Children’s Ministry Online

Church Marketing Sucks just posted about one of Integrity Music’s newest artist, Joel Auge. Absolutely amazing! Visit his site here. I’ve been listening to the few sample songs on this site for the past few hours. Track one (so deep in love) is just incredible. I’d buy the album right now, but I’m on a tight budget right now… so I’m just listening to the songs on his web site for now.

I think it’s the folk/pop feel that I like so much. It’s different from your normal P&W albums. Check it out!

Technorati Tags: Joel Auge,Integrity Music

written by Kenny

So, my team had an interesting idea for a video. We had been talking over the summer about how we continue to get the word out about volunteer opportunities. One day my team sat around and threw out all these ideas for a funny recruitment video. A few weeks later, they put this together. Tell me what you think. We’re pretty sure the opening scene is too long, but the second half is where things get pretty funny/cute. Any thoughts?

written by Kenny

Just curious as to what you think. I held a baptism class this last weekend and I got this comment on one of my baptism response forms:

"My child is autistic and I’m not sure how much he really understands. How do you usually address this?

So, what do you do with a child with special needs who’s family has expressed a desire to have him or her baptized (specifically when you are unable to really determine their level of understanding)? I have some thought in my head, but I just thought I’d see what others had to say. Oh, and I haven’t actually talked to the family or child, so I don’t know where this child in particular is.

written by Kenny

A friend of mine recently introduced me to TextMarks. He knew that I loved twitter and he usually asked me the question, "but what useful things can you do with twitter?" From a networking solution, I’ve found twitter to be incredibly useful. However, I think that twitter is trail blazer… showing the world what micro-blogging looks like and it will be either a new evolution of twitter or another company that will do something absolutely amazing with it. As I use twitter, I think of all the cool things that I could do, but I’m not always convinced it will quite work.

For instance, I have known some people who desired to use twitter to keep parents or volunteers connected by offering daily or weekly information. The only problem? They have to sign up for twitter. They have to go online, create an account and elect for text messages. That’s too many steps for someone who may be interested but not convinced they really need it.

Then last week my friend sent me this site: TextMarks. It does very well what twitter doesn’t. It isn’t a replacement to twitter by any means, but if you’re wanting a group of people to follow your updates and you want it to be easy for them to sign up and start getting updates, then TextMarks is your solution. Simply send an email to the group you want to have receive text updates. Tell them to text the number 41411 and in the subject type "CMOtest" or whatever keyword you create. That’s it. Now they’ll being receiving text updates from you whenever you send them out. You can also put a widget like this on your web page:

This way they can actually see what the current message/status is and even sign up on the widget instead of signing up through their phone. So if you have a group of leaders you need to communicate with on a regular basis, use TextMarks. In your next meeting, have them pull out their phones and have them do it right then… it takes less that 20 seconds. You could use it for your parents of kids attending camp. Rather than sending out emails every day when finding a wireless signal is difficult, you can send out text alerts through TextMarks. Ever been way off on your arrival time and either got back to the church form camp long before parents arrived or long after? Use TextMarks to send travel updates, letting them know where you are and what the ETA is several times along the way.

If you want to check it out, feel free to visit their site. There are a lot of other things you can do with it as well. I haven’t jumped head first into this yet, but I do see many applications for this in the very near future. After I’ve been using this for a little while, I’ll post again on how well it has worked out.

written by Kenny

In case you don’t read Phil Vischer’s blog, his newest project Jelly Telly is up. You can visit it at www.jellytelly.tv.

Actually it’s an in depth video of what Phil has been working on for the last several months (maybe years). It’s the "world’s smallest TV network" providing quality programing for kids all online. It’s brilliant and I’m excited to see how it turns out. Rather thank spend tons of money on advertising, Phil wants us to spread the word. So, I’m doing my part in posting to it right now. So… spread the word.

You can read more about what this announcement is all about right here!

written by Kenny

I have so many posts to write… but I don’t know when they’ll come out. Many of my posts are inspired by something I read online or a site that I found. Right now I have 36 tabs open in Firefox. Yes, I said 36. Most of them are things I need to write. So, I’ll try to tackle some of them this week. Here are some of the reasons why I’m not nailing these things out right now: Oh and I know.. it’s probably not good to have 36 tabs open right now. I close down Firefox often and restart (I love how it saves my tabs and opens them up again when I restart).

• This weekend I had my baptism class during two of our services. We had 45ish kids and their parents to learn about baptism.
• This weekend I had a good friend of mine and his girlfriend come visit and stay with us for the weekend. He’s a teenager who just graduated from High School. While kayaking out on Lake Austin, I dropped my camera in 1 inch of water. Pray for the camera!
• Sara and I had two international students over to our house on Sunday night for dinner. They’re both from Iraq… just got here from Iraq on Tuesday. It was a fascinating dinner and I learned a LOT! And yes… I asked about how they felt about the war.
• My good friends Joel and Heidi Hayslip (and their kids Jakob and Silas), missionaries to West Africa) arrived on Monday afternoon. They’ll be staying with us this week.
• I have my first set of Parent 411 meetings this Sunday… I’m still not sure exactly what we are going to cover.
• We’ll be baptizing well over 50 people this Sunday night.
• I had an interim elementary director start on Monday and an interim Early Childhood coordinator start on Sunday.
• I still need to recruit about 15 small group leaders within the next 30 days.

Well, I think that’s enough for now. I need to go to bed, it’s 3:00 AM and I have meetings at 9:00 AM.

written by Kenny

A good friend passed this on to me last week. I finally installed it on my computer last night (it’s free). Now I wish I had done this earlier.

When I was between jobs, I stopped using Outlook. The only reason I used Outlook was because at church we usually had an exchange server and we could take advantage of email, calendar sharing, tasks and all the other things that come with Outlook. However, since I wasn’t a part of all of that, I just used my gmail account. As soon as I came on staff at Gateway, I started using Outlook again. I immediately missed using gmail as my primary email. The search function of gmail is so amazing and it absolutely puts Outlook to shame. If I’m looking for a particular email to a certain person, I could waste quite a bit of time scanning emails looking for the email in question. Then there was Xobni. Xobni brings Gmail type tools (and a lot more) to the Outlook environment.

Ultimately, it indexes your email and allows you to search email by the word (or even part of a word). Even if you don’t have any contacts loaded (I don’t yet) it will create contacts within Xobni. It will tell you how many times you’ve emailed them, how many times they’ve emailed you. I don’t know why it would matter, but it even charts when during the day you communicate the most. It will put your conversations in threads as well. Okay, here is the really cools stuff. It will search the context of your emails and look for phone numbers and if it finds a number, it will make it the contact’s phone. If in any of your emails you or that person copied someone, it puts them in that contact’s network all right there at your fingertips. Last of all, it creates a little bin at the very bottom of every attachment you and that contact have ever sent each other. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen something this cool. So, check out the video below and think about installing it. It’s super easy and very free!

written by Kenny

Okay, I’ve been using this service called Digsby for about 3 months. It’s actually made a big difference for me as I’ve become more and more spread out over multiple email and social services. Other than my church email, I have a gmail account, yahoo account, email for this blog, IM capabilities for yahoo and gmail. In addition I’m fairly active on facebook and twitter. Those are a lot of sites to stay on top of. Well, Digsby is a social network aggregator and brings it all together. Once you load it, you have one touch access to all of those services and more. You can chat with a friend on Yahoo while your checking your Gmail, chatting with someone using facebook chat in addition to updating your twitter status… all without having a single web browser open. For me it’s a no brainer. Now, if you want to be alerted everytime one of your 500 facebook friends signs on and everytime a new tweet comes across the wires, you can set it up that way. Or you can have is running in the background ready to be checked or used whenever you are ready.

Here is another use you might have for Digsby. I have good friends who are missionaries in West Africa. For a while, the only way to contact them was through America Online Instant Messenger. Because I wanted to have contact with them, I signed up for an AIM account for free, but I had to install it on my desktop. With Digsby, it isn’t necessary. With Digsby you can just create an AIM account and then enter your username and password information into the AIM component on Digsby. No need to install AIM, Yahoo or Google Talk software on your machine… just run it all through Digsby. Honestly, it’s been a great application for me. So, if you’re connected to more than one web email, IM service or social network, you might want to consider giving Digsby a spin.

written by Kenny

This poster goes with the postcards I designed last week. Any thoughts?

written by Kenny

Has this ever happened to you? A volunteer who’s been serving in your ministry for a few months informs you that they need to step down. You ask why and the throw down the stinkin’ God card. "I feel the Lord is calling me to do something else." Again, I haven’t heard this one in a while as I’ve been in churches lately that were a lot less "spiritual." Where I’m at now they just stop showing up.

What the heck are you supposed to do with that? Who am I to argue with God?

Actually, this one isn’t that difficult. It’s Joshua chapter nine. The Deception of the Gibeonites. Just before this chapter, God had given very specific instructions. He told the armies of Israelites to wipe out all the enemies. No peace treaties what so ever! So, Israel went about their business claiming their land. The Gibeonites then crafted a plan. They pretended to be from a far off land and offered to sign a peace treaty. Israel accepted. A few days later, Israel realized that they had been duped. Bamboozled. The Gibeonites were not from a far off land, but were a close by tribe that should have been annihilated.

So, what happened? Israel honored the treaty. Even though it was God’s will and command that they be wiped out, there was honor in the commitment signified by the treaty. Beautiful.

So, when our volunteers sign a commitment to serve by signing a contract, they’ve given their word. On several occasions, I’ve had volunteers pull the God card. I have responded by saying, "you know, I really don’t feel it’s God’s nature to ask someone to break a commitment." I can’t say that it’s really changed anyone’s mind, but I feel better calling people on the truth. So go ahead. The next time someone plays the God card on you, go ahead and drop Joshua 9 on them… they never saw it coming!

written by Kenny