Vision 100 IT takes us back to School

Thanks heaps to the Vision 100 IT team. This evening I spent a good while (along with leaders from a bunch of churches) thrashing through how to best use our various IT systems to manage our data and communicate with our church, and beyond.

Here are their six things on 'How to do IT well':

1. The pastor has to own IT. It's about consistency of vision and communication.
2. Have regular content, up to date content.
3. Get your 'Key Person' - you need that person. To update content.
4. Key Systems - get a sense of what you need and how to write that. Regularly oversee it with your key person.
5. Coordinate/Integrate all of your communication.
6. Make it Look Good - if it looks crumby people will think its dodgy. Quality of photos matter. It all matters.

Some Advice on using Social Media

• If your ministry or church isn't on Facebook, it's not on the Internet.
• All of your staff have gotta be on there.
• For members and visitors to see your involvement in ministry, in your particular ministries, then they see how you work and where there are opportunities to serve.
• Don't think of Facebook as a commercial front door, think of it as a window on your gathering, a window into your church. Incidentally, that way it actually becomes a commercial front door.
• Embrace the change: make Facebook for your church. Make your website for your visitors.

Some Warnings from the Graveyard of Social Media.

• Don't blindly link between social media--Facebook to Twitter linked, but then only commenting on one of those. Death.
• Facebook events are potentially where your ministry dies. If you don't invite people, post the image, include times, places, etc. then there's no point having it.

Some Best Practices in Social Media (esp. Facebook)

• Events: Fill out the detail first, when you begin.
• Don't put stuff into your page which is likely to change and get outdated unless you're confident it will get updated (so write a procedure). Provide links to your website, which will be updated.
• If it's announced up the front, then it should feature in your social media.
• Feed (some of) your new website content to your Facebook page.  
• Write a procedure to creating events on Facebook (or doing other things). Procedures for social media are a good and helpful thing (especially for delegating, quite apart from helping you out).
• Interaction. Do it.
• Give your posts personality.
• Twitter. Time is the filter on Twitter. Whereas popular posts stick around on Facebook.
• So e.g. rosters posted to twitter won't really get caught by many people.
• Organisations on Twitter must post regularly.

Why you should Focus on the Wrong Things

Welcoming guests, getting in touch with them afterwards, and then helping people 'break-in' to our church community, are things we've been working at recently at Crossroads. And that's meant a whole host of small changes (and many more to come).

But what I'm discovering is this: it's only when I focus hard on making one thing happen, that some-other-thing that gets me really excited comes into view. And if I'd never put in the effort on plan A, plan B would never have come to light.

Example: I've been trying to devise a 'response card' (or 'contact card', or...) that I'm actually happy with. Finally I go the wording, the layout, the everything, just right. But then Good Friday came along, and I realised that I didn't even want a response card. What I wanted was a Guest Book--something I'd never even thought of before. But here's the thing: the guest book took me about ten seconds to produce, because I'd done all the thinking on the response card.

I focused on the wrong thing, and the right thing came into view. I'm very happy with the result.

Check it out here.

Remembering Repentance

In preparation for this Sunday's Easter service at Crossroads--hey, you should come if you can!--I've been writing a sermon on one of Luke's resurrection stories. It's a ripper. Luke 24:36-49. But something that's really hit me is a reminder of the place of 'repentance' when the New Testament talks about people becoming Christians. Particularly, I'm wondering if that biblical emphasis is reflected in my (and, our) preaching.

Here's how Bock puts it (long quote, worth it):

“For Luke, repentance is the summary term for the response to the apostolic message […] Change in thinking (i.e., a reorientation) is basic to human response to God's message. People must change their minds about God and the way to him, especially their thinking about sin, their inability to overcome sin on their own, Christ's essential role in forgiveness, and the importance of depending on him for spiritual direction. Those responding to the apostolic message of the gospel must come to God on his terms in order to experience the forgiveness that comes in the name of Jesus. But repentance means more than changing one's mind about God. People must also change their minds about who they are and how they can approach God. Repentance involves turning to and embracing God in faith. Forgiveness of sin comes to those who stretch out a needy hand to Jesus, clinging to him alone and recognizing that without him there is no hope.” Bock, Luke (BECNT), 1940.

These two things gripped me: "Repentance"; and, "without him there is no hope"

On Evil's Elimination

Later this year, the University Fellowship of Christians have their God vs. Evil events. I'm really looking forward to them, and I figure now is a good time to prepare for it by getting my head back in the game, so to speak.

Obviously, you could scarcely manage to be a Christian for as long as I have without giving evil/suffering/pain considerable thought. For instance, I particularly appreciated Henri Blocher's, Evil and the Cross.

More recently, I liked Alvin Plantinga's video interview on CPX a couple of years ago (the last part of the interview, especially).

But just today, I read the transcript of this address by Greg Clarke, also from CPX. It's entitled, The Elimination of Evil.

At one point, Clarke compares a popular estimation of God's judgement with a biblical picture:

This gracious act of Jesus, as God incarnate, is an entirely different kind of act to what people expect of a perfect God who is judging evil. It is almost the opposite of what Zizek [...] calls ‘divine violence’ [...] a gleeful divine punishment, pleasurably handing out what the evil creatures deserve. But the message of Christianity is vastly different.

Well worth a read. And it comes with a bonus: Clarke also includes a lengthy quote from Bono, which is bang on target.

Beyond Hellish Self-Centredness

Recently, I finished reading David Powlison's, Seeing with New Eyes. My ol' mate Kristan recommended it to me years ago, and I'm very thankful that he did.

Powlison's writing about Counseling as a professional in the field. But he's an evangelical trying to put the horse back in front of the cart in a discipline where the cart has led the way for a good while. (Note: this book pre-dates Tim Chester's, You Can Change, by some 5 years, I think).

I particularly appreciated his thoughtful critique of Gary Chapman's, The Five Love Languages. Chapman's book, says Powlison,

"...not only leaves fundamental self-interest unchallenged, it plays to self-interest." (230)

He pithily captures the dynamic here:

"[Five Love Languages] does slightly alter the 'You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours' calculus. It is a 'glorified version', taking a small step in the right direction by reversing the order. 'I scratch your back (and then it's likely you'll scratch mine).' " (232)

Now, let's be clear, there's lots of handy stuff in Chapman's book as Powlison is quick to point out. But oh-so-many Christian-ish psychology books pull the same move (e.g. Kevin Leman's books spring to mind).

Powlison pin-points the problem when he makes the gospel his point of comparison:

"The love of Christ speaks a 'love language'--mercy to hellishly self-centred people..." (236)

That's the language in which Christians must become fluent.

Cultivating Intelligent Engagement with Common Objections

Recently I was looking over the Effective Ministry stuff again. These common objections caught my eye (numbers are percentages for people in their twenties):

• Irrelevant        13
• It’s for non-copers        17
• Set of rules        5
• Science disproves it        6
• No proof        10
• For the well off        2
• The only way?        9
• Problem of suffering        31
• Truth of the Bible        27
• Good, but not for me        21
• Too many hypocrites        5
• I’m not good enough        5
• Other        3

It got me thinking, "Where are we equipping our people to intelligently engage with these common objections?". It's not hard to relate any of them back to the gospel, either, as (for example) Tim Keller has shown in The Reason for God.

But then a second reflection came to mind: perhaps there's an implicit assumption that undergirds all of these objections. Let me put it positively in the language of a hypothetical objector:

"I want to be thoughtful about how I live in this world, and why I live that way. And I just don't think churches are in the habit of intelligently engaging with real issues with satisfying depth."

As an axiom, it's kinda the flip-side of the naming of the Brights Movement, for example.

So what? Well, if I'm right, then...

• we've gotta assume that our public communication (e.g. advertising for church) has to punch through that assumption to register anything more than glib dismissal.
• where we fail to engage with current issues, it will more likely be taken as deriving from our inability to do so, rather than our burden for evangelism-ahead-of-apologetics.
• the task of training our people in winsome apologetics paves the way for evangelism methodologically, as well as topically.
• the way we engage is important--and I don't mean rhetoric. But as we carefully articulate our engagement with any of the above topics (or indeed, something else altogether), we undermine the knock-down strength of all of them by illustrating the depth and integrity of Christian thought.

RTR now (finally) has a website

At long last, the brilliant Australian journal, Reformed Theological Review, has a website.

In the past, if you wanted to, say, change the mailing address for your subscription, you had to use one of those red post-box things in your street, together with stamps, an envelope, etc.--I could never figure it out.

No longer!

Subscribe now. Here. I dare you.