Greg Davis - Technically Speaking

This coming Sunday, June 8, Fellowship Church (Glen Mills, PA) is going to be joining with 1300 churches and over 760,000 people in a unique and historic event. Churches from all over the globe will be doing a new series together, called “One Prayer”.

The theme of this series is:

“If God would answer ‘one prayer’ for the church at large, what would you pray?” 

Pastor John is going to start us off with his message “God, make us different” as Live Different has been the theme for our church this year. The following 4 weeks we get to hear some outstanding pastors from different churches across the country via video. Fellowship will be hearing:

• Craig Groeshel (LifeChurch.tv in Edmund, OK)
• Wayne Cordeiro (New Hope Christian Fellowship, in Honolulu HI)
• Ed Young (Fellowship Church in Grapevine, TX)
• Perry Nobe (New Spring Church in Anderson, SC)

It is so amazing to realize that so many churches are all joining together ‘to be one’ in the month of June!  Imagine, 1300 churches all doing the same series at the same time for the same purpose!  Beyond just the message series, these churches will have opportunity to all contribute to a missions project to help plant 500 new churches in Cambodia, China, India and the Sudan. If you are not familiar already with the concept behind the series, watch below or here.

In addition to partcipating on Sundays, the One Prayer web site has a blog where you can join the conversation (here is the RSS feed if you want to subscribe in a reader).

The significance of this event really struck me when looking at it in reference to Jesus’ prayer in John 17:20-24:

“My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one: I in them and you in me. May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.” (NIV) 

WOW!  This year has been a big one for me in hearing God’s calling about my life and the passion He has put inside me. I know that helping the church realize and achive things like this with the aide of technology is what I was made for.  I was created to serve Jesus with the gifts He gave me for this purpose. I am very excited to be taking part in this historic event and to be serving the church at this point in history and standing on the threshhold of something incredible.

I am looking forward to see God elevate how we reach our communities with the name of Jesus!  I am desperate to be a part of it!

 

I learned something new today (actually many things), but one in partcular I’d like to share. Many of you use various methods to subscribe to blogs. Some use email (if offered) but most rely on “news readers” of some type. They are many types of news readers, including Bloglines, NewsGator, Google Reader, and others. I’ve posted before about how to subscribe to a blog and also referenced some great short videos which explain the basics of RSS and why it is your friend here and here. (If you aren’t familiar with RSS feeds, do check them out first.)

I personally like NewsGator the best. I’ve used Bloglines before and it is a very good product and I can certainly recommend it. NewGator gives you some exta features however that are quite interesting. First of all they have both the free online reader as well as a free desktop version (called FeedDemon) that sycronizes with your online account. In addition they also have a mobile version that allows you to download your feeds directly to your mobile device and it too syronizes with your online account, which simiply means is that if you read something in one place, it will be marked as read in the others - no worry about seeing same posts over again on your mobile device that you just read on your pc.

Anyway, the part I learned today and want to share with you is a feature of FeedDemon that I didn’t realize before. You can create and share clippings folders with others. That is simply an easy way to share posts and other web pages you like with others. You can read more about it here.  Simply put, you can copy posts or web pages (even drag and drop them) to your clippings folder and if you check the option which says to share the RSS feed of that folder others can subscribe to your “clippings”  To demonstrate this I have created a new shared clippings folder and used FeedBurner to generate the RSS feed I want to share. 

So, if you’d like to subsribe to Greg’s Shared Clippings, you can use this RSS feed,  or subscribe via email here:

Subscribe to Greg’s Shared Clippings on NewsGator Online by Email

I plan to share things here that I stumble upon that I find of interest to the church IT and technical arts community but may not do a seperate blog post about here on this blog.   Yes, you may have heard about other sites like Digg.com and StumbleUpon.com which are similar in concept, but I’m liking this integration with my news reader which makes it much easier and quicker for me to share. Let me know if you try it and what you think! 

One of the reasons we want to keep an eye on technology trends is to understand when there is an opportunity to take advantage of that can serve the church in reaching people for Christ.  Bobby Gruenewald, from LifeChurch.tv, posted this perspective on the on the new Apple TV.  While it can be brushed off as a ‘fad’ or ‘entertainment’ only, I think we would do well to reconsider that. 

With the trends of YouTube and other social media content watching still on rise, why shouldn’t the church be taking advantage of it? With this easy of use from Apple TV, you don’t even need a computer to watch content from the internet.  As Bobby points out, think about your shut-ins, house churches, etc. who could benefit if your ministry (think broadly) were readily available to them? 

And Apple isn’t the only one. TiVo has also announced a new release of their TiVo Desktop software which will allow you to subscribe to any video podcast feed and transfer to your TiVo for watching on your TV. While this one does require a home computer, the concept is the same - more availability to watch internet-based content right in your living room - no more requirements to sit in front of the computer to watch it.

As a church, our job is to preach the gospel and reach the next generation for Christ. So, recruit some young volunteers and get them involved. Start video recording your messages and get them out there and tell people where to find them.  You never know who might be impacted!

Powered by ScribeFire.

 

Tony Morgan has posted about America’s Most Innovative Churches of 2008. The list came out in the Jan/Feb issue of Outreach magazine. You can see the full list of the most innovative churches on Tony’s post, but you can read more about what really makes churches innovative today here.  The top 10 for 2008 are:

1. LifeChurch.tv, Edmond, OK, Craig Groeschel   
2. Mars Hill Church, Seattle, WA, Mark Driscoll   
3. Granger Community Church, Granger, IN, Mark Beeson   
4. Flamingo Road Church, Cooper City, FL, Troy Gramling   
5. Seacoast Church, Mount Pleasant, SC, Greg Surratt   
6. Saddleback Church, Lake Forest, CA, Rick Warren   
7. Mosaic Church, Los Angeles, CA, Erwin McManus   
8. Fellowship Church, Grapevine, TX, Ed Young   
9. North Point Community Church, Alpharetta, GA, Andy Stanley   
10. Willow Creek Community Church, South Barrington, IL, Bill Hybels  
    

In a an article titled “Church Forward” which is also found on the same link,Lindy Lowry “How are America’s most innovative churches reaching a changing world?“  This is an interesting question and obviously a subjective one, but some things to consider are in the areas of:

• Technology
• Multi-location
• Non-traditional church experiences
• Church planting
• Communication and Media
• Global DNA
• City/community renewal
• Church Resourcing/Partnering
• Raising Up the Next Generation

Whether you agree with how these churches do things they are experimenting with different methods of how to reach their areas of influence. To see some examples in action check out these 4 wild and crazy Christmas Eve services. One of the things I like to do is pick a church each year and follow them closely to really study what they do from communications to their worship services.  It can be a great way to get new ideas if you are part of a worship design team or to broaden your perspective a bit.  I have followed Fellowship Church and Granger Community Church in the past.  This year, I’m paying closer attention to LifeChurch.tv and I’m very excited about some of the things they are doing (more to come).

The point is not to intimidate other churches or just copy whatever is successful somewhere else, but rather to learn how to think creatively and  in innovative ways. If you only ever live in you own box and never look up to see how God is at work in other places you can miss a great blessing and maybe the chance to be inspired.  So for this New Year, how about picking a church off of the list and let God use it to help you be innovative in your church. I’d love to hear which church you pick and what you learn (just add a comment below!).

 

 

 

 

In this article from CNET News the author highlights how universities are using Web 2.0 technologies like blogs, wikis, social networking, etc to engage prospective students and maybe even help them choose one university over another.

A social-networking environment gets students comfortable with a school well before freshman orientation, said (Jan Day, senior director of client engagement at Blackboard, an educational software company). Prospective students can e-mail roommates, make friends and find out the best campus hangouts even before they accept admission. Some universities use video downloads to introduce professors.

What if church was a place prospective seekers could learn and get comfortable with as well? One of the main goals of the church is reach out and engage the world and tell of the greatest story there is to be told. As our culture changes and adapts to the interests of the next generation, are we as the church adapting as well?

Some see the advent of Web 2.0-style tools in the classroom heralding a shift in everything from education theory to how schools are built. The bottom line: traditional lecturing may be on its way out, said Claire Schooley, an analyst at Forrester Research who follows learning trends at universities and corporations.

That interaction between student and professor is going to become more prominent where you have already read about or watched the lecture online. The days of the large university with a 300-person lecture hall are over,” said Schooley. “Universities will be built very differently, with the concentration on workshop life.

Will the church require seekers and the un-churched / over-churched to be part of the conversation on it’s own terms or will the church go to those Jesus asked us to love and care for with the tools and methods they feel comfortable with? Sharing the Gospel is about building relationships not technology. But if the tools can be used to help build and foster some of those relationships shouldn’t we be using them? Imagine a church service or Christian Education time where instead of passively listening to the preacher, the congregation could participate in a Q&A dialog discussion about the sermon message which they already watched or listened to online before hand.

If a new generation can be reached with new methods and tools with a message that is timeless, shouldn’t the church be equipping and preparing a new breed of missionary to reach them?

Jesus’ last instructions to his followers on Earth were captured in Matthew 28:19-20 when he said,

19”Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”

In this article Jesuits say take word of God to Second Life - Yahoo! News we find that the Jesuits are now encouraging fellow Catholic missionaries to be involved with the virtual world known as Second Life.

I find in encouraging that they are taking such a view and they are not alone.  LifeChurch (based out of Oklahoma) has many physical and virtual locations including an Internet Campus as well as a presence in Second Life Church Campus itself (they purchased a island of 16 acres). 

Over the years and the centuries as man has learned and discovered more about planet earth, we discovered how large the command to “go into all the earth” really is.  In the past half-century we have started to learn more about how large the “world” is as we start to explore space.  Now the definition of “world” seems to be changing again and taking on an entirely new dimension.

Culture and society will always being changing and evolving.  While it is true that there is truly “nothing new under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 1:9), there are many different ways in which relationships and communications are used. Is the church ready to take on this new “mission field”?

Powered by ScribeFire.

An interesting news story today in Yahoo which says,

“If pious Muslims follow the Koran, might Christians and Jews benefit from a closer read of their scriptures too? Can Biblical verses help make them better people, better parents, or even get along better with their in-laws? “

The article is about a guy, David Plotz, who has a project whereby is is blogging his way through the Bible and making very secular observations and summaries about what he reads.  The blog is hosted by Slate.com, an online magazine.  He is a Jewish lay person and taking a very frank look at the Old Testament. 

It is an interesting project and while you may not agree with his opinions you do have to give him credit for one thing, getting people to look at the scriptures in context of modern day life.  Perhaps there are others out there who might try to do the same.  Perhaps it could be a way for small-group Bible studies to read and interact over various passages of both Old and New Testaments.  Maybe there are people you know who wouldn’t come to a formal Bible study but would be willing to interact over the biblical text in a relaxed non-pressured way. 

The Bible and its message are indeed timeless.  The methods and tools and techniques we have to interact with it and to communicate the Gospel to others are endless!  May the Holy Spirit work through you and prompt you for ways to be “fishers of men” wherever you are.