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Technology

reclaiming wesley : a little creativity from the methochurch

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saw this today over on kevin watson’s deeply committed blog. its a promo for reclaiming the wesleyan tradtion from out of discipleship resources (a division of the general board of discipleship). i recognize one of the voices as my friend bill lizor who is part of the division on ministries with young people.

i like the over feel of the video and i like how it plugs reclaiming wesleyan tradition. it mixes the success of the guiness commercial ads without the moving mouths and a succinct history & message. well done. my big issue (as i always seem to have an issue) is that the video has been on youtube since the summer and only has 67 views (at the time that i viewed it). we need some help getting our agencies ingrained in the social media spectrum.



in other oddities, i noticed, what seems to be the ‘pee standing up pastor‘ (viewed over 200k times) talking about john wesley (viewed 1500x more than the reclaiming wesley video has).

unfettered hope : technology and commodification of parents

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Unfetteredhope
…the development of the technological milieu has caused parents to lose the natural authority they held when their children needed them to learn skills to survive. The device paradigm of our culture has also eroded parent-child relationships, for young people can easily envision their parents only as the device from which they can derive commodities of toys, money, clothes, or technological gadgets.

from unfettered hope, by marva dawn

new board news : dallas as a third home

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Logo

you may have missed my announcement on twitter a few days back.

last week i was asked, and said yes, to being a member of the board for the united methodist reporter communication. from what i gathered they want some of my perspective on church & social media, my propensity to speak my mind, as well as my strikingly good looks. haha!

this isn't the first time i've been asked to be on a board, but it is the first i've said yes too a board. the timing feels right and it fits in with one of my many passions. the umr offices are in dallas, so if you are in that part of the world give me a shout. i'll be down in the middle of january and periodically after that.

there are some friends i've made over the years of participating & cultivating the methoblogosphere that i look forward to working with & getting to know more in real life.

anyways, just thought i'd share.

tennessee conference position updates : what a long strange trip its been

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Masthead

our conference office sent this announcement out just last evening via our listserv.

The new Directors of Children and Family Ministries and Director of Youth and Young Adults will be announced in January. Before that announcement the CCOCM Personnel Committee wanted to update the conference on the procedure.

The 2008 Annual Conference voted to have the job descriptions approved by the CCOCM before the interview and hiring process could begin. Prior to the development of the job descriptions, listening sessions were conducted with the existing Children's Council, Youth Council, youth, workers with youth, young adults, and interested persons. These listening sessions refined the direction of the CCOCM and lead to the development of the job descriptions approved on September 25th.

A national search was conducted for both positions. Ten resumes were submitted for the Children and Family position and the Personnel Committee picked four applicants for interviews. The President and Vice- President of the Youth Council were added to the Personnel Committee and were valuable participants in the selection and interview process. Thirty-eight resumes were submitted for the Youth and Young Adult position and five persons were selected for interviews.

Opal Ransom, Chair of the CCOCM Personnel Committee, said, "We have sought to be fair in the hiring process and I am very pleased with the candidates we have selected."

i am pretty close to these situations, so i was at first confused.. why give an announcement that you are going to announce seven days (at least) from now? especially when holding off information got in the way of the original process that has led us all the way to here.

for those that do not remember, i became the face and an undermining voice (in some opinions) with my position at conference youth coordinator and this blog here, not to mention all the various social networks that i am a part of or created, when our conference office terminated both our youth & children's positions at the conference level for a joint position. part of that firestorm came because communication was not in a timely manner, ie. now. people were not getting information from the office so they talked to whomever they could, and sometimes just created stuff. i have taken some responsibility for some of the information that went out, partly because i wasn't being called or communicated with either. i did, as i do, tried to convey as much information without telling people what to think. i never told someone what to write or call and say,.. anyways, thats old news i care not to relive. i have pissed off some people, made some new fans, become fan of many people, and all in the name of holding together our conference youth ministries. since we went from a joint ministry person to a full-time person (which is actually an improvement from where we were) i consider our groundswell of people to have some element of success. but as with anything like this, no one wins happily.

back to my initial confusion.

what is in this news alert is true. i can speak for the youth portion of this process. myself, opal, loyd, brad (the new incoming youth coordinator back during all this) and an assortment of youth, young adults, and youth leaders got together a number of times to talk about ministries in the conference area. we dreamed up some big stuff and challenged each other. we then produced a document based on that which contained some plans, a description of sorts, and some goals to hit for an incoming person. no one asked me to be on the personnel group to go over candidates, knowing my track record with some of the people, i didn't expect to be invited either. i know who we hired and i am very content with that decision. i have also known who we hired for the children's position, which i am indifferent about that. from the children people i've communicated with, they know too.

what our conference leadership needs to learn from this (and i know you read this), is that appropriate communication is needed. now 'appropriate' is a perception term, so let me share that the perception is 'now' or like yesterday. no, its not fair all the time, but with people finding out that there was a plane crash or terrorist attack via hyper news outlets as twitter acts frequently, people are only going to be more expectant of information they care about quickly. going days weeks, months, without saying anything is giving your
audience license to create and say whatever they need to fill their
information gaps. you allow people like me to speak & give words to others opinions, which may or may not be a good thing. bad communication undermines peoples confidence in you and your mission.

a great case in point in the obama campaign using various tools to keep people, in the know. their only slip up seemed to be when the txt updates for vp candidate were lost in a huge database of people that the news got to burst the story before millions got their message. he's keeping to that communication commitment by doing weekly 'fireside' chats via youtube talking about what/why of some of his decisions. wonder if he will share why he's chosen rick warren?

this process has gone on for over 9 months now, its time to say something. name people and lets move on.

things on tab : stories sex religion church teens and technology

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as part of my new integration of lifestream stuff into my blogs newer look. i've been plugging a lot of stuff into my gavin del.icio.us account. so you can track back to these and other links of interest long after this posting (and others) have cycled out of view. i'm working on figuring out how i like stumbleupon or digg.