Bad Powerpoint....baaaaaad powerpoint

Considering I do worship powerpoints at church, and do your 'typical business' powerpoints at work, this one strikes pretty close to home...

23 Squidoo!

Sometimes my head spills over with all the new ideas I stumble across on the web. I recently found Swicki, a combination web search and wiki - its a search tool that you can optimize and tailor, and train, and then allow your community of users to improve by giving feedback.

Here is a test swicki I've created.

I'm also still trying to get my head around Squidoo. Its a web site that allows you to create Lenses, or unique views on different topics. The lens is a web page that can point to lots of different resources and web sites devoted to that topic.

It would seem useful to have a lens devoted to a church, which could highlight the church's vision, mission, programs, and ministries. I did a very brief search this afternoon and didn't find too much. I did find Church! At Bethany

http://www.squidoo.com/churchatbethany/

I like the ideas behind Swicki, Squidoo, and del.icio.us because they allow you to place another viewpoint over existing web structures. It allows for alternative ways to access info, and allows for community participation in making a web site stronger.

For now I'll keep thinking this one over

Phoning It In!

OK. this isn't the world's most exciting photo. Its a picture I took a while back on my phone at a Chris Tomlin concert (from the back row at the Dodge in Phoenix).

The cool thing is that I created this blog entry from my phone (well not the whole entry, I sent in the picture first in order to get it "claimed" and routed to my blog, and then I went and edited this after the fact to add the text (I have no mobile-typing mad skillz).

I got on this small sidetrack after finding a church youth group blog here on blogger (weareonetour), chronicling a mission trip for Katrina relief, and having a "V8" moment. Our church's youth are currently on a mission to Mexico, and something like this would be a great way to share the trip. I'll have to get this worked out for the next one....

Volunteer Coordination through Blogs

We were recently having some discussion at church about how to handle scheduling and signup of volunteers for Sunday mornings.

I recently finished reading The Blogging Church by Brian Bailey and Terry Storch. It is a terrific resource for learning about using blogs for many different uses in church life, and I'm hoping to write more about it later; but one use for blogging mentioned was using a blog for sharing news of ministry teams. The book suggests using multiple (and free even, like this one) blogs for sharing information.

I came across an example of this - a blog used for scheduling Sunday morning worship. The media team for Lake Pointe Church uses several blogs to schedule media team volunteers for multiple campuses.

You can see the schedule gateway here. Choose a campus, and you'll see a blog like the one I've shown here. There is one blog entry per week. Volunteers can view the current schedule in the entry and add comments to volunteer (or change status).

Its a very simple and elegant concept, and an effective use of blogging.

I believe the same concept can be applied over at our church's forum. In fact, I'm currently using the forum to list songs for each week for the Praise Team. It would be pretty easy to extend this concept to scheduling.

The one big drawback is that it requires volunteers to actually use it; and I'm not sure our congregation may be ready for this.

Oh Usher, There's a Cheetah in My Seat

Along the way in my discipleship journey I've come across lots of innovative things for ministry. This one boggles my mind.

Second Life is an online virtual world, where users can create digital versions of themselves and explore, participate, and basically live in a online universe.

As with many online worlds, some of the interaction can be, well, adult oriented, let's say, but some churches are making outreaches into this world as well.

LifeChurch.tv is a progressive church that connects many locations through satellite hookup, and hosts online church activities and worship experiences.

They're also entering the Second Life world with an virtual version of their church. People can attend the same worship that's being broadcast in the "real" world in Second Life.

Imagine being in a worship experience where the worshiper next to you is a Cheetah (see above).

According to the LifeChurch.tv website,

We developed "Experience Island" as an effort to share God's truth and love with the rapidly growing number of Second Life users. We desire to engage people right where they are (physically or virtually), and Second Life represents a new frontier in that effort. Because the Second Life environment uses avatars, people are able to remain relatively anonymous. We find that this creates a less-threating environment where people are much more willing to explore and discuss spiritual things.

I have to admit I'm both completely fascinated with this idea, and somewhat unsure about what this means for worship, especially in terms of human contact. This MSNBC article and video covers that angle as well.

I do think that we need to continually examine how we as Christians adapt to new cultures and new technologies. I'm still thinking I need at least some "real" church though.

I found an example of the Second Life church experience on YouTube, see for yourself:



By the way, a nod to TechnoPraxis for the original article that led me to some additional reading and surfing.