ministry.conf

05.11.07

gospel.com

September 14th was my last day with Campus Crusade for Christ, Canada. The co- op with Human Resources was over, even though the project I was working on wasn’t done. After stopping by my Dad’s place in Edmonton, I headed out to Grand Rapids, Michigan for Gospel Communications’ Internet Ministry Conference.

When I registered, I was mainly thinking about my 3-year-old project idea, intercessory.net… and all the non-programming things necessary for a startup such as this. But that was less on my mind by the time I arrived.

A few of the interesting people I met include larger-than-life movie reviewer David Bruce, writer Paula Hendrickson, budding web entrepreneur Jon Swift, videography guy Evan Davis, and recording artist Wayburn Dean of Acappella fame.

boot camp

Before the conference, I took a course on CentOS Linux with Peter Green. It was good to round out my knowledge by learning a little more about the server side of web applications. It certainly left me with a lot more to learn, including a thousand-page Linux book.

see no evil

The most powerful talk was given by Richard B. Maring on the state of Internet pornography, and how it’s influencing our children. The age kids are exposed and even addicted just makes me sad. Particularly alarming were the statistics of usage among church-going men, women and clergy. But facts and stats only reach our intellect.

There is a real need for honest confession, and tolerance of confession. Otherwise we’re just a bunch of religious hypocrites shouting about the immorality of the world, while hiding in our own shame.

God is all-too-familiar with our screw ups, yet He embraces us with grace. We as the church of Christ are called to reflect God’s love, even if it would be easier to avoid the uncleanly reality around us… and within.

missionary.local

David Bruce gave a talk on being missionaries to our own culture. “Go into all the world”¹ may be better translated “as you are going…”

The folks at Hollywood Jesus don’t review a movie just to warn other Christians not to go. Rather than concentrating on morality, they look for redemptive analogies that connect our world to Jesus.

This meshes well with the Mark Driscoll talk I mentioned briefly in my last post. To summarize: we all have a concept of hell, and a dream of heaven. We all look to someone/something to save us, to bring us to that heaven. Problem is: new toys, fame, fortune, girlfriends or boyfriends, they all let us down. While they may be good in themselves, they aren’t able to satisfy our soul, because God made us for Himself. Everyone is looking for a savior, not everyone realizes His name is Jesus…

web logging

A few sessions on blogging seemed relevant. Some good tips, like writing with a reverse pyramid (important stuff first). You can see I’m not really following along… this is more of a 7 week brain dump.

Rich Tatum talked about relationship blogging. Unlike articles, blogs are often raw, emotional, and unedited. It’s more like a letter to friends than a formal publication. Taking this analysis further, he compared blogs to the letters of Apostle Paul, which seems fitting. Paul wrote his letters to the Church as a group, they were read to the congregation and quite likely sent on to the Church in other cities. Blogs are more like that then the letters of today (yesterday?).

Write about what you’re passionate about, and from your experiences. But keep your readers in mind… it may take me a while to get a hang of that advice.

reflection

In the final talk I attended, Rich Tatum reflected on how technology and the Internet are shaping our culture. Things like: “I don’t have to remember, I can look it up.”

There is so much information available, that we may not even skim it. Instead we will bookmark or tag something to read later. There is a shallowness to our consumption of information, there is always another hyperlink to follow, but when does all this information become knowledge?

Furthermore, how does the Internet seep into our day-to-day lives. Do we take Sabbath rest to reflect? Do we memorize scripture and meditate on it? How does one flip mindsets from quick skimming to deep reflection?

I’ll be first to admit that I lack discipline when it comes to the Internet. With 280+ friends and acquaintances on Facebook and near-200 news feeds in NetNewsWire, it’s easy to spend an enormous amount of time wandering about the Internet without any meaningful conversation or real learning.

This talk seemed like an appropriate conclusion to the usual information- overload associated with conferences. There are other sessions I attended, but haven’t noted, and many others I missed. For more coverage, check out the Internet Ministry Conference blog.

After lunch and listening to Paula rehearse some wedding songs on the Grande Piano, I went for a short walk among the fall colors. Before I knew it, it was time to catch my flight back to Edmonton for a week of visiting with my Dad and sisters.

back to b.c.

While I was away, the organization I worked for changed its name! Once settled, I began working in IT with the newly named Power to Change Ministries. I’m still working on the same project, trying to get it done. I finally wrote the necessary scripts to deploy it to our internal servers so that Human Resources can began working with the tool and giving me feedback.

Since my Dad drove me back to British Columbia, I was able to pack the van up with all my stuff. The desk I haven’t used in two years is now setup in my own little home office. Matthew was kind enough to take me to Ikea, where I got a shelf to hold all my books and a good desk chair. It’s very nice!

a little moonlighting

I have been doing a fair amount of technical reading lately. Of particular interest is “Programming in Lua,” a very good book on the Lua programming language. I intend to explore it further, and have started up a separate blog to share my findings.

-n.joy