It never will surprise me the amount of money a company will spend in order to have its associates, leaders and partners Grow.
An example - Exchange ~ which is being held in Washington DC next week. It’s three days with 80 of the top CEOs and business leaders in the country. It’s up close and personal with John Maxwell. Cost is no less than $7,000 a person.
While I personally believe the church can spend $7K in much better ways - imagine if we spent money building and teaching leaders to be leaders? Imagine if we invested in the people doing ministry and in the people we are doing ministry for….
How much is your church or ministry willing to spend to ensure you are trained and equipped?
ENVY: We want something that another church has: It used to be that the church was the specialist when it came to God - and the things of God. Not any more… WikiPedia, Google, … well lets face it… the Internet is where people go now… But… then there are those few churches out there - you know Go Christ Fellowship, Granger, COR, Ginghamsburg, … where people flock to listen to the message… But not to your church. And Envy Sets In. Envy comes into play when we want a piece of that market - but dont consider whether our approach is a good fit for our churches ministry plan… the mission God has given to our church. If we are built to do ministry in one way - changing and doing something that we have no clue how - or no business doing - might not be a good idea.
Gluttony: You go to a level of excess that’s just plain wasteful. I call this going big but not small. The church will target a niche “customer” because they might be able to help the church grow - help the church financially - or make them seem to be better… but … The church does not really undertand the person they are marketing towards… The church needs to be clear about distinguishing what they can offer that is specific to the needs of that niche target.
Greed: how many churches have an unbridled appetite? Churches show greed when they go after a new niche using the same marketing methods they always ave - even when those marketing methods are not applicable to the new “market.” Worse yet - they do nothing to change so when those persons do come in the doors - they find the same old same old… and are now turned off more than ever… Sadly these churches try to get more people in the door without exerting the effort to serve those people… MORE MORE MORE but not give back MORE MORE MORE…
LUST: Churches have obsessive or excessive thoughts or desires. It is possible to overfocus on one thing or one person - or one group. There are some real key differences in how people react to the gospel - (Adults, Teens, Young Adults, Children… all need to hear the gospel in a different way…) Pastors and church leaders need to be aware of all the “stakeholders”. We are guilty of lust when we act on that excessive desire for the numbers without really figuring out all the people we need to talk to, serve and influence along the way.
PRIDE: We Lack Self-Awareness - Sometimes we just dont know enough about the people we are serving - but we think they want what we are selling… We, the church, fail to ask “Do we Fit In Here” - “Is there a Need for what we are offering” (more than just the pathway to salvation) ” Am I going to solve a problem for someone?” Irrelavence is Irreverance!
SLOTH: This is perhaps my biggest pet peave… Church Leaders are just … well let me say it… LAZY and apathetic. Many pastors and churches fail to distingis their message between the segments of society they are serving. You see examples of this on their websites. You can’t tell if the chuch is taling about serving people or being served, do they even do anything for children? Do they do things for men, women, …? Sadly - many have never taken the time to differentate their message. Worse… They have no programs to do this either…. No Mens, No Ladies, No Singles, No Youth Groups, … i could go on…
WRATH: Many of us are impatient. Some of us are so anxious to get the message out that we dont bother to research the people we are targeting… Churches dont figure out what is its that these peopel need - or who their target audience (their Macedonians) are…. or how they relate to God, or to each other…
Intercessory Prayer is perhaps one of the most important things we can do in our life as a Christian.
While I will not go so far as to say that the Pending Storm coming against New Orleans & the surrounding area is a punishment from God- as I have no clue… I do believe that praying for this area and those in the area is important. Let me back this up:
Great responsibility is involved in the ministry of intercession.
A. Because the Lord God did not find anyone to “stand in the gap,” to intercede for the land, He was requited to pour out the judgment due its disobedience.
Ezekiel 22:30-31
B. Moses’ intercession for the people of God, in pleading with the Lord for mercy, held back the hand of God from consuming the nation in His wrath.
Let me say this again - There is Great responsibility is involved in the ministry of intercession… And as a Christian we are called to this responsiblity.
Will you join me - and other Christians in praying for those whose lives will be adversly affected in the path of the Gustav Storm? If so visit Prayer Helps and follow sign up for a time slot - and then pass to a fellow Sister or Brother In Christ.
Recently, a friend of mine had an interesting experience - (he blogged about it - so guess I can share).
as Chuck Russel, Jason Reynolds, David Helbig, and Clif Guy discussed Internet Campus while enjoying a beautiful night on the beach just a couple hundred feet away in the beach parking lot, Jason’s car window was smashed and Clif’s briefcase/laptop bag was stolen containing his laptop, digital camera, web cam, cables, and all kinds of personal items.
Recently I purchased a Mac Powerbook Pro - and I absolutely love this machine… I think I might need to start attending a 12 step program as I sleep with this thing, take it to church with me (ok so I use it while preaching…) and it has even made the occasional trip to the bathroom with me… it would be devastating for me to loose this or have it stolen.
Adeona is the first Open Source system for tracking the location of your lost or stolen laptop that does not rely on a proprietary, central service. Whats nice is its 3 primary properties:
Private: Adeona uses state-of-the-art cryptographic mechanisms to ensure that the owner is the only party that can use the system to reveal the locations visited by a device.
Reliable: Adeona uses a community-based remote storage facility, ensuring retrievability of recent location updates.
Open source and free: Adeona’s software is licensed under GPLv2. While your locations are secret, the tracking system’s design is not.
The Mac OS X version also has an option to capture pictures of the laptop user or thief using the built-in iSight camera and the freeware tool isightcapture.
So what are you waiting for? LoJack your hardware !
Recently Ian Beyer, Network Extraordinaire out @ Church of the Resurrection in Leewood KS and I had an interesting conversation about network topology and the naming convention of servers, routers, switches, and workstations.
Salvation-Topology
We are in the process of bringing on Phase 2 of the VineHosting Data Center, complete with our new R1Soft Bare Metal Restore Servers (another blog post perhaps) and our new Virtual Infrastucture.
Since we now have so many more servers than we did in the past - and we have exhausted all the cities Paul visited in the Bible, the names of the sacraments, etc… I reached out and asked Ian what they were doing -
He got to joking a bit - saying they used all Dr. Seuss themes @ an old employer (not sure if he meant Sun Microsystems or Sprint…) anyhow - pretty funny stuff. Imagine that - us having Thing 1 and Thing 2 …
I sat down and had to write up an assignment for my seminary class on the vocabulary of Salvation… and suddenly thought … WOW there it is…
The Servers Host name is Salvation: its guest machines are:
conversion, substitution, reconciliation, propitiation, remission, imputation, adoption, justification, sanctification, glorification and regeneration (thats the PXE Booter…)
Our R1Soft Servers are called Preservation and Redemption.
Now If I could only turn this in as an assignment instead of the long term paper… I would be happy as pie.
And of course - I still have all these other servers to do…
I guess I could use a few other examples - imagine getting a welcome email being told your on the purgatory server…
Recently, a friend of mine from Church of the Resurrection (Clif Guy) was blogging about the beginnings of the Internet Campus and how COR is looking to do this…
I began looking around @ the web and found the Internet Church (www.Lifechurch.tv) seems to be the ones doing this the best…
I believe many churches will soon be taking a turn towards the virtual. Who would have ever thought of virtual church, but it is becoming a reality in the 21st century. Yes - it is hard to touch, love, and hug - but in this day and age with text, voice, video chat and other social networking tools like twitter, facebook, youtube, etc - fellowship is just a click away…
Soon - You can worship from any remote location with just an internet hook-up and the web address of your own church… (are they ready ?)
We are looking for people who want to make a positive impact on the Kingdom of God working for a not-for-profit Christian Hosting organization, a career in customer service/technical support and who want to be the best in the web hosting industry. We currently have openings on daytime and weekend shifts in our Magnolia New Jersey Operations Center.
Job Description:
• Front line support for Chats and Telephone calls.
• Troubleshoot any issues customer is having with their hosting plan.
• Provides technical support via helpdesk, live chat and telephone.
• Performs miscellaneous job-related duties as assigned.
• Provide basic user training and support for the Web Empowered Church Content Management System (training provided for new-hire)
Required Skills:
• Excellent written and verbal skills in the English language to communicate effectively to clients.
• Ability to work with a team and follow instruction from supervisors.
• Ability to work on your own with little direction or instruction.
• Outstanding customer service skills.
• Must be dependable to be at work during assigned shifts.
• Knowledge of FTP, DNS, Cpanel and WHM preferred extremely important.
• Knowledge of Linux (CentOS flavor) important.
• Ability to multitask and meet specific goals set by supervisors.
• Experience with documenting procedures.
• MySQL Experience
• IPTABLES / pfSense / PIX Firewall operations
• Able to troubleshoot basic webhosting procedures.
• Knowledge of XEN, HyperVM, and OpenVZ an asset.
• Shell Scripting / Bash / Perl / PHP an asset.
Technicians must be able to work from our Magnolia NJ office location and/or home depending upon need and schedule. Compensation will be determined during the interviewing process and depends on skill level/experience.
Please email your resume’s to HR@VINEHOSTING.ORG
Only those applicants that are of interest will be contacted.
I was chatting the other night with @cyberentomology and he told me that they had stopped some of the p2p and napster stuff cold on their network @ COR.org
This got me thinking about how - so much bandwidth is used sharing files, videos, audio etc… during the average work day (can anyone say “Traffic Shaping” 3 times fast after having a moca-latte?)
Anyhow -I began to check a few of the church networks I help support on the side and wow - amazing what do I find - but tons of P2P stuff going on…
OK - all those out there in Twitter, Blogging, and whats that called… oh yeah - The Internet Land…
I still have this project where I am looking to solicit from both people in the church and those out of the church their feelings and thoughts about the church.
Please direct everyone you know to: http://churchfeelings.com take the survey’s yourself. I plan on pushing out a weekly survey and the results will be used in the upcoming book
“Snapshots of a Dying Culture - the crisis of significance”by yours truely.
ok - so I just found what might just the best Flocking Browser on the face of the internet…
I am testing www.Flock.com ’s new browser (Mozilla / Firefox based) to actually write this blog posting.
The browser allows me to interact in one place with flickr, youtube, my blog, facebook - and a slew of other social networking tools…
Recently, a friend of mine had an interesting experience - (he blogged about it - so guess I can share).
Anyhow -I began to check a few of the church networks I help support on the side and wow - amazing what do I find - but tons of P2P stuff going on…