Kerner.net

Q 2009 - Initial Thoughts

I've been in Austin this week for Q, a conference that brings together leaders to discuss how the church, culture, future and Gospel all relate. The event brings together people from numerous spheres of influence, slightly more than half were primarily connected to the church. Over the course of three days we heard 18 minute presentations on topics ranging from the narrative of Scripture to nuclear  disarmament to neuroscience. Interspersed with the presentations were a lot of opportunities for conversation. This is one of the first conferences I've been to where absolutely every session sparked something for me. It was also great to catch up with friends I haven't seen in awhile and meet a lot of new people.

Alan Hirsch gave a great opening presentation and I had the opportunity to have several follow up conversations with him about a missional approach to church, technology, ethnography in a digital world, and how age-specific ministry fits with a both/and attractional/missional ministry model.

Probably most important takeaway from this session was that discipleship is much more important than conversion. Hirsch uses the example of the disciples in Scripture, who by modern "baptized by the spirit" standards weren't converted until Pentecost, yet were still disciples. It's about the direction of your life and learning to follow Jesus than getting people to a statement of faith. The church should be more about helping people grow than about trying to convert them. People who are being truly being discipled (as described in Scripture) will come to faith because their lives are moving in the direction of God.

Some other thoughts:

• The church has gotten really good at extracting people from culture but is not very good at keeping people in cultural relationships once they become Christian.
• Holiness has been defined negatively (by what we don't do) rather than the way Jesus exhibited holiness redemptively.
• Christianity should be about redeeming the world, not fleeing from the world. How can we ensure that discipleship isn't an isolationist activity.
• Current church models will realistically only connect with 30-40% of the population. What models need to be developed to reach the other 60-70% of people?

I'll write some more about other sessions, but now I have to get on the plane.

NetNewsWire Makes Reading Blogs Fun Again

I've been a long supporter of reading blogs in some sort of aggregator. For a long time I used Bloglines to collect, organize, and read feeds. My main goal for using it had been to have access from any computer in a format that I liked. I tried out a lot of different web-based feed readers, but Bloglines worked best for me.

Until recently. The UI for Bloglines on the iPhone never lived up to my expectations so I set out to find a better solution. I decided that I needed to have a native app, rather than a web-based interface. My main goal for the search was to have a good user experience across devices. I wanted to be able to sync read/unread feeds from anywhere. NetNewsWire was the perfect solution.

I used NetNewsWire several years ago and was pleased with it as a desktop aggregator, but back then it was a desktop-only solution. I really needed a way to keep current at any computer which meant that I needed a web-based reader. In my happiness with Bloglines I never noticed that NetNewsWire got bought by NewsGator and along the line and integrated into their family of tools. The best part is that this integration allows for syncing of feeds, read/unread status among all of the tools. NetNewsWire on my mac syncs with my  iPhone and stays current with the web-based NewsGator (it would also work with Windows-based FeedDemon).

It's really great to have access to everything I want in a RSS Reader anywhere I've got phone service. It's even better that when I switch between reading on my computer and reading on my phone everything is synchronized. Reading blog posts is fun again. I can catch up anywhere and not have to worry about wading through posts again at my computer.

Easter 2009

Finally feeling somewhat recovered from the insanity that is Holy Week and Easter around here. I stupidly added up how much I've been here and last Wednesday to today involved more than 80 hours. Yikes! Thursday - Sunday involved five different worship experiences at six different times. Over the course of the weekend we had several firsts. It was our first use of moving heads in worship. It was our first use of a click-track to sync the band with a video. It was the first time we did our college worship on the main campus instead of at MSU. It was the first time we pushed a secular song into worship outside of the college setting (You Found Me by The Fray). I'm most excited about the video we put together to go behind You Found Me. I'll post some details about the process, the outcome, and the actual media. I've got to say that Easter was great across the board and lots of people on many teams did outstanding work to make it go smoothly.