Hacking Christianity

iPastor iPhone App [review]

This is a gifted review. As always, while I claim I can be bought, buying me doesn't guarantee you will get gold stars...but hopefully you will get good feedback!

I was gifted a copy of iPastor from the developer of this iPhone application. It's basically a CRM for pastors that allows you to input a person's contact info but then append five areas to their contact info:

Connection: drop-down list of how you know the person (church member, visitor, etc)
Situation: drop-down list of what's up (grief, end of life, decision-making, etc)
Care strategy: drop-down list of how to respond (visit nursing home, card, prayer, etc)
Delegated to: fill in the blank
Notes: fill in the blank.

Then when you are ready to fulfill ministry needs, you can select to view them by category. Say you are on a nursing home run, you scroll to nursing home and the people you say need a visit will show up there. Check them off as you visit. Works exactly as a CRM should.

As you know, I review gifted items as fairly as ones I purchase. So do I like it? I do and it is great to keep things organized, but its Achilles heel is that it requires a tedious amount of text-input. Would it be great to scroll to nursing homes and see everyone? Yes, but I have to input all of them...or hire a 5th grader to input them. Each individual is entered individually, and if I want multiple contacts on one individual I have to enter them multiple times. My test is which is faster or more useful: an iPhone app or a piece of paper. I don't see an advantage yet, but it could be useful if you take the time to input.

Some suggestions:

Connect with the Contacts module in the iPhone so I can simply select individuals or auto-complete individuals or grab most recent individual instead of typing in their info all over again. That would remove 90% of my frustration and be a time-saver.
Allow for custom fields of ministry needs or responses. There's a lot of drop-down lists which makes for an easier program but isn't as customizable as I'd like it to be.

But don't take my review as Gospel. Their website has some video reviews, so check it out and read the reviews on iTunes.

Anyone else have ideas on what would make an effective CRM app for a ministry context? Shout 'em in the comments!

Jesus the 8-bit Video Game

(h/t Exploring Our Matrix)

iPhone for Pastors

You would think that in real life I would be hipster-chic with this blog and working in youth ministries, but if you know me, you know my jeans are not girl jeans (not that there's anything wrong with that) and I don't have anything Apple makes at all.

Well, until now. No, the jeans are still the same, but I did get an iPhone 3G 8gig. And the obsession has already started.

So, to spread this obsession to other pastor-types, here's what free and cheap-o apps I've found to be very useful and why:

YouVersion Bible. Online bible app and you can download specific translations for offline reading (takes a while but worth it). I do increasingly get frustrated with the NCC for not making the NRSV more easily accessible...it's not available here. Free
Evernote. Keeps all your notes available, sermon illustrations, bible studies. It's Evernote and you must have it. Free (paid version allows for offline notebooks)
Air Video: if you show videos in staff meetings or bible studies on your church network, you can stream them from your computer to your iPhone. It's less intrusive than a laptop but also less usable...but the ubiquitous factor with youth is oddly effective, and I can watch Nooma vidz on the iPhone without paying $4 each. Free
GorillaCam: helpful app with the camera on the iPhone that makes it easier to take pictures, like timers and such. Useful for taking pics of altar arrangements or new member photos or storing notes more clearly to Evernote. Free.
Stanza has lots of books and free John Wesley notes/sermons for ease of reading. Free

Quick unlinked apps that work very well:

Wordpress lets me update my future snazzy blog on the fly. Oh, did I say future blog? Whoops.
K-Love or Pandora for Christian music while at work, also NPR for when I want to feel elitist.
Social networking tools like Twitterrific for updating Twitter on the go and Facebook for keeping in touch with my teens.
Gashog ($1) helps me out with calculating the Prius mileage (Shucks, I do have a Prius, that is a +3 hipster point! Augh!)

So what are your favorite apps for people in ministry? No advertisements please, just recommendations!

Hope the list above is helpful and you find new ways to be effective in your context.

Critiquing with Accountability

Populist websites that aggregate reviews are all the rage: amongst others, you can rate your professors, rate movies, rate restaurants, and rate who has the loosest morals in college (thankfully the latter is toast). People have opinions and look for places to make them known.

So it was only a matter of time until someone started up a populist ratings website on churches. Enter ChurchRater.com:

Now you can church shop without leaving home. From the mundane to the profane, Internet critics are rating everything. They're even rating churches now on new site called Churchrater.com. Evangelical mag Christianity Today headlined its story on the site Church Raters or Church Haters? probably because anybody can weigh in with an opinion. Visitors. Malcontents. Longtime members.

Reviewers give the church one to five stars. Some churches get raves. Others get rants. One visitor voiced his unhappiness with a pastor whose sermon seemed all about his smug little life. He ended his review with "This isn't what Jesus was about."

There's a top-rated list and a bottom-rated list.

This isn't a new site: Out of Ur reviewed it last year. The reviewer noted that at the time, there was no contact information of the reviewed churches, so all you had was the reviewer's notions. At my viewing, I could find contact info, so that critique seems to be addressed.

But the bigger issue is the growing phenomenon of unaccountable critique. When you criticize the pastor or church in a community, people know it is you and can respond. Even anonymous critiques via a Staff-Parish Relations or HR church group have some level of feedback and response, with the committee as a proxy. If you had a bad experience and tell your barber, it will eventually make it back to the church in some form or another.

The problem is that online, there is no such community or feedback chain. And frankly, there's not a thing we can do about it. People will be anonymous, despite any attempts to the contrary. It is unrealistic to think that any website like this would have any sort of accountability.

To ChurchRater.com's credit, I saw fledging attempts to deal with this. As a case study, on a 1-star rated church, two people expressed disapproval, an administrator invited them to enter into email dialogue with the pastor or online, and the pastor responded online (it is unknown if it was from a dialogue). The administrators seemed to try to encourage dialogue online, but still there is no ability to truly nullify unaccountable gossip.

Remember that populist review websites have two problems:

Arbitrary rating system. There's no indication of what 5-star means for different people. A church that preaches social justice every Sunday may get 1-star from Glenn Beck, but 5-stars from Jim Wallis. Will that equal out to 3 stars? Maybe.
Critique reflects context not content. When I criticize something, I'm coming from my own perspective of brokenness. Online critiques do not reflect that to those who are not discerning. People experience content in their own ways, and while they can write about it, if they don't write about what in their background or context gives them that response, then the review is rather worthless. "If you love Jesus, come here" isn't compelling. "I was an alcoholic and I found Jesus here" is compelling! But sadly, most reviews don't do that.

Perhaps given those, there is a tremendous responsibility of commenters and raters to (a) explain what the rating they give means to them and (b) give more context about themselves to the critique. And both of those are very hard to get in anonymous forums.

Thoughts about populist reviews of churches? Would such a thing be good or bad in your context? Why?

Thanks for your comments and welcome to our visitors!

Passed

Passed my full Ordination interviews

in the United Methodist Church!

Ordination Date: June 1st, 2010 | Tulsa, Oklahoma

Longer post later but for now...woohoo!

The Nazareth Principle for Coping

I'm still waiting. But while I am, I found that Andrew Sullivan has a link to a father's conversation with his son. I love it.

Our son Simeon says that faith is summed up in something he calls the "Nazareth principle". This refers to the question in the New Testament where someone scoffs at Jesus the carpenter by asking, "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?"

The idea was that Nazareth was a city, in the region of Galilee, which was known for its "mixed-blood" and therefore suspect practice of Judaism. Because the carpenter/prophet came from Nazareth, didn't that disqualify him from being the real thing?

Yet as Simeon says, in life -- time after time -- the best things come from the unlikeliest places. And this "Nazareth principle" extends to the fact that out of trouble and wounds, disappointments and closed doors, come often the actual breakthroughs of personal life.

I am constantly amazed at the areas of our life that grace unexpectedly comes from, and the people that I don't expect to be grace-filled that are so.

This could be helpful in coping with trauma and difficulty. It's not about ascribing meaning to suffering; it's not about believing God has a plan and pain is part of the plan; it's about finding "what good can I find?" in the midst of pain and transition, and what unexpected breakthrough might come from it?

Thoughts?

Ordination Interviews...again!

As loyal readers know, last December I had my ordination interviews for Full Connection in the United Methodist Church.

Quick summary: Ordination in the UMC is a multi-year process where we are first commissioned to ordained ministry as provisional ministers, evaluated over a 3-5ish year process, and then finally voted in by our peers as full ordained clergy (called "full connection"). I am at that final stage.

I passed most of my doctrinal questions, but the Board of Ordained Ministry (the evaluating body in the UMC regional conferences) deemed it necessary for me to further reflect on three doctrinal questions and be re-interviewed at a later date. While I was a bit miffed at passing 85% of the questions (which is good enough for the Bar Exam and medical school), I did learn a lot from reflecting further on these questions:

(5) How do you understand the following traditional evangelical doctrines: (a) repentance; (b) justification; (c) regeneration; and (d) sanctification?

(7) What is the meaning and significance of the Sacraments?

(9) What is your understanding of (a) the Kingdom of God; (b) the Resurrection; (c) eternal life?

Why remind you of this?

Monday morning 3/22, 11:00am CST is my interview. Yow!

I'm at another turn on the long winding path to full ordination. Thanks for being on this journey with me. And thanks for your prayers, karma, happy thoughts, butterfly kisses, and whatever else at around that time.