.

    With that in mind, I want to give you my personal top 3 sites for getting Youth Ministry Stuff for FREE.

    1. Simply Youth Ministry Freebies Subscribe to the feed
    2. Tim’s Schmoyer’s "Life in Student Ministry" Subscribe to the feed
    3. Youth Ministry Exchange’s "The Monday Exchange." Subscribe to the feed

    Just as a bonus… here are a couple of other "FREE" sites that I use all the time for snagging good ideas.

    1. Pastor 2 Youth
    2. The Source for Youth Ministry’s game section

    Do you just take what is being given away and use it? Not all the time. In fact, with the YMX giveaway we’re trying to give away both a ready to use version and the source files so that you can easily tweak stuff for your use. To me, there is nothing worse than using a free or a pay resource and having your students walk away and say… "It’s not like they came up with that, it has some other youth group’s logo all over it." I believe people should give credit. But then again the point behind the free resource giveaways for me is helping youth workers look good. If they want to tweak a couple of things so they can call it their own, I’m cool with that.

  • Getting Green Again

    Green_grassAfter some drought conditions, the last several days have been quite rainy in the Romeo area. I still think we are behind on rain for the year but we are back on the right track.

    As a result, this morning the grass was noticeable perkier in the backyard. Instead of seeing patches of green among the brown we can see greenish brown grass and darker green grass.Playground

    I’ve nearly given up on making the front yard look as nice as possible. With the easement looking like a playground in Baghdad, other than keeping the grass cut and stuff like that I don’t really see the point.

  • Wonder why we want a new sign?

    Here’s why.
    Romeosign
    At first I thought… "Should I post this?" Then I realized… somewhere between 9 PM and 9 AM a few thousand cars already saw it. I’m posting it to make a couple of points.

    Interestingly, both Jason and I noticed it immediately. It’s funny because you don’t often notice the text of a sign as you drive. That is, until the text is different.

    You see, our eyes take in billions of pixels of information an hour. Our brains automatically ignore most of the images we see because we’ve already seen and processed that. We can ignore what we already know. But our mind draws our attention to things that are different.

    This is why marketing is such a fascinating science. How do we develop a message that both lasts and is different all the time?

    And the new sign we want. It won’t have moveable letters for this reason. Only problem with that is that it won’t have moveable letters to draw your attention to it. Which mean, we need to design the new sign in a way that is memorable for other reasons.

  • Sex!

    College students talk about sex. Some interesting thoughts here. Some that are thought provoking, stupid, and…

    What do you think?

    HT to Jeremy DelRio

  • Random Facts Meme

    Well, I have been tagged in this by the big guy over at YS. I’ll share my favorite movie below and you’ll know why I am going forward with this.

    Rules to play

    1. Players start with 8 random facts about themselves.
    2. Those who are tagged should post these rules and their 8 random facts.
    3. Players should tag 8 other people and notify them they have been tagged.

    My 8 random factoids:

    1. I drove a 1978 Ford LTD station wagon in high school. I graduated high school in 1994. You can imagine how much of a chick magnet that was.
    2. Kristen and I met when we were just 18 years old. We’ve dated now for 13 years and are seriously considering making it a lifetime.
    3. I have a man crush on Paul Simon. I’ve got diamonds on the soles of my feet. I’m a poor boy, empty as a pocket with nothing to lose. My favorite movie is the Godfather. I can’t lie, I would like to be the Don.
    4. I went to the bathroom in the woman’s bathroom at Giordano’s last spring. It was an accident and the whole time I kept thinking… why don’t they have urinals here?
    5. In 2001, Sammy Sosa’s 50th home run of the season hit me but I didn’t get the ball. It was a line drive and left quite a nasty bruise.
    6. I have never watched any of the most popular shows on television. Instead, we watch mostly the Travel Channel, Discovery, History Channel, and Food Network.
    7. I have never broken a bone nor been in a car accident while driving. Though mentioning it somehow guarantees it will happen in the next 24 hours.
    8. I’ve played thousands of holes of golf, carry a 7 handicap, but never gotten a hole in one.

    I’m going to cheat and tag the same 8 people as Patti. Why? Because I’m tired!
    Knotter
    Cathy
    Angie
    Pk
    Jeff
    Todd
    Dirk
    Beth

  • No Child Left Behind

    Marines1
    The United States Marine Corp has a motto that
    they never leave a soldier behind on the battlefield. In the same way,
    in every youth ministry interview I have been asked some variant of the
    question, "What would you do if you discovered that you’ve left a
    student at a location?    " As a youth worker who loves taking students on
    road trips, this is a very practical question and it speaks to the very
    heart of youth ministry road trips. At the end of the day, each child
    that you take on a trip needs to return on that trip. Every child
    matters!

    The reality is that during each person’s youth ministry career there is
    one story about you leaving a student at a rest stop. When I was in
    high school we all told the story about our youth pastor leaving the
    senior pastor’s daughter at a Christian college. Unfortunately, in the
    days before cell phones, he didn’t discover his mistake until he
    arrived in the church parking lot to find his boss steaming in the
    parking lot because his 14 year old daughter had called him hysterical
    from the school’s bookstore because she had been left behind. That
    story, while funny, has haunted me every time that I’ve taken students
    from my ministry on a road trip. But I don’t think that I’ve had
    success in this area of my ministry because I’m haunted, I think it’s
    because I’ve implemented a simple system to ensure that I never leave
    student’s behind.

    3 Practical Failsafe Measures to Ensure You Never Leave a Student Behind on a Road Trip

    1. We always travel together. On
      multiple vehicle trips, I alway have the group travel together. This
      seems exceedingly simple but I am surprised to discover that not all
      youth ministries do this. When we stop for gas, we all stop together
      and we all leave together. When we leave an event, we don’t leave
      the main location until I’ve checked every name off the list
      physically. This means that no matter how large the group, my eyes have
      made visual contact with every person we’ve brought. And I won’t give
      the "all clear" to leave the main event location until I have accounted
      for every student.
    2. Never allow students to change vehicles. When
      I first started doing road trips I thought it would be fun to have a
      constant shuffling of students in vehicles. From a group dynamics
      perspective this made some sense but it was terribly hard to keep track
      of people. Now we simply don’t allow, no matter how much whining or
      reasoning, a student to move vehicles on a trip. They can change seats
      in a vehicle but the vehicle we leave the church in is their vehicle
      for the trip. This makes it simple for each driver to do a count at
      each stop before they leave. It seems a student should notice if the person they were sitting next to was not on the van. So my job is simply to walk around to each
      vehicle and make sure each driver has everyone. When all the drivers
      have everyone, we depart… together.
    3. We talk about it all the time. "Nine out of ten, that’s an ‘A’ in my book."
      I have intentionally ingrained a joke into the youth group for the sake
      of keeping our desire to bring everyone home that we left home with. This is
      a fun way to keep the discussion on everyone’s mind and much less
      annoying than the trips mantra being "Do we have everyone?"
      On every road trip I start off by telling everyone how many people are
      on the trip and then introduce the joke. "Today we are going to Cedar
      Point in Sandusky, Ohio. We’re leaving the park at 6:00 PM and it’s
      your responsibility to be at the meet-up location so you don’t get left
      behind. Today there are 36 of you and one of me. In my book 36 out of
      37 is 97%. (Pause) And that’s an A in my book. Good enough for me      ." It
      always gets a laugh and it always keeps the thought in everyone’s mind
      that they don’t want to get left behind. The last kid leaving the bathroom and running to the van will say something like "I don’t want to be the reason you don’t get an A+."

    Eventually, it
    will happen.     My system will fail and I’ll leave someone behind at the
    Super J on Interstate 75 south of Detroit. To answer that parent’s
    question of "What would I do if I discovered I’ve left someone behind?"
    I like to tell them these two answers. First, I’d call their cell
    phone. This is 2007 and most students have a cell phone. (They were
    probably playing with it in the gas station in the first place and
    that’s why they got left behind.) And second, I still got an A
    because 9 our of 10 is 90%. (Heck, 90% is better than I did in almost
    every class in Bible College.) All jokes aside, I answer that question
    by reassuring parents that we have a system with 3 failsafe measures
    built into it and that we will do everything we can possibly do to
    ensure that it never happens.

  • Brandon Inge Lays Out

    Inge
    Here’s the video. (This isn’t the picture from the game, it’s from a previous dive at Comerica.)

    Jaw dropping play there.

  • Saturday Tunes

    Saturday_tunes_2Quiet day around la casa de McLane. Here are the next 10 tunes on my iTunes shuffle. No cheating. Feel free to laugh and comment! My rating is also included.

    1. Somebody to Love (Happy Feet Soundtrack) *****
    2. Bittersweet Symphony (The Verve) *****
    3. Replace Me (Family Force 5) *****
    4. Sometimes You Can’t Make it On Your Own (U2) ****
    5. Constant (Building 429) ***
    6. Losing the Will to Survive (Findlay Brown)*****
    7. X-Girlfriend (Family Force 5) *****
    8. We All Want the Same Thing (Kevin Michael) *****
    9. Feels Like (Jeremy Camp) ****
    10. Casting Off (This Beautiful Republic) *****

  • Pray for Cathie

    Cathie Gibbons, daughter of Patti and Tom, is right now en route to La Paz, Bolivia. She’s on a 20 person mission trip for the next 12 days doing all sorts of ministry. You can get updates on their trip on their mission team blog. I am positive Cathie will have a great time serving our Lord as she is an awesome young lady.

    I got to know Cathie a little bit on my trip to Albany last month. She is 100% 15 years old, but also developing a 100% heart for God. As a youth worker she is the reason why we do this thing. She truly gets the idea of "blind stupid faith that makes no logical sense" and lives it out.