Kerner.net

State of the House

The state of the house 11-8-09
Originally uploaded by kerner

Sarah put together a nice mosaic of the current state of our house. The cabinets are mostly complete, we should have countertops, a kitchen sink and trim installed this week. The contractor this morning told me that ideally they'll be hooking up our fridge and oven today. Hopefully we're getting close to being able to relocate out of the bedrooms into the rest of the house. The whole project is still several weeks away from being complete, but it finally feels like we're getting to the last detail work.

#cultivate09 and #story09 initial thoughts

This week I attended to brand new conferences, Cultivate and Story. I can only say the teams in charge of both events did an exceptional job. I was especially happy with Cultivate because it was a format I'd never seen before. It was driven almost completely by conversation - presenters shared for a brief amount of time and the rest of the session was driven my questions and comments from the attendees. I'd say it was a huge success.

I took several pages of notes from both events. Rather than post my notes I decided that I'd take some time next week and process what all of it means. That's probably a more useful exercise and certainly more interesting to read than my random notes.

If you happen to want to know what happened at the events this week, my friend Tim Schraeder (from Park) took and posted some outstanding notes. You can also follow the key points by searching through twitter for the hashtags #cultivate09 and then #story09.

My initial takeaway from both events is that through the modern era the Church has generally increased in communicating the what of faith while sharing the why of faith less effectively. As people have become more overwhelmed with marketing messages and quick access to information our ability as leaders in the church to translate information into story, helping to express the why, is more critical than ever. It brings us to a decision: do we tell the story of faith and why it matters in compelling ways or do we just bury people in more useless junk?

It's a boy!

Ultrasound Pictures
Originally uploaded by kerner

As many of you know, although I'm sure quite a few people don't know yet, Sarah and I are expecting our first child in late March. We had the ultrasound this morning and everything is going very well. Our baby boy looks healthy and about 8oz at 18ish weeks.

We haven't finalized name choices yet, but we do have it narrowed down to a few options.

Outward Focused Ministry

I spent yesterday with a small group of youth leaders, pastors, and Bishop Schnase (the Bishop of the Missouri Annual Conference) discussing the conference role in helping youth ministry. I wasn't quite sure why I was invited as I have very little involvement in youth ministry (other than I used to be a youth leader). One thing I do know is that if the Bishop invites you to something, it's probably best to attend.

The big question of the day was what the Annual Conference can do to help local congregations have outward focused youth ministry. It was a great conversation and I'm looking forward to seeing what might come of the various ideas that got kicked around.

The bigger question in my mind though is what can be done to help all churches be more outward focused. The driving principle is that we fulfill our mission as a church when we interact with people past the edges of our community of faith. This applies to my primary areas of ministry - college & arts. It's one of the reasons I continue to lead the local Adobe User Group even though I'm not working in the marketplace. It's a big reason I spend a lot of time using the student union as my office.

The question can really be shifted to any level and any ministry, and is something we should explore thoroughly. Denominational structures looking at how they support churches, pastors looking at how they support leaders, leaders looking at how they support church members, and church members supporting each other. All asking the question: what can we do to help others (and ourselves) be more outwardly focused?

What are your ideas? What could you do in your current role to help other people engage in ministry focused on those outside of your community of faith?

What's In A Leader?

We had an amazing leadership retreat last weekend, and as part of the opening session Zak Lampert produced an outstanding video about the qualities of a leader.

Remodel Shopping ugh

We've started the process of shopping for all of the things that go into a kitchen remodel. I'm shocked at how many decisions there are. Sinks, faucets, countertops, cabinet hardware and the list just goes on and on. Once you pick a style there are materials, edges and even more choices.

We've made some progress though. We selected a contractor, have made decisions about the cabinet layout and most likely a new front door. It seems like every time we make a decision there are more to make.

After a stretch of decisionless shopping a visit to Andy's for an Orange Freeze is comforting the big box headache.

Texting and Worship

Last night we made our first foray into texting during worship. We had a panel discussion answering questions that focused on how faith impacts life as a college student. I thought the questions were very good and the panel did an excellent job dealing with them. We did have a few issues in the moderation process, which is something we'll have to improve in the future. There were several questions that we didn't get to because they didn't show up in the moderation tool until after the panel was completed.

We used the services of Jarbyco to setup the the text-to-screen and moderation interfaces. They did a great job and made handling text messages really easy. A team in the back was able to filter questions and get them posted to the screens. I was able to read all the approved questions off my iPhone. The huge screen behind the panel scrolled through questions as they were being answered.

I'm looking into whether or not doing this on a regular basis is going to work. I try to keep the message time during worship on campus to about 18 minutes. I'm pondering trimming messages to 15 minutes and then spending three minutes answering questions every week. The Jarbyco tool will also let us do polls, voting, and send outbound text reminders/updates.

Last year we did a panel about romantic relationships where we had students step up to a mic to ask questions. I feel like the quality of the questions were much better this fall given the anonymity provided by texting (just the question showed up on screen). Working with college students I've become incredibly aware of how important texting is to effective ministry. I'm very excited to see how the use of this technology will unfold and how it will help us to be better communicators of the Gospel.

40 Days of Prayer for College Ministry

NOTE: I'd written this a couple of weeks ago, right before the 40 days started, but it didn't get posted. It's a bit dated, but I logged into write a new post today and saw that this was unpublished, enjoy.

Starting August 17th my friends Creighton Alexander and Ashlee Alley and the team at College Union are calling all of us in the United Methodist church to 40 days of prayer for our college-aged ministries. I would challenge every Christian to be in prayer for students and college ministries as a new school year begins. Each day of the 40 days has a different author who will be writing a prayer for us to share. The focus of these prayers will be:

Evangelism—sharing the Gospel of Jesus on our nations campuses

Discipleship—nurturing the spiritual lives of university students

Provision—building financial resources, personnel, local church involvement

Campus Pastors—supporting family, leadership, vision, personal integrity

Students—raising up the next generation of Christian leaders

I encourage you to join in, visit College Union, and pray along with us for students and ministry leaders all over the world. College ministry is incredibly important and I can't think of a better way to prepare for the year and start a new school year than with prayer.

Theology of Technology Conversations

I'm spending this week in Kentucky at the Asbury campus in a class about the web in ministry. The primary purpose of the class is to familiarize students with the Internet and the web with each of us in the class completing some sort of a final web project. For my project I'm not building a web site, instead I'm working on the SUMC media player - a Flash RIA using the Flex framework, the YouTube API, and skinned through Catalyst.

While understanding and using the technology is an important aspect of the class I'm really enjoying the conversation that is frames the larger issue. Lots of McLuhan, social constructs, relational issues, how we tell the Story, and how Truth is represented in various media. It's a conversation that a lot of people never have and I'm really happy that the seminary is facilitating the conversation.

As church leaders, really as Christians, it's important that we understand the shift that's happening around us. The migration to digital information is as significant as the shift to mass printed text and from an oral tradition to a written tradition. How do we reflect this shift as individuals and as the church?

Unexpected Kitchen Remodel

Moldy Floors
Originally uploaded by kerner

We were planning to replace the flooring on the main level of our house with hardwood last week. This is what we discovered during demolition. Not a happy sight. A slow water leak, estimated to have started before we bought the house, has caused substantial damage to the subfloor and allowed for quite a bit of mold to grow. ICK!

Replacing the flooring has grown into replacing the subfloor. Since we're already in this far we decided that if there's ever a time to remodel the entire kitchen now is the time. Right now we're getting bids from contractors on tearing out some walls and moving the kitchen to the area where our dining room is now. The result will be one room that's 13x30'.

We've sketched out some ideas, looked at appliances, it's going to come down to the construction bids whether or not the project is happening. Hopefully we'll know more later this week.