Kerner.net

Reorganizing the arts suite

I'm a fan of how change can impact productivity. Yesterday my assistant Matt, our January intern (Ryan), and I reorganized the arts suite. It was really an excuse for a major cleaning - vacuuming under furniture, throwing lots of crap away, etc. I wish we'd have taken before and in process pictures. It actually occurred to me to turn on a camera and timelapse the entire transition, but also something I didn't do. I could probably dig up some old pictures from when we moved in 18 months ago, but for now there are pictures of the new arrangement.

The main reason for the shift is that a few months ago I replaced a broken monitor with a nice new one from Dell, but ended up with a glossy screen. I used to have my back to the windows and that provided a nice amount of glare. I also wanted to see if there was a way to open up the space while keeping all the furniture. I think we did a fairly good job.

What changed? The conference table moved slightly. My desk and the seating area flipped sides of the room. Originally when we moved in Lori & Jeni insisted that we do things "catty whompus" with very little square to the walls. It was a nice asthetic but felt cluttered. Everything but the conference table now sits squared off with the walls. A bit institutional, but I like it a lot better.

There are three or four people that work out of our office on a fairly regular basis as well as a stream of volunteers that do projects in here. The space also works as a small studio for video and minor audio work. We have a lot of creative meetings both around the conference table and on the couches.

Things I really like about the new layout. It puts the seating area in view of the window in the door. I was always a bit concerned about meeting with people not in view of the window. It provides a much better traffic flow through the room. It lets everybody see the tv from their desk and gives a better viewing angle from most of the room. We're going to be able to start letting stuff play in the background, have news, etc. It also lets us play xbox from our desks. I also like that the workstations are centralized on one side of the room. Conversation between desks is much more comfortable. Most importantly the room feels much more open.

Communication Shifts Part 3: Evaluation

We learned four main things when we started to actually evaluate our communication.

1. The process we had in place was painful for everybody. Event promotion required several forms and talking to numerous people. If somebody got left out of the loop an event didn't end up someplace (web site, bulletin, newsletter, preworship slides, etc). The communication team was frustrated because we'd catch all kinds of "why wasn't my event in X." The ministry team was frustrated because things fell through the cracks and it was way too much work.

2. Nobody really heard what we were saying unless we caught them when they were thinking about church. Our most effective tools were the bulletin, the preworship slides, and platform announcements. The mailed newsletter that showed up at the end of the week didn't get read by most people. An informal survey put the "straight to the trash" rate above 50%. The younger people were the less likely they were to read a mailed out newsletter.

3. For the most part people only wanted event information. Thank you notes, recaps of events or projects, and feature type stories were really just clutter. When asked what they really needed us to communicate people clearly told us they wanted to know when and what was happening in the various parts of the church. Everything else was noise.

4. We were publishing a lot of information for weeks on end. Officially we promote small events two weeks out, but what was happening is that most every event would be publicized for about a month. It made it very difficult to sort through what was important now and what was important a month from now.

Next we'll look at how each of these lessons apply to the various ways we communicate.

Communication Shifts Part 2: Old Ways

We communicated in a lot of ways. There wasn't a lot of coordination among all of the media. A shotgun approach evolved as pieces were added over the history of the church. We were using:

Newsletter - Our weekly newsletter, The Story, has been mailed for 52 years. Newsletters mainly included event information, but also had a pastor's letter, prayer list, thank you notes, and various other tidbits of information. Roughly 60% of the information in a given issue of the newsletter had been published in earlier issues. This was mailed most weeks (about 40 a year) to 1,200 households.

Electronic Newsletter - Our electronic newsletter was a link to a PDF version of the print newsletter. Newsletters were also published as a PDF of the print version. Each week another 400 people received the email with this link.

Weekend Bulletin - Each weekend we put a bulletin into the hands of everybody that attends worship. Other than the order of worship the bulletin also includes a series of announcements and opportunities to sign up for service opportunities.

Web Site - Our web site was designed in 2006 with a structure focused on first-time visitors to the church. It contained a news section that included information from the newsletter (and the PDF version). It also contained an extensive collection of many of the ministries within the church. When we outlined the web content it amounted to a nearly 30 page outline.

Information Center - Our Information Center sits between the sanctuary and the Fellowship Center (our cafe area). It was staffed by a member of our guest service team and usually covered with sign up sheets and flyers about various ministry opportunities.

Preworship slides - Prior to worship there are a series of slides that play on the screens in the sanctuary. These same slides play on a digital signage system throughout the church building.

Platform announcements - During each worship service a pastor makes some type of announcement. Usually these announcements come from one of the announcements printed in the bulletin.

Ministry Flyers - Each ministry has been publishing their own flyers. Sometimes they get posted as rogue posters on the walls around the building. They often get stacked at the Information Center as well and passed out at ministry events.

Email Lists - Leaders of a variety of ministries use direct email (either through personally managed lists) or mail sent from Shelby to communicate within the specific ministry.

Random Mailings - Postcards, letters, and other USPS mailings. A few years ago we dramatically cut the amount of mailing (no more reminder postcards for meetings), but there are still letters that get sent out.

Specialized Web Sites - We have a couple of blogs and some Google sites that are used for collaboration by teams. These are used mainly by the arts teams to prepare for worship.

Monday I'll continue this series talking about the results of our communication evaluation.

2009 in Three Words

@terrystorch and Shawn Wood tipped me off to a great post by Chris Brogan about goals for 2009. Last year I set very specific goals and did a very poor job of meeting them. I really like the approach of setting broader thematic goals rather than specific action oriented goals. I'm pretty sure I'll be able to keep these goals more easily. Most of the goals for last year are ongoing. I'm still working to blog more, I go through periods of focusing well on fitness, I'm going to take guitar lessons. So this year I thought I would take the broader approach.

Here's how Brogan describes the process:

If you want to try the process, it works something like this: think of how you want to be successful in 2009. Then, try to think in even broader terms. Extrapolate on the broader terms, and find one word to hang the idea on.

My three words for 2009:

Create - I've been in a rut creatively for the past several months. As a worship team we've been a lot less creative than I'd like. I've not been doing things that feed me creatively as much as I would like. So I'm taking some immediate steps. I'm getting out of my environment and working intentionally surrounded by other creative professionals. I'm taking guitar lessons. I'm starting to write without a real purpose - just to get words on paper - maybe it will develop into something. I'm going to relax, and cook, and take time off to really recharge (see word three).

Pray - Our core emphasis as a church for the next year is prayer. I believe very strongly in the power of prayer, but it currently isn't an integrated part of everything I do. Prayer has been an important part of my life, but it hasn't been as intentional as it should be of late. The staff is spending the first several weeks of the year going through Richard Foster's book Prayer: Finding the Heart's True Home together. It's a great book and the first time I read it nearly 10 years ago was really when prayer became real in my life. I'm really excited to see how a focus on prayer for the year impacts both my life and the church.

Relax - I tend to be a ball of stress and a workaholic. I worry about things that aren't all that important. I obsess about quality often times about things out of my control. I neglect taking appropriate time off to recharge. My goal is to be very intentional about taking my day off and taking breaks during the work day. What that means is saying no to doing some things and more effectively delegating to others. It also means that I'm going to try to be a lot less serious. I plan on playing and having fun a lot more this year. 

What would your three words be for 2009?

Communication Shifts Part 1: Introduction

Over the past several months we've been making some substantial changes in the way we communicate as a church. Last summer we did a fairly extensive review of all the media we were using and the effectiveness of each medium. What we discovered was fairly concerning. We felt like we had been communicating effectively, but people kept telling us they didn't know about upcoming events and hadn't heard about something that happened at the church. While we had been communicating people obviously hadn't been listening. More accurately though they had tuned us out.

A few years ago we made a major shift in our worship planning to move towards a single big idea for each weekend. That idea often carries into the ministry we do with children, youth, and small groups in the church. We've seen a dramatic impact to focusing our message during worship. This same focus was needed in all of our communication.

Ultimately communicating is less about how we share information and more about how well people receive it. We took time to look at each tool we were using to communicate with people in the church. The evaluation covered the source material, final output, and measured the how well the message was received. 

Over the next week I'll be posting detailed information about the prior way we were communicating, the results of our evaluation, and the changes that are taking place at Schweitzer.

ProPresenter Remote

Renewed Vision recently updated ProPresenter and made available a remote application that runs on the iPhone. I got a chance to use the remote in a real environment on Christmas Eve during the runthrough for our 11pm service. I've got to say overall I was very impressed. It let me flip through slides for the band without having to sit in the booth. In the past I've used Screen Sharing on the Mac to get out of the booth for a runthrough, but Wednesday I wanted to be able to walk around the room, not just sit at a laptop. Overall I was really happy with the performance of the remote. It's incredibly easy to use and very responsive. I'm not sure it's ready for production use (it crashed twice in 40 minutes), but in a pinch it's better than nothing. The remote offers both a view and a control mode letting somebody with an iPhone or iPod Touch either control slide display or review data. The remote is an extra purchase, but it's under $5 on the iTunes App Store. The remote is a great tool and I'm excited to be able to use it more. Some features I'd like to see:

• ability to show and hide the output window
• confidence monitor mode - that uses the iPhone screen to display the main output content
• ability to edit slides from the remote would be awesome
• saved passwords for quicker connections (especially given crashes)

Mint.com

A few days ago I signed up to use Mint.com for tracking spending and budgeting. We had Quicken in the past, and basically never used it. Even with most stuff importing into Quicken automatically it would take several hours at the end of the month. The result was that we basically went months without doing any real work on tracking our spending.

It took me about 30 minutes to set up all of our bank info, credit cards, etc. Mint linked up quickly and easily, imported the data, and auto categorized most transactions. I spent another 15-20 minutes categorizing the transactions Mint didn't figure out. There's also an iPhone app that makes it incredibly easy to get the status of what's going on with our finances, get detail on transaction, etc. The iPhone app doesn't let you make any updates, but it's great for viewing information. Mint has gotten some great reviews and the best part is that it's free.

We'll see how it goes after a few months. Since setting up the account, importing transactions, and categorizing the unknown transactions took less time than we used to spend on a fully-configured Quicken setup I'm optimistic. 

Slumdog Millionaire at the Moxie

Last night we went to see Slumdog Millionaire at the Moxie. If you haven't seen this movie yet you absolutely should.

It's a great story about an orphan in India, the girl he loves, and his experience on Who Wants to be a Millionaire. The film is very well done, directed by Danny Boyle (Sunshine, 28 Days Later, Trainspotting) and the editing is superb. It's very quickly paced and fits the chaotic nature of the story very well. I especially liked how the story is told almost entirely in flashbacks.

This was our first time visiting the Moxie's new location. It's much nicer than the old location with more convenient parking, two screens, expanded bathrooms, and a huge lobby. The comfort of home with a big tv, surround sound, and Netflix have dramatically reduced our going to the theater, but I love going to the Moxie. The Moxie is also the only theater I'm aware of in town where you can accompany your movie viewing with a beer or a glass of wine. At the old location they pretty much had to have an intermission for changing reels, even if it's not a requirement at the new location I still like the intermission. It lets me stretch my legs (a big gripe I have in theaters), go to the bathroom, get more snacks, and chat about the first half of the movie. A lot of people may not like the intermission, but I'm a fan of a 12 minute break in the middle of a film.

MAX 2008

I had a great time at MAX this year. It was probably the best conference Adobe has put on in several years. Each year I make claims that I may not come back next year because of disappointment. After this year I have no plans to miss MAX next year (although I don't like it being in LA). Usually I have the experience of skipping sessions to hang out and network with people in the Community Lounge.

The main educational value coming from one or two sessions that blow me away. Sometimes it's hard to make a schedule for the conference. I always have a couple of can't miss sessions, but the others usually seem lackluster. This year was totally different. I only had four slots that didn't have a good fit for me. Most of the sessions had several presentations that interested me. I found it hard to pick between several good topics - an ideal situation in a conference. My big complaint is that a lot of the sessions were only offered once. The sessions are all supposed to be posted on Adobe TV so hopefully I'll be able to catch those I wasn't able to see at the event.

My favorite sessions:

• Anatomy of a Video Player
• Hands on with Flash Catalyst (Thermo)
• Using Flex and Adobe AIR to Automate Creative Suite 4 Workflows
• Creating Effects with Pixel Bender
• Programmatic Animations in After Effects with Expressions and Scripting
• Both Keynotes were also really good

If this pattern holds, MAX getting better every year, next year should be great. This year it had the same feel I remember from the Macromedia UCON days. Great job Adobe!

50,000 Shoes in 50 Days

Just took part in the 50,000 Shoes in 50 Days challenge. I would encourage you to do the same. It's pretty amazing that for $5 you can send two pairs of shoes to people who've never had shoes. It just takes a couple of minutes. You never really think about how important shoes are, because we wear them all the time, but over 300 million people around the world don’t have shoes. Walking around barefoot most places on the planet isn't safe like it is in your back yard. Having to walk around without shoes puts people into life-threatening situations.

It only takes 2 minutes to provide shoes for people who really need them. It costs about the same as a trip to Starbucks.
 

Coolest Birthday Gift Ever - Cheese Making Kit

My birthday was this weekend and Sarah got me what is probably the coolest birthday gift I've ever gotten. The gift being a cheese making kit makes me a pretty big dork. We've been on a kick of producing our own food whenever possible (going on three months of no bread buying). We joined a farm-share coop. Our milk comes from a local, natural dairy.

Sarah's knitting has been a big part of the joke that developed into this gift. I've for the most part been against her spinning yarn. I put up with the room dedicated to yarn. I put up with the supplies for dying stuff. Spinning was out of the question. The rule was no spinning unless we had the sheep and I could quit my job and make artisinal sheep's milk cheese. I'm wondering if there is a plot that involves a spinning wheel given that the cheese making kit includes supplies to make mozzarella, ricotta, an instructional DVD and a book of 75 cheese recipes. Several of the recipes use sheep's milk. Hmm.

I'm going to start with the quick, soft cheeses first, then try goat cheese. I'm hoping that if all goes well I can start a hard cheese or two after the first of the year. I think the crawl space under our living room is the perfect temperature/humidity to be a cheese cellar. If not there's the spare dorm fridge in the garage. On second thought the dorm fridge might be a better idea to start.

End of the Political Season

I've got to say that I'm glad for the end of the political season this year. Last night was the first election where I didn't have more than one television going in my living room. The main reason is that we only have one television, so I didn't have others to pull through the house like previous elections. Sarah and I each had our laptops as well. I'm a huge fan of the political process and I love elections. I worked on several campaigns in the past (two Bond senate campaigns, several Hulshof runs for the house, and Dole in 96). I'm glad the season is over because I'm tired of the division this year has put upon the country. I'm sick of people being called a hillbilly for being Republican and being heathens for being a Democrat.

As the presidential campaigns came to a close I've got to say I was incredibly impressed by Obama's positive approach, and dismayed that the Democratic party and most of the Republicans team took a negative route. On Saturday I went to an Obama speech and was impressed how when the crowd would boo McCain they were told "No need to boo, just vote." It's a shame this type of behavior couldn't exist in all political settings. While I was certainly leaning one way the attitudes and styles of campaigning presented a dramatic difference between the candidates that impacted my decision. I think the days of calling myself a Republican may be over, but I have difficulty calling myself a Democrat. My political views haven't changed that much over the years, but the Republican party certainly has changed. I used to joke that I was a Libertarian, which is partially true, but not very practical.

The biggest challenge that faces the Republican party are voters like me. I'm fiscally conservative and want balanced budgets. I'm also relatively socially liberal because I want to take care of the poor, have good schools, good roads and good healthcare. I think governmental action is most effective at a local level but that quality needs to be balanced across the nation. I'm incredibly protective of my civil liberties which is why the concept of a "free speech zone" makes me sick. I believe that as one of the richest nations in the world there are global problems that we should be working to solve (hunger, lack of clean water, curable disease). I want smaller government, less federal taxation, and a radical commitment to human rights.

I'm also religious, I work as a pastor. My faith doesn't just influence my decisions, my faith is the largest guide to my decisions. My faith is not a weapon to be used against those who disagree with me. Government is not about enforcing the faith values of one group on another. If people in the Church lived their beliefs, put their money and actions where they say their faith guides them governmental intervention wouldn't be required in so many cases. It's the reason we support Heifer every year. It's why organizations like Compassion are so important. It's why Advent Conspiracy is such a great idea. It's the reason congregations run food pantries and shelters and missions and adopt villages, neighborhoods, and schools.

I was incredibly impressed with both the speeches by McCain and Obama last night. I feel like both handled their respective role with dignity and class. I pray that as a nation we truly can come together and work effectively. Like it or not, Barack Obama is going to be president. It's time for us to put differences aside and restore respect and civility. I'm proud to be an American after this historic election.

Backyard Complete

Got the leaves in the back all cleaned up. I like being able to post from the phone. Going to make short posts here possible when Twitter is too limiting.

Backyard Project

This post is mainly for testing the iPhone typepad app, but this is the project before me. I'm hoping to get a considerable amount of the leaves picked up before it gets too dark to work and the polls start closing. Would have started earlier, but was still a bit groggy from this morning, but that's another story.

Hello TypePad

Just making a new post to TypePad. I've already updated my old site to redirect people here. In just a few days I'll swap the domain over and TypePad will officially be the home of kerner.net

FCP Multicam with Aiptek Camera

Aiptek on Canon
Originally uploaded by kerner.

Last week I had the opportunity to do a bit of playing with multiple cameras for a video to promote MOPS at the church. As you can see in the picture I mounted one camera on the other. The main camera is our Canon XH-A1 that we use for most production work. The small camera on the top is a super cheap Aiptek camera we bought at Wal-Mart for under $200. For the interviews in the video we used the Canon, a consumer grade Canon HD camera, and the Aiptek mounted to the shoe on the larger camera. 

The footage all got edited using the multiclip feature in Final Cut. We've done multiclip pieces for interviews in the past, but never for b-roll. The day I shot the footage the MOPS project was cooking, so I set the Aiptek for a nice wide shot and then did closeups with the Canon. It provided us with cooking show style, synchronized cutaways yet only one camera operator.

The Aiptek footage looks really good for a $180 camera. It shoots 1080p at 30fps or 720p at 60fps. I'm going to have to try some slow motion stuff soon. The microphone is horrible, but strapped to a camera with XLR inputs it's great for cutaways. It integrated very well with only minor color correction with the two Canon cameras. I think we'll be picking up several of these cameras to collect random footage from youth and kids events (ideally shot by youth/kids). It's perfect for run and gun b-roll.

I'll post some footage samples soon.

Homemade Hamburger Buns

Sarh and I have been on a quest for quite some time to eliminate high fructose corn syrup from our diet. We've also tried to reduce the amount of processed food that we eat - which means we limit the amount of processed food we buy. As many people have noticed it's almost impossible to buy any food without HFCS in it - even bread. Before we got married I baked almost every day for about a year to have fresh bread on a regular basis. The hustle of life got in the way of the baking fairly quickly though. A while back we made the switch to baking our own bread rather than buying it (although not quite daily baking). The bread has been much better.

The exception has been when we would have burgers or bbq or some other food that requires a bun. I'd never had great luck with making buns. I'm guessing it's because I usually tend to bake a hard-crusted, rustic bread - not good bun material. I came across this recipe the other day and had to try it:

Homemade Hamburger Buns 

This recipe is great. It's incredibly easy, taking less than an hour from start to finish. I substituted a cup of the flour with whole wheat flour and the results were great. This marks the end of buying hamburger buns in my book. 

Innovate 2008 is HERE!

I can hardly believe it's time for Innovate again this year. It seems like not that long ago that I had my first experience at GCC last fall. This year finds me in a very different role than I was last year and I'm having trouble picking sessions, workshops, etc. I really want to go to those that focus on the old, comfortable, tech/media hats I used to wear. Those sessions appeal to my inner geek. Simultaneously I want to go to sessions about leadership, vision, and strategy. Today I'm in Kem Meyer's web workshop which is clearly communication strategy, but focused on a tech-like topic. I'll miss getting to hang out with the IT Roundtable folks, but this is probably a better fit for my role. Tomorrow and Friday I'll have tougher decisions because the breakout sessions look really good. One thing I'm excited about is the casual Q&A sessions that have been added this year. I'm doing two of them, one on leading artists and one on college ministry. I'm excited for the presentations by Shawn Wood, Steven Furtick, and the LifeChurch.tv team. I guess that means I'm excited about the whole event. Should be a fun week.

New School Year - Green Room Launch

Classes have been in session at Missouri State for about three weeks now and we're in full swing with our college ministry. It's been an eye opening experience to go through the process of discernment, vision casting, planning, and launching a new worship location. We wrapped up our first series on Sunday, a discussion about key relationships called My Circle. We launch a new series this weekend with corresponding small groups. Some parts of the launch have gone smoothly and others have gone not as smoothly. Overall though I'm amazed at what God has been doing through the students and on the campus. 

The new semester also marks another semester of seminary classes for me. This fall I'm focusing on coursework related to Old Testament study. I'll be academically tackle the New Testament in the spring. I've found that while my coursework is dramatically different from the students at MSU being having classes helps me in relating to the college life.

Some things I'll probably write about in the future (posted in an effort to make me blog more often):

• marketing strategies on campus - successes and failures
• initial thoughts on team sermon writing
• our approach to discipleship
• more about our model - planting a multisite campus focused on college students

Wild Goose Chase

I'm about halfway through Mark Batterson's Wild Goose Chase and I'm really enjoying it. I've been a fan of Mark's teaching and leadership since I attended the first conference NCC put on a couple of years ago. His previous book, In a Pit with Lion on a Snowy Day, was used in a lot of ways around Schweitzer. I imagine that the same will be true of Wild Goose Chase. Along with the book Mark has written a 10 steps to help with setting goals available at www.chasethegoose.com. 

I think it's pretty rare for a book to both convict me and have it be something I really want to read. I sat down last week at Asbury during a few breaks from class and managed to get halfway through the book before I decided I had to stop carrying it with me - I was reading it instead of doing work required for my course. I wish I'd have taken it on the weekend fishing trip to Cumberland because I'd have both finished it and had something to read.

I haven't had a lot of time to process my thoughts about the book yet, but here is my initial take on it. I really do agree with Mark that oftentimes our lives are boring because we play it safe. The book is built around six cages that we tend to put ourselves into rather than living freely in God's spirit. I think my life most often reflects ordinariness. It's pretty hard for me to break out of the day-to-day, week-to-week routine. 

I can't wait to get the chance to finish the book. I can already tell that some of the ideas are shaping my thoughts. It's probably one of the few books I'll read, put on the shelf, and then read again in a few months. 

Leadership Summit 2008

I've spent the last two days attending the Willow Creek Leadership Summit. It's a great event most every year. Usually there is at least one session that really makes me think, challenges my assumptions, causes me to pray more, and leads to reevaluating how and why we do ministry in the local church. Willow almost always puts together a great slate of presenters and interviews.

I was going to take notes and post them about each session. I had been taking notes for my own use at the start of yesterday, but I discovered that Mark Meyer was taking and posting exceptional notes and that Mark Beeson was posting almost transcripts of the sessions. My note taking stopped and I just let myself soak it in.

My favorite sessions this year:

• John Burke & Efrem Smith  (pastors)
• Craig Groeschel (pastor)
  
• Catherine Rohr (CEO of Prison Entrepreneurship Program)
• Brad Anderson (CEO of Best Buy)

Leading Change

I'm getting ready for my last class of the summer and I'm really excited about it. I've read through all of the articles and most of the books already. I've got two books to read this next week. It's a leadership class about managing change and transition. This is the second class I've been able to take that directly relates to what I'm doing in ministry and these classes are a lot more fun than the others. Like my June class this is a week-long intensive class. It's being taught by Tom Tumblin who is certainly qualified to teach this sort of content.

If you're looking for some books about leading change here's the reading list for the class.

• Deep Change: Discovering the Leader Within by Robert E. Quinn
• Diffusion of Innovations by Everett M. Rogers
• Leading Congregational Change by Jim Herrington, et al. 
• The Missional Leader: Equipping Your Church to Reach a Changing World by Alan Roxburgh and Fred Romanuk
• Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change by William Bridges

We're in the process of making some changes at SUMC and launching several new ministries. It's been helpful to have real world examples of the situations described in the books. I also like the fact that the reading list includes articles from Fast Company which I've thought was a great resource for a long time.

The class involves doing some interviews with church leaders that have gone through a major change iniative recently. I've got a couple of ideas of leaders to interview. What are your thoughts? 

Canceling Cable?

Sarah and I are looking at making a major shift in our media consumption habits this fall. Most likely we'll be canceling our cable subscription in favor of getting all of our visual media needs in more efficient, on-demand formats. We're thinking that we'll unplug ourselves from cable around the first of August and see how it goes until the first of the year. I've been thinking about the idea for quite awhile, and the recent experience with Dr. Horrible leads me to think the net is becoming a viable distribution tool. The big drawback to this shift is that a lot of content isn't HD right now, but my guess is that will change soon.

There are several reasons for this experiment. The biggest factor is probably the budget. We were evaluating our spending and trying to make some changes because of the increased expenditure of seminary. Turns out we're giving over $100/month to Mediacom. Another factor is that we watch entirely too much television. It's the easy evening activity - we'll watch reruns, bad reality tv (Sarah is obsessed with anything in the Idol franchise), and other pointless content. My guess is that we'll read a lot more without the ability to flip through channels. The DVR has helped focus our TV viewing, but even when there's nothing we really want to watch recorded we'll still watch something. The most interesting factor for me though is the social experiment of trying to stay up-to-date with culturally significant programming without cable/satellite. 

I think we can get everything we would want to watch from iTunes, Hulu, network sites with streaming video, Netflix, and video podcasts. Netflix is the only traditional media we'll be receiving, but I imagine that will change when their watch it now feature is available on the Xbox 360. Our initial plan is to watch content legally without purchasing it whenever possible. When that doesn't work we'll buy content from iTunes.

Our setup:

• HD LCD TV
• AppleTV
• XBOX 360
• DVD player
• PC to be rebuilt into some type of media center
• 6mb DSL

I'm pretty confident that this setup will work. We won't have the PC reconfigured immediately, so there will be a period of hooking one of our laptops up to the TV or just viewing on the laptop. There's a possibility I'll hack the AppleTV so that we can use it as much as possible.

The only thing I'm aware of not being available in any of these formats that I watch regularly is Good Eats from Food Network. I'm wondering what it would take to get Netflix to add the DVDs to their library. As far as we know most of the call-in shows (Idol, So You Think You Can Dance, America's Best Dance Crew, etc) aren't available in any type of digital format. It doesn't matter a lot to me, but Sarah will miss this programming.

Has anybody else made this sort shift?  Anyone have suggestions for content sources? AppleTV hacking tips?

Dr Horrible's Sing-Along-Blog - Is This the Future of Entertainment?

 

Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along-Blog is what happens when a bunch of talented people who can't work get together to do something to fill the time (and make a point about the last year's writers' strike). During the the strke Joss Whedon teamed up with a group of people and have put together what I'm guessing is a great 44 minutes of entertainment. I guess because I've only seen the first act (which went live today). Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along-Blog features Neil Patrick Harris, Nathan Fillion, and Felicia Day.

It's also a musical! Joss Whedon generally gets geek points but he's also very musically talented. One of my favorite episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer was the musical episode. Having Neil Patrick Harris and Felicia Day (also a trained singer) doesn't hurt.

Dr. Horrible is so popular that the web site has been down most of the day. I was lucky enough to watch it before beginning a day of writing. I kept going back to the site in hopes of watching it again. There is a scalability issue here but hopefully it will be solved soon. Whedon obviously has relationships/connections that let him pull together the cast/crew for this piece. There is some budget behind it, but I'm guessing the budget is still substantially below that of a standard 44 minute television episode.

So Dr. Horrible is fun, looks great, is full of talent (both on screen and off), why isn't all television this way? I really wonder if the future of entertainment might be this type of production. Each act will be available only until Sunday, released a day apart on Hulu and in iTunes. Felicia Day has been writing and starring in The Guild for the past year and it shows the other end of the web entertainment spectrum. The Guild is entirely fan supported and is distributed on YouTube. I wonder how long it will be before I can get rid of cable. The time is coming soon when services like Hulu, YouTube, Netflix, etc. will eliminate my need for cable/satelite/broadcast television.

Family Reunion Time!

It's technically Sarah's family, but unlike some people I'm going anyway. That's right it's time for the biennial Skelton Family Reunion. The large family reunion is something that I don't quite relate to, but it's a lot of fun. You see I grew up in a family where both of my parents only had one sibling (and we rarely saw aunts/uncles). Sarah on the other hand comes from a big family on both sides. Her mom is one of 10 (that's right, double digits) siblings - she's also one of the youngest, which means Sarah has cousins that have kids almost our age. It's a crowd of people - always an adventure.

A few cycles back the siblings decided they'd trade off coordinating the family reunion in birth order (it's going to be a long time before Sarah's mom is in charge). This year we're headed to Smith Mountain Lake in Virginia. From everything I've read it will be a nice location, although I fear it may be the Branson of Virginia. I'm looking forward to getting some open water swimming practice before the triathlon in a few weeks. I'm also looking forward to my first four day break from work/school related activities since last October.

I am taking several books with me to help pass the time. I'm planning a sermon series for the fall based on Leonard Sweet's 11 (going to read it again). I'm also taking Lois Kelly's Beyond Buzz. I'm also taking The Shack and a couple of magazines. I've got rips of Labyrinth and Across the Universe to keep me entertained on the plane.

The Flip cam is packed and I'm hoping to get some video that's actually editable. We'll see what happens. Regular updates on Twitter.

Rain Rain Go Away

It's been an incredibly rainy day today. It wasn't raining when I first got up this morning, but started soon after. There have only been a couple of lulls, but the ground here certainly can't keep up. Lucy refused to leave the overhang of the door to go outside, but she'd been heading to the door for about 30 minutes, so I took her out with an umbrella. Right now I'm thankful for huge umbrellas and plastic birki shoes. I managed to stay fairly dry, can't say the same for Lucy. While I was up to my ankles in water I thought taking some pictures would be good. The street in front of our house is under a couple of inches of water, and the river that runs around the back of our house and down the side to the front is certainly contributing. 

You can't really see it in the first picture, but the second shows the lake by our upper patio nicely. There's also a great little waterfall pouring into the river that runs from the side of our house to the street. The standing water is about 4" deep much to the dog's dismay. 

 

Leadership Reminders

Last night we had our summer worship kickoff. Overall I think the night went really well. We're using OnePrayer materials for the summer using four of the messages, small group materials, etc. The prep leading up to the worship was a bit more chaotic than I would have liked. Honestly, it was a lot more chaotic than I would have liked. I've had a bit of time to reflect on the night and I think most of the headache was probably more my doing than any other factor. Ultimately leadership plays a huge factor in the success or failure of any endeavor.

So here are some leadership lessons I was reminded of last night:

1. Be Specific - I made the mistake of asking people to help coordinate the event without asking them to do specific jobs. When I asked people to help I also let them know when we would be starting setup before the event. I neglected to tell people when they needed to arrive. If people don't know when you need them to be someplace they'll get there when it's convenient rather than when  you need them. 
2. Confirm Commitments - I had several people tell me they would help us when we initially asked, but I didn't follow up on the day of the event. That leads to a lot of unneeded stress. I think most everything would have been resolved if on Monday or Tuesday I'd asked people to confirm they would be at the event to help and if I'd have repeated their confirmation, "We'll see you at 4 tomorrow night."
3. Plan Redundancy - Realistically, sometimes people don't show up to serve. Sometimes there are legitimate reasons for not being there, sometimes people forget, sometimes you get a lame excuse. In any situation though the work needs to get done. My redundancy plan last night consisted of frantic phone calls to get people to fill in for various slots. In the future I'm going to plan to have a couple of people scheduled to fill in when an unexpected need arises either because of an unplanned circumstance or additional people requirements.
4. Overcommunicate - Vision leaks. It has to be repeated. This is probably one of my biggest failures recently. I make the assumption that because I know the vision and I'm passionate about it that everybody else is as sold out for what we're doing as I am. Honestly the leadership team is behind the vision. Where I need to improve is to make sure that I effectively communicate how the vision relates to every ministry opportunity.

All things considered last night went off well. I didn't get to hang out and chat with folks as much as I would have liked because I was paying attention to last minute details. Thankfully Sarah, the Soles, and a couple of other people came through at the last minute to take care of things I wasn't able to do. I'm especially thankful that Sarah puts up with so much of this sort of stuff from me.

One Brush to Rule Them All

We're working on a new site for our college ministry which is launching in the fall. Zak's been doing the design for the site and after several years I've finally convinced him that Fireworks is a great tool for web design. He did a template redesign for the Youth section of our site last week and has become a new Fireworks convert.

This week however, neither of us is a big fan. We wanted to use some design elements that can be easily handled by a Photoshop brush. The problem is that the workflow for using those brushes in Fireworks is horrible. We would LOVE to use Photoshop .abr brushes in Fireworks, other apps too.

Here's the current workflow:

1. Start a design for a web page in Fireworks
2. Realize your banner would be better if you used a couple of Photoshop brushes
3. Discover that FW doesn't support add-in brushes
4. Open PS, design a banner graphic in Photoshop using brushes
5. Import the banner into Fireworks
6. Update the page layout for the new banner
   
7. Realize the banner needs an update
8. Go back to PS, update the graphic
   
9. Reimport into FW - basically starting over with the banner in FW
10. Repeat as needed
11. Slice up your design to convert to HTML
12. Go back and make tweaks based on feedback - leaping back to step 8

Here's what I'd like (either of these would work). Easy solution might be for editing capability in a similar fashion to what Illustrator will allow for a linked/embedded image. Ideal solution would be for .ABR brushes to be supported in as many Adobe apps as possible. Who wouldn't love to have PS brushes available in Flash, Fireworks, Illustrator, and maybe even After Effects in addition to Photoshohp?

This ideal solution has prompted this graphic and shirt designs.

 

Indiana Jones - Bleck

I really wasn't expecting much from the latest installment in the Indiana Jones franchise. After reading Hershey's review I was expecting even less. A group of us from licensing school decided to go see the movie last Friday night to end our week together. A couple of people liked it, several of us seriously considered getting up and leaving.

I knew it was going to be cheesy - heck we wanted it to be cheesy. After about five minutes the cheese quota was pretty well covered. The only part of the movie that really felt like an Indiana Jones movie was the classroom scene at the start of the movie. It had the right look, the right type of editing, the right dialogue. The rest of the movie was just off base.

I don't want to spoil it for anyone who hasn't suffered through it yet, but the entire premise is a but too much for my tastes. I'm a SciFi fan, I'm an action/adventure fan, I'm a historical thriller fan, but they can't all go into one movie. It felt as if the plot was composed of a series of brainstorming sessions thrown together. "I wonder if..." and nothing got left out of the plot.

My friend Lisa joked about it sucking until they blew the world up at the end. That probably would have been an improvement. 

Sushi at Kubota - Japantown, San Jose, Ca

A group of us went out last night to Japantown in San Jose.  It is one of only three such communities left in the US (there were more than 40 before the internment of Japanese during WWII). At a tip from Rob Brooks-Bilson we went to Kubota for dinner. 

Several of us ordered the chef special sushi, which is essentially all you know before it shows up. This is a picture of my plate, although I'd already eaten a couple of pieces. One measure of good sushi is whether or not you need to use soy sauce and/or wasabi. I'd poured some soy sauce into the little bowl, but after lightly dipping the first piece realized it wasn't at all needed. Each piece had a different amount of wasabi that provided varying levels of heat to each piece. The toro and the hokkigai were easily the best two pieces. We finished the dinner with mochi ice cream, always a treat.

We took the light rail to Japantown but by the time we left it had finally cooled down enough to walk back. This evening, the group of people and the sushi, was one of the highlights of the week. 

Adobe Community Summit 2008

One of the highlights of my year is getting to hang out with a group of Adobe community leaders from around the world in San Jose, CA at the Adobe HQ. It's a fun week of hearing strategy from Adobe, training, and catching up with some great people. The group is about 60% developers and 40% designers from more than 16 countries. The best part is getting exposed to what people are doing creatively and a roadmap for the future from Adobe. It's always a lot of fun and a time of creative renewal.

Random stuff & The Green Room

This spring has been a blur so far. I dont' know that I've ever been busier. I think it's a combination of my classwork, expanding the college ministry, and general life insanity. Most people keep up with what I'm doing on twitter, but I'm going to try shorter, more frequent blog postings as well (how many times have I said that now?).

We had some of the best worship at Schweitzer we've ever done on Easter weekend. There was an outstanding drama, a huge tomb built for people to walk through, and great music. Should have posted pictures and some video from the flip cam, but I never got around to it.

After Easter I got to go with a group of 15 students from our college ministry to Port Arthur, TX. During that week the group leveled and refloored a house and reframed the back of a house with a new door and a covered back porch. It was a great week.

Last weekend we were given the check from the college ministry grant we were awarded. We also had our second worship on the Missouri State campus. We're opening the Green Room as a second site ministry in the fall - worship every Sunday night at 9pm directed at college students and young adults. Our goal as a college ministry is to plant an arm of the church that genuinely builds relationships with students on their turf. It's culturally relevant (secular music, movies, tv, etc), media intensive, there are lights that change colors (ooooh), and so far it's been a lot of fun.

Sunday night I set up a camera in the back of the room to capture the action. I like the way this song came out - there are a few glitches, but overall a great experience. We're doing monthly services this spring on campus, hopefully outdoor services over the summer, then every weekend starting August 24. Here's a video from last Sunday:

 

It's Official!

I'll be appointed at Schweitzer as an associate pastor next conference year. I just got done in a meeting with our Staff Parish Relations Committee with our District Superintendent. It's been a long process, but it's now public that the intent of the Bishop and the Cabinet is to appoint me here. I can't imagine serving on a better team.

Multi Site College Ministry

I'd promised this post last week but never got around to writing it. It's been incredibly busy these last few weeks as those of you who follow my twitter probably know. It's really an exciting time to be in ministry at Schweitzer for a lot of reasons. One of those reasons is our new college ministry.

We started the college ministry here last fall as part of an expanded view of our age-specific ministry strategies. It's been pretty low key up until this spring. We've been really blesssed by the Missouri Conference in supporting this new ministry. As a conference they've made the shift to ministries that local congregations lead from the traditional Wesley model. As part of this we've been dreaming about what a new ministry from Schweitzer would look like. Last fall we were awarded a one-time grant from the conference to help us expand the ministry (see my previous college sound gear post). This winter we applied for another grant to really expand what we're doing.

I'm really excited to say that we received the second grant we requested. It's going to fund this ministry dramatically, essentially matching the investment Schweitzer is putting into my role as a pastor. All of our pastors wear several hats. The two core areas of emphasis for me will be college ministry and creative arts leadership. The title is a bit clunky, pastor of creative arts and college ministry, anybody got better suggestions? It's not officially my title until July 1, so there's some room to play.

The approach we're taking is to plant a second site on the Missouri State campus.  Right now our college worship is a monthly event. Starting in August we'll be opening a new campus at MSU with a weekly Sunday night worship service. Our worship offerings will be Saturday night (5:30pm), Sunday morning (8:30, 9:45, & 11am), and Sunday night @MSU (9pm). Obviously the focus of the site will be college students, but we've got a great group of older folks that are going to be working with us on the worship and other ministries. We've been using the Big Idea worship planning model for about a year now which will let us coordinate the messages I preach at MSU with the weekend on our main campus. Obviously there will be some differences because of the group, but generally we're going to try to keep on the same message.

My favorite part of this approach is that rather than being a traditional campus ministry we're part of a church. Our goal is to offer campus ministry like options with all the depth, opportunity, and community that happens within a local congregation. We're going to be connecting students to service opportunities, leadership development, small groups, discipleship, etc. We really believe that the local church can dramatically impact student's lives.

I'm having a blast planning and working with students for the future of college ministry. The shift to being a multisite church is really challenging. It's taking a lot of work, training, and prayer. I'd really like to talk with some folks doing portable multisite ministry. It's going to be a fun ride and I can't wait to see what God does.

Green Room Runthrough

We had the first runthrough for the Green Room (our college worship) at Missouri State this weekend. I'm incredibly excited about moving our college worship to the campus, but man is portable church a lot of work. We held the group to the core leadership team (about a dozen people), met at the church at 1:30, and headed to the Plaster Student Union. Getting things out of Schweitzer and to MSU was easy. We did leave some key equipment on the floor of the church and had to send a group back to get it. Load out from the room we're using to having things put away in the church was also very quick. I think both of those tasks took less than 40 minutes each. I really see the benefit of a packaged system for portable ministry, but I think we did a decent job putting our kit together given how smoothly we were able to move things. 

Our biggest hurdle was the time it took from getting all of the gear in the room to being setup and ready to run worship. We're going to have to do some substantial training/practice on the tech/band setup. We did okay - we were ready to do worship about two hours after we met at Schweitzer. I'd really like to get that under 90 minutes.  

We're going to do the worship on campus monthly for the rest of this semester to get us ready for the fall.

College Ministry Sound Gear

Justin & Gear

Unboxing


Basic Setup


M400 Boxes

 

 

Last fall we received a grant to help us fund buying a portable audio setup for our college ministry. We're going to be moving our college worship to the Missouri State campus rather than doing it here at Schweitzer.

As far as our research (and a lot of students) have told us we'll be doing the only full-band worship within walking distance of MSU. I'm incredibly excited about the possibilities.

We finally got around to ordering the equipment and it showed up yesterday. I figured it would be fairly big, but I didn't expect what we received. For some perspective on the size I made my friend Justin stand next to the wrapped pallet. It really isn't all that much stuff, but the packing to ship it is ridiculous. 

Several people have been giving me advice about the system so I thought I'd post a basic list of what ended up in our gym yesterday.

• 2 RCF Mains - 12" drivers, 350w
• 2 RCF Subs - 15" drivers, 800w
• 4 Mackie SRM 150s (for monitors)
• 2 ART headphone amps for wired in-ear
• 4 Shure SM58 mics
• 2 Shure SM57 mics
• 2 Shure ULX wireless mics (one Beta 87 and one Countryman headset)
• Bags, cases, and a pile of cables 

I'd had a couple of people tell me that they really liked the Kaltman Cable Coiler, so I decided to give it a try as well. Quality cables are expensive, and if this can make sure they always get coiled properly and can do it quickly it will be an absolute win. 

You'll notice that what's lacking in this setup is any type of a mix console. I'm really torn about that purchase. We decided that we wanted to go digital for a lot of reasons, but that's a different post. I've got experience (as do a lot of people) with Yamaha consoles and been pleased with them. While I was talking to our rep at Full Compass (we love them by the way) he suggested looking at the Roland M-400 system. 

The M-400 is a new console from Roland which raises some issues with me. It's built around the digital snake (40 channels over cat5) that Roland has had out for  awhile and I know many people who have been using it and are happy. We've got a demo unit for the next week so we can evaluate it before making the purchase. Initial impressions are good. We're doing a more thorough review with a full band this weekend so I'll write more later.

More big announcements related to the college ministry next week. 

Great Ash Wednesday

 

We had a great Ash Wednesday service last night. We had a short acoustic worship set with Kathy and Stephanie. It was also our first attempt at any type of architectural projection. I love the stuff Cameron Ware is doing at Irving Bible Church and been planning something of our own. Ash Wednesday is a good service to do this type of experiment - it's not Sunday and the crowd is generally pretty flexible. We set up an Optoma EP1691 projector at the back of the sanctuary about 10 feet off the ground pointed at the front wall. We used imagery from Awake Images, a large celtic cross. The throw from the projector to the wall is about 85 feet at the farthest point. I love that this is possible with a $1,000 projector and a laptop. We're going to do a similar set up for Good Friday. I'm hoping that we'll be able to incorporate a more permanent setup to establish this type of atmosphere more often. in the not to distant future.

NB: Something went arwy with the publishing of this, it's actually from last Thursday. 

Mardi Gras in Columbia

I had to come to Columbia for the pitch related to our college ministry grant proposal. I think the presentation went pretty well - it was very brief though. I've got to say I think it's a bit ridiculous to drive six hours round trip for a 10 minute presentation followed by five minutes of questions. Thankfully I was able to schedule some other work doing some tech training and a few other meetings. I'm just wrapping up the last of my business in town and headed back to Springfield for Ash Wednesday services (including our first stab at architectural projection).

I was looking for something to do for Mardi Gras but I was in Columbia by myself which doesn't lend itself to going out. That said, I didn't want to spend the night in my hotel room. One of the people I met with yesterday suggested that I go to Village Wine and Cheese for dinner, they had a special Mardi Gras menu. VWC has been a great Columbia establishment for years. They used to mainly focus on selling high-end cheese and wine (think Brown Derby IWC for you Springfieldians). About a year ago they pulled out the cheese case, put in a bar, and began serving dinner. They always used to have outstanding brunch, sandwiches, and other food that would go with being a purveyor of cheese/meats. Now as a dinner establishment they have great choices with a rotating menu.

The entire menu looked great, but I opted to have the crab stuffed trout. The trout was perfectly cooked and lightly brushed with a spicy butter. It was served on a garlic pilaf that had both white and wild rice and sauteed vegetables. The crab stuffing was a perfect compliment to the spice of the dish. The sweetness of the crab and carmelized onions was delicious. Starting with a salad and closing with a cup of coffee made for a wonderful cajun themed meal. 

Long Weekend

It's been a long weekend. I really wish our staff meetings weren't on Monday mornings. I suppose that it's both good and bad - we get the meeting done early in the week, but we have to be here on Mondays. We took a little getaway the first part of the weekend then came back for the normal Sunday morning dance at Schweitzer and then a super bowl party for the college students at our house made for a long day.

This weekend Sarah and I went to Columbia on Friday night to hang out with her family and go to the Mizzou/K-State game. It was a great weekend of basketball and food favorites from our college days. Friday night we ate a late dinner at Flat Branch. Saturday morning we ate breakfast at Ernie's Cafe & Steakhouse. It's a Columbia establishment having been around since the 1930s. Ernie's is a bit of a hole in the wall though and if you come with less than three people you should expect to be seated with others. We had six in our group and ended up at a table that should seat four - cozy. The MU/KState basketball game was outstanding. Mizzou was down most of the game, but pulled it out in the end handing KState their first Big 12 defeat. There was much screaming and jumping. After the game we went to Shakespeare's Pizza and devoured a Masterpiece. While we were there we ran into several other Cowherds.

Overall a great weekend. Not very healthy, but a lot of fun with family and friends. I've got to be sure to hit the gym this week.

Bedtime @ Connect

Finally settling down for the night at Connect, our state-wide retreat for college students that's being hosted at Schweitzer. So far it's been a lot of fun getting to meet new students from all over Missouri, talking with college ministry leaders, and hanging out. This is the first time we've done this type of event with college students and so far it's going great. We had some last minute scramble when we decided it would be better to get a console from the production company rather than feed things from the auxes on our board and I gashed my hand pretty good while raising a lighting tree. Overall I'm happy with day one.

The Wayne Kerr band has been providing some outstanding, rocking worship music and Margaret Feinberg's first session was exactly what I'd hoped it would be. Tomorrow Margaret's speaking twice, there are some breakout sessions, and a concert featuring Todd Agnew. Most everybody is sleeping now, a small group is playing games and watching a movie in the youth room. Time for a few hours of sleep.

Pop Goes The Church

I had the opportunity to read an advance copy of Pop Goes The Church, a new book by Tim Stevens, and make some review comments. I thought I'd share with you what I've gotten out of this book. It's seriously going to challenge church leaders in the way we relate to the culture aroud us. I've been quietly (or not so quietly) beating this drum around Schweitzer since I came on staff. My initial thought about the book is that I'm buying a copy for everybody on the staff. It's that good. I figure if our senior pastor can pass books out to everybody why shouldn't other people?

The book includes an outstanding collection of examples from churches of various size, age, and location. It includes practical steps for any church evaluating how it relates to pop culture. Tim tells his own compelling story including his very first movie experience. Pop Goes The Church is incredibly well researched and it presents a balanced view about the church's relationship to the culture around us and the dangers of connecting inappropriately with the culture. Ultimately Stevens wants the church to engage pop culture, but the approach is Biblically sound and cautions about embracing culture for the wrong reasons. I'm incredibly excited to see what happens as this book gets released and church leaders read it.

Knitting Hobo

Knitting Hobo
Originally uploaded by kerner.

Apparently I'm a knitting hobo. Sarah made me a new scarf (in about two days) and wanted to take a picture this morning. I'm sure this is going to show up on her blog soon too. I just thought it was funny because I'm wearing a sweater she made, a hat because it was only 4° outside (and you have to take knitting pictures in natural light for some crazy reason - even in the freezing cold), and the new scarf. None of it really matches, but it's warm. I really didn't mind not having a coat.

 

 

 

Connect 2008 This Weekend

I'm super excited about Connect this weekend. It's our first state-wide college ministry gathering. We're hosting this year at Schweitzer and it should be a great event. I'm really looking forward to hanging out with Margaret Feinberg and Wayne Kerr. The event starts on Friday night and runs until 4:30 on Saturday. The first session is at 10pm (it is for college students). There's also a concert with Todd Agnew, Manafest, and One Star Story on Saturday. My favorite part of the event is that it's mostly planned by college students. We've got a great student leadership team from all over Missouri that has been working to make this event possible.

This is the first large scale event we've done for college students. I'm really hoping it will be a success. The cost is only $20 so it's a great deal. I know a lot of churches are subsidizing some or all of the registration for their students. Schweitzer is paying half for the students in our ministry. Even at full price it would be hard to pass up.

Not sure how many college students read my blog that wouldn't know about the event already, but registration is open until Thursday at noon if you want to spend a weekend in Springfield, MO.

College Focus Group: What would a new church for college students look like?

This fall as we were exploring what a new college ministry from Schweitzer would look like we thought it would be a good idea to talk with students about the idea. We gathered groups of students together and asked them four questions. This is a summary of their answers to one of those questions. 

What would a new church for college students look like?
Students were very clear that having a regular, church worship service was important to them. They also wanted to have that worship in very close proximity to the college campus. Several said that even the edge of campus may not be close enough to attract some students. Numerous students stated that there were no modern worship offerings within walking distance of Missouri State [to our knowledge there is one modern worship gathering in downtown Springfield]. Most of the students expressed a preference for modern worship; only those growing up in church said they would attend a traditional worship. The time of the worship gathering was of importance to students - evenings primarily, or in the afternoon on Sundays. Students said they want to have a pastor rather than a campus ministry leader [sacraments are important to students who grew up in a church]. Students want a variety of opportunities to be in fellowship, worship, and service primarily with other students but also have opportunities to connect with older and younger generations.

College Focus Group: How can you bridge the two together, a church and a campus ministry?

This fall as we were exploring what a new college ministry from Schweitzer would look like we thought it would be a good idea to talk with students about the idea. We gathered groups of students together and asked them four questions. This is a summary of their answers to one of those questions. 

How can you bridge the two together, a church and a campus ministry?
The best way students claim to bridge the gap between a church and a campus ministry is make sure that what the church does suits college students. It needs to be on their level, in their environment, challenging, and relevant. A common suggestion was that a church should be built on campus. Proximity was the second concern. Students say that having to drive is oftentimes not an option, especially to visit a new church. Students said that they felt the church connection for a ministry on campus was very important - churches are stable, campus ministries sometimes are not. It was also important for students to have opportunities to interact with people of other generations, but that a student worship setting should be primarily ages 18-25. Students said having opportunities to connect with the larger church body from a campus ministry would help to bridge the gap from college to the church.
 

College Focus Group: What are you looking for in a campus ministry?

This fall as we were exploring what a new college ministry from Schweitzer would look like we thought it would be a good idea to talk with students about the idea. We gathered groups of students together and asked them four questions. This is a summary of their answers to one of those questions. 

What are you looking for in a campus ministry?
The primary item discussed in looking at a campus ministry was that it had welcoming people, and provided a comfortable environment. They want the atmosphere to facilitate hanging out and the programming to minimize the possibility of cliques. The biggest shortcoming they say of current campus ministries is that they don’t have significant outreach and follow up with visitors. The relational connection is incredibly important. Students also say they’re looking for a ministry that understands the “flakiness” of students and doesn’t guilt them into participating. As part of the student situation they’re looking for events that are under an hour in duration so there is time for fellowship. Numerous students also said it was important that there was clarity about how to get more involved in the ministry: they want easy steps that don’t involve a huge commitment to test being in leadership. Ultimately the students say the success of a ministry hangs on it’s ability to be a both/and environment where visitors feel welcomed and can build relationships but aren’t harassed into participation.

College Focus Group: How can a church help you develop your faith as a college student?

This fall as we were exploring what a new college ministry from Schweitzer would look like we thought it would be a good idea to talk with students about the idea. We gathered groups of students together and asked them four questions. This is a summary of their answers to one of those questions.  

How can a church help you develop your faith as a college student?
We think the most significant discovery from this question is the distinction students see between a campus ministry and a church. They recognize the importance of being involved in a church. They talked about how campus ministries are most often about activity: fun, fellowship, service. They’re looking for something more in a spiritual venue and want to have more than fun. Students desire an environment of Christian fellowship that incorporates age diversity, but recognizes that college students are at a unique stage in life. They want to be treated with more respect and have more responsibility than youth, but the church needs to realize they are still young. They are looking for a setting where they can be young but still build relationships with those of other generations, particularly mentoring relationships. Students feel like having older people teaching is good and provides a different perspective. That said, students are concerned about their need to feel comfortable, especially as a visitor to a new ministry. They say that many churches are not welcoming to college students, or don’t accept their unique life situation. A church setting helps students to build deep, significant relationships better than a campus ministry. It also provides broader opportunities to be involved. The number one reason stated for not being involved in a church was convenience and availability of a desirable church.

Hacked Web Server Back Online

If you've been following my Twitter you know that the web server at Schweitzer got hacked. Whoever broke in didn't do a very solid job, and managed to kill the network before doing anything terribly malicious. The site was only down about 12 hours. After looking through the system it looks like the vulnerability was caused by my not patching ssh reliably (it was several versions out of date). The server rebuild was time consuming, but easy. The biggest hurdle was slow mirrors for downloading the most recent linux ISOs. This sort of thing is a known risk of running our servers in house. The good news is that our backup strategy was rock solid and there wasn't any data loss (maybe a couple of hours). As an expansion of our current approach to backups I'm going to set up a duplicate server that mirrors the home tree of the main server hourly. In the event of the main system going offline for whatever reason we'll be able to bring up the mirror just by adjusting the firewall. Hopefully we'll never have to use it, but having a hot spare web system seems like a good idea.

College Ministry Grant & Focus Groups

I've spent a good part of my work life the past couple of weeks working on a grant application to fund part of our college ministry on the Missouri State campus. Currently our college ministry consists of small groups (right now there's only one running), mission projects (which will be increasing in the spring), a weekly coffee gathering, special events, and a monthly worship service. We were awarded a grant this fall to help us purchase portable a/v gear to be able to do the worship on campus. We'll start our monthly worship on campus in February. We're planning to go every week in the fall. We still haven't picked out the gear yet, but that's another post.

As we were determining what we wanted our college ministry to look like we did some focus groups. The research methodology isn't very sound, and I'm pretty sure that we couldn't get any statistical significance out of the data (although I'm pretty sure you can't get quantitative data from a focus group without some intense coding). For the focus groups we gathered together groups of students (usually 12-15) and just let them chat about a series of questions. The first group was students currently involved in some way with our ministry, the others have been random assortments of students recruited mainly with free pizza. We didn't do much other than clarify the questions, and ask "is there anything else to add to this question?" until they said they were finished. We then moved on to the next question.

We asked four questions:

1. How can a church help you develop your faith as a college student?
2. What are you looking for in a campus ministry?
3. How can you bridge the two together, a church and a campus ministry?
4. What would a new church for college students look like?

I'll share what we learned from each of the four questions next week.

Testing Twitterfeed

I just set up an account at twitterfeed. I figure that I haven't blogged regularly for awhile, so having new posts show up in my twitter feed might be a good idea. Not sure how long I'll leave it set up, but it may help to both prompt more posting and get some traffic back to the blog.