my district superintendent whom i respect a lot has mentioned on more than one occasion that he wanted me to input on this ‘virtual church’ project. i didn’t know much about it till yesterday. hap, a pastor whom i also respect greatly in our conference sent out this proposal VirtualChurchfinally. i hate to critique or question in a final draft (note, the format of the final draft is due to me importing to google docs and not tweaking when converting to pdf, my fault, i’m lazy) but if you want me in on the project and ask for my input or energy to help get going.. i am going to be honest. so i went into writing this epic response. with all the other happenings, i am betting my bishop & ds are rolling their eyes as they read another email from me.

hi all,

thanks for including me in the special project. hap, thanks for all the work that you have done. i have a couple of questions and suggestions so if you don’t mind entertaining me. apologies if this changes it from a final proposal.

i saw that we are anticipating a filming of bishop wills small group facilitator presentation this coming weekend. does this mean we are having any meetings before or after to discuss success, next steps, etc.? i ask this, as i am somewhat confused with where we exactly are in this process. i know i’ve been around this conversation, ie. i’ve heard the exploration of "virtual church," but until hap’s proposal document yesterday, i had little clue as to what it was all about. so i’d be interested to know when a next collaboration event is.

some thoughts, take them for what you find.

when i first heard of the "virtual church" i was expecting something like the church of fools experiment by the british methodist church some four years ago. i know there was some discussion of bringing that back with more current technology, saint pixels was the name i heard of. jay voorhees would know more about that and i believe a lay member of blakemore umc (name escapes me) as they were both part of the church of fools project. the site is still active, i happen to visit it two or three times a year just to kick around in it.

i was encouraged to know this wasn’t our route. though i don’t think this is a bad idea, i do not think it isn’t our endeavor. i like the idea of creating resources to help plug people in and direct them into the local church, but my quick question to that is.. isn’t that what umcom or the united methodist publishing house is for?

a response i might hear from that is, ‘well they don’t do things specific for our particular context’ which i’d say is fair. however, they do have resources that we probably should have some access to without spending around the 11-17-20,000 dollars that is budgeted out knowing the actual cost when things break or are needing an extra piece of equipment. a response i might hear from that is, ‘well they don’t loan out items or will not allow to travel’ which is fair. but when the scope of this operation (as i am seeing it take) with work hours and the need to spread it out due to the fact we do not have a paid staff (only bill) to make this all happen, the need to loan out and then control equipment will be so great, a natural reaction would be to buckle down on controls and then it becomes more hassle then benefit. this might not be the case, but in processing it, is my natural state to troubleshoot.

i have an ultimate question of… have we asked churches what they need in these realms of technology? when i have taught tech workshops or talked with young people. the general rule is it isn’t because of anything technological savy that has gotten them back to church. it is that old school personal invitation and long term relationship. it might happen over the net, but it is within social networking.

now, resourcing the church leader and/or reaching young adults in a community is different & i have some more expanding thoughts.

in the case of phase 2. there are many programs out there that will allow people to conference live and with images & video feeds already. a few weeks ago i had a 6 person conference conversation with social media expert joseph jaffee from south africa online, with camera feeds so we could all interact and see each other and converse in real time. only trick was some folks has to put on headsets to avoid microphone feedback. that software is called oovoo and is free (though that particular one is still in beta version). skype has been used for years. i use it with my family and can connect via computer webcams with great quality and no expense, well, a 70 dollar christmas gift for my mom.. i plan on using one of these softwares to do summer intern interviews from candidates across from knoxville to arizona. &:~D

those are just two options i use that are free. no cost and highly functioning.

i’d be interested to see how the wiki will be used. i am well aware of the function and benefits of a wiki, but i’ve never felt it was something a church should engage in. there is just too much control need to maintain an image of the church. but that might be handled a few clicks of the administrator, but then, it ceases to be a true wiki. you can say this is just for the team, but then all ideas then only come out through the team thus limiting the depth of idea, support, and need within a parish or the conference.

phase 3. i have thought we should be doing more web-empowered church propping for quite a few years now. i think the whole tennessee conference website should shift that way and a consolidation of the conference blogs would be easier to navigate. not to mention cleaning up that busyness that the site contains. a resource site doesn’t need to be super fancy only accessible. clear pages, many & clear links, a fabulous search engine for the resources. probably need to have rss feeds ability which, last time i talked to mark (he’s a buddy of mine) the wec software blog component didn’t function better with readers (your young adult tech person who knows this is a resource they want to plug in will have this feed in their reader) as a wordpress software. this is remedied and might already be done, i can check with mark tomorrow. i know that i have done a podcast for youthworkermovement and the folks at lake junaluska that tech support the site were able to set up the podcast with a feed that gets to itunes.

i would also suggest that you "go where the people are".. blip.tv is nice the channel idea is cool, but youtube, myspace video, facebook video, google video, even godtube, all those are where people are hanging out (google video only because of the ease of the search engine). the best part about these things.. they are free & this message gets out to more people. a few weeks back to show our staff, i set up channels for our church http://www.godtube.com/hfumc & http://www.youtube.com/hfumc . nothing major, just got a dvd of two services, ripped ’em trimmed them, converted to downsize file size and uploaded them. i also uploaded a whole service onto google video (a 1 gig file).

this takes your content and spreads it, but in doing so you/we no longer are able to be gatekeepers to know who is using or not. which is a control issue. but in the scheme of thing, i never heard Christ say, ‘take control of my church so that folks get the message right.’

to embrace spreading all that stuff out there is counter to a traditional method of communicating. case in point, there was some great sat night live archive clips a few years ago on youtube that the nbc lawyers were fighting to get offline, they never knew that it was their own marketers that were uploading everything. the marketers knew the audience and how to get more brand loyalty & build back that audience. i don’t like marketing talk, but to discount the communication contained in branding is silly. and it is silly to not embrace the temple where the masses gather.

this is also to say, does anyone know the time it takes to do video? putting those videos onto youtube & godtube took probably two days.. the steps were simple, but rendering takes forever. not to mention the time invested in filming & editing that was done prior to our distributed dvd. larry nelson, of umcom, heads up our film team which takes three guys, two minimum (that is larry walking from one camera to another making stops at the feed console) to do sound and operate cameras. the man hours alone will take wear.

in the proposal piece, we have an article by marty cauley and there are some things i want to highlight for pondering as i close this darn thing called letter.

"Since their birth, this generation has been told they can change the world, and they intend to do it. But many are disgusted by what they see as the incongruity of spoken values and lived values in the church and the culture." if we don’t want to give up control and spread this out then we really just holding onto a traditional framework of educating and resourcing that can (and prob should) be done by umcom & umph. it would be seen skeptical by the young people it is trying to reach.

"…the church’s token attempts to reach young adults are actually alienating rather than attracting them. They see it as hypocritical when the church states how important their presence is but develops program for them but not with them such as “90’s style” praise services. This is a generation of “doers” and not “watchers.” " i don’t know how many of this advisory group are actually young adult age. i know i am not. i am the same age as some folks on this list i know, 33, and younger than most i know. if you want the young adults, and the ones that actually are on the net (consider me an exception cause i am a geek).. the 28-35 younger adult doesn’t want to get on the net at home unless it is for work. they have been on all day already. you are looking for the 18-25 year old. to capture this networks like fox has embrace this "doer" that marty highlights by signing many of these young people making videos for their own networks and putting them to work. these teams should be made up of the people you want to attract and commission them with producing the content to meet the audience they know. to give "oversight" with an advisory board is just giving a message of who is actually in charge. you can find some people who work well as a mentoring editor/producer role, but to have a large team of folks, that wouldn’t fly. mtsu has a nationally known communications program. i am sure there is a methodist or two in there who would love to be a part of something that has such promise, but we have to be willing to give it away.

the problem then is.. when the young people move into the church, how are they treated and what structures are there for them to plug into? this is a greater issue than just an electronic media.

if any of you have read "the hidden power of electronic media" by shane hipps (which is mentioned in the proposal, if you haven’t it is my suggested reading) he would warn against doing tech stuff for the sake of tech stuff because we have tech stuff. leo laporte (techtv & this week in tech podcast fame) warned of that when jay voorhees interviewed him on "the methocast" a methodist related podcast.

what are the benefits but more importantly why? i think this idea needs more flushing to meet that why. so i look forward to some sort of meet up in the coming weeks to talk all this face to face.

shalom
-gavin

now, maybe some of these things were talked about. i just wasn’t in on the action. so i’m throwing in my thoughts at the first opportunity