I’ve been thinking lately of my calling and what God has planned for my future. It’s scary, honestly. There is a personal business and a non-profit in the works, and starting something so new and huge and (let’s be honest here) responsible is daunting.

Especially when I think about the fact that I’m simply following God’s will in this. I’ve prayed about this and my method and where I should start, but sometimes I feel a little bit like Indiana Jones when he’s looking for the holy grail. Indiana Jones stands at the entrance of the temple trying to figure out the pre-set traps and riddles and get there safely. One wrong step, one wrong stone and he’s toast.

I feel a little like I’m standing at the entrance to the temple. I can see my businesses and the work that God has called me to do at the far end, but between here and there, there are false stones and hidden traps. God has a plan, but I need to get there the right way – to step on all the right stones, so to speak.

So – to start a solid non-profit, I need to find the stones that will not crumble: Mission, vision, operational plan, marketing. These are the “pre-launch” stones that will get me across the first chasm safely.  What is beyond that? Traps and more riddles. But that is for another post.

I realize that I have been quite absent from the online community for a while now, and I don’t think I’m going to apologize. It can be easy to get caught up in my online blog and my invisible and imagined readers and think that if I disappear for a short while, the world will end. In all fairness, most people probably didn’t even realize that I hadn’t posted in a while. So here I am, breaking the cardinal rule of not blogging about blogging and reminding you that yes, I am still alive, and no, my life does not revolve around my blog. But you knew that anyway.

Now to the serious stuff. The year of 2009 has been thus far a year of deep changes. Not that the changes are completed, or coming to fuition, but that the seeds that were planted years ago in my youth are now showing signs of life. Hurrah! So, since I believe so strongly in transparency (in business, in life, and in religion), I will give a synopsis of some of the deep-rooted changes that God has been doing in my life; it will be in two parts. Maybe you’ll continue reading this, maybe not. But I’m going to proclaim it anyway.

The most pressing issue in our lives right now is that of our personal finances. While I haven’t been completely spend-happy, and considered myself generally thrify, God has been showing me how harmful that mindset is and how we need to completely control our money because it already controls us. This is a recent and ongoing revelation, but we’re starting to transition to living only on cash (i.e. we route all our bills automatically through our checking account, then take out a set amount of cash each week based on our budget, and that’s it). With courtesy bounce and overdraft protection, it is too easy to spend money you don’t have with a debit card just as easily as with a credit card. We’re also trying the Debt Snowball that Dave Ramsey is most known for. I’ll update you in a few months once we figure this out. I may (again, in the spirit of transparency) place a debt reduction ticker on my blog.

As an addendum to the financial changes, God has been showing me how skewed my priorities are. I continually said that we didn’t have enough to afford health insurance, or to save, yet somehow, we managed to do anything we wanted. Every time that I told my husband that we couldn’t afford for him to get medical coverage, and then went out and watched a movie, I was implicitly telling him that I valued entertainment more than him. More than his well-being. This has to end. So I enrolled him in health insurance. Is it expensive? Heck yes! But that’s not the question. The question should be: Is he worth it?

Another problem that God has brought to my attention is our underlying pride. This past year we have struggled and struggled to pay our bills because we decided last June that we needed to rent a house. We were tired of living in apartments and we decided that it was worth it. Somehow, miraculously, God has provided for us this entire year, and He has finally shown us how prideful we were. Instead of living in an apartment, saving money, and potentially giving more, we chose to have financial difficulties. So now that our lease is coming due again, we will be going back to an apartment. Hopefully a low-income apartment so we can knock out all our debts in a year or two and then move on from there.

So, assuming that you’ve read this far, what do I want you to take from all this self-revelation? Be open. Be aware. Because the minute you think you’ve finally gotten things all figured out, God is going to shake you up. That’s how He works. And think about your finances. In an era of bailouts and bear markets and bankrupt cities, people need to take responsibility for their own finances. As much as God creates and controls our lives, we live in a world of our own choosing. For better or worse, our priorities and our decisions set the path for our family. Yours do as well. Think about those priorities the next time talk turns toward your finances.

Due to my leadership position in my church and some of the changes I’ve been advocating, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the different kinds of leaders (or managers) and why each one is important in its own right. I’m also re-reading Bill Hybel’s book, Courageous Leadership. He mentions a few types of leaders, so I figured I would expand upon them.

The first kind of leader is the one who visionates. The one who can see the end product. This is the person who says that we need a new website with all these neat tools. Or who envisions a community-wide Second Life church. Or churches networking with local businesses and schools. It’s the Edubloggers, the libloggers, and often, many tech-oriented people in general. It’s their job to come up with the great ideas.

Then there is the promo leader. This is the person with the social power to advocate the ideas and get people excited about them. This type of leader isn’t normally seen as a “leadership” type, but he is one of the most important steps. Without public and institutional support and excitement, the greatest of ideas will wither away in the storage room. Great ideas need to be marketed, and it is this leader who will garner the support (which, inevitably, leads to funding) to make the ideas become reality.

Finally, there is the details leader. This person understands how to get from “here” to “there”. It’s not enough to simply say that we’ll have a website redesign. There are hosting costs (which host shall we use?), there are marketing costs (which marketing route should we use?), should we have a department-specific blog (which blog platform? who should blog?). This person designs the operational steps that we need to take to get to that vision. It’s the one who helps in a strategic plan. They say that if we want to be “there”, we need to do this and this and this.

Each type of leader is integral to the success of a church. Sometimes, especially in times of less funding, one person needs to be all three. It’s how the “somewhat-tech-friendly-I-use-email” person become the figurehead for the website redesign.  As Miko mentions in a discussion on MetaFilter, it’s the “default tech-person” phenomenon that gets us into trouble. If there is one person with some semblance of tech-savvy, he gets the burden of leadership (all three kinds) in any tech-related project. That is a cumbersome burden indeed! Especially if this proclaimed techie really doesn’t have one of the leadership personalities. Then you’re trying to get projects done when the person doing them can’t see the big picture, can’t get people excited about it, and can’t understand all the menial details that make up the project. All in all, a complete recipe for failure; and enough tech project failures make for a tech-skeptic.

And the last things the church needs right now are more skeptics.

So now that we’ve had time to assimilate my last post about the church website as an online branch, let’s brainstorm a little as to what, exactly, and online branch of a church would look like.

The first thing to consider is the design of the website itself. A lot of churches go for the cutting-edge grunge look, or something simply because their web designer says it’s “hot”. A true church website should accurately reflect the people that belong to that church. Not to say that design isn’t important, but if you’re a traditional church, perhaps the grunge theme isn’t quite for you. If you’re Episcopalian, you probably will have a very different web design than a seeker-friendly church.

Secondly, the website needs to be accessible. The relevant information that visitors look for (times, locations, media, whatever) need to be easy to find. It shouldn’t take 5 clicks to find out whether there is a nursery or not.

So, that’s the church website for guests. What about the church members themselves? How can they be served by the church website? Some churches have separate member’s entrances, with passwords and profiles. Others integrate them.

One highly recommended feature is an email subscribe. This way, prayer requests, bulletins, sermon transcripts or podcasts, or whatever can easily be sent to many different people. Churches can also have an RSS feed, so people who follow their feeds will also get the news in their readers.

A bit more controversial, but what about Facebook and Twitter? Obviously, Twitter would be another way to get out the prayer requests and news in short bursts. Facebook is a great way to network, but they also provide good support for groups and maybe a bible study would work as each person takes a verse and posts their take on it.

A final thought; what about blogs? Obviously, I’m a bit biased about the benefits of blogs, but I think it’s a great idea for a Pastor to be blogging. Not only does it introduce outsiders to the character of the church, but it also allows for church members to get to know their pastor better as well.

These are just some thoughts about what would make a good church website. For more ideas, or these ideas more in depth, I’d recommend looking at Church Marketing Sucks

I will be the first to admit that I was skeptical of this teambuilding exercise. Not that it wouldn’t build team togetherness and workability skills. And not that it wouldn’t be beneficial. No, I was skeptical that the youth would be able to do it. Maybe it sounds bad, but I honestly didn’t know how they were going to manage it.

Do I have your curiousity piqued yet?

The exercise is called the “Electric Fence”, and apparently it’s more popular than I realized. This is how it works:

You cordon off a smallish square (maybe 6′ by 6′) with rope. We set up 4 stacks of church chairs and tied the rope around them. Then you place a big board (2×6x12, or something long and flat) inside the square. The youth then get into the square. The object of the exercise is for all of them to get out. The trick is that they can’t touch the rope or the chairs, and they can’t go under the rope.

It sounds simple. It really does. But when the rope is chest high, getting over the rope seems a little more daunting. I certainly can’t jump that high.

Amazingly, our youth banded together, made a plan, implemented it, and they were all out within ten minutes. It was amazing. I was completely stunned, and what made it even more rewarding for us as youth pastors, was that the last person that we expected stepped up as the leader and made the plan.

So teambuilding exercises, for all their hackneyed use, do work. They are useful, and you will learn something about your youth, as well as yourself. And really, what can be better than a game where everyone learns something?

Not to mention that they had fun the rest of the night try to vault over the rope onto bean bags. Fun time all around.

It’s an easy concept to grasp, for one who lives and breathes technology. Want to expand your company? Get a website. By now most companies have websites. And many of them are very good websites. Some, however, need work. Not just in the programming department, but in the imagination department. In the vision department. And we all know what a big thing “vision” is nowadays.

According to David Lee King, libraries have physical branches where you can do things: Search the catalogue, ask a librarian, check out a book, read the newspaper, etc. He then takes it a step further to consider a library’s website as a type of “digital branch”. And then he asks the salient question: Can you do the same things in the digital branch that you can do in a physical branch? And unfortunately, all too often the answer turns out to be no. All too often, he says, websites become simply signposts, pointing to the physical location. And that is bad, because there is an entire world of digital people out there who will never check out the physical location.

I think this goes for churches too. Perhaps more so, even, because what church have to offer is intangible. Thanks to Obama, we know now that you can market change. You can market hope. But salvation, man, that’s just something that we need to get the word out. So let’s put on our imagineers hat, just for a moment, and think outside the box. Let’s think outside the church as a traditional one location, three service building.

What if the church were everywhere?

What if someone from Australia could be just as encouraged from our well-designed and well-thought out website as they could if they came to our physical location? Wouldn’t that just be a glory to God? Wouldn’t it be truly spreading the gospel to all ends of the earth if our website got regular visitors from 30 different countries?

What is keeping the church from expanding in this direction? Fear? A lack of knowledge? A lack of personnel? A lack of faith?

I can understand them all. Fear of the unknown world. A fear of technology. A lack of knowledge about what is out there and how a website can be made and used. No one to maintain the website, let alone set it up. A belief that no one will care or ever see the website. All very valid. And all can be overcome, though perhaps not easily.

Firstly, let’s think about the fear of technology. Coming from a rural church, I understand this more than most, perhaps. I think that many people (not just Christians, though they may be more than most), simply see the internet as something to connect to to get your email. Maybe the more web savvy ones will pay their bills online, or check their bank account, or use the online yellow pages. But mention one technical thing about it, or new social networking application, and their turtle-reflex snaps in. It’s over my head, they think, so they stop thinking about it. Or they dismiss it. Or, even worse, smile tolerantly at your geeky-ness in an “isn’t-she-cute-in-her-obsession” kind of way.

The latter two excuses, a lack of knowledge and a lack of personnel can be rectified. Learn how to make a website. It’s really not rocket science or anything like that. You don’t have to have a computer engineering degree. Kids have websites. The information is easily accessible, and if you can follow directions, Web Sites for Dummies will take you step by easy step and you’ll have a workable website in no time.

So for today’s post, let’s get out of our turtle reflex and understand that the church’s website is not just a side hobby, but is integral for the spreading of the Good News. Let’s start thinking about our website as a church “branch”, and as such, as a reflection of the One we serve. And the one that we serve is Great and Mighty. So why shouldn’t our website be too?

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Next post, I’ll be expanding this topic and thinking about the ways that the church website can be useful as a “branch”, and some of the technologies that can make it happen. If you have any ideas or things that have worked for you, I’d be glad to hear them.

The web is an amazing thing. From all perspectives. It gives a global platform for corporations (or other business entities) not only to market their goods, but also to provide better customer service. How much better is life now that we can just google a company and immediately (usually) find out their store locations, contact numbers, sales of the week, etc. Before the internet, you were constrained by your own knowledge base and the yellow pages.

However the internet gives the consumer a much more vocal power base as well. Before the web, to find out if there were any complaints about a business, you had to call the BBB or Attorney General’s office and the process could take much more time than the answer was probably worth. Now, it’s a few simple clicks and you can view complaints, see reviews of products and services. Honestly, I rarely buy anything without searching for consumer reviews. Amazon? They’ve got ‘em. Target? Sure.

One of the newer platforms for reviews is the blogosphere. Bloggers of all types can review new products, applications, technologies, and not only can their readers hear their review, but it’s indexed and searchable. Have a bad experience with a company? Blog about it. Twitter it. Get it out there. You can almost see the PR execs scrambling for a handhold in this avalanche of Very Public Information.

One way that it seems companies have been taking control of this issue is to have someone scour the web (either by computer programs or actual employees) for references about the company. And then have that person, or someone in the PR department respond. I have seen a couple examples of this. The most recent involves the use of a survey on the Quaker Oats website. I was attracted to this post because I have had experiences like this (popups about subscribing to newsletters, as well as surveys) and it was annoying to me as well. So I read the comments. The post was blogged on Jan. 6 and by Jan. 14, someone from Quaker Oats commented. Not too bad of a turnaround. Granted, the replies are usually couched in typical PR-speak, but what it says to me is that companies are keeping track of what is being said about them.

So, how can we apply this? As churches, it’s especially salient that we know what our reputation is in the community. This may apply more toward larger churches, who may have more of a web presence. But it’s always possible that someone, somewhere is blogging about their great/horrible/boringly normal experience at your church. And that is hard marketing data that you need to know.

So, what should you do? Periodically search the major search engines for your church. I regularly do this for my own name, so why shouldn’t I do this for my church (or employer) as well? The internet can be a powerful tool, both for the public, but also for corporations. That is, if the corporations (or churches) can learn how to harness that power.

As the first of hopefully many blogs I invite you into my home. Feel free to grab a book off of the shelf, pull up a chair (not that one… O.K you can take the comfy one this time) and settle in. I know, I know the top shelf is not that exciting, but keep looking I’m sure you’ll find something that you might like. Excellent choice, “The Comedians Guide to Theology” by Thor Ramsey.  Flip it open to page 129… there is a good section there…

Foxe’s Book of Ferraris: A History of Abundance and Greed in the American Prosperity Gospel

Founder of Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard once said that if you want to become filthy rich, you should start a religion. This is something Scientology has in common with the Prosperity movement of American-brand Christianity where believers like to encourage greedy, overtly materialistic preachers by giving them more money for their ministries, which consists of asking for more money for their ministries. They’ve confused faith with begging. Hey, if these preachers all have that much faith, you think they could just pray all that money in rather than beg for it?

I belive that God provides miraculously, but if you think God MUST provide for you because of your tithes and offerings, all you’ve done is reduce God into a manageable idol for your own private use. The Church of Cha-Ching. Christianity as a pyramid scheme.

What kind of Gospel is that?

“Would you like to give your heart of Jesus?”

“Not Really.”

“What if there’s a Rolls Royce involved?”

“Well, sure?”

“And for only 10 percent of your yearly income, God can make you a millionaire.”

“Really?”

“Only if you believe.”

“What happens if my faith is weak?”

“Do you want your Rolls Repoed?”

“No.”

“Then Believe.”

What many professing Christians fail to realize is that the abundant life according to the apostle Paul can mean an abundance of beatings, imprisonments and hardships (see 2 Timothy 3:12). Did you get your blessing yet?

The thing that brings God the most glory is when people in hardship and persecution trust Him because they believe so strongly in His character. This is why there is something called “Foxe’s Bood of Martyrs” and not “Foxe’s Book of Ferraris”. Jesus doesn’t want you to follow Him because He can line your pocket book or remove your bunions or fill your garage with fancy cars (or your hut with multiple pigs if you’re a Third Worlder). He wants you to follow Him because He’s the Truth.

As Darius Dunson (aka Guadscent) told Lauren Sandler in her book “Righteous”, “The biggest enemy to Christianity is the misrepresentation of Christianity.”

Anyone raised in a traditional liturgical church should be familiar with Mary’s Magnificat, or Mary’s Song. Anyone at all familiar with choral or classical music should also recognize the name, if not the words. It’s basically her song of worship and praise for the baby that is in her womb as well as for Elizabeth’s miracle as well. At least, that is how it is commonly seen.

                On this last week of Advent, people normally tell of the birth of the Christ-child, of peaceful mangers, starry nights, of Kings wrapped in swaddling clothes. While those are the reason for the season, I’m going in a completely different direction for this holiday. Let’s back up from Jesus’ birth for a bit to his mother and her song.

                On the surface, it seems like a typical song of praise. And it is. Mary was praising God for remembering the humble and remembering his promise with Abraham. But Mary isn’t the only one in the Bible to have sung such a song. There was another woman, another miracle of birth, ages ago. 1 Samuel  2:1-10 is Hannah’s song of praise. Hannah and Mary’s songs sound quite similar. They have similar themes, even similar wording. They exalt the Lord, they praise God for his faithfulness to Israel, and his commitment to the poor and lowly.

                Perhaps both songs can be seen as a part of one longer tradition. Mary’s song praises God, yes, but it also acknowledges that God favors the lowly. Reminiscent of many of the Psalms, Mary says that God brings down rulers but lifts up the humble (meaning poor in station). God fills the hungry but sends the rich away empty. Both women were in difficult situations: Hannah had just given up her child, and Mary was an unwed mother. Yet through the difficulties, they found the strength to recognize the sovereignty of God.

                Perhaps, instead of a peaceful lullaby or a sweet song of praise, Mary’s Magnificat should be seen as more of a battle cry. She understands the pain of the poor, the hungry, the lowly, the outcast. She raises her voice on their behalf and tells of the Lord’s redemption.

                During the Christmas season, it’s easy to get caught up in the dross that surrounds us. It’s easy to lose sight of the Christ when we are drowning in our own troubles. It’s easy to feel helpless when we’re eating Christmas dinner and so many people are starving. There are so many ills in the world that it’s easy to lose focus. And when those hurts are close to us, we carry them around with us. Even during Christmas, supposedly a joyful time, churches are still filled with broken people.

                So on this, the fourth week of Advent, a week generally associated with hope, let’s re-read the Magnificat and realize that God is not finished yet. He is still working. I repeat the cry of David in Psalm 27:

“I am still confident of this:
I will see the goodness of the Lord
in the land of the living.” (Ps 27:13)

Let us cast off our cares, just for the moment and praise God for His ultimate victory over the troubles of the world. Hunger? No problem. Poverty? Taken care of. Jesus Christ was born to die for our sins so that we can be redeemed. That is victory. That is the ultimate battle cry. That is Christmas.