Monday look back 6-1-09

1. I love the music when Standby plays at our services. They are a great local band that is made up of members of the DP band. Its funny how 2 bands made up of basically the same members can sound so different. I love it!

2. Got to play with the new intelligent lights that we hung from the ceiling last week. The programming button on the new board was broken so I had to manually run them this week. Me and Anthony had a lot of fun!

3. Laurah and Dave were my Sound and Computer operators this week and they both did a fine job.

4. Jeff did great filling in for Philip, the pie illustration was good and I found my self laughing a little.

5. Speaking of Philip, His wife Angela gave birth to a healthy little girl over the weekend, thus why Philip did not preach this Sunday.

6. Isn't it funny how the mornings you fill most prepared are the days where the have the most issues to deal with and the mornings where you feel totally unprepared are the mornings that run the smoothest.

7. My computer operator made fun of me because I told her that I get nervous before every Service. I think nerves are a good thing. It keeps you sharp and it lets you know that you really care about what is about to happen.

8. If you missed the Standby Concert last night in Conyers (like me) I heard you missed a heck of a concert.

9. One Prayer begins next week! Our first video speaker will be Steven Furtick from Elevation Church in Charlotte. This is going to be a powerful 4 weeks. Don't miss it!

10. Can't wait for Play Groups to Start I am posting a schedule for all of the different groups later this week!

Social Media and Church: What are you trying to do?

The single most important thing to me when deciding how your church should use social media is to ask your self "What am I trying to do?". Are you trying to be cool? Are you trying to change the way people think in your church? Are you trying to communicate better? Are you trying to save money? Are you trying to reach new people? There are so many ways to communicate things to the people of your church. There are paper bulletins, announcement slides, verbal service announcements, blogs, twitter, Facebook, email, YouTube and probably several others that I have forgotten. It has been said many times that for businesses that social networking is a strategy. It takes planning and research to know if you should use social media to communicate. It takes knowing the people who come to your church as well as knowing your community. For that matter it takes knowing who you trying to communicate with. It takes trail and error. The most important thing it takes is knowing what your are trying to accomplish. So what is your stategy? What are you trying to do through social media?

Inspiration of the week

Cool Stuff from Redferriswheel's Flickr Photostream Check it out

Tutorial of the week

I love tutorials on the web without them I would be lost. I scour the web every week and try to find the best tuts I can. This is one I did this week and thought it was really cool.



I found this at http://ps-dimensions.blogspot.com give it a try!

Top Ten Tuesday

Every Tuesday I post a top 10 list of things in my life. Sometimes these are just for fun. Sometimes they will reveal some cool websites, apps ect. Either way you will learn more about the way I think. Then again I don't know if that is a good thing or not.



Today's list is my top 10 favorite TV shows growing up (Non-Animated). I grew up in the 80's and 90's so all of the following shows should come fro that time frame.

1. Sports Center- Every Morning I would wake up to it and every night I would go to bed to it. Not much has changed.

2. The Wonder Years- Loved me some Winnie Cooper

3. Star Trek TNG- Every Saturday Night me and the folks would watch Star Trek and eat Pizza

4. Dawson's Creek- I'll hand in my man card now.

5. Seinfeld- Who didn't watch Seinfeld?

6. Boy Meets World- TGIF anyone?

7. Full House- See above

8. Salute your Shorts-

9. The Cosby Show- Funniest TV show ever!

10. Hey Dude- All I have to say is Melody

So what do you think. Did I leave out any great shows from the 80's and 90's? The X-files, In Living Color, Growing Pains and Who's the Boss get a honorable mention.

Monday Thoughts 5-24-09

This a weekly look back on the Sunday Service from Discover Point Church in Conyers Ga, from a production standpoint.

1. Technically simple but technically clean service.
2. Lots of regulars missing but we had tons of visitors, it was a great crowd for Memorial Day weekend.
3. We had 2 Acoustic guitars and 1 vocal, I really like acoustic sets but 2 in a row is too much for me I will be happy to have a full band back net week.
4. Philip did a great job as usual, talking about money is always hard and doing it for multiple weeks is even harder.
5. One Prayer was teased again and I got a few more questions about it.
6. Huge announcement next week. There is about to be a major change to one of the Ministries of DPC.
7. Play Groups is one of the best ideas God has ever given us. I am so excited.
8.Angela (Philips's wife) is like 80 weeks pregnant and will have the baby this week one way or the other. I wish for her sake the baby would hurry up!

Social Media and the Church- Twitter Tools

I have spoken to church leaders about using social media in the church a couple of times and the one thing that seems to come up more often than not is the issue of time. With everything else that is going on throughout the week, taking the time to update Twitter, Facebook or to write a blog seems like a challenging task. The question should not be do I have time to use social media, the question SHOULD be how do I make time use social media to reach people with the love of Jesus.

I work a full time I.T job, have 4 kids under 7, a wife who works 2 nights a week as a nurse and a part time staff gig at my church that takes up about 15 hours or so out of my week. Now I may not be the busiest person in the world, but my life does not stop most days until I go to bed. I have to balance spending time with my kids and wife with both jobs and house work. I told you all that so you would know that this is not being written by some one who sits in a office all day and has all the time in the world. My life needs short cuts. I need short cuts to use social media, not only for the church but for my personal accounts as well. Here are a few I use for twitter:

TwitterFox: This is a Firefox add on that puts little Twitter Icon at the bottom of your browser. When you click on it all of your friends recent updates are put in a nice neat little box in the corner of your browser. You can even update you status, see your @replies and Direct Messages (DMs)

Seesmic Desktop: A lot of people will tell you tweet deck is the best desktop Twitter Application. I disagree but only by a little bit. You can view and update multiple twitter accounts at one time as well as your Facebook page. So if you have a personal twitter and manage the twitter for your church you can update them both with out logging out and logging back in.

TwitPic: The Seesmic desktop allows you to put links to pictures hosted by TwitPic if you don't want to use Seesmic than you can simply go to the Twitpic Site enter your user name, upload pics, write a comment of two and they load the pics to Twitter for you.

Twitter Feed: This allows you to ad an RSS feed (such as your blog or Google reader shared items) to Twitter and every time you update it post a link and a short comment to your twitter feed.

Facebook Twitter App: Allow you to update you Twitter account from Facebook and Facebook account from Twitter. It's really Cool.

Twiggit: A tool that post a tweet every time you Digg a Article on Digg Nation.

Tiny URL: Not a short cut but a URL shortener so you can use less of your 140 characters when you want to post a link

Last but not least this is not really a shortcut but for Stat nuts like me I love to something I can use to track my twitter account so I use Twitter Analyzer. It provides tons of tools to see everything you have been doing on twitter.

Another Tool we will talk about in a later post is the Flock Browser. Without getting too technical its basically the Firefox browser built for Social Networking. Check it out if you get a minute.

I hope these help you use twitter faster and more efficiently. Do you have twitter short cuts that you use in your ministry? What are they? How are you using them? Let me know!