Dave Winer: “I don’t like Christmas, maybe that has something to do with not particularly liking Christians. Let me explain. It’s not the people I don’t like, it’s the Christianity of the people. “

Something for all of us to chew on during our Christmas break.

Dave Ferguson: “policy is what happens when we can’t get people to do what we want them to do or when people are not championing a clear cause. Policy occurs when the ethos of a church culture is weak and the cause is not compelling.”

Wow. Maybe there’s a good reason I don’t like to think or speak in terms of “policies”?

Did I mention how cranky I am with Road Runner right now? It gets worse.

Our master e-mail list has around 9,000 subscribers. All of a sudden, the number of subscribers dropped significantly yesterday. Upon investigation, 1,400 of our 1,700 Road Runner subscribers are bounced.

Road Runner tech support is clueless – we might as well be talking to a wall. Our IP addresses aren’t getting blocked. We aren’t on any blacklists that we can determine. We are having a temporary problem with our DNS service that messed up our SPF record, but that doesn’t explain the issue. Is it related to the issue we had last week? Who knows?

Our e-mail service is Intellicontact. They are nice and helpful, but they haven’t been able to figure it out either. The problem is, they send huge numbers of e-mails for thousands of clients, so figuring out why one ISP is bouncing the e-mails from one client is a needle-in-a-haystack problem for them. According to Intellicontact, they are on the Road Runner whitelist. If so, it isn’t helping us. Their web interface shows the number of times bounced for each subscriber, but it doesn’t show the last date/time bounced or the bounce reason – both of these pieces of information are critical to figuring out why Road Runner is bouncing us. So Intellicontact is investigating.

But in the meantime, we can’t send e-mail to 1,400 people – 16% of our entire list. Christmas Eve is 36 hours away and we can’t communicate with 16% of the congregation. I’ve spent a full day on this and I don’t feel any closer to resolution. Road Runner, your spam Nazis are making it impossible for us to communicate with 16% of our congregation. Would it get your attention if they started switching to other providers?

Here are the most popular searches this year on Google. (“Zeitgeist” means “spirit of the times”.)

While you’re on Tony Dye’s blog, also check out his post on Choices for the CMS we want and the comments that follow. This post sparked a lengthy conversation between myself and Brian Slezak, my fellow Appian Way blogger who works with me in the IT Department at Resurrection. Particularly, we discussed the comment by Carl Wilhelm. I guessed that Carl’s comment was referencing Barna’s new book Revolution that I posted about previously. (I haven’t read it yet because our bookstore hasn’t been able to get a copy – apparently there have been some delays in printing and distribution – but I know enough about the subject matter of the book to surmise that Carl was referring to it.)

Our conversation was around the differences between tactical IT execution and strategic IT leadership. This is a subject that deserves a long post of its own, or perhaps several posts. In very brief summary, we have found smooth sailing when we’re responding effectively to an IT need identified by a ministry leader. These are generally situations where there’s an opportunity to improve efficiency (and thereby reduce costs) by automating an existing process that has gotten to a large enough scale that automation is appropriate. On the other hand, when we begin to think bigger, more strategically, about social and technical trends and how that may impact ministry in the future, then we are sailing on much more difficult and choppy waters. The risks are much higher because our role as servants of the other ministries of the church puts us in a great position to respond to their needs, but a bad position to lead technical change.

Speaking only for myself, I have been an IT executive for a number of years. As such I have been accustomed to being on the executive team in the secular, for-profit world and sitting in all of the executive meetings where strategy is being discussed and the technical implications of each strategic option are thoroughly explored. At Resurrection, I’m not on the executive team. My boss is, but he’s the CFO and is not a technical person. So I’m not able to influence church strategy from a technical standpoint. I know from talking with a number of my peers at very large churches that this is the case in most of their churches as well. Few churches have an IT expert on their executive team, unless the senior pastor happens to be a person who thinks strategically about IT and drives it.

This becomes very important when you start considering questions like those raised by Carl Wilhelm. Even though I have the background and skills to determine technology strategy and to make a plan that directly responds to Carl’s questions, I’m not in a position to influence the decision-makers to make it happen. Is it just a simple as me learning how to “lead up”?

A few weeks ago Tony Dye posted the PowerPoint he used in a “lunch & learn” session on syndication and blogging. Thanks Tony for this great resource. I know I need to offer similar training to our staff at Resurrection.

Richard McManus gives us his take on the top 10 Web 2.0 moments of 2005.

Effective Web Ministry Notes comments on an article in the Orlando Sentinel regarding how college coaches are sending text messages to recruits’ phones as a tool in their recruiting efforts. We need to figure out how to use texting in our student ministry strategy.

One of our senior ministry leaders is replying to e-mails from a hundred or so people who e-mailed her. Many of these people are on Road Runner e-mail addresses. (Road Runner is the Internet service from Time Warner Cable.) She started getting bounce-backs from Road Runner that look like this:

The e-mail system was unable to deliver the message, but did not report a specific reason. Check the address and try again. If it still fails, contact your system administrator. exchange01.church.cor.org #4.0.0 smtp;452 Too many recipients received this hour. Please see our rate limit policy at http://security.rr.com/spam.htm#ratelimit

So I clicked the link and read about Road Runner’s rate limit policy. Turns out that we didn’t have forward DNS for our mail server, exchange01.church.cor.org, which caused us to fall under the category of “Systems With Incorrectly Configured DNS Entries”. Accordingly, we are limited to sending e-mails to 10 Road Runner customers per hour. Since we have literally thousands of people in our congregation with Road Runner addresses, this is a problem.

Needless to say, we corrected the DNS issue right away, but how long will it be before Road Runner’s system checks again and realizes we fixed it?

Later in the same Road Runner page about their rate limit policy we read:

The SenderBase Reputation Score that Road Runner uses as part of its inbound email rate limiting decision cannot be looked up on the SenderBase site as a direct query.

Woo hoo. So Road Runner is going to base its rate limitation partly on the SenderBase Reputation Score, but there’s no obvious way for me to find out our score. Road Runner, this is not serving your customers well. How are we supposed to explain to our congregants that we can’t get e-mail through to them due to a policy of their ISP that’s so complicated, even us IT guys can’t figure it out or do anything about it?

Seems as if this whole “no church on Christmas” thing is generating a lot of discussion. Even national popular press stories are appearing, such as this on one MSNBC.

Chuck Russell, my fellow Appian Way blogger, linked one of his seminary professors, Ben Witherington, who really blasted churches for closing. Ben’s post drew a lot of comments.

Another perspective is from Perry Noble who explains why he decided not to have services on Christmas. Perry also takes the opportunity to poke fun at the controversy.

And then there’s Rich Tucker who linked a very old story about Resurrection explaining that we’ve bucked the trend by being traditional in some ways, yet we’re still successful. By the way Resurrection is having worship on Christmas Day, and so is my wife’s church, Living Water. So hey, if your church is closed, you’re always welcome here. 😉