Tag Archive - YouTube

Formulating an Online Strategy for College Ministry: Part 7–Flickr, YouTube and Other Forms of Sharing and Streaming

July 8, 2008 in Ministry-Theology with 3 Comments

This is actually the form of social media and online sharing that I am the least familiar with. I have only had a Flickr account for about 6 months, and I just upgraded to Flickr Pro. How many videos have I uploaded to YouTube? Only a couple. So this is new territory, but a territory nonetheless that I think ministries need to explore more often.

Let me start with a couple of reasons for why you should use these tools:

  1. People like watching videos and looking at photos. Period. In my opinion, they are often more likely to do this then read a post or follow a debate on a forum page.


  2. I think ministries need to start creating more of their own content. Why? One, because how many churches use stock photos of people on their websites that don’t even attend church. I usually hear, “Hey, I’ve never seen them at our church.” Or my favorite, “Our church is not that ethnically diverse.” That’s usually the typical Bible study photo that has a representative of every tribe, tongue and nation represented, and is nowhere close to the actual makeup of the church. Two, video and photos give great insight into people’s lives.


  3. Shooting, editing, creating and uploading video and photo content has never been easier.


  4. These tools are so easy to use that anyone in the community can create content and participate. You don’t have to leave it in the hands of professionals or video/photo department people. This does two things. One, allows for community participation. Two, reflects more the reality of a community, than stuff being created by one department. And when communities participate, the content doesn’t have the constant professional look to it, but looks more reality which is nice. Not that professional is bad at all…but raw footage from the community is great also.



What Would This Look Like?

For example in the college ministry that I used to pastor, The Quest, here is what I think would have been helpful if I had done it. Obviously Facebook is one place where people share photo and video content with each other, but who is going to go look at each profile?

So I think what would be helpful is to have a “central hub” webpage, as I discussed in The Purpose of Your Website. And on this page you would embed the code from Flickr, YouTube, etc. that would automatically stream the content from your community to the page so that everyone could see it. You wouldn’t need to go look at multiple locations, but go to this one home page and share video and photos. This can be done by creating accounts that everyone can upload to.

Then you can develop some creative team to use those photos and videos that are uploaded to the site and post them at various sites in your community, like Facebook, a blog, etc. So you have one site where all the content is uploaded to, and a team that sifts through the material and places it in different ministry locations online.

Some Good Tools

Like I mentioned at the top. I’m a rookie to this, so please chime in with some suggestions. But here is some tools that I have found helpful and have used.

  1. Flickr: Great photo management site. You can get quite a bit of space and ability with a free account. But a Pro account is fairly cheap and gives you lots to work with. I mainly migrated to Flickr based on what I have read in various books on this topic and by the many praises from other such as Wess Daniels and Terry Storch. Flickr is great for photo management, but also you can upload video as well. They have a 90 second limit for video which I think is great. It really helps when determining what you want to shoot and share. I use Flickr video for my blog intro., but I don’t use it for a longer retreat video, etc.


  2. Vimeo: I love this video site. I have migrated from YouTube over to this site. I like the look of the site better. I like that my videos upload faster, etc. Check it out. You can create communities around your videos and create your own channels.


  3. YouTube: This is obviously the standard. Some people love it and it’s fun to go to their YouTube channels to see what they have done.


These are the only three I’m sharing.

So what photo/video management/sharing sites do you use and like?

Formulating an Online Strategy for College Ministry

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.

Practice, Participation and the Art of “Remixing” Church and Community

July 3, 2008 in Ministry-Theology with 7 Comments

In class my adviser, Ryan Bolger, often tells a story about a pastor of a mega-church in Arizona. One day the pastor, while walking with his son across the campus of the church he built, said, “Son, this is all going to yours someday,” and his son took a step back and responded, “I don’t want anything to do with this kind of Christianity.” It was then that this pastor realized his church was rooted in a boomer culture phenomenon (and has since gone on to rethink their mission as a church). This “mission-station” approach is rooted in a different time and sensibility than that of our younger generations. Theirs is a do-it-yourself culture: sites like YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia and open-source community-based software need community cooperation in order to work. These sites represent a rejection of powerful top-down hierarchies where the flow from producer to consumer maintains control, predictability and efficiently. Those influenced by the participatory culture, actively participate in creating where they see need and they do it with or without permission from those in power, they share information and welcome low levels of control, they are highly energetic and creative and they want to be active in shaping their future through a variety of grassroots means. (From the article, Remixing Faith in the 21st Century by Wess Daniels)

Recently I have been thinking a lot on two terms that author/consultant/professor Clay Shirky used in his book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. He discusses, among many other things:

  1. An “architecture of participation” (coined by Tim O’ Reilly)


  2. Communities of Practice

Both embody what I think are two important necessities for the Church. That we create an environment that allows for and encourages participation among everyone. Not just pastors, directors, paid staff, or those that we often single out as having special gifts. Rather it is a community that everyone brings something to the table. And that we foster a community environment that encourages practice, which allows for mistakes, failures, successes…everything that comes along with practicing.

Churches are often bad at these two things. We don’t allow for failure, and therefore we inhibit a participatory community.

That’s why you rarely see anyone up front during worship on Sundays unless it is the paid staff. That is the way that we minimize mistakes, which therefore limits total participation. It’s a vicious cycle which eventually leads us to being consumers of Church, the community and all that is offered.

I have great hope for the Church as I see many new communities and Churches embracing some of these values of participation and practice, while also moving away from being consumers of the Church and worship. Many are also moving away from top-down hierarchies that maintain command and control. I think these moves are a step in the right direction.

Wess Daniels has got an amazing post over at Barclay Press, Remixing Faith in the 21st Century. I leave you with another great quote from the article. Then go read it for yourself because it is well worth the time.

This past April Radiohead did another thing that sparked imaginations and challenged the preexisting structures of the music industry, yet again. They setup a website and invited people to remix one of their singles, “Nude.” Along with the invitation, they released the audio tracks containing the guitars, strings, drums, bass, and vocals through the iTunes music store. They invited people to participate in a contest to see who would make the best remix of their song, all the votes would be made by Radiohead fans (the winning remix received 38568 votes). By looking at remix culture, I think the church can learn something about how creativity and imagination interacts with existing ideas and structures and builds off those resources while also moving beyond them in new ways.

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)

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