It seems many bloggers are commenting on the recent story in Time Magazine about teens and how they use multiple media at one time. For example, Andrew Careaga wonders, “Are kids too connected? Are we?” And Kathy Sierra says all this multitasking degrades performance at every level.

I’ve previously mentioned that I’ve noticed this media multitasking in my own teenage daughter. Actually, I do it myself a fair amount. IM, e-mail, phone calls, and conversations in the office with co-workers are all happening at the same time when I’m at work. Am I really as bad at multitasking as Kathy says? As a parent, should I be stopping my daughter from doing this?

Shane Raynor at Wesley Blog republished on Wesley Daily my most recent post about MySpace, “If you’re not on MySpace, you don’t exist.” Gavin Richardson then added a lengthy comment at Wesley Daily as well as a post on his own blog.

I’d like to comment on something Gavin said:

“our churches” don’t get invovled in this because of the quick percepetion of pedophiles, perversion/sexuality, vulger language, & secular-ness of the community. churches would rather say, ‘don’t go there’ or ‘your not allowed’ than to say, “this is a glimpse of our society and we should be ministering amongst this world and not just watching idly.”

I love the idea of MySpace, Xanga, blogs, etc. because they could give us a way to get involved in the world beyond the walls of the church, which is one of our guiding principles at Resurrection. My questions are aimed at understanding if anyone is already having measurable success with this idea. From what I’m able to determine anecdotally, this is still very early-stage experimenting without much in the way of measurable results (yet).

Gavin, keep up your pioneering work and keep us updated on your progress. I need some good stories of life change to get people at Resurrection excited about this.

Here are a couple of search engines specifically for podcasts, MP3s, and videos:

A few quick searches suggested to me that they aren’t yet finding a lot of what’s out there, including sermon feeds from Resurrection and Living Water. When will this multi-media search start to work well enough to be useful?

Hat tip: Web Evangelism Bulletin link to article on Search Engine Watch

Cathy Sierra posts here regarding MySpace and why her daughter finds it so compelling relative to other social networking sites. She thinks it’s because MySpace is continually updated with new functionality through rapid software development and lightning release cycles.

However, something she quotes her daughter as saying suggests a different reason: “If you’re not on myspace, you don’t exist.” To me, that indicates her daughter is there because MySpace is the cool, hip, happening place to be right now.

Our discussion continues about how to use social networking in ministry. In particular, see the comments to my post, Scott Reese on MySpace & Paul. It seems that churches are in the earliest stages of exploring this new technology and social phenomenon. So far no one has hit upon a truly effective strategy that they can teach the rest of us.

I’m just old enough that I don’t get a lot of this. How is MySpace fundamentally different from the online forums we’ve had for years? We were grappling with this same question months ago and I still haven’t heard a convincing answer. Personally, in the church world I haven’t seen forums be nearly as successful as blogs. What am I missing?

From my wife, Laura:

I received word that my best friend, Kay Roberts, passed from this life to the next at 1:30 this morning. The breast cancer she had battled for two years had invaded other parts of her body, and her last days were spent at home, surrounded by loved ones. I have spent the last four days taking my place beside her for many hours, whispering prayers, singing hymns and even reminding her of funny moments we have shared over the last 14 years. She has been a constant presence in my life almost every day for those 14 years, and I have not even begun to grieve her loss.

Yet I know that our goodbye is only temporary, and that she is with One who loves her even more than I do. Please remember all those who are feeling the sting of her loss – her husband Richard and her children Isabella, Micah and Juliana, her mother Zoe and step-father Don, and her brother Ken, as well as many other friends and family.

Thank you for your prayers for me. My body is beyond exhaustion, yet there is still much to be done to help support her family. I will rely heavily upon the strength of God to get me through the days and weeks ahead.

I went to the Microsoft CRM 3.0 launch event here in Kansas City on Thursday morning. I wanted to see what had been done with the product since I last saw it demoed (version 1.0 in Sept. 2003). I was pretty sure before I went that it wouldn’t work as a church management system (ChMS), but I figured it was a good use of my time to go find out for certain.

The strength of Microsoft CRM is native integration with Outlook and a full Internet Explorer client (like Outlook Web Access). If you have a “Microsoft shop”, their CRM fully leverages your investment in the Microsoft platform. It now has a cool dashboard view with graphs of key metrics and drill-down capability. Custom reports can be built in SQL Reporting Services. It’s now much more customizable than before.

So, could it be used as a ChMS? In a word, no. The core functionality of tracking people, households, and family relationships it can do at least as well if not better than any ChMS out there. The problem is all the functionality we expect in a ChMS that it doesn’t have – things like online event registration, check-in, attendance, volunteer management, and so on. So the VAR that invited me to the event, NetStandard, asked me if we could build a connector to integrate Shelby with CRM. Of course, the answer to that is yes, but would it make strategic sense? I know what I really want.

My wife’s best friend is Kay. Kay is 44 years old with three kids and an active faith. She has recurrent breast cancer that is now spreading all over her body. Sadly, it appears that the end is near, at least from a medical standpoint.

Laura (my wife, who is a church-planting pastor) visited Kay yesterday and wrote this e-mail to a number of her friends:

Many of you have been praying for Kay and have asked for updates. Most of you know that the breast cancer has now spread to her lungs and stomach, and possibly other places we don’t know about. I got to see her today for the first time in 10 days due to a cold I have had. During that time, her new doctor has prescribed all kinds of pain medication in the hopes that her body could finally get some rest and maybe feel like eating a little more. The doctor has also started her on hormone therapy to help fight the cancer.

The difference between the Kay I saw 10 days and today is dramatic. The pain medication keeps her in a near-constant state of “doped” to the point that she is unable to have any kind of conversation at all. Her body looks very emaciated, and in the hour I was there today, it was a battle for her mother to get her to take three sips of Coke. And the hormones are making her agitated and irritable. When I walked in and saw her, it seemed to me like the end of her life is near – although I cannot say if that means days, weeks or months. Of course, our God can even now reverse the cancer and the damage it has done, but I think God is preparing to welcome her home soon.

Please pray for her family – for her three kids (Isabella, Micah and Juliana), for her husband Richard and her mother and step-father Zoe and Don. And I covet your prayers for me, as well. Kay has been my best friend for 14 years, and hardly a day has gone by in that time when we haven’t spoken on the phone. She is such a huge part of my life, and I will need God’s help to fill the emptiness when she is gone. I know that our goodbye is only temporary, but it still hurts so much to have to say it.

Robert Scoble posts today about websites that are “ugly” but still commercially successful. He calls this “anti-marketing design.”

But, go deeper: we’re sick of committee-driven marketing. We don’t believe it. If we ever did. We’ve built a bulls**t filter that filters out well-designed things in a commercial context. We trust things more when they look like they were done for the love of it rather than the sheer commercial value of it.

That certainly contradicts studies I’ve seen that link credibility to appearance. The same content when presented more beautifully will be considered more authoritative. What’s wrong with being beautiful and “real” at the same time?

In my previous post I expressed the concern of my wife and I about the worship service we attend. A service that has seen little growth over a year and is not nearly it’s former self. Most of the younger crowd is missing. I’d say we met with just about everyone we should meet with, and expressed our concern for not being fulfilled in the worship service we attend. We’ve talked with the praise band director, the senior pastor, and the director of Foundational Ministries.

Our conclusion is that the church is not changing at the pace it needs to. Each individual we talked to has a different story. I’m not about to point fingers, and there are plenty of other circumstances you could attribute it to, but the cold hard fact is that change was needed more than a year ago – and here we are in the same situation today. It’s no secret that the process of change has a greater lifespan within a church than outside of it, even in churches that are nimble. Our pastor, still newly appointed here nearly a year ago, has been extra careful with change. I understand not wanting to come off as dividing rather than a uniting – then again, how long do we continue to fail in face of not rocking the boat? In the life of a church, that can prove to be a while.

The questions that remain: Will as many people who needed the change still be around by the time change occurs? Will we still be there?

In talking with our pastor, he stated that he has implemented change in other churches quite successfully. He reminded us that change takes time. Sure, no problem. In fact, some of those changes took eight years to achieve. …. !?!?
[Insert another record scratch here]

Wow. In an age when technology allows information to flow at light speed and change to follow quickly behind, me thinks that churches need to learn how to change a bit quicker than that. I’m dumbfounded. I’m not suggesting that a change in worship style will take eight years to implement, but I’m not waiting around another one, all the time being unfulfilled in worshiping the Lord!

I will admit this is a localized problem. They’re only losing the younger folks; attendance is strong among people in their 40s and higher. So even if a church like ours actually understands what is needed to survive into the future – can they do it fast enough? I’m not filled with hope at this point, and reading Barna’s Revolution didn’t help either. I’ll talk about that next.

Brian Slezak

Mark Batterson: “For what it’s worth, blogs are postmodern wells. I’m psyched about our blog groups that have launched this semester. Digital discipleship!” By “well” of course he means a place in the center of town where people gather and talk.

I’m hoping to learn something from this. If they are able to blaze the trail on the “blog groups” idea, I’ll have a successful example of blog ministry to show ministry leaders at Resurrection. Go Mark! Go NCC!