Tuesday I head to Knoxville to participate in an unusual event for a Baptist preacher. I’ll be a roundtable discussion leader at A Public Conversation on Web Journalism. Other speakers include local newspaper editors, executives from the media giant Scripps (HGTV, Food Network, etc), and other online creators of advertising, and journalism sites. How did [...]
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Archive | March, 2009
A blogging, twittering sabbath
March 26, 2009
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Lots of conversation around the tubes on giving up cell phones, ipods, blogging, and other forms of social media for Lent. I have decided to do what the Dervaes in Pasadena do — I am taking a blogging sabbath from sundown Friday until Saturday sundown. I have several reasons for doing this, not the least [...]
Read moreHomeless in America’s tent cities
March 25, 2009
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Photo courtesy New York Times This is not a photo of a third world country. This is the new America for some in California. Tent cities are springing up from coast to coast as the unemployed lose their homes and apartments. I have visited countries in Asia where whole families live in barns, or chicken [...]
Read moreAll Search Committees are Liars, But Not Intentionally
March 24, 2009
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If you have ever dealt with a pastor or staff search committee, you perhaps noticed a significant gap in what the committee told you during the search process, and the reality at the church once you arrived. This is known as Search Committee Syndrome — the tendency for search committees to overstate, underplay, hope-for-the-best, or [...]
Read moreSmall Churches Need a Brand Revival
March 23, 2009
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Tim Avery at Christianity Today’s Off The Agenda asked me to write an article on the way small churches are viewed by others. The result is Small Churches Need a Brand Revival, and I hope you read it. Here’s how it starts: After the presidential election, I read a lot about the Republican “brand.” Nearly [...]
Read moreSeminarians Opt Out of Church and What We Can Do To Change That
March 23, 2009
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“Students don’t want to serve in the local church when they graduate; they want to do something more exciting.” — Southern Baptist seminary administrator A prominent seminary administrator made that comment to me several weeks ago. I’ve been rolling it around in my head since then, disturbed and challenged by its implications. If his comment [...]
Read moreSermon: We Are What He Has Made Us
March 21, 2009
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Here’s the sermon I’m preaching tomorrow, Sunday, March 22, 2009, on this fourth Sunday of Lent. I hope your day is a wonderful Lord’s Day! We Are What He Has Made Us Ephesians 2:1-10 1As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, 2in which you used to live when you followed the [...]
Read moreWe will all be connected forever
March 19, 2009
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“People today are going to stay connected forever,” says Jeff Jarvis. Jarvis, journalism professor and author of What Would Google Do? made that observation in a talk to Google employees recently. Jarvis’s point is that Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Plaxo, FriendFeed, Twitter, Flickr, and a host of other social networking platforms enable people to reconnect with [...]
Read moreWhat business is your church in?
March 18, 2009
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A probing question companies ask themselves in planning is, “What business are we in?” You might think it would be obvious that a newspaper, for instance, is in the print news business. But, not so, according to a popular journalism blogger. Steve Yelvington says that newspapers are in the business of helping other companies sell [...]
Read moreWhat Would Google Do? author quotes me
March 18, 2009
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Jeff Jarvis, journalism guru and author of What Would Google Do? quoted from my post The Future of Churches: A Network of Niches. Needless to say, I’m honored and thrilled. Jarvis is one of the prophetic voices who warned of the decline of newspapers when everyone else was in denial. His book, WWGD?, looks at [...]
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