New Spring Brand New Site this Sunday, July 13th
http://joshuablankenship.com/blog/

New Spring Before Rebrand

I am excited about the change.  IT will be fully customizable which I am really looking forward to.  There are a lot of great themes out there that I will be able to select from.  So hopefully tomorrow by noon I'll have a new set-up going on.  In the event that I can't use this domain anymore I already have a new one picked out that's not yet taken.  So maybe it's time to retire "serial youth pastor" and go with something fresh...something even more attention grabbing than now.

Once the switch is made let me know what you think..OR of features that I need to have on here.  As my blog audience grows so shall my blog.

Das ist einer der Gründe, warum dieses Alt-Katholische Weblog vor knapp einem Jahr online ging und ein Weblog eigentlich schon wie selbstverständlich zum internetten Inventar einer Alt-Katholischen Kirchengemeide gehören müsste. Denn die synodale Struktur der liberalen Alt-Katholischen Kirche, in der die Kirchenmitglieder zusammen mit den Geistlichen den Weg der Kirche bestimmen, bedingt den Dialog, die Diskussion und den Austausch miteinander.

Ein Weblog bietet dabei natürlich auch die hervorragende Möglichkeit, die Interessen einer breiten Öffentlichkeit - in diesem Fall möchte ich sie mal „virtuelle Gemeinde“ nennen - abzufragen, auch wenn ich mit dieser nicht unmittelbar im Rahmen einer Gemeindeversammlung oder einer Veranstaltung der Gemeinde kommunizieren kann.

Mit diesem Beitrag möchte ich sowohl die Mitglieder der real existierenden Gottesdienstgemeinde als auch die Mitglieder der „virtuellen Gemeinde“, welche diesen Weblog immer mal wieder besuchen dazu motivieren, ihre Wünsche und Bedürfnisse an eine „Kirche für Menschen heute“ (so die Selbstbeschreibung der Alt-Katholischen Kirche) zu artikulieren, und miteinander sowie mit mir zu diskutieren. Das umfasst die Frage, was eine Gemeinde an Veranstaltungen „anbieten“ sollte oder wo „Kirche heute“ engagiert sein sollte genauso wie die Frage nach der liturgischen Gestaltung der Gottesdienste.

Ich freue mich auf eine angeregte Diskussion, die dann auch Auswirkungen auf die Praxis haben soll.

P.S.: Wer sich insgesamt mal näher mit dem Thema Web 2.0. auseinandersetzen will, den möchte ich auf die Literaturtipps des Kommunikationswissenschaftlers Thomas Pleil verweisen, welche er auf seinem Weblog veröffentlicht hat: "Neue Literatur zum Web 2.0."

Foto: Markus Hein - Quelle: www.pixelquelle.de

I'll start with a couple of principles which I try to remember.

Church buildings are tools. So are social media.

When people think about church, they think location. They go to a building. But the building is a convenience, a place to gather and stay warm and dry. Although we want buildings that are useful, if we get stuck on making them too cool, too amazing, too vast, we use up resources that could go elsewhere. Not just money, but time and attention and energy. When we think about social media, we often get captured by the coolness.

I do. As a result for example, I have a pownce account that I never check, which has left one person thinking I left the internet. When I am at my best, however, I am looking at social media as a set of tools to be used for a variety of specific purposes...and I will choose carefully based on what I want to accomplish.

Church is by definition about community and relationships. So are social media.

If you take what Jesus said about what we know as church with some seriousness, it is a set of vertical and horizontal relationships. It is about the people. And so it is with social media. How are we building relationships? How are we developing connections and using the connections to help people grow?

The curtain is pretty transparent

For some reason, people who are exploring social media for proselytizing seem to think that no one will know what they are trying to do. For example, if you are creating strategies for saving people and you publish those strategies online, the "lost people" who are the "target" of the "assimilation strategies" can read them. And will understand that the appearance of authenticity is just a strategy. Maybe of the borg.

I understand this struggle. It is the struggle of every brand that is trying to create a social media strategy. However, at some level, church isn't a brand. My solution is to just live and talk and explore as if my Invisible Friend is real. Just like Big Bird did.

What I've done:

1. Share work trips with flickr and audio blogging. I was part of a team that went to Gulfport as part of Katrina reconstruction. While we were there, we put pictures on flickr, we audioblogged with hipcast, and just blogged. People back home were able to look and listen and read. Even people who didn't know what the technology was could follow the links that we emailed around and also put on the church website.

2. Share corporate gatherings with ustream. A year ago we started turning on a video camera and streaming our services. These weren't services produced for broadcast, with great camera work, stellar audio, and TV timeouts. Quite the opposite. The service existed and we let people at home watch it through an unobtrusive camera. For the first couple months, we just used the mic on the camera. We just took what was happening inside outside. And people watched. A guy whose wife couldn't get out because of early Alzheimer's disease. People who are living on the other side of the world. And one day, people who couldn't safely travel because of the ice. (Though I haven't tried it, I'm guessing that you could use blog.tv and chat back)

3. Share your heart with blogging. I've been writing here for a couple years. My friend Rick sometimes tells people what he will be preaching about to get ideas and suggestions. The key, however, is to wrestle.

4. Share community development with a corporate blog. During Lent this year I was part of creating a small group. 7 people wrote once a week each about a lent-related theme. They talked with each other. They talked with commenters. They ended up having as much interaction as a face-to-face small group might have during its first 6 weeks of meeting. They want to keep going.

5. Share your life with twitter. I can't ever figure out how to describe twitter. Even calling it microblogging doesn't help. So I just send people here. Especially when I am traveling. And then they discover that they can find out what I'm doing and where I am. And then they understand.

6. Share your heart with youtube. I've created a number of pieces of video to use in services and other places. Some are citizen journalism, showing what people connected to church are doing in the community. Some are thought pieces. (Bonus: that video used audio that was captured by on a digital voicemail service. People could call in, leave a message, and then I was able to edit it in.) Some are, well, odd. But all of them are quickly produced and connect to particular people. The secret is to remember that an apology or a birthday greeting with only one intended audience member can be absolutely huge in impact.

7. Share attention with a note. Yep. You can actually handwrite a note to someone. Of course, if you take a picture with your cameraphone, order a print through walgreens or snapfish or other photo sites, and then glue it to cardstock before you write the note, you can personalize a moment or an event in a way that merges multiple media for maximum impact.

8.  Be human. Are people at facebook? Friend them. Building networks at Linkedin? Connect. Writing a book on conversation? Sign up. Raising money to fight cancer? Join in.

Chris has had a ton of other ideas I haven't done. One of the best? Have kids interview old people on camera and produce videos together.

Oh, one other thing. I know people that I didn't know a year ago because of all of these things above. I have cried and laughed with, prayed for, talked to, understood, taught, been taught by these people. There are real people behind these words and screens and cameras. Out here, outside the church building.

[lähde: Top 80 Church Websites | churchrelevance.com]

I'm thinking about Good Friday services and thinking, a little, about what it would look like to have one here.  The first question that I thought about asking was, "What do you want from a Good Friday service?"

The more I thought about it, however, I realized that my opening question matters more. The latter one, about what we want from a service is about us, from an experiential perspective. That's fine, of course. We are created to have experiences. But I'm curious about the larger conversation. What, in descriptive terms, is the question that Good Friday is a turn in, that this death answers?

Of course, the follow-on question is, "What question do you wish it answered?"

I'm curious about your answers. They will help me think about having a virtual Good Friday service, an exploration of some aspects of that day.

You can leave comments here or you can email me at jnswanson at gmail dot com.

This is a journey into the trees. I'm not sure where the path goes. But I'm interested in your thoughts.

Aloitin Hengenvedossa myös uuden LGD-blogin, joka kyllä toistaiseksi sisältää vain vanhoja juttuja uudelleen lämmitettyinä. Uutta matskua on kuitenkin tulossa, joten sormet korviin, räksytys kuuluu jo.

[vodpod id=ExternalVideo.478211&w=518&h=332&fv=]

You see, I'm thinking about thinking about social media and worship, both of which are intended to be interactive. And I realized an hour ago, that I better ask you all whether this makes sense from a  social media perspective before I commit to writing a paper about it.  So here's my abstract as it stands now. Is this a set of research and reflection that you would like to reflect more about?

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Interruption or invitation?: Social media and congregational worshipSending text messages during a corporate worship service seems irreverent. But what if the texter is actually sending 140 character summaries of the service to 500 people who follow his twitter feed, many of whom have no other connection to worship? For many church leaders, that question is nonsensical; what is a twitter feed?

In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman argued that the nature of television raised significant challenges for those seeking to use it for religious purposes. Religion was about mystery, television was about entertainment, and the better religious programming was as television, the worse it was at religion.

A new generation of communication technologies have emerged with a new set of values.  With very simple technology requirements and no cost to the producer, these tools are allowing individuals to produce content with greater ease. Working with values of community, interactivity, authenticity and immediacy, these Web 2.0 tools are disrupting thinking about news, entertainment, marketing, and community.

They also have tremendous potential in corporate worship settings:

• With ustream.tv and other video streaming tools, it is possible to broadcast directly to the internet, and to record the broadcast. As a result, any church with a highspeed internet feed can allow parishioners to watch the service from anywhere in the world.
• With twitter and other microblogging tools, people report on their current activities in 140 character messages. Some tweeters are reporting on the services they are attending.
• With flickr and other photosharing tools and youtube and other videosharing tools, individuals can share pictures quickly with their faith community, pictures which can be incorporated into the congregational gatherings very simply.

As helpful as these technologies are, however, there are significant questions for study:

• How distracting does using the technology become for those sitting around? For example, are non-tech people distracted by the sermon-tweeter?
• Do people move beyond information into worship? Are you watching ustream for the participation in worshiping or the information gained?
• Is a broader worship community developed or are we still in a period of novelty?
• Do we need to figure out even better ways for the people "out there" (not in the physical space) to interact with the people in the physical space?
• How can we most effectively move these technologies toward being just ways to communicate, rather than being distractions or objects of attention?

As these technologies become part of the lives of people in congregations, it is helpful to explain them, to consider the implications for community and faith, and to help congregations use them most effectively to extend invitations to those who live in the contemporary communicative context.

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So what do you think? What can you suggest as additional research questions? Can you help me shape this abstract?

Mr. Ryan Moede does a great job of creativing a visually and rhetorically compelling case for social media as an active part in the Christian college community (and organizations and academic institutions of all shapes and sizes). I've been thinking about this since November of last year, the notion especially hit home with Professor Michael Wesch and his anthropology class at Kansas State produced this:Increasingly as we think about now and the next three to five years: we are the media. That revolution alone is reason enough to wake up and recognize the need to integrate social media in the college classroom and across the ideological spectrum:
• Blogs and social media are an intimate part of personal branding and careers. Online networking via Linked In, Facebook, and niche social sites are proving this.  Networking Events are even transmitted and supported in the digital space (think Goto Meeting, Blog Her's Second Life initiative,  the promotional video for Blogger Social, or the way you find out about events in Facebook, Meetup, and Upcoming)
• Mainstream media is trending down and increasingly going both digital and interactive.
• People of all ages are spending more time online, with YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, and blogs taking off.
• It's a digital communication revolution. Blogs, wikis, and other social media are personal expression engines that will help create Communication 2.0, Education 2.0, and Work 2.0.
• The web is changing the fundamental nature of organizations now and dramatically over the next decade. If Christian Universities and Universities as a whole are going to keep up, they must adapt. Its a fundamental shift in culture and identity that I don't think has been seen since the 1960's.
• Video, mobile, and community platforms are the place where the next revolution is at. Bottom up, participatory, and creative communication is the wave of the future. This means that social media is anywhere (and almost everywhere).
• Christian organizations and individuals face unique responsibilities and value conflicts in this digital space, which aren't being addressed in mainstream curriculums.An excellent example of the power and creative passion of social media is found at Qui Diaz's blog about social media and nonprofits:
I'm hoping to pen a couple other thoughts later.  How about yourself?  Thoughts, inspirations, or creative outbursts?

It would be interesting to have a Linked In Answers or Yahoo Answers in the area of a) non-profits b) spirituality/philosophy/faith. For non-profits it could be hosted at Net Squared--with a Facebook application for current zeigheist of questions.

I also think Beliefnet is interesting and its social aspects are massively expanding, but I wonder if a more robust video. I think more easy to access perspectives. For instance Max Lucado and Jim Wallis are very interesting, but I want to hear from other pastors and folks on the issues. Web 2.0 to me seems all about breaking those walls down.

How would you add or improve on my ideas above? Also, if you know any developers, particularly on the earlier issue please feel free to drop me an email at nathan_debate[@] yahoo.com or leave a comment.

(photo credit: Hurleygurley)

Drop your name in the comments, if you would...whether you do if for a profession or if you do it for fun....as act of telling who you are and sharing. If you have a blog, vlog, or photo blog feel free to drop that in the comments too.

(photo credit: Cindyli)

At the end of that time I reserved lent2008.wordpress.com. I wasn't sure what I was going to do with it, but I figured that it would be a good project.

Then one morning, I realized that I needed to make it a group project. As a result, there are 8 contributors who are signed on to write for the Lenten season. Although Lent starts with Ash Wednesday, February 6, the first of the posts is up today.

As people responded to the invitation, their hearts were pretty open:

I am interested. Willing. And scared. But fear is fleeting. And obedience ... obedience is better than sacrifice. You obeyed the calling to do this in community, so I'll answer the call too.

Well, it sure beats coming up with stuff for my own site, I'm in.
Thank you for hearing this call and for being so brave as to invite me
along.

This is a little scary to me, but I would like to ask the Lord to teach me through this opportunity and to share His answer to that prayer with others--count me in.

I am honored and humbled to be included in this holy mess. I was going
to give up writing for lent. Thanks for screwing that up Jon! But,
hey, if God says "Kill and Eat!" who am I to say it's unclean?
I pray, and beg, and fully expect that we will draw things out of one
another we didn't recognize in ourselves. And as we stumble around,
expectantly looking for the right words, that we may encounter The
Word, find Our Way, and discover Truth and Life.

May we be broken to be given.

What has been happening already in the email conversation is that these writers are already helping each other rethink the traditional "giving up" approach to Lent. There is a shift happening from giving up to offering up, from giving up to acting. It is a wonderful thing to watch.

We'll be posting a couple times a week between now and Ash Wednesday. At that point, we'll start writing daily. We aren't sure where were going, but wherever it is, we'll get there together.

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Thanks to Rob Hatch, Thomas Knoll, Anna Lenardson, Laurie Nichols, Connie Reece, Tom Swank, and Amy Van Huisen, spread from Maine to Texas to Minnesota, for being willing to live out here.

Subscribe to Lent

i am stopped dead in my tracks, my brain locks up, my heart crumples and i thank god for shaun and for reminders like these.

The folks that do that kind of work have compassion that I can only talk about. If you want to hear more of the story, check out his YouTube video channel here.

Wow! Thoughts? How does the video make you feel? Doesn't he do a great job?

Out on that stage, every action is visible to 2,000 people. Every word, every mistake, every gesture is evident. You are literally in the spotlight.

This picture is what it looks like backstage. Dim lights, whispered conversations, people dressed in black to be obscure while making things happen. It is the place where you stiffen your spine before walking out to create a persona. It is the place to be real before putting on your best behavior and stepping out into the performance.

One of the things that we are trying to do as we live out Web 2.0, Life 2.0, Community 2.0, Church 2.0 is to make the disjunction between onstage and backstage less glaring, to reduce the gap between being real and performing. We're trying to live in dialog rather than monologue, to have a measure of authenticity. Sometimes it means that blogs get pretty self-indulgent and tweets are, well, gross (or at least pointless). However, much of life is self-indulgent and seemingly pointless, so perhaps that is the point.

My own version of this living out is to give a picture of what it means when you are confident that a real God really interacts with real people...and you want to resist the temptation to ritualize those interactions in a way that traps us into thinking more about the routine than the Person. I mean, I really have real interactions with Nancy. You can believe she exists or not believe, but I do really walk with her almost every night and hold her hand occasionally and argue speak with intensity and love her. I don't want you to start reenacting those walks; I just want you to meet her sometime. And I want you to understand that while I am not perfect, I am in love with her. And with God.

So that's why I think out loud here. So I can wrestle through relationship and invite you to watch. And that's why, sometime in the middle of August, I learned how complicated that kind of living out online can get.

I got a call inviting me to talk about a new job at a new church.

(Just so you know, I don't look at what I do as a job. It's more like a life, like a calling, like a relationship, like an addiction when I don't watch it. It's just easier to call it a job here.)

At the first conversation, I discovered that it wasn't the job that I had thought it was (mostly administration). Instead, it was mostly what we are calling spiritual formation, a process of helping shape people so they more and more resemble Jesus. That's what I've become more about, and so I stayed in a series of conversations which resulted in a job offer and acceptance on November 2.

Here was the challenge: I couldn't write about any of it here.

That's the kind of process I'd love to talk about. How do you know that God is saying something? How do you know whether to leave where you are? How do you decide that it isn't a career move but a calling? How do you decide to leave the people you have loved for 11 years (more than 7 on staff)? How do you know?

I mean, those are the questions that everyone faces, whether a Christ follower or not. And the question I face is, do I wrestle with those any differently than anyone else?

However, my face-to-face community and my online community are pretty well blurred together. Some of you I have never met. Some of you I see every week (at least). So I can't say, "Because I see you regularly, Anna and Dennis and Laurie and Randy and Amy, please ignore this little conversation about what interviewing is like." You understand?

So now that this change has been announced (this morning) at the church where we have been, I can talk about some of the things I learned over the past months.

1. My wife is my best friend and the one who I most need to talk with. Nancy and I have walked more and talked more in the past year than in the previous 23 years. Combined. If I talk through this stuff with others and not with her, it's silly. At best.

2. When I ask other people to pray for me, I am often doing that instead of talking with God myself. So because I couldn't write here, because I couldn't ask my usual circle of pray-ers, I had to actually just talk with God. And that was and is a healthy thing. After all, don't you hate it when people talk about you as if you weren't sitting in the room? I realized that I regularly treat God that way.

3. My online friends really are. Friends I mean. I have written a couple of "off-line" posts, emails to a small circle of online friends. I had to stay in touch and let them know why my writing just felt flat sometimes. And their encouragement and spiritual direction has been invaluable.

4. Sometimes I actually have to make decisions. I am an option-generator. That's what I do best. I'll give you six ways, sixteen alternatives, sixty ideas. But one night, sitting in this very chair, with just Nancy and I and God, I had to say, "This is the direction that I'm thinking. If it isn't right, You need to kill me." And I knew He wouldn't, but I wanted to be clear to myself and to Nancy and to God.

5. The right decision is both delightful and painful. And that's how it is. We love the people we have known. After 13 years in our current church (off and on), with the last 7 of them as a pastor, we have been folded into several lives. The part of that folding that is "pastor" will change somewhat. And that will hurt.

However, we are excited about the new people and the tremendous opportunities and responsibilities that will be ours.

6. Although some things have to happen backstage, I want to make the distinction disappear as much as possible. For this time I needed to be quiet. There was the very real possibility of not changing jobs. I didn't want to have people unnecessarily disturbed. My explorations of possibilities can have real implications in the lives of other people. However, I need face-to-face AND online, I need inside and outside of my head. I need to be able to live with all these parts of my life integrated.

Thanks for reading this far. And thanks to Robert Hruzek for challenging us to think about what we have learned. I knew that I was learning something significant; his group writing project pushed me to figure out what. So this is part of the What I Learned From series.

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Oh. You want to know where I'm going? I could be difficult, even more than I have been by waiting until this point in this long post. In January I will become the executive pastor of Grabill Missionary Church. Grabill is near Fort Wayne, about the same travel time from our house as First Missionary Church (Fort Wayne) has been. As a result, we won't move and Hope will be able to graduate in 2009 with her friends and Andrew will still have a house to live in while going to college.

Sometimes I feel a little creative.  I was able to get the Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 software this year.  So I am trying to learn how to use it.  Today I edited a photo I have had for a while.  I think it comes from Simply Youth Ministry.  Hopefully they won't mind I used it or did this with it.  I edited the colors and highlights and just dropped some text on it.  It's nothing real special but I think it's nice.   If I get permission from them I will make it available.

What do you think of it?

Well so we haven't actually stepped up to podcasting. We have however joined the technological abilities of the early 90's and are now offering our sermons online that can be downloaded as mp3's. This has been a long long time coming for us but we have finally made it.

Click the link and give them a listen. We just started our new series "The Great Christmas War."

I look forward to hearing how Rob's experience with Utterz goes and look forward to hearing from other folks. Why don't you check out Utterz?

Update: I'm officially on Utterz. It takes about 3-6 minutes to sign up and its super easy to set up an automatic post. Also, if you don't like the Utter you create its very easy to scrub it and make another.

The Cultural Revolution:
Is everything miscellaneous? For us? For today's students? Folks like Weinberger and Mike Wesch and his students are asking imporant questions like "Where are we heading culturally? And is education keeping up? These are questions that I'm pretty passionate about because it frames how we relate to each other and who "we" are. Wesch's video has been bouncing around the blogosphere since about October 12th.

Professor Wesch, whose students put this together, suggests:

This video explores the changes in the way we find, store, create, critique, and share information. This video was created as a conversation starter, and works especially well when brainstorming with people about the near future and the skills needed in order to harness, evaluate, and create information effectively.

What does this revolution mean for you and the world?
There are a number of perspectives on the web from different social sectors (education, marketing, technology, and religion) that weigh in directly or indirectly on this ongoing cultural revolution:

Inititally, the video certainly confirms that we are media snackers as Web Strategist Jeremiah suggests.

Second, DC Curry at Granger Community Church has questions about what this cultural revolution means for teens, churches, and youth ministers in his post "What students are trying to tell us."

In a similar vein, digital marketing guru Mitch Joel suggests you drop everything and watch this video.

Certainly this changes the face of publishing and books and perhaps even Amazon. Fewer book shelves, more tagging. Merlin Mann at 43 folders suggests this means the future is hybrid. While this is true, when is the last time you purchased a wax record, tape, or cd? (to be true: the analogy is less than perfect, but instructive)

The Signs of the Revolution are Everywhere:
For those that doubt the reality of the revolution Facebook, Myspace, Google (perhaps including mobile due to a recent aquisition of Zingku), and Hulu (a new AOL/NBC video platform from with some rave reviews like Giga Om's simple "Brilliant") are all pushing new changes that will have ripple effects in the new media communication and culture. The Wall Street Journal and other newspapers like the Washington Post and the Politico (YouTube) have been making steady moves into the social media space. Its made the frontpage of most major magazines in country, including being featured in the Time Magazine Person of the Year for 2006. One only wonders when Apple will make its splash in social media space. Certainly, its hiring of a YouTuber to create advertising does signal that it recognizes the revolution.

What now? How can I learn more about our cultural location at the tipping point of the revolution?
For those interested in the revolution in communications, technology, and culture, Wesch has made the text of the video available here. Wesch's students have put together about 30 videos that anthropologically explore different aspects communication via platforms like YouTube. It serves as a metaphor for interative digital communication and community. You might also like Wesch's introduction to Web 2.0.

Your Perspective/Your Role and Identity/Your Thoughts:
What are your thoughts about this revolution? About the digital divide? About new media, mobile, and interactive digital technologies? The video questions the core our information explosion and digitally induced ADD? Wesch asks important questions like "Are we using technology or is technology using us?" on his video the Machine is Us/ing Us. What do you think? Is the revolution for the better or worse? Is it an attention economy or a trust economy or both?

Enjoy the digital culture!

Bonus: For those of you who appreciate the wisdom of Marshall McLuhan check out slideshare (thanks to Chris Brogan):

[slideshare id=75856&doc=mass-media-vs-usergenerated-content1745&w=425]

Just click on the forward arrow to see the next slide. You may just want to check out a couple, given that its a long presentation.

thanks to wise acre for the creative commons flickr photo.

I have come to really like the ASBO Jesus blog. Some of the cartoons there are stinking hilarious. This is one of my favorites.