I made the following comment to Tony McCollum’s post about Saddleback adding services and changing service times in response to the release of The Passion of the Christ. I figured since I commented there, I should share it here too.

I was with a group of mega-church pastors (actually executive pastors) at Saddleback the week they changed all their service times. Our meeting was February 26-28, 2004. The film had opened in theaters the day before on Ash Wednesday.

As I recall (and of course it’s been more than two years, so my recollection could be a bit foggy), Rick and his executive team decided only earlier that week to change service times. The movie was getting such a huge buzz, they were concerned about being overwhelmed the first weekend after the opening. So they scrambled to arrange for additional parking a few blocks away and got some shuttle buses. They opened up a new entrance onto the campus to allow for increased traffic flow. They identified the impact on everyone from Sunday School teachers, to ushers, to parking greeters and got the word out. It was an amazingly entreprenurial effort like you would see from a startup company trying to release its first product.

I’m an IT guy and I was in a breakout session with IT guys from the other mega-churches. Rick came into our session and told us that they couldn’t do church the way they do it without information technology. You see, since they hadn’t even announced the change to the congregation the prior weekend, the best way they had to get the word out was via e-mail.

The next week I heard from Eric Busby, Saddleback’s CIO, that they had blowout attendance that weekend. Instead of a great opportunity, the surge of people would have been a disaster if they hadn’t seen the wave coming and quickly adjusted to catch it. And catch it they did. People came to know Christ that weekend because of their extreme effort and willingness to change instantaneously.

Now that’s a lesson in dynamic, purpose-driven, change-embracing leadership. I will remember it always.

Stuart Cowen of Casting My Net asked for my list of church IT blogs that I subscribe to and read. Since I created the list for Stuart, I figured, hey, I should share it with the world. It’s the next best thing to an Appian Way blogroll!

http://webevangelist.blogspot.com/
http://www.betachurch.org/
http://www.blogministry.com/
http://www.bloggingchurch.com/home/
http://brianglass.wordpress.com/
http://castingmynet.wordpress.com/
http://churchtechmatters.com/
http://www.churchnerd.com/blog/
http://www.davidblog.com/
http://www.e-vangelism.com/
http://www.eministrynotes.com/
http://godbit.com/
http://www.healyourchurchwebsite.com/
http://jpowell.blogs.com/
http://www.leaveitbehind.com/
http://rodpearcy.typepad.com/
http://www.strategicdigitaloutreach.com/
http://techshepherd.typepad.com/
http://tonydye.typepad.com/
http://guide.gospelcom.net/resources/bulletin.php
http://webempoweredchurch.org/home/

… and (of course) http://appianway.blogspot.com/ 😉

I encourage you to read this post by Shane Hipps in which he argues that electronic media isn’t message-neutral. He contrasts how the text medium favors communication through systematic, linear reason, whereas the image medium favors communication through stories and experience.

Personally, I favor the use of multi-art, multimedia presentation. This approach uses emotion and reason, experience and information, story and logic to increase the liklihood of connecting in some way with each person and their different ways of learning. And yes, I agree that the medium affects the message. A multimedia approach means the communicator needs to think even more than ever about what they’re saying and the most effective way to say it. I think that’s a good thing.

The Church Report has named Jason Gant, our new youth pastor, as one of the top 20 youth ministers in the nation. Jason is awesome. All the pieces were in place before Jason came and now the ministry is exploding under his leadership. Youth pastors are my heroes because they tell kids about Jesus.

While we’re on the subject of youth ministry … props to Leo Johns, our jack-of-all-trades web guy, who helped put together our new youth ministry web site. Check it out.

Hey, I just now interrupted my work to post a link to an article I just now read about interruptions. How’s that for self-referential?

Are any of you out there actually getting real work done? If so, please tell me how you do it. 😉

Check out this post by Beta Church in which they quote an article from Fast Company about how people use the web to get opinions on products and services they’re considering for purchase. No doubt people are going to the web for opinions on churches too. Large churches particularly need to be aware of what is being said about them online so they can become part of the conversation.

Dave Winer said some thought-provoking things yesterday about the potential negative consequences of using Feedburner to generate RSS feeds for your blog or podcast. Hmmm … I’m using Feedburner heavily now, including on this blog (see the orange XML button there on the right?).

Along the same line of thought, I insist on registering all domains with a registrar of my choice, rather than allowing a hosting service to do it for me. If you don’t control your domain registration, you don’t control the domain. Do you really want to be dependent on a service provider that you’re leaving in order to successfully move your site to a new provider? Me neither.

One caveat: doing this occasionally causes hassles when the hosting company needs to change IP addresses of their DNS servers since the provider’s network operations people generally assume that they control the registration and DNS for all their clients. Any time they want to make this kind of change, they’ll need to coordinate it with you to avoid a site outage.

I just now discovered that Jeff Kirby, one of our pastors, was featured in this NPR story on how Christians are responding to The Da Vinci Code. Cool!

Richard McManus has an interesting post today about Superglu, a service that creates a site out of feeds from multiple sites such as blogs, del.icio.us, and Flickr. Called a “content aggregator,” Superglu is a cool example of the kinds of things Web 2.o enables.

Brian Bailey: “One of the biggest challenges of web development is balancing the big things and the small things. My goal is to get the main thing right while still being obsessive about the details.”

That philosophy applies to most things we do in the church, not just web sites and applications.