Greg Davis - Technically Speaking

I’ve been really busy lately with a project at work (with a July go-live), but here are some interesting things and personal stuff I’m excited about.

• Perry Noble’s message “Celebrate or Sulk” in which he talks about Luke 15 and the parable of the lost son. Everyone in church in America today should watch or listen to this message!
  
• Collide Magazine - I am more impressed with every issue that comes out. I love the tag line “where church and media converge”
• OnePrayer - It is going to be awesome to make history in the month of June and be a part of something BIG that God is doing!
• Pop Goes The Church - Can’t wait to read this!
  
• The new Innovate Conference web site - very cool and can’t wait for the conference in September!
• Church’s that Think Big when it comes to visual worship.
• While Twitter is having some growing pains, it is still being used and more people are jumping on all the time. I love the creative ideas of Perry Noble in thinking about, what if Peter twittered? or what if David twittered? Very cool ideas!
• If you haven’t caught up with what Twitter is all about, check out this good primer to get you up to speed!  Thanks to Matt Singley for that one.
• We have our summer vacations plans nailed down!  We are headed to a dude ranch in August!  Should be really fun time for us and especially the kids. You can watch a video clip promo here (or watch below).
  

In the past several weeks and months I have had more opportunity to help set up / rework some blogs for more pastors and ministry leaders than I ever imaged I would be involved with doing. I must say it was helpful for me as I have had the opportunity to learn much more about Wordpress and Blogger than I knew before.

Here are some of the blogs I’ve helped with recently and some things that were unique or what I learned in the process.  These comments are not about using the blogging software, but rather about installing / customizing it.  Each has different merits in the actually processing of creating and posting blog entries.  I’m only going to share my thoughts on the technical side here.

• A Student Ministry Search Committee - an interesting use of a blog to keep interested parties updated on the general progress of the effort by the search team. (Wordpress hosted blog)
  This was the first one I created on Wordpress.com. The process is fairly straight forward and mapping to a personal domain was easy (after purchasing the $10 in WP credits from paypal).  We were able to pick out a simple theme, customize it a bit, add in a few sidebar widgets and were up and running fairly quickly.  I like the ability of creating new users for the site with out much hassle.
  
  
• Life From the Porch - A view of the worship life from Sam Stein - Pastor of Worship and Music at BVBC. (hosted on Blogger)
  Blogger (Blogspot) is one of the most common blogging platforms and one that many use to get start with. I did myself.  It has improved much over the years and provides much more flexibility and customization then it did in the past. One pet-peeve of mine is that Wordpress-hosted blogs do not let you override the default RSS feed. I’m glad to see that Blogger now does.  However, I did find it much harder to get the custom domain working from GoDaddy.com with Blogger.  Maybe I just wasn’t doing something right, but it took forever to get it to work.  One good reason to start with Blogger, almost all other platforms have the ability to import your blog from Blogger.  Very handy when you want to bring your history with you to a new platform.
  
  
• Cremeans’ Blog - John Cremeans is the Lead Pastor of Fellowship Churchin Glen Mills PA - . (self-hosted Wordpress)
  This was my first actual complete install and setup of Wordpress. I had heard and read about others doing it, but had never done one myself. So while it was more work, I did learn a lot about working with a generic host provider, downloading the Wordpress files and doing the SQL DB setup, FTP of the WP files and installation on the host. Being able to compare it to the other Wordpress hosted sites, I can see how you get more flexibly by going with the self-hosted option (more widgets you can add, ability to hack the theme more, ability to remove the default WP feed so that you only publish your Feedburnerfeed, and a few other things, but it is a bunch more work on the front-end to get everything set up.  I guess once it is up and running it is about the same (fingers-crossed).  We did a good bit of custom design work on this one but in the end looks and works pretty well I think.  I just wish there was an easier way to import new themes instead of having to manually download and upload to your site.
  
  
• Jeff Ream - Jeff is the Worship Pastor at Fellowship Churchin Glen Mills PA. (Wordpress hosted blog)
  His I have had to do the least with so far - just a basic set up to get his custom domain “jeffreyream.com” to be used instead of the Wordpress default and “burning the feed” via Feedburner and add the links to the sidebar. Jeff already added the cool custom banner!
  
  
• Ryan Geiger - Ryan is the Pastor to Students at Fellowship Churchin Glen Mills PA. (Wordpress hosted blog)
  This to was fairly straight forward. Ryan already had a sweet theme picked out and custom banner put in. I did the work of getting his custom domain “ryangeigerblog.com” to be used on the site as well as the Feedburner RSS and e-mail subscription options. On Ryan’s we also put in his Facebook profile badge and link to Twitter.
  

The next one on my schedule?  Buddy Cremeans (John’s brother).  Looking forward to this one because I’m hoping to move it off of Wordpress and maybe use Squarespace (the platform I’m using). The biggest hurdle I see so far will be importing the history. I may have to use a TypePad account to make the bridge as Squarespace cannot import a Wordpress blog directly.  Should be interesting experience.

I’ll be sure to post an update when I’m done about key learnings and final results. Let me know if you have any suggestions!

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! 

This weekend, I’ll be taking a road trip back to my alma matter with 3 of my roommates from my senior year, Don, Greg (yes another one), and John. We couldn’t find the 4th (Dave).  We had a really cool 3 bedroom, split-level apartment just off campus our senior year in 1988. That means it is how now a full 20 years since we graduated and left Happy Valley for the “real world”. 

So, in honor of that milestone, us dudes are heading back to the land of Joe Paterno, who amazingly is still the head coach of our football team, and going to have a guy’s weekend just hanging out, seeing everything that has changed on campus since we were there and talking about our time together there. Most definitely we will be feeling very aged as our 40+ year old selves will be surrounded by so much youth, but it will be good time for the 4 of us to catch-up as we have not been together (just the 4 guys) for a whole weekend since 1988.

I’ll miss my family this weekend but I am looking forward to hanging out with my old roommates again. In fact, we are on the road as this is published - got to love the “publish on” future dating function! 

LET’S GO STATE!

To conclude my visit to Oklahoma, I had the opportunity to go to the 5:00 pm Saturday night experience at the Edmond campus and then the 6:30pm experience at the Oklahoma City campus. Edmond is a satellite campus and gets a live feed direct from the OKC campus. Both services rocked! The worship was incredible at both, but the thing that surprised me the most was how baptisms where handled at Edmond. During the service the main center screen showed baptism taking place live, but in a different area.

The really cool part was that during this time we did not stop singing or praising, but rather we were encouraged by the worship leader to do so even louder each time a new believe came up out of the water! I really felt like we were joining with the angels in hevean as they rejoiced and celebrated.

LifeChurch.tv OKC CampusAt OKC campus I got to see Craig Groeschel preach in person. I was impressed with how good the first service I saw at the Edmond campus was in comparision to the service where Craig preaches from directly. 

These service were enjoyable on may levels. First, I love the loud, all-out
Stage Area for Warror Series worship style with plenty of guitar and drums. These guys didn’t hold anything back and it showed. They gave everything they have and I believe Christ was honored. Second, these are definately services you could invite an unchurched friend or neighbor to. Nothing to be ashamed of or embarassed about. Third, the Word of God was preached openly.  There is no question that Craig is a man after God’s heart and it shows in his preaching.

I’m glad I got to see LifeChurch.tv in person. They are doing amazing things for Jesus not only in Oklahoma but all across the country and even the world. I had previously only seen them via the Internet Campus, which I must say is also very high quality and very real. If you have never tried it, you might want to take a peek. If you don’t believe the internet is an effective tool for reaching people for Christ, listen to campus pastor Brandon as he talks about the impact it had in the month of March alone. Over 400 people made decisions to commit their lives to Christ!

 
The team at LifeChurch.tv is not afraid to try new things. You may have heard last year about there virtual campus in Second Life.  If not, you can take a free tour here. 

Friday was the 2nd day of MinistryTECH 2008 conference in Oklahoma. It was a day that really messed me up!  It started when Terry Storch gave the morning keynote talk. He said he was lead by God to change the topic of what he originally planned to talk to us about and instead spoke about “Being an Idiot”. Terry used this opportunity to openly share with us his personal story of coming to Christ as an adult and God’s directing him away from the “Zuckerberg Dream” and instead into a life of ministry first at Fellowship Church in Texas and now at LifeChurch.tv.

To have the skills that Terry has and to see how he gave up a potentially very lucrative career to work in and serve the church is quite an inspiration. As Terry puts it, he was an idiot. His family and co-workers knew it was the only explanation for doing what he did. Who else gives up the kind of money that could be made in the secular IT world and the kind of fame that could be had. Who else trades a life of comfort and convenience for one of extreme challenges and anonymity? Only an idiot.

The church today is in the midst of a world undergoing a digital revolution. There are 6.5 billion people in the world and over 1 million of them are connected to the internet (and growing). The church today has an opportunity like never before to fulfill the Great Commission and idiots like Terry (and us) can help be a part of that.

3 characteristics of idiots that Terry discussed:

• Idiots embrace being idiots - following God often doesn’t make sense to the ‘world’ but to the idiot, that doesn’t matter. As a result we can do things that everyone would think are impossible.
  
• Idiots are comfortably uncomfortable - as technology guys we can easily focus on process and forget about the real goal of why we do what we do. We always need to ask ourselves ‘why’ and make sure we are not doing things just to make our lives easier and more comfortable.
  
• Idiots expose their weaknesses - Satan knows them and will use them to take you out. Acknowledge them, deal with them before God and do not allow Satan to use them against you. The unexpected reality - your will often find your biggest weaknesses in the areas that are also your strengths.
  

Some key suggestions Terry gave to help counter attack your weaknesses: setting priorities, making boundaries for yourself, and having accountability to someone.

While being an idiot is really stupid in the eyes of the world,  It can give you the opportunity to demonstrate extreme child-like faith. Some key questions Terry left us with:

1. What have you been holding on to that you need to let go of?
2. What are your weaknesses?
3. What faith jump do you need to make?

Of coarse this post does nothing to justify the impact Terry had in person and the way I felt God speak through him. I cannot describe the feeling I had that morning and the way it totally messed with me. I have been prayerfully considering what God wants next for me in my life. I have been doing SAP consulting for the past 10 years and volunteering as I could in technology and creative areas within the church, but I have felt his calling recently to something more, something different, something that He has in mind. I don’t know if there were others in the room in a similar position as me, but I believe God truly lead Terry to change his topic and it was one that He wanted me to hear.

Thank you Terry for being open to God’s leading with your talk. Thank you for being an idiot for Jesus and the mission of the church. Thank you for the friendship you showed me during these 2 days of the conference.  While the world may look on us as idiots, in the eyes of Jesus I truly believe we are warriors!

I’m actually excited to be going to Oklahoma today (I can’t believe I’m actually saying that!)  I’m flying in to OKC later this evening for the MinistryTECH conference on Thursday and Friday (April 2-3). I’m pumped about the keynote speakers, Tony Morgan and Terry Storch as well as the breakout sessions.  The highlighted ones below are the sessions I’m planning to attend. I expect to be blogging about them and sharing my thoughts and impressions over the next several days.