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Archive - May, 2008

Formulating an Online Strategy for College Ministry: Part 3-Why You Should Be Blogging

May 31, 2008 in Ministry-Theology with 12 Comments

Of all the topics I’m going to address in this series, this seems to be the no-brainer to me. I started blogging about 4 years ago at the encouragement of one of my students at the time, Jared Kleier. He set up a blog for me on our college website and away we went, though it wasn’t quite that easy. I remember writing and deleting one post after another because I had never experienced writing something for immediate consumption by the public.

All it took was some encouragement from others, and a few links from other bloggers, and then the blogging bug just seemed to take over.

Lots of people have various reasons for why those in ministry should blog. Mark Roberts has 18 Thesis’ for why pastors should blog. You can view his Powerpoint Presentation, Pastors as Blogger, at GodblogCon 2007.

Mark is just one good resource.

There are a lot of reasons why I think those involved in college ministry should blog, so let me give you just 11 (yeah 11) that come to mind and that I have found helpful reasons for blogging:

Communicate, Communicate, Communicate: A blog is simply in many ways about communication. When you blog, you communicate to others on a variety of topics.
Reiterate the Mission: When you blog, you can continually communicate, and therefore, one of the important pieces of communication is to continually reiterate and blog about the mission of the ministry. It’s a good way to remind students and keep everyone accountable, focused, and on task.
Encouragement: A blog is a great way to encourage those in your ministry, whether it be other staff, leaders or the congregants. Devotionals, posts of encouragement, thank yous, and recognizing others are just some forms. Continue Reading…

Downward Mobility is not Cool

May 28, 2008 in Ministry-Theology with 6 Comments

The way of the Christian leader is not the way of upward mobility in which our world has invested so much, but the way of downward mobility ending on the cross.
Henri Nouwen, In The Name of Jesus: Reflections on Christian Leadership, 62.

Just yesterday I was in two conversations on topics related to discipleship, coolness and downward mobility.

Bottom line: We tend to live in a culture where we all want to be cool. So much so, that the Church often tries to find cool ways to bring people to Jesus and into the Church.

And let’s admit it, we all want to be cool, there are just sometimes varying degrees of it. People in Los Angeles really want to be cool, and try very, very hard at it….and yep I live in Los Angeles.

We try to wear cool clothes, hang out at cool places, attend cool churches and be in small groups with cool people.

But I’m left here scratching my head thinking to myself: “I can’t think of anything cool about following Jesus. Giving your life away, carrying your cross and following Jesus to the cross is just not cool.”

So what are we doing then by trying to make Jesus and Church cool? Takes us nowhere and leaves us empty.

The Dilemma of the Church: Pursuing it’s Mission or Self Preservation

May 23, 2008 in Ministry-Theology with 2 Comments

Clay Shirky in Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (pp. 29-30)

Running an organization is difficult in and of itself, no matter what its goals. Every transaction it undertakes—every contract, every agreement, every meeting—requires it to expend some limited resource: time, attention, or money. Because of these transaction costs, some sources of value are too costly to take advantage of. As a result, no institution can put all its energies into pursuing its mission; it must expend considerable effort on maintaining discipline and structure simply to keep itself viable. Self-preservation of the institution becomes job number one, while its stated goal is relegated to number two or lower, no matter what the mission statement says. The problems inherent in managing these transaction costs are on of the basic constraints shaping institutions of all kinds.

Thoughts:

Churches cast a vision/mission statement. This can often be handled in two ways: 1) They spell it out very specifically for the congregants through steps, action plan, etc. 2) They leave it open, allowing for the creativity of the congregants to carry out the vision/mission as they see fit.

Dillema: If the church doesn’t spell it out, and wants the congregants to be creative, the church needs to cut off the “choke point” that is usually created by layers of bureaucracy and hierarchy, giving freedom to the people. Or they need to spell it out, give marching orders, but in the process they cut off people’s creativity and the participation of the congregation.

In the end, the church has the choice to be self-preserving by maintaining control, or really pursue its mission/vision by opening up.

Responses to a Commenter

May 23, 2008 in Ministry-Theology with 2 Comments

Ryan at Tilling the Soil asked me a couple of good questions related to my post below, so I want to give them proper attention in a post, and not just leave a comment for him.

I had the chance to talk with Ryan by phone last week and I enjoyed our conversation, and I’m looking forward to connecting with him when we move to Dallas this summer.

1. Ryan Says:
May 23rd, 2008 at 9:01 am e

Rhett,
Hey man, I’m really enjoying this series.
I have two concerns:
1) With all of the networking that is going on, is it realistic to ask people to go to another site (your church’s site), even if you are farming out all of the content to facebook, flickr, etc.? In my world if I can’t RSS it, then I probably won’t see it.
2) How do you deal with students who want this before the church authorizes it, and so they create their own facebook groups, mychurch.org pages, etc? (i.e. how do you maintain control in such an environment?)

-ryan

Response to Question 1

Ryan, I don’t think it really is realistic. In fact, I know for certain based on traffic, that our college webpage’s traffic decreased dramatically after our Facebook group was launched, and it has pretty much decreased to no traffic. I think most church’s will have this problem and may not realize it. They design sites that have forums, videos, photos, links, etc., but people aren’t going to leave their networks to do those activities on a church’s website. One, people already have enough committment to a site like Facebook, and to ask them to commit to your church’s website in the same way is unrealistic. Second, church website’s just can’t compete with the social tools out there.

Formulating an Online Strategy for College Ministry: Part 2–The Purpose of Your Website

May 22, 2008 in Ministry-Theology with 15 Comments

I think it’s important for college ministries to be forumlating a plan, and developing some ideas about how they can strategically use the internet to best serve their ministry.

There are a lot of topics that I could cover, and maybe 9 posts is too much, so I will try and keep them shorter than my last post.

Last week I posted Part 1–Simplicity, Flexibility, Cost and Speed. Bottom line: You need to have a design and plan that is simple (easy to navigate/aesthetically clean from a design point of view. You also should keep the costs low which is easy to do with all the free and inexpensive tools out there. And speed should be taken into consideration, mainly from the perspective of how fast can you integrate new technology to meet the needs and wants of your ministry. Way too many ministries plunge lots of cost and time into a site, that they no longer can adapt to changes, but are stuck with it for years to come.

Today I want to post about The Purpose of Your Website.

What is the purpose of your website?

This is an important question to begin with. What do you want it to do? What do you want people to come to the site and see and use? What should they walk away with? Sometimes ministries just build websites because they feel like they should have one, but never stop to consider its purpose.

Is it for college students to retrieve information? Is it for them to sign up for Bible studies? Is it for them to be able to visit forums and dialogue?

With these questions in mind we also need to keep in mind that with all the tools out there (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, etc.) a website shouldn’t have to do everything, unless it can do it better than those services (which I doubt it can do).

So here are a few pointers that I have found helpful:

Romans 8 Movement: Harnessing the Self-Organizing Creative Power of Church Community

May 21, 2008 in Uncategorized with 7 Comments

Back on Wednesday, April 23 I wrote a post called This Isn’t Your Parent’s Prayer Chain. The post was about a young woman in our church, Katherine Wolf, who was one of the volunteer leaders in the Young Marrieds ministry, and who went through an unbelievable 13 hour emergency brain surgery at UCLA.

There are a lot of amazing things that are coming out of this story, such as the unwavering faith of family and friends. The huge network of people praying for her and her family. God’s continued grace, presence, support and protection during this very difficult time, etc.

But what has really, really impressed me as well is the way that Katherine Wolf’s circle of friends have self-organized in a powerful way, and created amazing avenues and opportunities for people to be involved.

It’s probably cause I read The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations a few months ago.

And maybe it’s also cause I just finished Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything.

And last night I was reading through Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations.

What do they all have in common? Basically, people are organizing themselves in powerful ways that thwart the traditional means of organization through leaders in authoritative, hierarchical positions. No longer do people need to go through an institution to achieve their end goal. Many churches already know this, and still, so many other don’t. Those who recognize the shift will be in positions to harness the unbelievable creative power of a church community. Those who don’t will find themselves struggling to carry out the vision for their church community.

Two Conferences to Put On Your Calendar

May 20, 2008 in Ministry-Theology with 0 Comments

There are a lot of conferences out there, but here are two that I will be talking about more, especially as time draws closer.

DRINK–CollegeLeader Conference

September 4-7, 2008 in Southern California!

DRINK: The reservoir of college-age ministry resources is no longer dry. It’s no secret that it’s been bone dry for years, but we thought we would provide a little refreshment! Come and join us for a time of learning, brainstorming, discussion, networking, and talking about church-based college-age ministry over cups of coffee.

The conference doesn’t stop with leaders though! This weekend will also be for students. We can all drink from the fountain!

Speakers include Chuck Bomar, David Kinnaman and others.

GodblogCon: A Gathering of Christians to Advance the Kingdom Through Blogging + Internet Technologies

September 20-21 in Las Vegas at Blog World & New Media Expo

I will definitely be at GodblogCon again. I look forward to seeing old friends and meeting new ones…looking forward to meeting Andrew Jones. That’s worth the cost of travel, hotel, food and conference.

Formulating an Online Strategy for College Ministry: Part 1–Simplicity, Flexibility, Cost and Speed

May 16, 2008 in Ministry-Theology with 24 Comments

DISCLAIMERS: 1)There are better technical people out there concerning the web. 2) Do as I suggest, not as I do. I’m trying to keep up myself, and our college website reflects almost nothing of what I talk about. That’s how fast things change. 3) There are a lot of college ministries out there, and there are a lot of online tools to use, but it doesn’t seem like many are thinking through how to best utilize the new media and Web 2.0 (and yikes, Web 3.0) in their groups. 4) Knowing that things change overnight in technology, I hope to somehow impart to you some of the things I have been learning and wrestling with in these areas. You don’t need to be an expert in this area, just know enough to think critically about the issue. 5) If you have feedback, suggestions, criticisms, please comment. This is by no means all encompassing.

Starting Out

There are a lot of good books out there on the new media, web 2.0, building web platforms, etc., but no book has challenged my thinking, and convinced me to turn in certain directions as did the “manifesto” Getting Real by the guys at 37 Signals, when it comes to the issues of simplicity, flexibility, cost and speed. I consider it a must read in this area.

Getting Real is about skipping all the stuff that represents real (charts, graphs, boxes, arrows, schematics, wireframes, etc.) and actually building the real thing.

Getting real is less. Less mass, less software, less features, less paperwork, less of everything that’s not essential (and most of what you think is essential actually isn’t).

Getting Real is staying small and being agile.

Getting Real starts with the interface, the real screens that people are going to use. It begins with what the customer actually experiences and builds backwards from there. This lets you get the interface right before you get the software wrong.

Getting Real is about iterations and lowering the cost of change. Getting Real is all about launching, tweaking, and constantly improving which makes it a perfect approach for web-based software.

Getting Real delivers just what customers need and eliminates anything they don’t.

When a college ministry decides to have an online presence there are a few things to keep in mind. Some of these things are:

student participation
the fast changing culture of college/university life
finicky tastes/styles
revolving body of students and leaders
budget
access/control
etc. (these are just a few)

The Things That We Yearn For…

May 16, 2008 in Technology-Social Media with 0 Comments

It’s funny how some words become commonplace in a community or culture. As a resident of Los Angeles you hear a lot of talk about “sex” and “sushi.” It seems that these are two things that Angelenos highly esteem. So when I came across the book, “Sex, Sushi & Salvation: Thoughts on Intimacy, Community, & Eternity” by Christian George, I knew I must pick it up. Rarely do you see the word “salvation” in the previous word mix, but I knew as a college pastor these are important topics to the community I minister to. People’s worlds often revolve around sex (i.e. intimacy, connection, belonging, love, etc.), sushi (i.e. food, sustenance, community, great conversation, going out) and salvation (i.e. God, Jesus, transcendence, community, eternity, etc.). George says:

Since humans are made in the image of God, we have three basic passions–intimacy, community, and eternity. We burn for them, save for them, pay for them, and pray for them. But only the God who fulfills these desires within Himself can perfectly fulfill them in us. This is a book about sex, sushi, and salvation–a book of snapshots–the ups and downs, the failures and fortunes, the smiles and trials. In these chapters, I retrace my travels around the world, from pagan temples in Greece to Transylvanian mountains in Romania. I confess my lust and love, my struggle with truth, and my quest for Christ.

Fasten your seat belt. It’s going to be a wild ride. And along the way we just might discover that the God who satisfies us with Himself joins us for the journey.