How do we as young adults and church leaders engage with social media sites? While this might seem like an innocent enough question at first, with seemingly easy answers (I use site x not site y, etc.) in actuality it’s much more complex.

I was recently at a local blogging workshop where they were discussing institutional involvement in social media (aka social networking). The presenter was speaking out of his experience working with colleges and universities that are trying to be more active in connecting with prospectives, students, and alumni using current and emerging social media sites. One example that he gave was how the chancellor of our regional campus of Indiana University (IU East) is using Twitter to make a personal connection with people, in addition to several other IU East-related Twitter feeds.

Immediately I started thinking of how different this is from how I use social media on a regular basis. Whereas chancellor Paydar maintains his single social media identity through his role with IU East, that model isn’t remotely appealing to me (and I imagine the same is probably true for others of you in my generation.) For me, such sites are enjoyable and meaningful because of the opportunity they provide for near-instant, authentic, personal connection between me and others who know me. In these spaces (as in the rest of my life) I am not first and foremost Pastor Matt, but rather Matt, who is a pastor. A subtle but important difference.

Obviously, the struggle is that while I maintain a personal presence on several social media sites (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn,Flickr, etc.) there are times that I do connect with people primarily through my role as a pastor and representative of the “institutional church.” The reason it’s such a struggle is because of the ever-present tensions between authenticity and appropriateness, intimacy and identity. On social media sites these desires get all mashed together in a way that is more difficult to manage than interacting with people in other ways.

I am like many folks who fall into the more post-modern mindset in that I have a deep desire for authentic, intimate connections with others. However, if I am to be truly authentic in such interactions then what happens when my personal thoughts, feelings, and actions are at odds with those of the institution I’m seen to represent? For someone whose primary online identity is institutional (like chancellor Paydar), this decision is easy – the institutional image always wins. But as someone who wants these sites to also be a space where I can truly be myself, the answer isn’t so straightforward.

The two options I’ve come up with both leave me feeling less than satisfied:

1. Maintain separate identities or sites for my different roles, i.e. a persona to use as an institutional representative and another solely for personal use. While this would seem to go with the “clear boundaries” approach to ministry, my lifestyle and self-perception are much more integrated than this would accommodate. I am not two persons, but one complex, multi-faceted person, which is how I would like others to see me and how I hope to represent myself.
2. Maintain my own personal persona and an identity for the institution itself. Instead of trying to be both “Matt” and “Pastor Matt” in two separate accounts, the other option is to give the church itself its own distinct social-media identity. I like this possibility because it takes some of the online institutional representation pressure off me, but at the expense of a somewhat less personal (less authentic?) persona for the church. While the church is an institution, it is also a community made up of real people, and our online presence should somehow reflect that.

Thus far my approach has been along the lines of option 2, with making a Facebook “fan page” for our church. I’m still debating what to do about other sites like Twitter and Flickr.

It’s safe to say that social media sites like this aren’t going anywhere, and that more and more of us will be using them with at least some frequency in the future. I’d love to hear your thoughts and reflections on how you’re navigating this digital dilemma, as well as what suggestions you might have for the rest of us as together we make our way through this brave new (online) world.

(Original post available here)

I don’t want this to come across as an “I’m just putting something on my blog because ohmygod I haven’t posted in ages!” kind of effort (even if at some level it may be), so here are a couple quick updates. In particular I’ll try to highlight some of the things I’ve posted about “recently.”

• My parents are doing quite well after their house fire last year. I just received word from them today that their construction loan has finally gone through. They are rebuilding on the same piece of land their old house was on, but starting literally from the ground up. They hope to start digging footers for the new construction next week (mid-May) and to be in the house by fall.

• The new Honda Insight has launched, to pretty good reviews I might add, but I’m still not convinced. It is about 4/5 of a Prius at a lower price, both size and mileage-wise. While the $20k price is attractive, I still have significant reservations about the overall environmental impact of all those hybrids’ batteries, even if they do use less fuel.
• I survived my first time through all the major seasons of the church (especially Christmas and Easter) and have emerged unscathed as I prepare to celebrate my 1 year anniversary of being a pastor on June 15th. It’s incredibly hard to believe it’s been almost 11 months, though I guess if you judge by the continually decreasing frequency of my blog posts, it’s not all that surprising.
• Part of the blame for my lack of blogging should also go straight to Facebook and Twitter. The more I seem to get sucked into these social-media oriented sites, the less I create original content for my blog. I do intend to remedy that though …

Rather than inundate you with more semi-interesting updates, I’ll leave you with news about this blog:

No, I am not abandoning it. Yes, I am actively planning new content!

• A review of my recent “road test” of a 2009 Nissan Versa. I’ve had my eye on the Versa as a possible next car for a while now, so you might be interested in my impressions after spending 350 miles with one.
• Some tech updates on “recent” purchases – Lenovo S10 netbook, Nikon D60 Digital SLR camera, and several others.
• Some insight into bicycle commuting – continuing the irony that this gearhead car-blogger often doesn’t even drive a car unless I can’t avoid it!
• A revew of Phyllis Tickle’s The Great Emergence – a wonderful, insightful (and relatively short) book about “how Christianity is changing and why.”
• A semi-regular feature for posting recipes, particularly for the soups and breads I make every Monday night as part of the dinner and conversation group I host.

So, there you go … proof that <montypythonvoice> I’m not dead yet! I’m getting better! </montypythonvoice> Stay tuned for new content coming soon, and feel free to leave your suggestions for interesting posts in the comments section!

As a missional-minded Christian I find myself thinking about how to reach out to and help those who experience poverty on a daily basis. Over and over again the bible speaks out against systemic poverty. There’s recognition that poverty is a part of the ongoing brokenness of humanity, but there’s also the promise that in God’s Kingdom injustices such as poverty will be overcome. Still, poverty remains a pervasive problem in the world today.

Most of us in the middle class don’t often come face to face with poverty. From time to time we may feel “broke” because we have over-extended our finances and over-stretched our credit. But in my opinion that’s different than being truly poor.

There are a number of personal finance books out these days with titles like You’re Broke Because You Want To Be that remind people of this in very frank ways. And while I think there’s some room for sensitivity in helping people to recognize how their consumerism-driven habits are wreaking havoc on their long-term financial sustainability, these forthright books do have the upside that they bring to light some of the differences between being broke and experiencing “real” poverty. Trent over at The Simple Dollar blog writes on this quite well.

I think that over time we can become disillusioned into thinking that we know what poverty is like, especially during times of “economic turmoil” like we are currently experiencing. But unless we’re put in situations where our lives cross paths with those who are impoverished we can only speculate and pretend we know what it’s like.

This is especially troublesome for Christians. As we try and find ways of participating in God’s work towards the continuing realization of the Kingdom, we are called to reach out to those who are hungry, thirsty, and without shelter. This inevitably includes the poor. Yet how can we reach out to those we don’t even know or ever encounter? How can we provide any sort of real help to those who are poor if we don’t also seek to establish relationships with them?

I’ll be honest in saying that I personally don’t have a lot of experience with those who are truly poor. I’ve helped with service projects, food pantries, and disaster response trips that sought to help those who were deeply in need, but even then there was little opportunity for real relationship. Now, in my work as a pastor, I occasionally come face-to-face with poverty in very real ways, but it’s not very often and it’s rarely because I have taken the initiative to reach out to those who are poor.

If Christians are to engage in working towards God’s Kingdom then at some point we will have to start taking real steps towards alleviating poverty. Groups like Sojourners and the ONE Campaign have been campaigning for a while now to fight poverty and are working to raise poverty-related issues during this year’s election. Next week I’ll be preaching with an eye towards the election and poverty will surely be one of the Kingdom-related issues I’ll encourage people to think about as November 4th draws near.

So what experiences do you have with poverty? In what ways have you been active in helping to alleviate the plight of the poor? How can we as Christians find real and tangible ways of reaching out to those who suffer in poverty in our communities and around the world? Feel free to share any of your thoughts in the comments …

This past Sunday after worship, the Richmond Church of the Brethren (CoB) celebrated the launch of its new website! This site has been months in the making, as it was in progress for quite some time before I became pastor in June.  You can check out the site to see all its exciting bells and whistles, including online calendars, a “conversations” blog, and online newsletter distribution. Since I did quite a bit of work getting the site finalized and ready for launch, I’ll talk about some of the more technical details of the site in the rest of this post.

The new site was set up and is hosted by Summersault database driven websites. There are several connections between Summersault and Richmond CoB, so they were a very logical choice. Summersault set up our server space, configured Drupal, an open-source content management system, and set up our preferred theme with some graphic-design tweaks. From that point the site was delivered to us to do any final design tweaks and to create the content.

(Working on getting this new site ready to launch has been another one of the reasons new content has been so sparse on my blog lately. Of course, buying a house may have something to do with my recent busyness as well.)

Calendar Setup

While Drupal has quite a bit of built-in event scheduling and calendaring functionality, both myself and the church’s office manager are committed Google Calendar junkies. While Drupal plays relatively nice with GCal, it isn’t quite as easy to use for recurring events, rescheduling things, and interfacing with other services and devices.

In the end we decided to use a combination of Drupal’s built in calendar and Google Calendar. Special events are scheduled using the Drupal site, while recurring events and more mundane things like when the church office is open, etc. are scheduled via GCal. Since Drupal exports an actively updated .ics file that GCal can subscribe to, I was able to set up a calendar display page that uses an embedded Google Calendar to display both sets of events at the same time. It sounds somewhat cumbersome, but at this point it’s the best compromise we were able to set up. For end users I think the experience will be relatively transparent.

CSS Tweaking

In addition to figuring out the finer details of how we were going to use the calendar, we also ran across several aspects of our chosen template that we wanted to tweak or change. Since a number of people in our community use Linux, I wanted to do what I could to make sure the site looked good on both Windows and Linux browsers. Since many Linux installs don’t include the same fonts as Windows, some aspects of the layout needed to be adjusted to make sure things lined up correctly when non-standard fonts were in use.

As I tweaked the CSS I also found myself banging my head against the wall a few times as I learned some of Drupal’s eccentricities. While Drupal is an amazingly configurable, adaptable, extensible piece of software, that sometimes results in complexity and a steep learning curve once you start to try and fiddle around “under the hood.” I made a few changes to the actual PHP and HTML code that makes up the template we’re using, but most of the changes I made were just in the CSS files.

What now?

Now that the site has officially been launched there will be some additional upkeep needed right from the start. We’re going to try and have an up-to-date list of upcoming worship themes and preachers on the “Worship” page, the calendar will need to be kept a bit more updated, and the Conversations blog will need attention if we really want it to be a place where conversation is taking place.

Because of Drupal’s expandable nature we have a number of options we may look into in the future for expanding the site. One popular possibility is to do some sort of sermon podcast, possibly with sermon texts available too. Another idea would be to have an area that those who help in various kinds of church leadership can use for collaborative planning and resource sharing.

Overall I’m excited about having the new site up and active. It will mean that my online attention will be stretched a little bit thinner with regards to blogging, now that I have 2 different sites vying for my writing attention. However I think that it may also be a generative experience, where I’ll be coming up with ideas that might not work just right for the church blog, but would be appropriate for this site. Only time will tell.

So what are you waiting for? Check out the new site! Let me know what you think, and if you’ve got any suggestions I’d love to hear them.

Serve God, Save the Planet is written by J. Matthew Sleeth, a former emergency room doctor, ER director, and chief of medical staff. He writes primarily out of his experience in evangelical Christianity, which is reflected by many of the theological assertions in the book. While I don’t necessarily agree with all of the theology he espouses, I do think that his core tenets of tying the care of creation with our love and service of God and fellow humans and are sound.

Though it’s not an incredibly long book (~250 pages total) it does cover a lot of ground. There are 16 chapters in all, so rather than summarize each one I’ll simply hit some of the book’s high and low points and provide some general reflections:

High Points

Style & Format – Sleeth writes in a very readable style, making this a book that can definitely be enjoyed by anyone who has a basic background in Christianity. As I mentioned there are 16 chapters, only 10-15 pages each, and 5 helpful appendices including a workbook, an energy audit, and an environmental to-do list. I could definitely see this book being used as the basis of an ongoing discussion group using the included workbook questions as a starting point.

Global emphasis – An important consideration when talking about the environment is that many of those who suffer the greatest from the damage that is done to the earth live in poorer countries around the world. Sleeth provides global insight into the problems of pollution and overconsumption through both facts and figures as well as personal anecdotes from medical misisons trips.

Practical – This book definitely appeals to my practical side. Even though many of the examples Sleeth shares from his own life are far more drastic than most people will be ready to undertake initially, he does provide other, smaller suggestions that are more easily incorporated into every day living. So while his story of living in a house that is the size of his previous garage may seem like an unattainable goal for some (depending on the size of their garages), his suggestions to use compact flourescent light bulbs, plant vegetable gardens, and hang laundry outside to dry are all more easily incorporated.

Inclusive – I think that too often we focus simply on the actions that are beneficial or detrimental to the environment instead of focusing on the attitudes behind those actions. Sleeth addresses this by grounding creation care in love of God and love of neighbor. He discusses how our attitudes about child-rearing, population control, and even our modern, western fixation on fitness and medical wellbeing can have a large impact on the natural world.

A call to simpler living – I have a theological and spiritual appreciation for simple living. The Church of the Brethren, the denomination I am a part of, has historically emphasized simple living in community as how we are called to live out our faith as Christians. As I read this book, much of what Sleeth said resonated with me not only because of my interest in the environment, but also because I value the quest to seek out a simpler way of life in the midst of modern busyness. What he says about rampant consumerism, our sense of entitlement, and our ignorance of how disproportionately wealthy we are compared to the rest of the world is not new. However, it is something we need to be reminded of often since our commercial-driven media is constantly trying to make us forget.

Low Points

Theological & biblical issues – As I mentioned earlier the theology of the book is more on the evangelical side, and I found my theological hacklesraised by some of the assumptions he puts forth as facts (like some issues of biblical authorship) and some of his choices regarding biblical translations. He uses the King James Version, which in my opinion is based on outdated scholarship and is often contextually irrelevant in the 21st century, and the New Living Translation, which is more of a paraphrase, for many of his scriptural quotations. While I had no trouble reading around these issues and didn’t see them as affronts to my own beliefs, others who have less familiarity or are less comfortable with the diversity of Christian belief may find it more difficult to do so.

Too broad? – I know that just moments ago I praised how inclusive Sleeth is when dealing with the issue of environmental care, yet I wonder if he’s possibly a bit too broad in his approach. Let me explain. Many of the things he writes about do have an impact on the environment, yet some are much more tangential than others. For example, he has entire chapters on his thoughts about television, work patterns and sabbath rest, family dynamics and child rearing, and even a chapter on childhood misconceptions and Santa Claus! While there are no doubt some environmental implications to each of these, the way he writes about them sometimes seems to lack the emphasis I might have hoped for.

Anecdotes – While Sleeth is a very readable writer and a pretty good storyteller, I sometimes found his anecdotes to be a bit much. Almost every chapter seemed to have at least one story from his experiences as an emergency room doctor, a medical missions trip, or his family life. While these stories often serve to prove a point, other times they are a bit graphic and shocking. Maybe that’s what he was going for, turning our stomachs to turn our thought patterns. I’m sure others may appreciate these stories more than I did, so this one I might just chalk up to personal preference.

To Read or Not To Read

Over all I found this to be a very enjoyable and thought-provoking book. I would suggest it to anyone who has an interest in learning how care for the environment can be a natural outgrowth of Christian belief. I also think this would be an excellent read for Christians who might be having a hard time figuring out why so many other Christians are jumping on the environmental bandwagon. They may even find themselves jumping on too!

Those who are already theologically-grounded Christian environmentalists may enjoy reading about Sleeth’s personal lifestyle changes in light of his conviction for creation care. Though I can’t recommend all of his theological nuances, I think his overall reasoning is very sound and I found myself greatly appreciating how he portrays saving the planet to be a natural outgrowth of serving God.

I’ve uploaded a few more photos to my AC Facebook album, sorry Flickr folks I haven’t sent any your way. I’m going to try to get some better (non-camera phone) pics to upload soon. Also, if you’re interested in more general reports of what is happening here at Conference, along with some more pictures, be sure to check out the official Annual Conference news page which is updated every evening.

One part of Annual Conference is the numerous insight sessions that take place on various topics of interest. I enjoyed going to a couple such insight sessions today, titled “Sharing the Good News Within and Beyond our Communities of Faith” and “Engaging our Communities with Jesus.” However one of my favorite events today was an opportunity tonight for those of us who are interested in the emergent church conversation to get together for our own conversation.

This was a special opportunity for me to sit down with people from across the country who are interested in some of the same trains of thought that I am interested in. I read many blogs that deal with the emergent church and I’ve really enjoyed reading the Emergent Brethren blog over the last several months. After tonight I’m going to try much harder to become a regular part of that online community as we work together to see what the emerging church looks like in our various Brethren contexts.

I’ve also purchased a stack of books (many of which are emergent or missionally oriented) and I hope to review some of them here in the coming months. I really do think that the emergent / missional conversation and movement is where the church is headed in order to be relevant and authentic in our society and culture. I see many ways in which the Church of the Brethren, both historically and currently, resonates with this supposedly “new” movement. Expect to hear more from me about this in the future!

One last note about my dining adventures while here in Richmond – last night we ate at the Strawberry Street Cafe and it was wonderful. It’s located in an area of Richmond near Monument Ave. known as “the fan” and has been a favorite eatery there for the last 30 years. Since I normally live quite a bit farther from the sea I took the opportunity to sample some of their crab-based dishes (crab soup, crab quiche, and crab cakes) and they were all splendid. I also got to taste some of their other offerings, all of which were quite good as well. I would definitely recommend it as a nice locally-owned place to check out if you ever happen to find yourself in Richmond, VA!

It was a long drive from Richmond (IN) to Richmond (VA) yesterday, but thankfully I had a friend travelling with me which made the trip much more enjoyable. I’ve been having fun already using my Blackberry to post pictures of my trip online. I tried using the Flickr app that’s available for Blackberry and uploaded a few photos from that. I may upload some more to Flickr, but I think that for the most part I’m going to use a different solution.

Another of the fun, addictive apps for Blackberry is a well-done facebook app that allows you to send messages, post to people’s wall’s, and upload photos. It has allowed me to easily create a new album, tag people, and upload photos almost as soon as I take them. If you’re on facebook, look me up there. If you’re not, don’t worry, not all is lost. There is a publicly accessible version of the photo album!

Last night we had a great worship service and I went with my folks to Sine’ Irish Pub and Restaurant for dinner. The atmosphere was awesome, the pricing was reasonable, and the food was great (though not all that Irish.)

Thus far I’ve spent a lot of time reconnecting with people and visiting the exhibit call. If you’re at Annual Conference and you want to connect, drop me a line here, give a call, send me an email, or leave me a message on the board and we’ll try to cross paths.

I’ll be updating this page occasionally with highlights of conference, so check back soon!

Open Source & Freedom

Linux is an operating system that is based on the “open source” model. In explaining what open source software is, the discussion often shifts quickly to the issue of freedom. One of the attributes of Linux that is often used to convince people to try it is because it’s free, it costs them no money to use it. While this is sometimes true, it is a distortion of the freedom of open source. The phrases that are often used in describing the freedom of open source are “free as in beer” and “free as in speech.” Put briefly, not all open source software is necessarily available free of charge. In fact many of the versions of Linux that are used by businesses and corporations can cost quite a bit. However, true open source software is always free as in speech.

At it’s most basic definition, open source is software where the end-user is allowed to change the source code of the program to suit their needs or desires. This means that if a user is technically savvy enough to know how to make changes in the programming language the software is written in they can adapt it to their particular situation. Often times users are then allowed to redistribute their new version. This contrasts with the “closed source” model, which has been the predominant method in the computer industry and used by companies like Microsoft, in which the end-user is given permission only to use software as the original author intended, and does not allow for any unauthorized changes, modifications, or distribution.

Why does it matter?

For those who could not edit the source code of a program if their life depended on it, why should you care whether or not the software you use is open or closed source? I’ve heard “open source evangelists” take a number of different tacts to this. One is the economic route – the scenario mentioned previously based on acquiring software that is “free as in beer.” While this may appeal to some people’s purse strings, I think it trivializes some of the larger implications of open source. Besides, most average users will never install a new operating system, so to them whatever version of Microsoft Windows (Or Mac OS X) came preinstalled on their computer probably seems just as free in this sense. Similarly, it is an unfortunate reality that software piracy leads to many people acquiring closed source software for free using less-than-legal methods.

In my mind, the attractiveness of open source (and in turn Linux) is that it is a more socially just model for using technology. As a Christian and a concerned world citizen I care whether or not my actions are furthering social justice or hindering it. Open source allows people and populations to adapt and use software in ways that are most useful to their situation, whether it is because of language issues, social context, cultural differences, and so on. Large, closed-source software companies are often less interested in smaller, less economically viable markets because of their primarily profit-based nature. Meanwhile open source allows programs to be translated into many different languages and settings and to be easily (and legally) distributed.

Open source software is available for all different operating systems, with one of the most popular examples being the Mozilla Firefox internet browser. Another great open source program is OpenOffice.org, a full featured open source alternative to Microsoft Office. But in my opinion the ultimate expression of open source is the Linux operating system. Because of its open source nature, there are many different versions (called distributions) of Linux. I personally have chosen to use Ubuntu Linux, but there are many other no-cost options that are just as viable, such as Fedora, openSUSE, Foresight, gOS, and more.

The nice thing about many distributions is that they available on a “LiveCD” which allows potential new users to try the operating system without making any irreversible changes to their computers.

It is important to me to support business practices and institutions that I feel are working toward fairness and equality. This is especially true with technology, because it can create such a rift between the haves and the have-nots. For me, I feel that supporting Linux and open soure software in general are ways to make technology more accessible to a broader range of people. One way I see this happening is through initiatives that make old computers and hardware usable once again by installing Linux and then making them available to people and families that may not otherwise be able to afford a computer.

If you still don’t want to use Linux …

I’ll freely admit that not everyone will want to (or even be able to) switch over to Linux. I promise I won’t think any less of you, and if anyone else does then shame on them. However, there are still some things you can do to help support social justice issues when it comes to computers. If you are interested in open source and don’t want to take the big step of replacing your operating system, give Firefox or OpenOffice a try. If you don’t want to (or can’t for whatever reason) take that step and you still want to support socially just computing, then you might consider donating money to an organization that is working to further such values. I also realize that some of you may not be interested in doing any of these things, even if you agree that Linux and open source are great ways of making technology more accessible. However, there are still some things you can do as well.

Let me tell you a short story: I recently had some interactions with an organization that required me to complete some extensive paperwork for them. (I won’t name any names, but some of you who know me may be able to figure out the identity of this organization.) To complete this paperwork, I had to use a program that only runs in Microsoft Windows. This was a problem for me, since none of my computers use Windows as their primary operating system. Thankfully I was able to set up a “virtual” instance of Windows that allowed me to use this program, but had I not had access to a legitimate Windows license and install CD I wouldn’t have been able to use this program and would not have been able to fill out the important paperwork. After using the program I had to upload a file to this organization’s web site. I first tried this using Firefox on my Linux computer, only to have it fail. I called them and discovered that their web site would only work with Internet Explorer.

I share this story as an example of how you (and others) can support social justice through supporting Linux and open source software. Our actions must not stop at celebrating the fact that there is a free and fair alternative to often expensive and inaccessible closed source programs. Linux and open source software not only address a social justice issue but they also create another. Once people have access to technology and the internet, we must also do what we can to make sure they are not treated as second-class because they do not use Microsoft Windows. Companies and organizations need to realize this as they require the use of computer programs and web sites that only work with Windows.

I don’t expect this article will cause anyone who hasn’t considered using Linux to do so. If it does, by all means let me know how it goes and if you have any questions. It is my hope that together we can begin to help others understand that Linux and other open source programs are not only used by “geeks” anymore, but are a viable alternative for less privileged people in this country and throughout the world, for non-profit organizations (such as churches) who cannot afford to spend lots of money on computers and software, and for users like me who want to support social justice in the area of technology. Regardless of what operating system and other software you may use, it’s time to stop looking down our noses at one another and recognize the social implications of the way we all interact with computers.

In the end I feel that the church is going to be a wonderful place for me to be the pastor, and will provide me with great opportunities to continue to learn and grow as a ministering person. Don’t expect any revealing posts about the congregation or my work there as a pastor, as I intend this to remain a site informed by my own interests and not those of the church. Likewise it should go without saying that anything that I may post here is not in any way meant to represent an endorsement by the church.

I begin my new position June 16th, and while there may be a higher than usual number of posts between now and then don’t be surprised if during the first couple weeks after I start there is a bit of a drop-off.