May 2008

One of the reasons I agreed to speak in Dallas at the Dynamic Church Conference was so I could catch up with my friends who live there.  I love Dallas and so I planned to get a lot out of my trip.  I ran out of time to see everyone I had hoped to see but I did not miss church.   

I was a bit torn as to where to attend services because I have friends at Irving Bible Church, Fellowship Church, Watermark Community, Stonebriar Community, Bent Tree and a couple of others.  My friends who serve at Bent Tree Bible Fellowship won out and I ended up there on Sunday morning.

After my hosts finished their service roles, we got to enjoy the worship & teaching in the main service.  Following the service, another friend known to many of you, Technical Arts Director Greg Atkinson, (Church Video Ideas) led me up onto the platform for the pastoral team debrief following the service. 

I found myself with the key service leaders and Pete Briscoe, the Senior Pastor at Bent Tree.  And yes, son of Stuart & Jill Briscoe. They reviewed what worked and what needed tweaking for the next service since there are often improvements needed.  I loved seeing how careful they were about providing the best experience possible for those in attendance - even if it meant they had to alter their original service plan.

This fall, Bent Tree will move into their new expansion facilities and it will all be paid for - all $30 million dollars of it!  Serious vision requires some serious tech support and since I got such an extensive tour of the facilities from Greg, I thought it wouldn't be right not to let you peek into some of the behind the scenes set-up at Bent Tree.  
(Photos from iPhone)

What we see….. 

What they see…. 

Finally have time to blog my great experience from the Dynamic Church Conference in Dallas recently.  I loved meeting all the Fellowship Technologies staff and was impressed by their mission and strategy to serve churches.  A couple of highlights include hearing the breakout sessions by Terry Storch, Digerati Pastor at LifeChurch.tv and Joe Suh, founder of MyChurch.org. 

Terry spoke on the future of LifeChurch's bleeding edge ministry to the next generation amongst other things which I could hardly wrap my head around. He breezed through pioneer works like internet campuses, metaverse church, YouVersion and OnePrayer and then got into his real passion "what if…"  Absolute inspiration to those of us who envision tomorrow's Church.

And Joe Suh gave an excellent overview of all things social media related.  It was particularly helpful to see the evolution of social media sites and view how rapidly they are establishing new expressions of community.

What a privilege it was for me to speak alongside these experts.  You can get some of our material as PDF downloads at the Dynamic Church Conference site.

And lastly, we got to hear a closing session by Randy Draper whose resources can be found at HeartSpring Media.  Randy is a member of Ed Young's Fellowship Church and is both an excellent story-teller and a passionate communicator.  

Following my time with Fellowship, I got to visit my friends at Bent Tree Bible Fellowship.  But that's another post.

Twitter fails, StumbleUpon succeeds, but just for one day.  It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.  Online, they really do go together.  The more we use digital technologies, the more we expose ourselves to the potential for failures.  It's a topic that keeps coming up amongst the bloggers at Digital.  At the same time, our web technologies are equally likely to do exactly as they should and give us a superior performance. 

Case in point. Yesterday, I was going to follow the PD Network Summit via twitter, qik (bobbygwald) and ustream without actually attending.  Although we got an invitation, my husband declined for us since we had other commitments this week.  I knew I could follow along at different random points throughout my day.

Unfortunately, I got the image above in the few slots when I was free.  While I was busy trying to find out what was wrong with my twitter feed, my @replies and my archives, I was checking links like these: Is Twitter Down?, Get Satisfaction and others (no, I did not ask FriendFeed what's wrong with twitter?).

But, while I was preoccupied and frustrated, my personal blog was getting awesome traffic that looked something like this from the back end:

Seems one of my faithful co-contributors had StumbledUpon me and it resulted in a good shot of increased traffic.  It was a nice long tail of a day.

I'm assuming each of us have had a good amount of personal technology failures and some successes.  Since talking about failures can lead to greater transparency, I'd like to ask, what's the most frustrating thing you're experiencing with online technology these days.  

And no geek speak please… real life reflections about your current techno troubles….  information overloaders, represent!

The Whiteboard Sessions - quite affordable. 

But FREE is good too:  Conference Channel @ WiBo. 

Great news if you're looking for the place where media & the Church converge.  COLLIDE Magazine has a brand spankin' new, redesigned website.  It's less than 48 hours old.  

And how can I resist mentioning COLLIDE when several Digital contributors are featured in the magazine's new May/June issue.  Odd happenstance?  I don't think so; it's more like Spirit-led inspiration if you ask me.  

Our Digital contributors in COLLIDE include:

Aaron Linne (Mr. Vimeo himself) His article, Stop Throwing Sheep, explores how we can use Facebook applications to spread the messege.

Cynthia Ware My article, Technology and the Virtual Church, was written to inspire early adopters of new media technologies to forge ahead.

Joe Suh (MyChurch.org founder) Joe's interview explains how social networking can serve local churches and facilitate their members connecting online.

Additionally, there are a lot of other good resources, articles and reviews in the magazine and while you're visiting the new website, it's easy to get a risk-free issue or subscription. 

Congratulations again, Tim Stevens, on Pop Goes the Church making the cover with some amazing graphics by Barton Damer.  And speaking of Barton and his way good digital media skills… you didn't think I was going to forget to show off some of his video maneuvers did you? 

Not when they feature this August's Echo Conference…..

ECHO Full Promo Video from barton Damer on Vimeo.

In case you missed this recent Digital post, How to Twitter (see Twitter in Plain English), you might consider going back and taking a second look.  Upon introduction, Twitter can seem both frivolous & narcissistic.  But as fan created, 3rd party apps roll out we will likely see it's growing value. 

For example, this weekend I suddenly lost over half my Feedburner subscribers here at The Digital Sanctuary. My data report clearly showed all those subscribers were using Google Feedfetcher.  No online troubleshooting provided me with any updated information.  I assumed, having just updated my WordPress from 2.3 to 2.5., it must be my problem. 

After hearing of my dilemma, a search genius someone sent this link to me……

Summize, a Twitter search engine, increases the value of the micro-blogging sphere for me. Mashable reviewed Summize and compared it to Tweetscan here.  Next time I have a problem and need immediate, niche-oriented news, I'll start with a Twitter search.  And now I might even pay attention to tlogging.

By the way, if anyone knows whether this micro-blogging sphere has an official name yet, please let me know. And please follow me on Twitter.

See also, Todd Rhoades post on Twittering.  

First Monday, an online, peer-reviewed journal, published the article - The Augmented Social Network: building identity and trust into the next-generation Internet by Ken Jordan, Jan Hauser, and Steven Foster.

The authors describe the future of the internet as an evolution from online experimentation and fads to stabilizing trends creating reliability, trust, even dependence.  They view social linkages as far more than a passing phenomenon.  They predict the ability of citizens to form relationships and self-organize around shared interests in communities of practice in order to better engage in online citizenship.

They propose an Augmented Social Network (ASN) model that facilitates connections between online communities and even builds into Internet architecture the role identity brokers could play. The authors note several elements of an ASN including:

Persistent Identity. Enabling individuals online to maintain a persistent identity as they move between different Internet communities, and to have personal control over that identity. This identity should be capable of reflecting an endless variety of interests, needs, desires, and relationships.

Interoperability Between Online Communities. People should be able to cross easily between online communities under narrowly defined circumstances, just as in life we can move from one social network to another. 

Brokered Relationships. Using databased information, online brokers (both automated and "live") should be able to facilitate the introduction between people who share affinities and/or complementary capabilities and are seeking to make connections. Such a system of brokered relationships should also enable people to find other individuals, information or media that is of interest to them, through the recommendations of trusted third parties.

The surprising thing is that this abstract was published back in July, 2003.  Only 5 years later, and here we are. 

My Facebook tells me I should add you as a friend.  Why?  It knows who we share in common.  Let me search you and verify your established online presence.  Now I can add you to my Plaxo, LinkedIn and twitter contacts.  This means I get to find out who you're connected to, see your work history, and probably hear what you ate for breakfast today via tweet.

Because building community is essential for the Church, we can capitalize on social networking.  In fact, isn't one of our primary goals to seek out those in need of spiritual hope and initiate relationship with them?  Since we know the Good News is most commonly transmitted person-to-person, it's not hard to see how the social web provides a unique new forum for sharing our faith. 

The relational trust individuals share paves the way for those with spiritual hope, healing and health to link with those they find in their circle of trusted others.  Equally importantly, it allows buildable bridges / connections with those a degree or more away. Quite obviously, we can not try to impose our beliefs on a whole society, but individually we can be witnesses of Jesus Christ, communicating with people of other faiths (or no faith) via the linkages we have online.

While some criticize the masks people wear online (persistent pseuds), view online communications as "not real" or reflect on the fragilty of social networking (all important considerations by the way) many Christians are engaging in conversations, networking and even collaborating with individuals they might never get a chance to communicate with face-to-face.   I say it's an opportunity.  What's your take on online social networking?

Although very few churches can afford to have a digerati team support their internet presence, most all can put up and maintain a web site online.  With some direction, every church can develop an internet strategy for beginning web-based ministry.  Here's a book for newbies.

Web-Empower Your Church: Unleashing the Power of the Internet for Ministry

Author: Mark M. Stephenson, Director of The Web-Empowered Church

Publisher: Abingdon Press

Summary: Harness the power of the internet for Jesus.  The internet is opening up new possibilities for all aspects of church ministry, from daily administrative tasks to worldwide evangelism and discipleship.

This book is about web-empowering your church ministries.  Learn the practical steps, techniques, and ideas needed to develop an excellent and effective web ministry that increases your efficiency and effectiveness.

Mark Stephenson, Director of CyberMinistry and Technology at Ginghamsburg Church, shares his experiences with starting and now leading a large and active church web ministry.  Ginghamsburg's website is now over 4000 pages in size, and averages over one new visit every half minute, 24/7.

Whether your church has a website or not, this book will help you grow you internet ministry and take the next step to fully web-empower your church ministries.