Together, on Singleness

Last night a dozen or so of us gathered at the church office for a ministrylab on the topic of Singleness. It's one of those tricky topics, I reckon--singleness is viewed with such suspicion by many these days, but the topic has our 'hearts', big time.

One of the stories that came out quite clearly was the significance that single people have in the lives of married people, and that married people have in the lives of single people. That's why singleness is a topic for our whole church: because we love one another in community. As long as we reduce 'singleness' to merely 'coping with singleness', or 'the problem of singleness', then of course we'll leave it to single people to figure out amongst themselves. Rather, we'd do well to honour singleness as a legitimate, intelligible, and even good way of being in the world--and that's a call to married people as much as to anyone.

Kudos to the married people who came along :)

You'll find the notes to the ministrylab here.

Segue in Story Telling

Last night I listened to this address from Ken Robinson at the School of Life, last March.

From a public-speaking point of view, the thing that stood out to me was the strength of each segue between stories. It seems to me that the mainline--so to speak--of his lecture was very short. He spent most of his time exploring one digression after another. And he waffled, rambled, occasionally stumbled around looking for the right way to say something.

But here's the thing: his segue from digression-to-mainline was seamless every time. He did not miss a beat *there*. His pace, his wording, were bang-on at those points.

And so I never felt that the address had lost its way, which is pretty remarkable for what was almost an hour telling stories.

Very Early Manuscripts. Like.

The Evangelical Textual Criticism blog has just linked to a quick interview with Dan Wallace regarding recently discovered manuscripts of the Gospels and Paul. It's less than 4 minutes long and worth a listen.

Still have to wait until 2013 before they're published, though.

I should probably say: I'm not expecting anything dramatic in those manuscripts. More likely, we're talking about adding to the already vast wealth of evidence we have for the reliability of our Scriptures. But they *are* early (or so Wallace says), which is nice.

Bargains Galore.

Ok, not actually 'Galore'. One bargain, to be more precise.

I grabbed a book from the 'markdown' section at Koorong today. $3. When I got to the counter I was informed that all markdowns are a further 50% off.

$1.50 for a copy of Mother Julian of Norwich's 'Revelations of Divine Love'.

Crazy mystics at crazy prices.

How Cool is their Swag Bag?!

I've had my eye on the 99% for a while now. They've just had another of their conferences this week. And their swag bag caught my eye, as well as my imagination.

I reckon it would be cool if...

• My church produced a grab-quote video for occasional post-church display, featuring the most incisive Christian thinkers of our day.
• FOCUS produced an infographic poster blending info on Christianity/Church/Tasmania.
• Uni Fellowship produced an infographic of the Christian life at uni, with a slightly activist bent.
• Uni Fellowship produced a grab-quote video engaging with typical defeater beliefs in Hobart.
• My church produced a grab-quote video of testimonial Christian-growth mini-stories.
• My church produced business-card sized info cards on ministries we partner with (all on one card)--just the barest of details, and with our own brand graphics.
• We updated the graphics on our lanyards (we're still back in 2006 there--they've dodged all our updates!).

Brushing-up on Email Use

Email is a key communication tool for the ministry teams at Crossroads. So that's one place I'm investing a bit of effort right now: helping our teams with best practices.

Best practices with email go way beyond basic etiquette, of course. And it's stuff that deserves a regular brush-up, too.

Here are two helpful articles (via Communicate Jesus) to cast your eyes over, if you're due for a tune up:

• How to improve your email etiquette - all about the ABCs.
• How to send a personal email - 'personal', that is, rather than 'raw information exchange'.

Both are a little dated, but remain current in their essence.

If you've got a go-to email etiquette article, I'd love to hear about it :)

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.