A couple of folks have asked me about the battle of Mars Hill that broke out last week.
There really hasn’t been a huge response. But I’m guessing that it’ll be a topic of conversation at the Emergent Village Gathering this week.
Here’s the blog response about the incident on Emergent Village. Those big tough buys from Emergent are battling with winks. I’ll bet everyone is shaking in their boots about it.
I thought this would make everyone think. With Billy’s health now failing, it’s good to see him as a vibrant 50-something exchanging wit with Woody Allen. Part 1 Part 2
HT to Think Christian
Last week I sat in on Kent Shaffer’s session on “Communicating without Words” at the Internet Ministry Conference. And tucked deep in the session were his “7 Steps for [creating/managing] an Online Community”
After all, if Seth Godin said this is one his top new jobs of the future, it’s worth talking about.
I wanted to take a few minutes to apply those thoughts… letting them play out.
I’ve had loads of people tell me that online communities are just a fad that will quickly fade. Well, as someone who manages a community (rather, I’m part of a team who manages a forum) I feel as though if we just continue a process similar to the way outlined… we’ll just continue gaining steam.
YMX just crossed the 200,000 post mark. We’ve got about 1100 members. And overall I see us as “just getting ready to go public with our service.”
At the end of the day… any organization would be wise to obey this process. It isn’t a God-ordained, perfect process. But it is a process that works.
What if "church" as we knew it started acting more like Web 2.0?
Think about it…
Web 1.0: Professionals controlled the content. They mostly collaborated with other professionals for web content, web design, web development.
Web 2.0: You and I are in control. In effect, the people are in charge and there are new professionals controlling content, designing their own sites, and developing what they want.
Web 1.0: We had to wait for Microsoft to come up with something new. Or a 3rd party had to build a plugin like Java to enhance our web experience. Remember… people used to pay for web browsers like Netscape Navigator, Internet Explorer, etc.
Web 2.0: Everything good seems to be open source now. The best browsers are free and I would argue the best content management software is also free.
Web 1.0: Statistics that mattered were mostly about visitors, pageviews, and everything else based on "did people look at my content."
Web 2.0: Stats that matter are… comments, interactivity, feed subscribers, widget implementers, social bookmarkers.
For discussion:
What about the church. What if the church were to change how it fundamentally went to a 2.0? What would church look like? What would ministry professionals do? And what would the people do?
p.s. There is apparently a video project called church 2.0 about this subject. Here’s another guy talking about it as well.
It seems like there are some interesting battles brewing. I don’t mean like nations that are about to start new wars, I mean within the culture I live in, there have been and will be some gauntlet’s thrown down.
Here’s a summary of the ones that I’m watching.
youversion vs. Gospel.com
I happen to be a beta user of both Web 2.0 utilities and while they are significantly different, both will be battling for the attention of Christian internet users. So far, I see the power in both of them. Youversion is a little more "open" as anyone can bookmark things. The flipside is that Gospel.com is only allowing Alliance members to bookmark content which means that all the content on Gospel.com will be more trustworthy.
Emergent vs. Evangelicalism
This recently heated up in what I’ll call "The Battle for Mars Hill." Jonathon Herron talks about Mark Driscoll calling Rob Bell a heretic. A few weeks ago Doug Pagitt and John MacArthur tangled on Headline News. Go ahead and grab a box of pop corn and get ready for fans of all sides to listen to the artists drop some game and scream, "Oh no he didn’t!" As Doug points out today, it’s already getting personal. Come on boys, no shots below the belt.
Iran vs. America
OK, so this one isn’t as fun to watch as the rest. This could get really ugly really fast. Iran’s president is either completely oblivious to the fact that American’s don’t like him very much or he thinks he can win the American people with his charm. New story. The Scott Pelley interview that was on 60 Minutes last night was quite interesting.
Lloyd Carr vs. Charlie Weis 
Who is in the hottest water with their team? Michigan fans have been quieted… but both groups of fans are not happy with how the season has gone. Lloyd Carr lost 4 games in a row before beating Notre Dame and Penn State. While Charlie Weis has list 5 in a row including 3 games where his offense failed to score a touchdown. That said, neither is in as imminent danger as 2006 Super Bowl quarterback Rex Grossman.
Anyone else see battles brewing?
I just by chance noticed that this was my 1000th post. (on this version of my blog, by the way. This is blog version 4.0 for me… been doing it a while.) Time flies when you are having fun. 1000 sure seems like a lot.
I’d like to take this moment to do a number of things:
An idea: I’d like to have some guest bloggers… so if you are a reader and would like to share something, please drop me an email, mclanea@gmail.com, and invite yourself to blog here as a guest.
Some stats: (I mean, I’m a pastor… shepherds like to count stuff)
Posts: 1000
Comments: 767
Pageviews: 30,366
Feedburner subscribers: 52
Average visitors per day: 44
Public service announcement over: I’m going back to my regularly scheduled posting.
As always, I relish your feedback.
Earlier this summer you may recall that I had the pleasure of serving as the youth speaker at the annual convention of the Diocese of Albany. I found the people of that diocese to be both longing for the truth’s found only in Scripture and hugely worried about the future of the Episcopal Church’s membership in the worldwide Anglican communion.
I read on Patti’s blog that Bishop Bill, the head guy in Albany, is asking people to pray and fast with him as today is the most critical day. (news story) Essentially, today’s meeting with the Archbishop (head guy in all of the Anglican communion) will determine the course of action for the American church.
I invite you to join me in praying that the Holy Spirit will come
mightily upon this House, touching and transforming the hearts and
souls and minds of every Bishop here, helping us to discern and carry
out the will of God. May His will and only His will be done. Just as
Paul encountered the risen Lord on the road to Damascus, may we too
have a Damascus road experience in which we, the House of Bishops, are
convicted of that which is not of God, repenting and asking His
forgiveness of our sins, and then be given the grace to be faithful and
obedient in exercising our ministry as bishops in God’s holy Church,
keeping Jesus Christ at the center of all that we do. (click here to read more)
Why should I care enough to pray?
Do you believe in the inerrancy of Scripture? (Is the Bible literally true?) Do you believe that people, in the name of Christ, should be encouraging, edifying, and blessing homosexual couples?
Clearly, the Bible teaches us to hate sin but love the sinner. It’s my prayer that today some people take a stand to guide their people back to what the Bible actually says instead of what pop culture has determined is acceptable. As my former pastor, Ray Pritchard, often said… "O, that we would be a people of the Book." Truly let us be like those in 2 Kings 22-23 and not only be people of the book, but stand with and pray for our brethren who also stand up as people of the Book. Will you battle with Bishop Love today?
Those who know me well will appreciate this story. This is a typical Adam story.
I came to Grand Rapids tonight with no plan. Basically I just got in the car earlier today and drove over here
and figured it would all work out. I was pleasantly surprised to see that dinner was free and as I entered the Prince Center someone from Gospel Communications took me over to the dining room and I sat right down and started talking to folks.
So the session ended and I wasn’t sure if we were supposed to hang out or not. I did for a little while and then figured it was a good idea to find a place to sleep.
I went to Days Inn… too expensive.
I’ve stayed at the Motel 6... let’s just say I slept in my sleeping bag that night.
I went to Marriott... $160!
I went to Hilton… yeah right.
Then I came to the Quality Inn…
First off, it’s way nicer than the Marriott. With a name like "Quality" my expectations we awful. But it turns out that it’s a very nice place. Free breakfast. Free wireless. And a great price.
Turns out not doing my reservation through the convention didn’t cost me anymore than the old AAA card got me.
Recently I submitted an article to our ministry friends at Simply Youth Ministry about communicating a single complimentary message from the church as opposed to many competing messages. And I am pleased to see that they have decided to publish it. Here’s a sneak peak:
On a staff retreat last
summer, a light bulb went on for our team. After reading a series of
articles and books about strategic leadership, we came to a simple and
profound conclusion: We are going to teach complimentarily and not
competitively across ministries in our church from now on. I’d like to
walk you through our team’s process so that you can see both how we did
it, and how our students have benefited as a result.
Click to continue reading the article
A funny sidenote: I kept wondering if they were going to ask me for a picture since I knew they would use the article for their email newsletter. To my surprise they chose a picture from my blog here that Megan took. Funny surprise.
As I mentioned a couple weeks back, Kristen and I were pleased with ourselves for being prepared for "Big Money Day" on September 15th.
At the same time, that also means that times are pretty tight for us as we’ve just paid a massive amount of bills. In fact, this causes a little anxiety and a little "ahhhh!" every time I think about it. For whatever reason, even though that saved money was for this purpose now that it is gone makes me feel in a panic. (Even when there is nothing to really worry about, we’re fine!)
Let me just articulate a couple of temptations I face when things get tight. Maybe it will be helpful to others who live on a salaried income… it’s not like I can just work a little overtime like in the old days. We simply have to budget our way back to "comfort."
These are all pitfalls I fight when times are a little "thin" in the bank account. Here’s the thing… we live on a budgeted income. Not very many people can sit down in January and know exactly how many pennies of income they will bring home in 2007… but salaried people can. This actually makes budgeting simple and yet a lot of ministry friends struggle to budget the high’s and low’s of the year into their spending mentalities.