PC Users – Got Protection?

Better Security through Software
One of the best defenses against security threats is a good offense, and we want to help you take the offensive by having the latest security software installed on your computer. Today, we are announcing a year-long partnership with McAfee to offer all 350 million people who use Facebook the ability to download a six-month subscription to McAfee security software at no cost, along with a special discount once the six months are over.

I was both surprised and glad to see today that Facebook is teaming up with McAfee to help you protect your pc from malicious attacks to steal your identity or ruin your computer.

If you don’t have an anti-virus, anti-malware product, I STRONGLY encourage you to take advantage of this partnership today. 6 months for free – who can argue with that?? NO EXCUSES!

Read the entire post here: http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=248766257130

Branches

Branches

Submitted by: dunno source via deMotivational Builder

Couldn’t help but laugh at this one today. It also made me think about how we so often overlook or don’t even notice the everyday things (branches) in our lives and when someone does, it seems funny or even weird. Yet, the truth is those ordinary, everyday things in life are also some of the most remarkable.

Ever stop to thing about the beating of your heart or the breathing that you are doing right now? If you are like me, you probably don’t give things like that much consideration, unless you have an illness or pain which causes you to think about it. Yet, if they stopped, we would be history within seconds.

What about the not so life threatening but still everyday things like your friends or family? What about your home or job or car or clothes? Chances are we get bored with the ordinary and the familiar rather quickly and soon we start craving something new. I guess it is just human nature.

Maybe that is why I like technology so much – it is always changing, always creating something new to learn or understand.

I read this passage today in Job 37:24 which says, “So bow to him in deep reverence, one and all!

If you’re wise, you’ll most certainly worship him.”
I believe taking notice of the countless everyday things in life that God blesses us with is a small way we can worship and give reverence to Him.

Noticed any “branches” today?

How Wise Are You?

Today, January 6th is recognized as the “Epiphany“.  Do you know what that is?  Try this little quiz and find out!

Wise men for centuries have been seeking Jesus – Do you?

Church Marketing Sucks

Looking for a new blog to frustrate, educate, and motivate you in 2010?  If so, you should check out Church Marketing Sucks.  

You can read more about their purpose, which includes their mission statement :

Our mission is to frustrate, educate and motivate the church to communicate, with uncompromising clarity, the truth of Jesus Christ. 

I believe CMS does a great job of living up to their mission.  I believe my calling in ministry is indeed to help the church not suck at what it does.  For me this includes a broad spectrum of technology and communication processes some of which are seen by the church at large, like the website, but many are behind the scenes and support our staff in doing their jobs better and more effectively.  It is easy to find areas where churches often suck and what they do, but that doesn't help much.  I don't know about you, but I want to do more than just stand on the sideline and point out the problems, I want to help do something about it.  

I hope the CMS blog will frustrate you into action in 2010!  
 

Migrating to a New ChMS

A few months ago, I did an evaluation and selection process to help Fellowship find the right Church Management System (ChMS).  There a number of choices these days as the industry has grown and matured over the past decade but we eventually selected Church Community Builder (CCB for short).  

I first came across CCB while at Ministry Tech conference last Spring and I have been impressed with not only the easy of use of the system features but also the attitude and helpfulness of those I’ve talked to in their organization.  What is a ChMS and what will CCB do for Fellowship you ask

?  Good question! 

Basically, CCB will help us in our vision of Redefining Church through Relationships as it helps to simply many of the administrative tasks of running a church but more importantly with many of the features geared toward promoting the relationships not only between staff and the church body, but across the church itself.  I plan to do several more posts that go into more detail about CCB and what you can expect to see in the coming months, but for now feel free to have a look at the feature list yourself.  Note: there are 3 tabs on that link to check out (church mgmt, community, website integration).

We are currently in the process of collecting the data we have from a number of different sources including our Fellowship One database as well as 3 other databases in Youth Tracker.  The process is rather tedious and time consuming but will be worth it once completed.  There are many duplications to be removed and cross-checking to be done.  We will also be asking everyone in the church to validate their data and profiles in a few months.

Got a Plan?

Just in time for this New Year, I’m excited to see that the team from LifeChurch.tv has made some great enhancements to the online Bible – YouVersion.com.  I have enjoyed the many features of YouVersion in the past, such as the online journal, but now they have added over 20 reading plans to make it even easier for us to stay in God’s Word more regularly.  

This past year, for the first time ever, I was able to go through the entire Bible by using a Chronological Bible.  So this year, I’m going to try it again, only this time using the online reading plan found in YouVersion.  You can customize the settings to pick how long you want you plan to be and track your progress.  Read more about the features and plans but most importantly – get started!  Let’s encourage one another in 2010 and share what and how God speaks to us!

Tech Tools Help with Pastor Search – Part 3

In the last of this 3 part series I want to share the main tool we used to actually conduct our live interviews. If you missed it, I previously shared in Part 1 about the critical online collaboration tools our team needed to stay organized in our communications and resume evaluations. In Part 2 I shared the tools we used to efficiently find times to conduct interviews.

We would use these methods to review and filter down to a handful of candidates that seemed to be a possible match and we where interested in talking with. Once we had our meeting time, we would ask the candidates to use a web cam, so that we could conduct our initial interviews online with video.  We used TokBox as our tool for the video interview.

TokBox was very easy and FREE to use!  We found that being able to conduct initial interviews this way to be so much more helpful as we had visual non-verbal communication which goes so much further than a regular phone interview.  So often you get a better feel for someone when you can see them, not just hear them.  Being able to do so online for free also saved us much travel expense that would have been required without this technology.

We choose ToxBox over others like Skype because there was nothing to install – it is completely web-based and the ability to have a group discussion was so easy to set up.

So this is how we used technology at Fellowship to help us stay organized and efficient in our pastor search and to ultimately find the man God had for us – Eric Koehler.  I am looking forward to 2010 and how God will use him and his leadership at FC.

Has anyone else found a practical use for technology in a project or team activity? I would love to hear about it!

Worship in Heaven

On this Sunday after Christmas, many of you may not be attending church anywhere.  If that is you, I encourage you to read Revelation chapters 4 & 5 (go ahead it won’t take very long) and then watch this video of the “Revelation Song” by Kari Jobe:

It just may be the most powerful worship experience you will have this week!  

Karate Kid Remake

Hat tip to Collide Magazine for finding this one.  For those of you that are old enough to remember the 80′s and The Karate Kid, you maybe interested to know that a remake is in the works!  Looks like this modern day version will be coming out next summer.  Anyone else going to be seeing this?

Tech Tools Help with Pastor Search – Part 2

In Part 1 on this topic, I discussed two of the tools that our Search Team used to stay organized and to administratively deal with the 400 resumes we received for job posting for the position of Lead Pastor.  In this post, I will describe the tools we used to set-up and conduct interviews and the benefits I saw from each.  Unless otherwise noted, all of these tools were FREE to use.

The first was TimeBridge. One of the most difficult things about trying to set-up and interview is trying to figure out when everyone is available to meet, or at least to pick the time that is best for the most people. With six people on the search team plus the candidate himself the logistics of just finding the meeting time could have been almost a full-time job. To avoid the never-ending back and forth that email communication would result in, I could use TimeBridge to propose up to 5 meeting times and simply have it send an email to each person which included a link that they could follow and then specify the times that were best for them within the TimeBridge database.

In addition, you could we were able to set up each member with a free account on TimeBridge so that you could share your calendar availability ahead of time which even made scheduling meeting times even more efficient.  There are many more features as well to TimeBridge and I would highly recommend it as a way to spend less time arranging meetings and more time being productive.

The next tool in the kit was from FreeConference.com. While you could get a dial-in meeting number to use from TimeBridge, one feature they didn’t have was the ability to record or save that audio file.  This was an important feature for us as despite best efforts to find the best meeting time, there would always be 1 or more persons who might not be able to make it. Having the recorded audio file available allowed team members to listen to the interviews afterwards and still be able to contribute to the post meeting discussion.  Note: There was a nominal fee to have the ability to do the audio recording ($9 per month), but we found it well worth the price.

I will save the last tool for my next post, which will go into the details of the interview itself.

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