Tim Weston

I spent much of last week at a conference in Washing
ton, D.C. with a bunch of coworkers (hence the lack of posts). Each year, on the last night of the conference there’s a “Be True To Your School” party where attendees are invited to wear school clothing/colors and hang out with others. There’s music, a cash bar and lots of fun activities; last year they had pinball and arcade games set up around the ballroom, as well as other activities.

This year, one of the activities was a green screen interactive video called PopNoggins. Somewhat surprisingly, there were six people from SU, including myself, who were interested in taking part in this fun activity. We were allowed to choose a song and then the guy running the computer added character bodies and, well, it’s probably easier if you check it out for yourself.

I came across this interesting test over at ysmarko and thought I’d post it here to share with others.

In 2m 1s

Click here to Play

Tonight I finished reading another book that Josh Griffin recommended, The Blogging Church by Brian Bailey and Terry Storch.

While I thought the book was great and very informative, I didn’t get quite as much out of it as Josh did, perhaps because the book really needs to be in the hands of other members of my congregation.

The reason I purchased the book wasn’t to learn about blogging (an aspect of the book in which the authors cover quite well in extensive detail) but instead to learn what benefits a blog has to offer a church.  As it turns out, there are far more benefits than I realized.

The first, and perhaps most obvious, benefit of a church blog is that it can share news about the congregation.  From stories about recent and upcoming events, to testimonies and stories of life change, to ministry news and the weekend message, there’s lots of information about a church that needs to be disseminated to current and prospective members.  A blog serves as a quick, easy and inexpensive means of distribution.

Second, a blog can cast the vision of a church.  Instead of simply posting the church’s vision and mission statement (which should be done anyway), a blog can help define the congregation’s identity.  It can also help answer questions raised by parishioners and explain why the church does the things it does.

Finally, and perhaps most important, having a blog can help a church reach out to others.  This process begins by starting conversations and extends further by helping to develop relationships and, eventually, build community.

I’m going to recommend this book to my Pastor and Directory of Lay Ministries and see what they think about using a blog as a communications tool.  If implemented and used correctly, I think a blog could be a tremendous asset to my congregation.

At this week’s Bible study with The Gap, we spoke briefly about how we have grown/regressed spiritually over the past year.  That got me thinking: how do you measure spiritual growth?  I’d never really thought about that before and now I’m wondering how, if at all, I’ve grown spirituallly throughout the past year.I’m interested in learning how others determine/measure whether or not they’ve grown spiritual from one point in their life to another.  Hopefully some of you will post comments from which I can glean some ideas.

Earlier this week, I came across a WordPress theme on Weblog Tools Collection called StudioPress by DailyBlogTips.  I really liked the design and layout, so I installed it and did some tweaking to make sure things would look good on my site before going live (thanks Ryan Boren for the Preview Theme plugin!).

If you notice any oddities/bugs while reading my blog, please leave a comment on this post so I can investigate and hopefully fix the problem.  Thanks!