I just got back from beautiful Durango, Colorado.  I spent the week with 1,300 teenagers and adults at Student Life Camp.  To honor my IT theme on the site, I’ll throw in some techno-goodness up front.  I was impressed by the camp’s use of the Internet.  Student Life uses the Internet to allow parents to:

• Read daily news from the camp
• Send e-mails to the campers (delivered daily to the students)
• Listen live to the worship services
• View pictures from camp each day
• Send a gift card to a camper

I was impressed by how well it worked and how the Internet allows parents to be an unobtrusive part of camp.  The kids in our group that received e-mails from their parents definitely felt that it added to their experience.

I was also excited because God was working in our students this week.  We brought 70 teens to camp and 12 adults.  I’m thrilled to see what God will do in the weeks and months to come as a result of this trip, and I’m so thankful to be a part of what He’s doing.

So, here’s some photos from our “While You Were Out: Sanctuary Edition” today. We had this lift in here changing lights. It has a reach of 105 feet but can fit through a standard double door. I promise, look at the pictures. We also had our crew from Fowler in today installing a new stacked video system. Limited photos from that because I was too focused on the cool lift. :) In any case, enjoy.

This week, we’re having a lot of action in our sanctuary.  The video team has contracted a company to renovate our projection system.  Hard to believe, but we’ve been running S-Video and composite to our projectors.  They’re running all new component cable to the projectors for high definition.  Woot.  They’re also stacking our main projectors, so where there were two projectors powering two screens, now there will be four projectors aimed at those same two screens.  I’ll try to take some photos tomorrow.

We’re also set to have this goofy looking lift come in.  There are purported to be only 6 of this particular type of lift in the nation.  It has to fit through a standard double door and be able to reach 75 feet.  Come on, who designed our building like that. :)  You’ll want to see photos of that thing too.  The lift will be replacing lights that are not accessible and cutting down all of our hanging microphones.  YES!  We have a zillion of those mics hanging over the choir, in the path of the projectors.  The result of that set up is nice black lines on the screen image that move in the A/C.

For most of this week, I have been working on a news blog for our church. This has been a fun process, and it looks like it will be a tremendous success for our church. I still have a lot of work to do, namely making it look like the rest of the site, or making a new template for both at the same time, or bringing the rest of the site into Wordpress. I’m just not sure about all that yet.

This begs the question, why would a church want a news blog? For us, it’s simple, we’ve got a ton of stuff going on all the time and only pockets of people knew about what was going on. Yesterday, our adult minister posted about the Thursday Club, an Alzheimer’s respite program. I’ve been on staff for over a year, and I didn’t have a foggy clue that we organize such a program.

So, here are some of the benefits of operating a news blog, which is basically just a regular blog (don’t all blogs post “news?”):

• Increased communication of news with our members, visitors, and community
• Syndication through RSS is great. Now, posting one time can result in headlines being shown on the individual ministry’s page, Facebook, MySpace, Upcoming, Twitter and more.
• Syndication through Feedburner’s e-mail delivery is awesome. Now, for those who are interested in a daily digest of our news items, we don’t have to remember to send it to them directly - Feedburner does it for us!
• Since Wordpress is easier to use than our CMS, the staff are more likely to update more frequently! Woot!
• For those who are really computer challenged, I can set up Windows Live Writer to get them going!

I could go on listing benefits, but I’ve got to tell you that I’m thoroughly excited about this. No one else on staff is quite as excited as I am, but that’s how it is with all techno-victories - we celebrate alone: no ticker tape parade, no fiesta, no cheers of loud applause at the finish line, just the silent satisfaction of a job well done.

I am proud of our staff too, in the two days that I’ve been pushing them to write, I’ve had 8 of them post 13 news stories… not bad at all!

I have always wanted to find ways to use technology to unite Christians. Yesterday, ACS’ president Hal Campbell talked about a networking platform for the church. He has also blogged about this. It’s a HUGE topic, and it’s worthy of great consideration.

This could be as simple as churches sharing calendars with one another or as complex as utilizing technology to organize ministries across geographic areas. Possibilities include sharing resources, encouraging people to plug into ministries where God is already working rather than creating another competing ministry, and more.

ACS already represents over 40,000 churches through their various products (ACS, Parish Data Systems, Membership Plus), and over 80,000,000 people are contained in the various databases of those churches. Many databases already reside on servers in Florence through AccessACS, LiveStor, On Demand, etc. We’re trusting them with a lot of powerful data.

So, building a “Christian Facebook” using that data is one way that this uniting-effort could be manifested. This would allow people to share prayer requests, get mobilized for local mission opportunities, collaborate on trips and events, etc. There are a number of great Christian and secular sites on the Web that accomplish many of these things, but they’re decentralized. Each one requires a different login and none of them have every church represented. The idea here is to create a platform that allows the church to link up.

The questions that are raised immediately:

1. Is it the place of a for-profit Christian business to unite the church? I say, why not? They’re poised and ready to dive in.
2. Who owns the data? ACS? The churches? The individual people? Is the church allowed to say that they will be sharing their database with other churches?
3. Is it possible to create a platform that will link a majority of American churches together? What kind of buy-in would be required from pastors?