Tag: gospel.com

  • Goodnight Gospelcom Alliance

    I was pretty excited to have Youth Ministry Exchange join the GCI Alliance back in 2006. In fact, we made a big deal about telling people with over 100 guesses as to what the big surprise was all about.

    I sensed in the last few months things weren’t going well… staff leaving for other places and not getting replaced, stuff like that.

    Yesterday I got news that the Ministry Alliance will cease to exist in mid-December. For the 200+ organizations who look to GCI for assistance and encouragement this was a huge shock.

    Here’s parts of the email I got.

    As the result of a number of factors, the Board of Directors of Gospel
    Communications has decided that the ministry of Gospel Communications as we
    have known it is coming to a close.  This was, obviously, not an easy
    decision, but our commitment is to carry it out in the best manner possible.
    We are currently involved in trying to find good stewards for the various
    ministries of Gospel Communications who will be able to carry those
    ministries forward.

    I wanted to let you know that the decision talked about above means that the services offered to Alliance Ministries (hosting, technical support, training, etc.) are coming to an
    end. Although this is not the path that any of us would have necessarily
    chosen, we are committed to making this transition as smooth and as
    God-honoring as possible.

    Right now it looks like our date for “end of service” will be December 15,
    2008. We are contractually obligated to give Alliance Ministries 60 days of
    notice. The December 15 date will make the transition period approximately
    90 days.

    Here’s my personal opinion. I think that the need for the Alliance may have passed. When it was created back in 1995 this thing was totally needed. Ministries struggled to find decent hosts, small ministries had no practical way to create an online presence without spending tons of cash, and there wasn’t a lot of technical support out there for people just learning. Boy how times have changed! Speaking as a member, having been to the conference, I just don’t see the need for this type of Alliance.

    With that said, I do think there is a great need to keep ministries together. I think that things like traning events and sharing resources is always going to be needed. Further, I think that as ministries get more sophisticated and as high capacity people look for work in this field there will be a greater need for the networking that something like GCI could provide.

    In other words, a retooled version of the Alliance could and will still work. Fewer hoops, increase the help, and loads of churches and ministries will flock to it. Hint: Make it for-profit, ask people to pay to be a part of it, but make it worth their while to pay. Another hint: Dump the hosting and technical support. No need to compete on that playing field with hosts that are so cheap and so reliable.

    What about the Gospel Communication sites? All I know is that there’s no way sites like ThinkChristian.net or Biblegateway.com will go away. They are simply too popular to let go.

  • The Road Trip from Hell Winner

    road tripMy students know that I love a road trip. There is nothing quite like climbing into a church van and driving to a destination. So a few weeks back YMX decided to have a contest to find out “Who has the worst road trip story?”

    It turned out that my NYWC buddy Chris Wyatt of South Carolina (and an adoptive parent newly back from Ethiopia) had the craziest story. This beats any road trip nightmare ever! Read the rest of the stories. If you like ironies, check out how Gospel.com avoided using the word “hell.”

    Here’s the winner:

    We’ll start with the fact that the last 20 miles of the trip took 2.5 hrs, driving over steep, curvy mountain roads in a whiteout. It snowed three feet in those two hrs. I was driving a loaded van, pulling a 10 ft. trailer, leading a caravan of several other vehicles. We couldn’t pull off of the road, and cars were going into ditches all around us. So, after 12 hrs of driving, we finally get to the lodge. We wake up the following morning to 18 degree temps and strong cross-winds. As we are walking to get the kids their skis, we start down a set of steps. One of our chaperones promptly falls on an icy step and breaks her ankle. Badly. I wrap my coat around her, and take off looking for ski patrol. We hook her up to a sled, and get her the infirmary. I then have to dig our van out of the snow (more than an hour), and go off the road twice driving to the infirmary. The nearest hospital with the facilities to help is almost two hours away over icy mountain roads. We FINALLY get to the hospital, and they tell us she needs surgery. They don’t have the facilites to do the surgery. So they put her in an air cast and send us back to the lodge. We get to the lodge and there are no wheelchairs, so we have to carry her to the room on a luggage rack. We get her settled in and drugged up, and my phone rings. It’s the ski patrol office. I have another girl with an injury, and one of my boys has been in a collision that required the other party in said collision to be airlifted out with a kidney injury (NOT my kid’s fault). So he’s been stuck in the patrol office all day, as he can only be released to his legal guardian (me for that trip…the other party tried to sue him for the wreck, and it went to court…our kid won). I take care of the injury, get the kid back on the slopes. The following day weather is so bad that no one can ski. Every kid at the place was holed up in the lodges. For a whole day. We start the trip back the following day. Our chaperone with the shattered ankle has never been in the mountains before this. She is doped up on painkillers. We are about 10 minutes into the trip when she suddently projectile vomits – right into the back of my wife’s head. There’s nowhere to stop for another 20 miles or so until we get to the bottom of the mountain. We finally stop, and I clean vomit up off of the van while my wife goes into the bathroom to try to clean the chunks out of her hair. Well, you know what happens when a van full of people has to smell vomit for hours. Everyone started chunking, and we had to stop every 30 minutes or so to empty out plastic bags full of barf. One of the vehicles broke down, another got lost from the caravan. It took us over 15 hrs to make what SHOULD have been an 8 hr. trip. On top of that, three kids ran out of money, and I had to foot their meals on the promise from their parents that I would be repaid on arrival. Did I ever see that cash? Nay.