::Leading With A Limp::

Dynamic Church Conference 08: Day 2

It's official: my body does not like to change time zones.  I stay up late and then *try* to get up early.  So when I wake up at 6am in Dallas my body reminds me that it's 4am in SoCal.  Pain...and a snooze button.

Today is day two of the conference, it's been a great day.  I'm sorry to say that I missed Curtis' keynote opening (sorry Curtis, see the opening paragraph to this post), but did get here in time to catch Cynthia Ware's second presentation of the New Media.  Again she did a great job.  I think one of my favorite quotes from this session was "there is no longer just a broadcast message to the congregation, there is now interactivity".  So true!  So many churches just haven't figured that out yet however, and I'm afraid it's hurting them.

Right after Cynthia came Terry Storch with a talk titled, "LifeChurch.tv - The Here and Now, and the Future".  What a powerhouse presentation!  Terry not only talked about LifeChurch (in my opinion and many others, *the* innovative church in terms of how to leverage technology to spread the gospel), but he waxed poetic about several social networks, attitudes of church leaders and what technology (Web 3.0) may hold for us. A few highlights from his talk:

• Regarding YouVersion, "I love my job because I'm not constrained to build things that are only for our church...we can build things and give them away to everyone that wants them."
• Regarding the internet campus, "What is the point of a building? God doesn't just exist in the building. What if we don't worry about the building anymore? What if we can no longer count attendance?"
• "My bandwidth bill would blow you away".  Priceless quote! He was bragging about the bandwidth consumption of their resources (up and down) and rightfully so, they give a lot of stuff away!
• Regarding OnePrayer, "Craig's vision behind OnePrayer is to make us one...to make The Church one body".
• Regarding an always-on, 24x7 internet church campus, "Why isn't prayer available 24x7? Why, if someone is going through a divorce...is hurting in some way...do they have to wait for the weekend service on Sunday?"
• "What if people could create groups on their own and it didn't require the use of church staff?"
• He implored us to read The Starfish and the Spider.  My buddy Rhett has been pushing this to me too, so I guess I should give in and pick it up. The concept?  Organizations that insist on controlling information from the head only (or two or three heads) are doomed to fail now.  The economy of conversation has changed.  You can no longer control information, you can only guide it and influence it.
• Terry's life verse, Ephesians 3:20, (paraphrase) "God can do anything you know-far more than you could ever imagine or guess or request in your wildest dreams".

He wrapped it up by saying something that he closed his talk last year with as well, and I could not agree more.  He said,

"Technology is no longer and opportunity, it is our responsibility.  If you think about it as another opportunity, you are already too late.  You have a responsibility to use the best tools available to share the message that God has given us in the greatest book ever written."

Amen!

Dynamic Church Conference 08: Day 1

Today was the kickoff day for the Dynamic Church Conference, the annual gathering put on by the fine folks that bring us FellowshipOne.  Today was a great day for a number of reasons.  First, it was great to connect with old friends.  I saw a lot of folks from Sunset, my former church in Oregon, and met a couple of new people from there.  A find crew, the whole lot!  Oh, to those of you that follow me on Twitter, I'm tagging my tweets with #DC08 for easy reference in Tweetscan.

I met some new friends (waves to Luke in Arizona), got to hang out with some virtual and IRL friends (hello, Terry Storch...I love the fact that you started applauded when they presented the XML API) and connected with my friends from Fellowship Tech.  It was great to see Mark, Steve, both Jeffs, Curtis, Tammy and others.

The breakout sessions today were great.  I enjoyed listening to Cynthia Ware talk about the new media and how it impacts churches.  I have my notes elsewhere, and I may post them up later (and even some video, heheh), but a very fair summary would be that Cynthia is calling on churches to embrace technology, not find ways to avoid it.  So many churches just "don't get it", they think that somehow they have to control all information that goes in and out...and they are so wrong.  They cannot control their brand (their impression upon others), they can only guide it.  If upper management isn't willing to guide it, then others will do it for them.  That is the world we live in.  It's not a bad thing though, it's actually quite good.  As Cynthia said, the world and the way it communicates has changed so dramatically over the past few years that it's hardly recognizable to those that cling to the old ways.  Amen, Cynthia!

Since a good portion of my readers are propeller heads, I won't bore you with the juicy details of the upcoming API release from FellowshipOne, but let's just say that it's exciting enough to get a room full of developers to applaude.  To get developers that excited about anything...well, it has to be special! ;)  Essentially what it means is that FellowshipOne is opening up the door to developers that want to interact (to push and pull info) with their data that is held in the F1 databases.  That's a great step!  Many of us have been waiting anxiously for this to happen, and it's coming to be. 

So today was a great day for connections, instruction and getting an idea of what the future of church management software (ChMS) looks like.  I've seen the future of this technology folks, and I believe it lies with FellowshipOne.  If your church isn't using this, you are spinning your wheels.  To loosely quote Jeff Hook in his opening keynote address, "churches need to do everything they can to catch up to this point, because the future is upon us and it's changing quickly".  Goodnight, all.

Oh, a very quick post script: my phone is dying a slow and painful death.  I'm holding out for version 2 of the iPhone to replace it with, so in the meantime, if you call or text me and I don't seem terribly responsive, don't take it too personally.  I still love you.   It's just my phone that doesn't like you enough to let me see the messages. ;)

Dynamic Church Conference 2008

Tomorrow I fly to Dallas to attend FellowshipOne's Dynamic Church Conference.  I went last year and found it to be an incredible time for learning, worshiping and networking.   I know a couple of the presenters this year (including this guy and this gal) so it should be neat to hear them speak about subjects they are passionate about.

Does your church use FellowshipOne?  If not I think you're missing out on a lot.  Beyond the fact that it's a collaborative, centralized storage unit for all of your church data, it also has some amazing tools like the children's electronic check in. If your church is struggling with keeping up with the ever-increasing flow of information, you really need to check this out.

Maybe I'll see you at the conference! If so, stop me and say hi.  I'll be tweeting updates throughout the weekend.

Hey, while you're here...go check out the work-in-progress over at mattsingley.com and let me know wha you think.  It's a starting point, not the finished product.  I hate to put things out that aren't finished, but I wanted *something* up by the time DC08 came around.

Dynamic Church Conference: Tony Morgan Keynote

I'm finally getting a chance to put up some video of the church conference.  The thing that I'm not liking is using a new video editing program (Roxio's VideoWave 9), because Adobe Premiere Pro won't work on Vista.  No, it's not a Vista problem, it's an Adobe problem.   This post isn't about that though, if the Mac and Linux Koolaid drinkers start commenting about that and getting us off track, I reserve the right to delete! Anyway, the editing on this clip is pretty poor, but it's late and I don't feel like poking around the tool chest in this program and making it super duper cool. It's pretty raw.

Back to the post.  This is video from Saturday morning, and it's Tony Morgan from NewSpring Church talking about 10 stupid technology mistakes churches make.  This 5 minute video focuses on the 10th point (Not making technology a priority to reach today's culture) and I think it's a very good point for those of us running lead on the technology and communications within the church.  Watch on, bloggies...

DCC '07: Cool Peeps

I used to go to conferences and conventions all of the time, back when I was working "out there"...you know, outside of the church walls.

For the most part I haven't gone to conferences since being on the inside, with the exception of MinistryCOM last year, which was great and I will definitely be there again this year!  However, I did go to the Dynamic Church Conference recently and I really enjoyed it and got a lot out of it.  For you non-FellowshipOne users out there, please put up with me for a few days while I debrief my experiences publicly.

This post is about the peeps: I met some great people there.  As I used to do in the conference setting, I spent a lot of time trying to meet new people...to date I haven't found a disadvantage to knowing a diverse group of people from all over the country.  So here is a highlight (and to those of you that I met but aren't listed...next time give me a business card!  If I have left you off of here, please leave a comment so people can find your blog or church site...):

Andrew Mitry from Anchorite.org spotted me right away...isn't it natural for the baldies to group together? :)

Jennifer Bartlett was the very well-humored person interviewing me in the video that I posted from last week.  After our "interview" I had a chance to talk with her more, and she was super kind and gave me and the boys from Granger a tour of the Fellowship Church campus.  Thank you!

One of my favorite classes (that I will discuss in a later post) was the CSS hands-on instructional breakout.  I sat next to Jason Yon and we laughed about how we are both such sold-out IE users that using Firefox in the class was new to us.  BTW, I have recently installed Firefox.  See...I don't drink only Microsoft Koolaid!

Daryl McMullen brought out some of his fellow Granger-ites.  We only met each other on the last day of the conference, and then ran into each other again at Fellowship Church.  Hrm...I guess you really CAN attend a church that is home to 10s of thousands and still bump into people you know...

Terry Storch and I spoke for a few minutes...for the most part I captured a bunch of video of his talks.  I'll edit them and get them up soon.  BTW, I'm envious of his title, "Digerati Pastor". 

I think that is everybody that I met that has a blog...

Honorable mention goes to Anne Jackson over at FlowerDust.net...although we didn't meet AT the conference, we met BECAUSE OF the conference.  She was very kind and showed me and the ALC crew around the humongous church known as Lake Point.  Of note?  Ultra-kewl youth center.  No, not a youth "room", a whole flipppin' center, skate park and all.  Very nice.

Oh, Fellowship Tech people...don't feel left out.  You'll get your mentions in the posts to come. :)