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I told myself that I’d write about each of the speakers at the conference individually. I haven’t had a speck of time to get to writing about the second day of the conference. And I keep forgetting that my notes are at my office, and I only have time to write at home, and hopefully some day soon the twain shall meet.

In the meantime, I’m still processing what I heard and learned at the most motivational, moving, and practical conference I’ve ever attended. Not that I’ve attended many, but this conference, from the things God told me or reawakened in me, has profoundly affected me. I haven’t felt this physically good, this emotionally well, or this spiritually awake in a long time. It’s near sublime, and I keep subconciously waiting for the other shoe to drop. But it hasn’t. And I’m trusting God that it won’t. If I keep my eyes on the prize, the race is mine to be won with Christ as the goal.

Until then, I can at least say that Steven Furtick’s talk kicked my proverbial butt. Learn more about him at his blog, the Elevation Church site, and this article in their local paper.

I told myself to get some rest.

OK. I didn’t actually tell myself to get some rest. I sort of just fell to the floor in a heaping pile of tiredness. I’m physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually drained, but my mind has been racing ever since the conference finished. I’m hoping it’s not just a “conference high,” and I don’t think it is. God’s up to something big in my life as a result of what I heard and felt this last week. It’s been an astounding rollercoaster, and I hate rollercoasters.

For the three of you that will notice, I skipped posting about a day of the conference, the day that God used to break me down and tell me what I’ve been missing and what I’m supposed to be doing about it.

Those posts will be forthcoming. I just need to regroup and rest before I tackle and write more about what I heard and experienced that day.

Kem Meyer told us to stop doing so much.

OK, she didn’t actually use those words, but that’s what she said. That’s what she always says. Her blog’s mantra is Less Clutter. Less Noise. so even though it may seem she’s contradicting the Stop Talking. Start Doing. motif of the conference, she’s actually reinforcing it.

People today are overwhelmed by choice, bombarded by advertising, and struggling to redeem their time. It’s up to us in the communications business to convey necessary messages without adding to the mess. Kem listed five myths, but here are my distillations in active form:

Reduce the gap between intent and perception.
See these unfortunate domains as an example. Be warned! Most are risque. But really funny.

Focus your audience’s vision.
Watch this awareness video for an example.

Every communication piece can afford liposuction.
Have you heard about the new stop sign?

Hit the heart within nine seconds.
Nine seconds is both the average attention span for a normal web user and for a goldfish. Trigger an emotional response to engage your audience.

Spend money on the experience, then on promotions.
A bad, personal experience is worse than a typo. A cool flyer that leads to an inauthentic experience is just more dead trees.

The distillation of the distillation? Effective and engaging communications wisely communicate concisely

Shawn Wood, Experiences and Creative Communications Pastor at Seacoast Church, and recent author of 200 Pomegranates and an Audience of One, told us not to touch the poop.

OK, he didn’t actually use those words, but that’s…actually, he did use those precise words. He’s afforded some leniency because he was quoting his two-year old daughter (who wanted to touch the dog doo-doo in the backyard), but I’d even go so far to say he’s completely absolved of any verbal wrongdoings based on Paul’s letter to the Phillipians where he considers everything “rubbish,” which, I’ve been told, may have referred to something a little more pungent than trash.

As it was, he was also reminding us in the church that we’re far too enamored with our stuff when our stuff should only be used to further the good news that Jesus loves us all and wants everyone to know and feel that in the very essence of their being. Yet, we want to “touch the poop” (or in C.S. Lewis’ much more masterful terms, “go on making mudpies”), when there’s something much greater out there to spend our time and effort on.

And it’s when we become so myopic in our own ministry areas that we begin to schism, to lose sight of the big-M, Meaning Of It All.

The distillation? The church is a continent, not an archipelago.

[Of course, he gets bonus points for two things: being on Twitter and using The Office as a metaphor for a day in the life of a pastor.]

Mark Beeson, Senior Pastor at Granger Community Church, told us all to shut up.

OK, he didn’t actually use those words, but that’s what he said. Stop Talking. Start Doing. Unending conversations accomplish nothing in the church for the betterment of the world around us. There’s a reason Jesus said “Go” and not “Discuss.” While there is a time and place for earnest, thought-provoking discussion, it should not last for eternity. Brian McLaren made this point in a different way in Everything Must Change, positing that the church is much too focused on it’s own needs (What color carpet would cause the least congregational uproar?) and not on the hurting, dying world around us. In many ways, the church can become all talk and no walk. He who has feet to walk, let him walk.

Then Mark Beeson told us he’s unbalanced. Which, after listening to him describe his driving habits, was easily believable. But he said that a balanced person never moves. You have to lean into life to get the most from it, all the while remembering that leaning means a greater chance for a fall. Mistakes and failures will most assuredly come, but your team, your spouse, your friends, your family, and your God will all be there to help you back up.

My distillation came from a wise, green, midget alien: Do or do. There is no do not

As led by the inimitable Kem Meyer, Communications Director at Granger Community Church, this all-day workshop was worth the self-induced hassles of the previous night’s drive to Granger.

The lessons learned have narrowed my focus, and, while it’s given me more work in the short-term, will prove invaluable to the future of the church I serve. To wit, in order to become a more organized and task-driven person, and because I wrote down so many action items as a result of this workshop, I signed up for a Remember the Milk account. RTM, in short, is an online to do list.

I spent the last 30 minutes or so inputting item after item. 25 items later, I felt overwhelmed, yet gratified, because they represent my first steps into helping create a better communications platform for what I hope will be a continually growing (in breadth and depth) church in Georgetown.

It’d be remiss of me to explain the details of the workshop. (Hint: Kem’s blog is an excellent start, and she does other workshops as well). But the gist, to me, seems to be the same thing I learned at a breakout session last year regarding video work. The prep-work that no one sees is the most important work you can do. The why’s that dictate everything else need to be properly answered before going live with a “deliverable.” This is something I’m not good at, whether it’s because of my own need for a quick, tangible goal, or because of our staff’s (or just our culture’s) preconditioning to immediate gratification.

So my first action step is to figure out why we’re doing things the way we are, how that can be streamlined, and how we can make sure not to lose anyone along the way. It won’t be easy, but change seldom is.

Finally, we managed to mention Twitter more than a few times, as many of us in there were twitter fanatics (Shout outs to Kem and Jeremy). I also suggested Yammer for inter-office communications, though I have yet to try it out myself. But I plan too.

I haven’t “blogged” (it’s still a strange word to me. Almost too hip. Isn’t it just writing?) in awhile. I’ve been enamored with Twitter, the 140-character limiting status update social network. On there, I’m batwood. My twitter feed is actually on the sidebar of this page, should you be interested in my updates.

It’s much less intimidating to do short bursts of status updates than to write posts of any length. The lack of lengthy updates is possibly due to increasing ADD or simply more time on my iPhone, where 140 characters are much easier than composing an email.You certainly learn the writer’s first lesson - cut, cut, cut. Being concise is key. Suffice it to say that I should be writing, blogging, and describing more of my world than I have been, because I’ve been truly blessed in a multitude of ways and I should share that.

I’ve been hard at work on a few websites outside of my day job. Take a gander at terranova or First Baptist Church Chattahoochee, both run by pastors that I’ve had the privilege of being pastored by. They are different churches, targeted at different demographics; thus the different looks. However, I’m not a designer, just a tweaker. Both of those sites are based on wordpress, a blogging management system that I’ve tweaked into a content management system. There are many, many freely available templates for wordpress sites; I download those then tweak them to find the layout that works.

The terranova site was different because we attempted to use a coverflow script (imageflow) as a major navigational component. While it requires a little more work on the end-users part to get around the site, I think it adds a nice dimension of interactivity and a near-tactile experience. Or maybe it’s just annoying. I’m still waiting on feedback after the newness wears off.

After putting in a lot of hours, it was great to get both of those sites live. Also great - converting the terranova pastor…to twitter. And getting him to have the twitter feed posted to the church’s website. It lets his church members connect with him very simply, but, I think, effectively.

As for my day job, the church finally gave me a title, so it’s a little easier to answer the question, “What do you do?” The answer: Director of Media and Communications. Which only produces another question, “So, what do you do?” I will try to make communications within the church body and from the church to the outside world become cohesive, cogent, complete, contemporary, and, maybe just a little, cool. This includes web to print to newspapers to TV and everything in between. It will be, as it already has been, interesting.

In related news, and for the next post, I’ll be attending the Innovate Conference at Granger Community Church in Granger, IN in about two weeks! I’m looking forward to the whole conference, but learning from the guru of church communications (and fellow twitterer) Kem Meyer is the real draw for me. There’s much I need to learn!

And it will be blogged…

Pop Goes the Church makes the case for the wise and effective use of popular culture within a church service. Stevens does not approach the subject lightly, nor does he speak from an academic or merely hypothetical point of view. As Executive Pastor at Granger Community Church in Granger, Illinois, Stevens speaks from years of seeing his opinions put into effective practice.

Television, movies, music, the internet: these are the means of communication in the 21st century, the way in which we (especially in America) learn the greater narrative of our times. It is mass media that entertains us while simultaneously telling us who we are and what we value.

As the church has had to adjust to the printing press and every other major technological innovation of the last 2,000 years, so to must today’s church. It would seem that the church has chosen both the path of most resistance and the path of least resistance. Most traditional churches err on the side of maintaining the Christian bubble, wary of the needles of pop culture that threaten to burst what must be a fragile faith in the first place. On the other hand, hipper-than-thou churches err on the side of accommodation, sacrificing substance for style in the name of the trend, the fad, and the holy most, otherwise known as a popularity contest.

Stevens pleads the case for the wise use of the culture around us to create welcoming and familiar places of entry into a church service for those that would otherwise be disinclined to step foot into a place of worship. Citing more than a few biblical instances, including Paul’s speech at the Aeropagus regarding worship of an unknown god and Jesus’ use of stories (parables) relevant to his culture, Stevens devotes half of the book to the theoretical underpinning of his belief. Fortunately, for those that don’t know what such a church service could look like, Stevens then uses the last half of the book to give concrete examples of how such positive use of popular culture has worked in American churches.

As a seemingly lifelong church service attender, I appreciate the changes Stevens proposes. Instead of escaping the culture, boycotting the culture, or diving headlong into culture, I agree with the notion that we, as the church, should be engaged with the culture, as long as the end result is life change.

“Stay alert. This is hazardous work I’m assigning you. You’re going to be like sheep running through a wolf pack, so don’t call attention to yourselves. Be as cunning as a snake, inoffensive as a dove.” - Matthew 10:16, The Message

www.popgoesthechurch.com - the book’s site
www.leadingsmart.com - the author’s blog

I’ve been busy the last few weeks attempting to get my church to tread into this century. There’s more we could be doing via the Internet, but it’s difficult to steer a large group of people to adopt new technologies for communication. So here’s a list of a few things I’ve incorporated over the last few weeks:

1. A blog specifically tailored to a new Bible study class covering the book The Worshiping Artist. Why we hadn’t tried this before, I don’t know. Discussion seems to be going well thus far. Also, the leader of the study (also the Worship Pastor of the church) is updating it himself. If you’re interested, check out www.fbcgt.org/dale . I’m also working on getting staff members to blog about their points of interest.

2. A forum for all church members. It has yet to be published, but if you’re reading this then you’ll be treated to a sneak peek at www.fbcgt.org/thehub . Forums may be a little foreign to some people, but they’re highly useful once understood. They will, hopefully, be used for the multiple ministries at the church, events around our city, for each individual Life Group, and also for leaders and other groups that might require a certain level of privacy for their discussions. I may be most excited about the prospects of this forum, but I’ve also been in this position before of starting a forum for a church, only to have it’s popularity wane in relation to the amount of time it’s "new."

An aside about the forum - it’s called theHub because I’d actually already created a forum called "the forum" using different software than what I’m currently now using. I had been using bbpress, as it syncs with wordpress, our publishing platform, somewhat easily. Unfortunately, it’s not as mature as some other options out there. One of the main problems for me in regards to that is the inability to restrict certain discussions to certain people or groups. So I turned to the big daddy of forums, phpbb. While I’ve never used it before, I’m learning it and liking it. And I like the sound of "theHub." It is a central meeting place, after all.

3. Video Podcasts. We’re not doing this yet, but we’re very close to it.

Slowly, surely, and with many a technical glitch to go, the church creeps ever onward into the vast, uncharted waters of the Internet.

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Why don’t you take a Kissimmee vacation? The irony in that is that it’s close to Disneyland and I just posted about a Baptist church.

I attended just a bit of the National Worship Leader Conference held this week at Riverbend Church in Austin yesterday due to the generosity of a fellow church member who happens to work for Church Multimedia, a company that specializes in A/V installations for church. He had a sweet rig of four remote cameras controllable by a joystick and hooked to a switcher, the kind of rig, or something close to it, that we’d like to eventually get for our worship services.

The conference is a week long, but as I had just taken a week of vacation, I limited myself to attending just one day, and I picked the right day, that’s for sure. For one, Fernando Ortega led worship with a four piece string section. I’ve always loved his music, and I’ve never seen him live. It was very, very good.

Secondly, the two main breakouts I wanted to attend were held that day, one right after the other. The first was put on by the guys at WorshipHouse Media, a distributor of mini-movies, motions, stills, countdowns, and other fun and meaningful visual media for use by churches. They showed many clips, and even some non-released ones. That’s My Money was really funny. They also have a very good video podcast showcasing the newest releases. I met Rob Thomas with Igniter Media as well (and they’re doing some cool stuff). Be sure to check out the hot dog eating contest.

After that, two guys I met a few weeks go led the next workshop: Stop Substance Abuse: Make Your Media Matter. Storme and Lee of Eleven72 live and work in Austin, and they led a mock creative session, showing how easy it is to be wholly intentional about the use and placement of visual media in a worship service. It was certainly encouraging. They’re smart and creative guys and I can’t wait to see what they’re going to produce.

Their presentation was slated to use the internet, as they wanted to do real searches for a crowd-proposed topic, but Riverbend’s wifi didn’t reach the room we were in (maybe they needed a wireless router or two). But, being the pros they are, they retooled the presentation and used example Pastor Evan Gelist of 360 Church delivering a message about Evangelism, then went on to show how much can be found online to help undergird that message.

They also showed me a Sony Xacti handheld, waterproof videocamera that I just might have to get for some interesting uses at the church. Check Eleven72’s blog for an example. Their video of "Who’s Eleven72" is pretty funny.

I’m very excited about the possibilities of incorporating more visual elements into our worship services, and creating our own content as well. I finally have all of the tools necessary to do so. Now I just need to learn this MacBook Pro (being a lifelong Windows user, more out of necessity than desire) and also Final Cut Express HD. Yeehaw!