Ben Gray of Blog Ministry: “Realize that they [students] view email as outdated and almost useless. They only use it to communicate with authority figures. They use Myspace and IM to communicate with friends.”

Check out Jason Powell’s recent post about Eric Busby of Saddleback speaking at Microsoft’s Tech Ed. I commented and shared one of my own Eric Busby stories.

My friend Jennie Ver Steeg is Director of Online Libraries for Career Education Corp. She asked me to post the following in case any of you out there are looking for consulting opportunities.

I am in the process of gathering prospective Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) for the various courses in the Network Administration, Management, and/or Design field. Prospective SMEs will be contracted to help on coursework and will be working with instructional designers to develop appropriate course materials.

Prospective SMEs are required to have at least a Masters Degree in the appropriate field with at least five years real world experience. Potential SMEs must also be used to working under aggressive deadlines and take feedback well. SMEs will ideally also have previous experience in teaching, training, or developing coursework. This is a short-term (8 week), part time contract. Please contact Brandon Morrison at bmorrison@careeredonline.com.

Dave Winer, the father of blogging and RSS, says that blogs are not primarily a means of conversation. Rather, they’re primarily about sharing your thoughts and things you’ve discovered. Search engines (and I would add hyperlinks and RSS) then connect your blogged ideas to others who are thinking about/struggling with similar issues. In Dave’s words, “I blog to share discoveries, large and small, mundane and profound and everything inbetween.” He doesn’t feel it’s his job as a blogger to write things that provoke a reaction.

I really like this idea that bloggers should share what’s on their minds, without concern about whether it will get others talking or draw attention and traffic. Having said that, I still think blogs are a means of public conversation. It’s simply a different kind of conversation. It’s a distributed, asynchronous conversation in which many people are talking at once and many people are listening at once. Blogs are about “shared discovery,” as Dave put it, and conversation. These two different ways of thinking about blogging are not at odds. If you’re thinking that “conversation” means comments and reactions to a post, then your view of the term “conversation” is too limited.

As I’ve said before, I like blogging much better than forums because they’re driven by the blogger’s creativity, writing ability, and personality. Unlike forums, they’re not dependent on achieving a critical mass of community in which some people pose questions or make comments and then others react. And blog posts do contribute to the public conversation whether or not anyone reacts or comments.

Saturday rally at the ampitheater

My son, Robbie (center with hat), chillin’ at the rally

My daughter, Beth, with the trip mascot, “Super Turtle”

4000 youth rockin’ out

Our youth (in green) rockin’ out with the other 4000

Joe White preaching at Sunday morning worship

Here’s the final installment of my interview with Chuck Russell about his background and his decision to come to Resurrection. See part 2 here.

Clif: What made you decide to move from the national, general agency level down to the local church level?

Chuck: My heart has always been with the local church. Just ask my colleagues here at UMCOM. They got sick of hearing me say over and over that it’s ALL about what goes on at the local church. One of my mentors, Gregg Taylor at the University of Arkansas Wesley Foundation, used to always say you can influence people from far off but you can only impact them from up close. The local church is the Father’s instrument in bringing about his kingdom rule on earth. It has been that way since a converted persecutor rambled around the Roman Empire setting up house churches.

Clif: What will be your title and role on staff at Resurrection?

Chuck: My title will be Internet Communications Director, and being that it is a new position my role will gradually evolve. Primarily I will be responsible for the Internet-based communications that the church as a whole and individual ministries use to live out their mission to make disciples. In a church with so many talented people, that will mean a lot of consulting, strategic planning, project management, volunteer recruitment, training and equipping. I see the web and Internet technologies as servants of the ministry of the church, so the goal is to really understand the needs and values of ministry leaders and help them bring technology to bear on those areas.

Clif: What are your priorities in this new position?

Chuck:
1. Getting to know the church in depth – its people, its programs, its heartbeat.
2. Establish an internal consultancy that has a well developed process for meeting ministry area needs.
3. Recruiting and equipping a volunteer team.
4. Establishing standards and guidelines for forward facing websites.
5. Learning to work in a cubicle. (Yep I had a really cool office with a view of downtown Nashville.)

Clif: What excites you most about the opportunity to be on the staff at Resurrection?

Chuck: The ability to work with such smart, talented people who are absolutely on mission. What I admire most about the church as a whole and particularly its executive leadership, is how focused they are on their core values. They know when to say yes and when to say no to something, and its always related to the question of whether or not it can get us further toward making disciples of Jesus Christ.

Here’s more of my interview with Chuck Russell about his background and his decision to come to Resurrection. See part 1 here.

Clif: What have you learned from your time on staff at UMCOM? What do you feel are your greatest accomplishments there?

Chuck: My first real learning is that there are people at General Agencies that really do want to help and that are great at what they do. I had grown up pretty much divorced from the national church and really felt like it didn’t have much to offer. What I found is that while sometimes the national church is out of touch with the local church, sometimes the problem really is just that people don’t know how much assistance they could get just by picking up the phone and making a call.

As far as accomplishments, we have helped thousands of churches get started on the web through resources and products, and we trained close to 4,000 local church leaders in the use of the Internet for ministry. We worked with numerous annual conferences to help improve their web presence, and of course working with Resurrection and other innovative churches has been exciting as well. I also had the opportunity to lead seminars at some great national events like the Large Church Leadership Institute, The Healthy Church Initiative, and more. Finally I had the opportunity to work with Matt Carlisle on the redesign of UMC.ORG which will launch sometime later this year.

Clif: Now, tell the story of how you became involved in the web team at Resurrection and what your involvement has been.

Chuck: Long story short – you called me up one day just to talk about what the national church was doing regarding the web because you were in the process of re-working the http://www.cor.org/ website. We talked for a good long time and I eventually referred you to the folks working with the Web Empowered Church. (Or maybe you already new about them, but I reinforced that you should talk to them. Its hard to remember now.) WEC was working with TYPO3, a content management system I stumbled on several months earlier, and I thought that it fit exactly with what Resurrection was trying to do. From that point of contact we began to communicate regularly, having discussions about strategy and direction, and as the site went live I was brought in to train and equip the staff on the use of TYPO3. I’ve been back to train on a couple of occasions and worked for a week with Peter Metz – the Director of Communications – doing consulting for each of the ministry areas. I’ve felt like an adjunct staff member for a while.

Look for the final installment of this interview tomorrow.

Follow up on what Chuck just said, Church Marketing Sucks hits us where it hurts!

I’m really excited today to get to announce to our Appian Way readers that Chuck Russell, our fellow Appian Way blogger, is coming to work on staff with Brian, Leo, and me at Church of the Resurrection. In his job as Internet Resource Consultant for United Methodist Communications (UMCOM), Chuck has been part of our web team for almost two years. But now he’s moving from Nashville to Kansas City and will be full time on our staff. Woo hoo!

I interviewed Chuck about his background and his decision to come to Resurrection. Here are my questions and his answers.

Clif: First, tell us a little about yourself – where you’re from, your family, your wife’s family, your pets, etc.

Chuck: I am originally from Abernathy, Texas just outside of Lubbock and my Mom and Dad still live there. My wife, Amy, is from Kansas City and her family lives in Parkville, Missouri (in the Kansas City area). We have one cat named Nilly who is already in Kansas City – she wanted to make the move up early to get adjusted. No kids yet but we will be working on that!!

Clif: Briefly, give us your testimony. How did you come to Christ? When and how were you called into ministry?

Chuck: I am a lifelong Methodist but I became a Christian during college at Texas Tech University. I was involved in an amazing Wesley Foundation (United Methodist Campus Ministry) and basically was converted by the love and Grace of Christ as represented in the people I came into contact with there. I was also deeply influenced by my reading of John Wesley’s sermons and writings. I am radically Wesleyan and could spend hours talking about why Wesley’s basic theological position is exactly the right direction for reaching this culture. My calling into ministry came first at Texas Tech where I knew I would be living my life for Christian service. God lead me through an amazing seminary experience at Asbury Theological Seminary that is basically indescribable. It’s also where I met my wife.

Clif: What have you been doing since you graduated from seminary?

Chuck: After graduating I worked in Lexington, Kentucky while my wife finished seminary. Yep two Masters of Divinity in the same house … that’s a lot of divinity! Anyway I was working with a corporate technology training company there, teaching everything from database applications to Internet technologies. After Amy graduated I was fortunate to find a job that combined my interest in technology and my heart for ministry at United Methodist Communications. UMCOM is one of the national agencies funded by apportionment dollars given by local churches. Its focus is on the communications strategy for the denomination and equipping local churches to effectively use technology. My job was focused on training and equipping churches across the denomination in the use of Internet technologies. I also worked with annual conferences and larger churches in a consultative role.

Look for more of this interview in the next couple of days …

In a comment on Brian’s post, I said I would post separately on my conversation with my mom yesterday regarding George Barna’s new book, Revolution.

First, let me get my book-review criticism out of the way so I can get to the real substance of what Barna is saying. In my view the book has two major flaws. First, it reads like a 6-page research report that was padded into a short book. There’s a lot of repetition and fluff and almost no hard data. Second, it presents Barna’s conclusions, but it doesn’t give us the demographic and polling data upon which those conclusions are based. Barna seems to be saying, “I’m the most respected sociologist of American Protestantism. I know what I’m talking about, so you should simply trust my conclusions.” It would be a lot easier for me to persuade others to Barna’s point of view if I could cite some solid, credible research to back it up.

Now on to the substance … My dad was a pastor for over 40 years until his death in 2001. During those long years of ministry my mom was a very supportive pastor’s spouse. Now she is my wife’s right-hand woman at Living Water Christian Church. (Her picture is at the bottom of this page.) She is a woman of deep Christian faith, having spent much of her adult life in ministry, scripture study, teaching, and prayer.

As we discussed Revolution, Mom repeated part of her own story about how in the early 1970s, when my dad had been a pastor for around 15 years, she became very disillusioned with my dad’s congregation as well as the whole structure of traditional church. Although she always supported Dad and was deeply involved in the life of our congregation, she felt alienated from it.

At that time she got involved in two prayer groups made up of women from a number of different congregations in the community. These groups weren’t in any way associated with or related to our family’s congregation. They were completely separate. These groups became “church” for Mom in a way that our congregation couldn’t be. In fact, if she didn’t have those groups, she wonders if she would have been able to tolerate the dysfunction of our congregation. The spiritual nourishment she received from those groups sustained her and made it possible for her to support Dad in our congregation without going insane.

While Dad supported Mom’s involvement in those groups, he continued to encourage her to see the value in a traditional congregation. He told her, “In ten years those prayer groups will be gone, but our congregation will still be here doing ministry, nurturing people in the faith, and making a difference in the community.” And in fact Dad was right. Those prayer groups are long gone but that congregation is still alive today.

However, I wish Dad were here so I could ask him, “Does the longevity or future prospects of a community of faith have anything to do with whether or not that community could rightly be called a ‘church’?” Somehow I doubt that it does. Living Water is a tender new church plant, whose future is still in doubt. Does that mean it isn’t a church? Of course not.

So that brings us back to Revolution and Brian’s concerns that the church is failing (as posted here, here, and here). The key to understanding Barna’s point is in the definition of “church.” The Bible is very clear that we aren’t meant to follow Christ on our own. Everyone needs a community of faith to encourage them, rekindle the flame, and bring them into a fuller, deeper relationship with Jesus.

But what kind of community of faith qualifies as a “church?” Does it need a building, a pastor, staff, and weekly gatherings to be a church? Or is any community of faith a church, at least for the moment that community exists? Does a once-a-year Promise Keeper’s event qualify as “church?” If not, why not? Barna’s ideas are intriguing if for no other reason than that they get us thinking about this fundamental question. In my view, it’s not whether Christians will be part of a church twenty years from now, it’s what kind of church will they choose. And I’m at least open to the possibility that Barna’s view on that will turn out to be correct. If so, it has huge strategic implications, which are outside the scope of this post.

And by the way, Brian, you’re in good company when you’re feeling that the church is failing. My mom felt the same way more than 20 years ago. Can you imagine being the pastor’s spouse and feeling what you’re feeling? That would be tough.