Category: hmm… thoughts

  • Anacortes

    We have made it to our day 1 destination of anacortes washington. its pushing midnight and we have to be up pretty early in the morning to catch our ferry to friday harbor.

    a couple of quick observations.

    first, dean force defines hospitality. he picked us up from the airport and drove us up here. that was super cool on a lot of levels. more than anything it was awesome to talk about his passion… messianic judaism.

    second, its cold! kristen and I just went for a quick walk and it has to be in the mid 40s.

  • move

    In the past few weeks I’ve heard a number of people… students, adults, business people, and youth ministry types use a phrase that I don’t believe in.

    "I’m waiting for the Lord to make it clear."

    This is a classic Christian stall statement. It makes me sick because it blames our inability to be decisive on God. God isn’t, by His very nature, indecisive.

    I don’t believe God calls Christians to stall.     I believe God calls us to act. The very core of our role as believers is found in the Great Commission and the key word is a verb… GO.

    • I think I want to look for a new job, but I’m waiting for the Lord to make it clear.
    • I like Joe but he’s not a Christian, so I’m waiting on God to make it clear to me.
    • I feel compelled to reach Mary for Christ, but I don’t know how to start so I’m just waiting on the Lord.
    • I want to make this deal but I just don’t know…. I’m waiting on the Lord.

    So, what are you waiting for? Are you blaming God for missed opportunities? (Which is the next step, isn’t it? "I was thinking about a new job, one became available that looked great, but I decided to wait until God made it clear to me, but then the job offer expired… so God closed that door.")

    Take some action.

    • Turn that prayer request into a first step.
    • Stop liking the boy who isn’t a Christian… God wouldn’t want you to sin.
    • Get some evangelism training.
    • Pursue the deal.

    I think a lot of the people I know are indecisive, not because of a character flaw, but because they lack the actual skills to make good decisions. I’m not an expert, and I make mistakes, but this is how I make decisions.

    1. Consult the Word. This may seem obvious, but you’d be surprised how many times something that makes perfectly good sense is actually taught in the Bible. Make a good decision would never involve my sinning.
    2. Seek counsel. Seriously, I never skip this step when it comes to big decisions. Heck, I even seek the counsel of my friends, pastoral-types, Kristen, parents, and the people in my life whom God has placed for MINOR decisions.
    3. Self-evaluation. When I hear what God’s unshakable word says, then listen to the counsel of the wise people God has put in my life… I evaluate the decision.. is this the best decision for me? Do I have to do this now? Is this too good to be true? Is this as bad as it looks? What kind of emotions is this bringing about? Is this a distraction from my life’s mission?

    When all 3 steps are done. Boom… I make a decision.

    I trust you Lord. I trust that His ways are better than my ways. And I trust that His path is better than my path.

    While I never want to be decision happy… I also never want to counsel people to blame God for their inability to get stuff done in their lives. I believe God has equipped each believer with the ability to make the best/wisest decisions and make stuff happen. It’s our role to trust God’s leading.

    Let our yes be yes and our no be no. But let God’s people be decisive.     God’s name is "I am." You don’t have to wait for "I am."

  • An update on the wink battle

    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.

  • Woody Allen interviews Billy Graham

    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

  • Reflections on Online Community

    Reflections on Online Community

    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.

    1. Define your purpose. For an existing community, I would swap the word “define” to “defend.” I’ve found that to be the hardest thing with managing YMX. There are both internal (mostly from myself) and external pressures to take the community in an unintended direction Effectively managing an online community takes overseers who are willing to guard the purpose. I think this has been one of the strengths of YMX, but it’s tough sledding too.
    2. Define the user experience you want. This is actually pretty important. Because taking the time to map out both what you want the community to be and how you want to form that community are two entirely different things. The platform your community uses is tremendously important to this. For YMX, we use a forum software package that really compliments the type of community we want to be. Open source, willing to try new things, secure, and flexible. That kind of paints a picture for who we are as an online community. But YMX is so much more than just our forum community… and as that picture gets more and more clear for us… we’re able to add features and remove features based upon our user experience design.
    3. Evaluate the system. We do this all the time. Better yet, our users do it for us. Every time I add a feature to the site I start a thread asking for feedback. If people try it and don’t say anything I presume that it worked. If they don’t give us feedback I take it to mean they tried it, it worked, but they didn’t like it. But if it doesn’t work, we always hear about it! Another important element of evaluating the system is noticing how people are using your online community in un-anticipated ways. When you notice that (for us, this was our recipe section) you have to decide… do I kill this? Do I allow it to be an abnormality? Or do I embrace it? For the recipe section… we decided it would be within our purpose to embrace it. And it’s taken off.
    4. Tweak it. Patient users of YMX will know we constantly tweak stuff. Features, design, layout… we tweak big and small things all the time.
    5. Observe it. Often times I perceive something as not working when it really is.
    6. Tweak it.
    7. Observe it. Getting the idea this is an ongoing process? I think this is one of the reasons why MySpace failed so hard. Once they got big they never added features, got rid of abuses of the system, or listened to customer feedback.

    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.

  • Church 2.0

    Web20
    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.

    Church20
    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.

  • Battles that are Brewing

    Battle_3It 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
    Youversion
    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
    Robbell
    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
    Iran
    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
    Charlieweis
    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?

  • 1000th Post

    1000thpost
    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:

    1. Thank you for reading. My audience is always "Adam McLane" as this is primarily a personal journal, but thanks for reading you crazy voyeurs.
    2. How am I doing? I obey some rules… do I follow them?
    3. What’s your favorite post? Just curious.

    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.

  • Please pray with Bishop Love today

    BishopbillEarlier 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?

  • IMC #4 The Hotel Hunt

    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.