Tonight I ate at my local, Belton Jack in the Box. I realize that many of my readers aren’t serviced by this fine dining establishment, so for you, I’d describe it as a trendier McDonald’s. For fast food, they seem to have better quality food and slightly higher prices.

Jack makes this Chicken Club Salad that I have come to love. Honestly, it tastes better than any other salad in my small town. It’s really good. I typically eat it without the dressing, resulting in a tasty meal with only 320 calories. That’s good practice for us Biggest Loser peeps.

However, as good as the food is at my local Jack in the Box - the service never meets the same mark of excellence. Before I go bashing their service, let me say that if you go through the drive-through, it’s fast. That’s their focus. I go to the dining room and wait an average of 2 minutes to be acknowledged. On many situations, I’ve ordered the salad and they’ll tell me that they are out of it. That actually typically means that they forgot to prepare any that morning.

Today, I ordered the salad and paid for it without any notice of anything being wrong with it. When it arrived, it was missing two things - cherry tomatoes and bacon ranch dressing. Now, you’re going to think I’m silly for writing all of this because I don’t eat either of those things on my salad. I pick the tomatoes off and forgo the dressing. But, curious as I am, I asked the lady who appeared to be in charge about their absence and she said, “Oh, we’re out of those.” No apology, no offer of substitution, just “we’re out of those.”

I wonder if we in the church do that? We sell the greatest product the world has ever or will ever know. We make a lot of promises to our people and our church menus look impressive. So, I have a lot of questions. Do we greet people immediately upon their arrival or do we make them wait to be served? Is our focus on all people that enter our church, or do we gravitate toward a certain group (drive-through)? Do we deliver the product as pictured or do we make it look better on the menu than it actually is? Do we play silly church tricks (like advertising a free pizza buffet with no mention of a forced 30-minute evangelical speaker in order to receive it)?

I know that in my ministry years, I’ve been guilty of some of these things. I get busy doing, and I forget that I’m in the business of serving.

“…whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be your slave— just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” (Matthew 20:26-28, NIV)

Spiceworks is releasing 3.0 soon, and they’ve put out this funny video as part of a series they say “explores what the world might be like if it was ruled by IT professionals…”

The ACS convention is finished, and I’m back home after a short 3-hour drive.  I had a great time at the convention, and my blog picked up a number of new readers.  Welcome.  Since there are so many new ACS readers on the blog, plan on getting some good ACS posts in the future mixed with my normal fare of Church IT and personal stuff.  I learned quickly that one thing that would help a number of churches is simple training videos.  (By the way, the link to the AccessACS video targeted to our church members can be found here.)

If you haven’t subscribed to me, I’d suggest that you visit the subscribe page to learn how.

Props to Kevin McCord for his post on why you should subscribe to him:

Let me give you my bottom line:

1. You are too busy to visit my website.
2. You don’t want to be frustrated when I don’t have anything new posted.
3. Subscribing will solve both of those problems.

I like that, a plain and simple reason that you should subscribe to blogs. Today, I took 45 minutes to explain the process of subscribing to RSS feeds to our staff.  I showed them the beautiful tools that Google has to offer, including:

• iGoogle - You make your Google frontpage look like you want it to and include gadgets that you want displayed.
• Google Reader - The easy way to subscribe to feeds and read them
• Google Reader Gadget for Personalized Home - Read all of your feeds without leaving your home page
• Google Blogsearch - Finding blogs of interest just got easier with Blogsearch.  Find all the important children’s ministry blogs, for example.

For the CITRT readers, this is a GREAT topic to train your staff on.  We, as uber-geeks, know how much benefit can be gained from the conversation platform that blogs provide.  Our staff aren’t typically there yet.  However, blogging is becoming more and more mainstream and less of a thing that only the geeks are doing.  Let’s get our children’s ministers, business administrators, bookkeepers, and others involved in a community of others who do the same thing they do.  I bet it’ll make a tremendous impact.

For those of you who subscribe to me via a feed reader, I’m sorry that you had ten of my posts re-posted.

I upgraded WordPress to 2.5.1 today, and it caused some problems with my FeedBurner feed.  Before you upgrade to 2.5.1, make sure that the URL that FeedBurner has for you is the same permalink structure that you are using.

I had http://www.matthewirvine.com/wp-rss2.php set up with FeedBurner, but as of 2.5.1, that page results in a null feed.  So, I had to update my feed to be http://www.matthewirvine.com/feed/rss2 to meet my permalink structure.

Keep that in mind as you too upgrade to 2.5.1.