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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!