GEEKING OUT!

So I’m not a geek, but I play one on TV…
Ok, I am a geek in real life too…

Since January of ‘07, I’ve been heading up our IT direction at Sanctuary in addition to communications, web and design. Some things are finally coming to fruition.

At the end of 4 days of Mac OS X Server Essentials training, I was able to configure 4 servers from installation, with 1 Open Directory Master, 2 File Servers with windows and apple file sharing, and 1 Netboot server all talking to each other with multiple users, multiple workgroups, multiple sharepoints, varying levels of directory access, application and file permissions, vpn access, multiple printers, ftp file access and much more, all in under an hour.

Beautiful, intuitive, APPLE.

With a bunch of new iMacs and iBooks to replace our dying Dell Desktops, we should be golden…

And when Leopard Server comes out in a month with new ical server, podcast producer, wikis, and time machine….well, this is what the simplified productivity is really about….!

The Great Reverse…

The Truth…from Granger Community Church.

Talk about removing the noise of our media saturated world.
This is everything that’s good about what the church can do with media.

Strip it down. Share the message. Share the impact. Share the truth. Move people.

Love it.

Two models walk into a bar…

When Jesus was around, he did most of his ministry on foot going to people rather than bringing people to him. He used culturally relevant stories that made sense in people’s lives. The temple, the building, was reserved for the holy, the pure, the godly to enter into God’s presence.

Isn’t it interesting that the modern church in America is leaning towards the opposite scenario. We open the doors of the church to the unholy and ask them come inside our house, stepping out of their comfort zones and their natural settings and ask them to watch our media clip and listen to our story and then join the folds. We rarely walk the hillsides of our communities to meet people in their own natural settings. We tend to make them come to us…

I don’t think it’s wrong.
In fact, I’m a proponent of both models.
I think you can meet people where they’re at, even if it means bringing them to where you’re at.

But I also wonder if the church has done too good of a job rallying people around building buildings and maybe not so good of a job rallying the people outside of our buildings, outside of our buildings.

bottom line…meet them in a bar, meet them at the movies, hit them with your postcard so they can come watch your big screen. just reach people. reach them now. life is too short to have no model…

i feel strongly that I have too much stuff.

household stuff is compensation for missing inner stuff.

some of my stuff i have to keep, but if you want any of my stuff, let me know…

i have lots of books…

Brilliant, Viral, Deliberate.

Love this post from Seth Godin.

Kinda puts you in an uncompromising position just for being you.

Are you in or are you “out.”

Sachs on the One-billionthaires

Great article from Jeffrey Sachs ( The End of Poverty ) in response to the combined wealth of the Forbes 400.

The economic possibility of our time: The elimination of extreme poverty.
Why should the church let a bunch of billionaires who are finally learning how to be philanthropists, beat us to the punch of what God asked us to do?

Brand Strategy: Target Audience

Through some discussions at MinistryCom last week, a few people have asked me about Sanctuary’s Brand Strategy…

Here’s the first page of Sanctuary’s Brand Strategy defining our target audience. This is very broad, and the strategy narrows from there, but here it is.

In words and pictures:

Download the Brand Strategy Target Audience PDF

MinistryCom – My Day 2

Day 2 at MinistryCom was a short one for me…
I spent the morning with Seacoast Church….well not really.

Shawn Woods gave a sweet message on Brand Schizophrenia.

Shawn says, Communications Issues fall into one of two buckets:
1. How can I get people to help me do more stuff?
2. How can I do less stuff?

Branding is:
Creating experiences that match the expectation of the experiences with the aftertaste of the experience.

Takeaways:

“Don’t focus on the stuff, focus on the experience itself…All you have to do is get people to the experience and then work the experience to bring brand value by meeting the expectation of the experience.”

Terry told me that Shawn was going to use about 160 slides in a 35 minute presentation. Looks like he did.

*****

Graphic Design for Ministry with Ashley Schuerman from Seacoast Church

I was completely on the same page with Ashley. Though, I think she works way harder than i do. She does the design and web work for all 11 Seacoast campuses. I struggle to keep up with 1 Sanctuary.

The most important thing about Ashley:
She is HILARIOUS!

Dear MinistryCom: I’d pay to listen to Ashley year after year. Even if she just gave the same talk.

*****

According to Kem Meyer, Seacoast should change their tagline to: Seacoast SPANKS. (Gentle, loving Christian spanks though…)

Why does the church try to force intimacy?

We need to be careful of the paths we try to lead people through as we integrate them into the church. We can create just as much isolation through forcing people into community that they don’t want, as in not providing opportunities for community for those seeking it.

Don’t we all just want a place to belong?
A place where we feel our needs are met and our desires are important?

The Church tends to try to take people from, “Hi, I’m visiting,” to “share your darkest secrets with this person who is now in your small group…” in a moments time. In most cases, I think the word intimacy needs to go. Try and find it in your Bible anyway…

We need to look at how we reach people at Public Circles, Social Circles, Personal Circles, and Intimate Circles without making the huge jump from Public to Intimate with no relationship building in between….

MinistryCom – My Day 1

Communications Revolution – Terry Storch
If you’re not there yet, it’s time to go to Web 2.0
Web 2.0 simply stated is The Participatory Web
(Enabling and Encouraging Participation, the relinquishment of communications control to viral methods and utilizing God’s people to deliver the message.)

Four C’s of Multicultural Marketing – Tracy Lewis
Cultural Awareness – eliminating fear, perception, criticism, preconceptions, doesn’t imply endorsement
Commitment – Long Term
Creativity – throw out the box
Christ-Centered – don’t sacrifice the message…but don’t limit the reach of it…

To accomplish this, you will need to have Multi-Cultural Awareness (Find Commonalities, Embrace Differences, Overcome the fear of honesty), Appropriate Application (Be Authentic, Know your Audience), and have a Strategy (Build conviction through scripture, Affirm diversity through identity and vision, Build a multi-cultural leadership and staff, Enjoy Progress and anticipate problems).

Writinng as an Act of Service – Jon Walker
Service Journalism answers two questions:
1. So What? (Why does this make any difference to me?)
2. What Now? (What should I do with this information?)

The goal is to leave the reader with a call to action.

Practical Outputs of Service Journalism:
- Timelines
- Headers and Subheaders
- Charts and Graphs
- Breakouts
- Q&A’s
- FAQ’s
- Captions

Branding 101 – Dawn Nichole Baldwin
Brand
the practice of delivering a promise that reflects the mission, uniqueness and personality of your organization…..

Positioning
Determining how you want to be defined by your audience.

A Matter of Message – Brad Abare
Matthew 5:13-16 – If you lose your saltiness what will you taste like>?
- Be Salty – Pursue God
- Be transparent – Pursue Your Own Story
- Think Local - Pursue Others
- Keep it Simple – Un-clutter the Message