Archive for July, 2009

Success, Failure and Courage

Posted on 27. Jul, 2009 by .

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My friend and co-worker Michael Warden wrote a post last week interacting with this quote from Winston Churchill. What a great quote that’s been stirring me up lately.

“Success is never final. Failure is never fatal. It is courage that counts.” — Winston Churchill

It’s prompted me to aks a lot of questions of myslef:

  • What old successes have I been living off of?
  • When was the last time I failed? Am I not taking big enough risks?
  • What have I done lately that required courage on my part?

What do you thinik?

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Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-07-26

Posted on 26. Jul, 2009 by .

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Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-07-26

Posted on 26. Jul, 2009 by .

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What’s your promotion strategy?

Posted on 26. Jul, 2009 by .

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Promotion Sunday is almost upon us. When do you promote? How do you promote? How do you communicate promotions to your parents?

John Saddington works at North Point, but he wrote about his experience as a dad. Click here to see the card he got in the mail.

They get a an A+ on communication.

What are you doing that is different but effective?

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Long term strategy

Posted on 23. Jul, 2009 by .

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Kent Shaffer from over at Chruch Relevance posted this a few weeks ago. The post interacts with some data from a new book called, “Already Gone.” The data shows how children’s ministry and Sunday School is and has been failing. Kent asked some good questions about how these trends might be changed. However, Kent said one thing in a comment that I’ve been thinking about for the last several days.

Bottom line is most children’s ministries are aiming at bringing kids to Christ and discipling them. If they are significantly failing at producing long term disciples, I see nothing wrong in identifying that failure and exploring how to improve the results.

Long term disciples. I started thinking about long term strategy. Do I really have one? Where I’m at we’ve begun talking about doing more to equip parents which is part of it, but have we really developed a long-term strategy. Most CP’s I know feel good when the have their calendar planned out a year in advance.

What do you think? What “long term” strategies do you have in place?

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Creative marketing

Posted on 20. Jul, 2009 by .

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Peter Jackson has a new movie coming out next month called Sector 9. Being a fan of the SciFi genre, I’ll be seeing this one. It’s about aliens who come to earth seemingly accidentally and just want to leave. We humans; however, trap them here and segregate them off to their own isolated area. It looks to have lot of past and present social issues tied into this SciFi movie.

Last weekend I went to see a movie and saw this sign on the bathroom door.

0711091328Humans only allowed in this bathroom.

If you hadn’t seen the preview of this movie, you’d probably wonder what this sign is all about. There is a web address at the bottom that one could look up for more information.

Regardless, I love this sign. I love this kind of marketing. When I saw it I knew exactly what it was about. It got  me more excited about the movie. If I didn’t know what this was about, I probably looked up the website to see what in the world this was about.

Has your ministry or church ever done this kind of advertising for an event or program. Something not entirely overt, but clever and creative like this?

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Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-07-19

Posted on 19. Jul, 2009 by .

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Eternal Moonwalk

Posted on 19. Jul, 2009 by .

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Have you seen the eternal moonwalk?

Not only can you watch a seemingly never ending moonwalk from people around the world, you can join the moonwalk.

Michael Jackson will always be remembered for the moonwalk. I remember trying to learn to moonwalk as an elementary aged child. I never was very good, I guess I didn’t practice hard enough. I still watch in amazement everytime I seem him glide across the stage.

I was going to try to tie this post into innovation and creativity in Children’s Ministry but felt I was trying too hard. Never mind. Just enjoy some moon walking.

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HTC Fuze: Epic Fail

Posted on 18. Jul, 2009 by .

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Okay, maybe that’s a little harsh. Now that I’m not longer a Fuze user, I’ll share my own little review of the product.

For over two years I used the Cingular 8125. It was a Windows Mobile phone and I genuinely liked it. I used it with a data plan and I had no complaints. The second year I owned the phone, I used it without data. It was still a great phone for calls and texting. In December it broke and I needed to get a new phone. Being an iPod touch owner, I really would have liked an iPhone. However, I wasn’t a fan of the $30 a month data plan. So I set out to find a WiFi enabled phone that would act and feel like a phone on a data plan without having to pay for a data plan. After a lot of research I ended up going with the HTC Fuze.

After only a week or two, Sara had to confront me for complaining. She reminded me that I picked it over the iPhone and that she’d prefer me to stop whining. Honestly, it’s an improvement from the Cingular 8125, but it frustrated me more than satisfied me. First let me talk about what I liked.

The Querty keyboard is great. It makes texting or typing out those emails so much easier. It also had a great email page where I could set up multiple email accounts. I couldn’t really take advantage of this on the Cingular 8125, so now I could check and send emails from all four of my emails. The phone also takes great pictures and pretty good video. The GPS worked great and I loved how it interacted with Google Maps. Unfortunately, I think that is where it ends.

Windows Mobile actually reminds me of everything I hate about the Windows operating system. Within the first ten minutes of playing with it, I encountered three errors and one lock-up that required me to take out the battery. Although I like the 3D touch-flow, it was sluggish and slow. In addition, it was about impossible to find anything on this phone. Setting up my email was a nightmare as I had to figure out domain stuff, connection settings, email setting and everything else required and each of these were located on different settings pages. Although I like the soft phone features, the setup on the Fuze frustrated me to no end. Every time I called my voice mail I wanted to cuss. I call call and it would start playing my voice mail. I want to hit 7 to delete. Oh, the screen already turned black. Hit the top left button to turn it back on. Click the bottom left soft button to show keypad. Click 7 and listen to next message. Oh, I want to delete that too. The screen is already black so I’ve got to do this all over again. Anytime I called some place where I had to enter numbers, I went though this. You know, I’m sure there is a place you can keep this from happening, but it wasn’t intuitive. I twitter a lot. There are only one or two options for twitter on a Windows phone. Neither are very good. I found it’s usually just easier to text to twitter rather than use a twitter client. If I wanted to send a twitpic, that took some planning. It couldn’t really be spontaneous. The web browsing experience wasn’t much better than it was on the 8125. I used Opera, but the experience was FAR inferior to the iPod touch browser. The final straw though was what I’ve experienced the last two weeks. I don’t usually turn off my phone, but when I did, it would literally take 7-8 minutes to start up again. I dont’ know what it was doing, but by the time it loaded Touch Flo, I wanted to throw it out the window. It’s been a long time since I’ve gotten mad at a phone. Last of all, the screen really crapped out on me. I never used the stylus, just my fingers. However, the use of my fingers totally scratched up a little rectangle area in the middle of the screen where the phone digits are. Whne the light hit it right, it looked like a little cloudy rectangle. I’ve had the iPod touch for almost 2 years and I don’t have any significant scratches on the screen.

My final conclusion. Stay as far away from Windows Mobile. I think I would have enjoyed the Fuze more if it wasn’t for Windows. I hear HTC is launching a phone called the Hero that will feature Android. That would be a different story. Other than the the scratches on the screen, I don’t have any issues with the HTC.

I’m just glad I was able to sell it. After four months of use and a pretty scratched up screen I was able to unload it for $200.

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Twitter funnies

Posted on 17. Jul, 2009 by .

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A friend recently sent me this video. She’s a huge Crowder fan and she’s always picking on my twitter habits.

If you don’t twitter, don’t let this video deter you. The chances of you getting hit by a car while twittering by a guy twittering while driving are remarkably small.

Twitter on!

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