From Sampler to Sower

I was recently asked to write a guest post for Tiger Bytes, a relatively new blog from my alma mater Olivet Nazarene University.  I chose to write about how the recent closure of Geocities and the archiving of many of the Geocities sites by the Internet Archive serve to illustrate the public and permanent nature of digital communications.

I think the principles are important ones for youth leaders to understand, and to pass on to students.  The impact of careless words “spoken” in the digital public can be severe and long lasting.  You can read the entire post here.  And while you’re at it check out the rest of Tiger Bytes, and if you like what you see, follow OlivetNazareneU on twitter too.

Given my recent post about getting past PowerPoint I found this video not only entertaining, but a helpful criticism of PowerPoint “worst practices.”  It’s funny because it’s true.

(HT to Tim Sanders whose Tweet sent me to this video.  Told you I was a Sanders fanboy.)

One of the things I do here at Middletown is make the sermon graphics for my Senior Pastor’s (Dr. Phil Rogers) sermons each week.  Phil likes to distribute notes when he preaches, and likes to have the “answers” show up on the screen while he’s preaching so people don’t get lost trying to fill them in.   That means Power Point!

Of course, Power Point is less than ideal when you’re trying to communicate to people.  There was a time when Power Point was new and cutting edge.  But the fact is, many people “get” to watch Power Point presentations every day at work (and a lot of times, it’s bad Power Point at that).  There’s few things worse than coming to church and getting hit up with more of the same stuff that left you bored and uninspired all week at work (especially when the Power Point at church is bad Power Point too).

That’s why we’ve tried hard to leave Power Point behind.  Each of our graphics is designed in Corel’s graphics suite, but we do use Easy Worship’s integrated PowerPoint viewer to make displaying them easier.  That way we get the ease of Power Point’s presentation interface without the often clunky and bland Power Point clip art and text rendering (and NO WordArt!!!).

To give you a feel for what our slides look like, here are some sample slides from a sermon Dr. Rogers is presenting today at ONU’s Pastor Appreciation Days.  His message shares the story of our small community and our church, and lessons that he has learned in more than 30 years of pastoring in Middletown.  The analogy he’s using for his message is the difference between throwing rocks (creating exciting but only short lived splashes) and the less glamorous task of digging channels so the current can flow.  I’m pretty excited about the message, and hopefully after he delivers it he’ll let me blog some more about what it all means.  (I’d hate to steal his thunder . . .)

Pictures after the jump…

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I saw a post the other day on the Swerve blog from Lifechurch’s innovation leader (and fellow former Decaturian) Bobby Gruenewald about a time when the Presbyterian Church took official action against the dangers of riding your bicycle on Sunday.  Bobby sees in this bit of arcane Americana a reflection of how the church often responds to innovation.  He writes:

It speaks volumes about how the Church reacts to innovation at times. Instead of embracing it and looking for ways to leverage it, we feel threatened.

Obviously, this kind of reaction reminds us of cell phones in church.  But that is beginning to change.

After years of slides, videos and announcements asking people to turn off their cell phones and pagers, we’re seeing more and more stories these days about churches that are telling people to turn on their cell phones.  From encouraging people to tweet about their worship experience to using SMS polls to solicit instant responses from the congregation, to the creation of YouVersion Live, a fascinating mashup of Scripture and Social Media, the signs of a turning in the tide are everywhere.

It’s no secret our youth ministry has been asking the question “How can we leverage SMS and MMS technology for the kingdom?“  Last Lent we started asking the question “How can we make sure the next time one of our students pulls out their cell phone to tell a friend ‘Hey check this out’ that the content they are sharing comes from Water’s Edge?”  We’re still asking that question.  Our You Decide series is also trying to leverage SMS technology to engage students in community and conversation.  But we’ve still got a long way to go.

Here are some ideas we and others have used to try to leverage the ubiquitous cell phone technology rather than try to fight it.  Some of them are just for fun, to get people talking. “You wouldn’t believe what we did at Water’s Edge this week.”  Others are more directly related to our attempts to minister to our teens or reach out to others.

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So, you’ve made that awesome Animoto video of scenes from your last youth retreat. You want to show it before service starts, but you always show countdowns before service so things start on time, and you just don’t know what to do about this connived conundrum . . .

Don’t worry.

Do the logical.  Turn your own custom video into a countdown.

There are a couple of good ways to do this.

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So, you’re fresh back from your youth retreat with a digital camera full of stunning photos and you want to know the best way to show your church all the great things that happened while you were away, but you don’t have the time to spend all day editing a video together.  What do you do?

If you’ve been reading this site recently, you know what I’d do.

Head to Animoto.com.

Animoto is a web-based service that takes your photos and video clips and edits them into a montage, complete with a tightly synced soundtrack.  It is, quite honestly, amazing what this software can do.

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polleverywhere.com SMS Audience Response System

We’ve introduced you to our new series at Water’s Edge called “You Decide.”  The essence of this series is the opportunity for students to text in questions and topics for us to cover in our teaching.  To facilitate this, we’re using the SMS poll service from polleverywhere.com.

It seems really simple from the audience’s viewpoint.  At the start of each service we invite students to text in any questions they’d like us to address.  “Simply text ‘youdecide’ and your question to 99503,” I say, and questions start rolling in.  “Have Twitter? Just tweet an @reply to @poll with ‘youdecide’ and your question.  And if you don’t have a cell phone, you can always go to our website, watersedgeyouth.com and follow the link to submit a question.”

During the week, students can check the live text wall at watersedgeyouth.com and see what questions come in.  As questions are submitted, we moderate the answers to make sure inappropriate messages don’t get posted to the wall of our website.

And all of it is made possible by polleverywhere.com.

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