Sitting in the IT Roundtable meeting at Church of the Resurrection in Kansas City and loving all these geeks with laptops and passion for ministry technology. Looking forward to two days of sharing best practices for enabling ministries.
David Drinnon was kind enough to reference a comment I left on his site in a fine post this morning on building site maps and information architecture. In it he even calls me a friend!
What I love about blogging is that I left a partially thought through comment on his site last week and then he gives me kudos today and places my thoughts alongside his wisdom such that I come out looking like a champ! The reality is that he has some great nuggets in that little post including Web Sort and Adobe’s Website Production Management Techniques.
In a beautiful example of what goes around comes around, I am today beginning work with my team on the Information Architecture for a new site we are trying to crank out by the first two weeks in December. David’s help could not have come at a better time!
LifeFaithFusion.com finally launches this weekend to an audience of 10,000+ folks associated with the ministry of Casas Church and Roger Barrier. My favorite UI designer, Christ Merritt of Pixelight Creative, did the design for me last winter. Some projects take much longer and many more hours than ever anticipated, and this is one of those projects that seemed to never want to end. Unfortunately, I brought a friend named Brian Slezak (of the Web Empowered Church and Church of the Resurrection) down this rocky road with me and I will forever be indebted for his service and amazing grace. In spite of it being a painful project, I am pleased with the functionality of the site and the overall result. The client controls all the content management on this site (which uses Typo3) and created all of the in-page graphics themselves, so Chris and I can’t take credit for any of that. They also completely control the sidebars.
I think the site will be a great free resource for younger pastors and prospective seminarians. I really respect Roger Barrier and his soft-spoken but confident approach in sharing his thoughts on the life in Christ. The site is packed with content including Podcasts, Devotionals, and Sermon Series. One of the podcasts includes my sports pastor buddy Derrek Engeler who brought this project to me in the first place. It is always great to get his commentary on almost anything.
Anyway, after another 3 weeks of supporting the client with training I am done with all freelancing for the next few years. If some consulting or speaking opportunities come up I am all over it, but I am through building web sites on the side and being the middle-man project manager outside of my day job.
As many of you who follow my blog know, I am slowing down on my posting here as I am transitioning out of building sites & applications (on the side and during the day job). I’m moving back into leading IT teams and projects and interfacing with executives, and that means my focus is shifting in life and in technology. This is a great move for me, but I am realizing I never really accomplished what I wanted to with this blog.
I had hoped to give churches a resource for making decisions about the internet and software, and also to reduce the demand for my time by other churches who daily reach out to me for help (selfish, I know). Some of that happened, but not to the extent I was capable of. Sometimes we are left with regrets like this that we can’t go back and correct. In this case, it was a personal choice to not prioritize blogging more than I have. Thankfully, others have stepped up to more than take up the slack and do it a lot more succintly than I can. As always, the Lord provides (see the far sidebar of this site).
So now I am rethinking the kind of blogging I want to do moving forward. I really love the stuff David Drinnon and other IT leaders bring out about how giga-churches make decisions about technology and manage the change that comes with it. There are so many great guys dealing with the trees in Church IT that I may attempt to look at the IT Ministry from a satellite perspective.
As I begin to wrestle with the realities of life in a church where the money is available and the leadership understands the importance of using technology as a foundation for ministry, the opportunities and responsibility shift to doing things that haven’t been done before in the Church IT microcosm. Why? Well, because my new church is doing most of the regular IT stuff really well (don’t look at the web site though). While I *think* i’m up for doing something extraordinary, I am not positive I can paint the pictures and form the words needed sell the vision to leadership and to the stakeholders who have to live with this stuff. Maybe my writing more blogs and your feedback can help draw that out of me and refine the story, I dunno. Previously this blog has not had a strong set of commenters, probably because I haven’t prompted you with stuff that was seeking input. But as I process what I can do that will help others and help myself, one thing I know will change is the length of my posts and the frequency of posts. More posts, less words.
I rarily talk personally about my blogging. People who blog about their blogging always kind of bug me because it seems so imbred. But I felt like letting everyone know what is going on with me is only fair since people may begin to think this is a dead blog. Its fate is not yet known, but I won’t be shutting up anytime soon. The only question is where and what.
