I went with the Mogul

Thanks for all the advice. I picked up the Mogul (aka PPC 6800) when I was in Fort Worth and have been using it for a little over two weeks. Having not had a smartphone before, it's a whole new experience for me. Many things about it are cool. Naturally I've encountered a few annoyances too.

Things that are cool:

• WiFi
• EVDO with easy Internet connection sharing (phone-as-modem)
• Ability to run Skype
• Ease of text messaging
• Ability to run Bejeweled (my favorite game!)
• Ability to get on the web anywhere, anytime
• Integration of Outlook contacts with phone, e-mail, and text messaging functions
• Ability to recharge through USB
• Ability to multi-task (sync, talk on the phone, browse the web, etc.)
• Small and lightweight
  

Things that are annoying:

• No way to exit an application without going to a control panel (am I missing something?)
• ActiveSync has had some issues that caused it to force a complete re-sync and lose my voice dial tags. This has happened twice in two weeks. Grrr!
• ActiveSync doesn't work when connected via USB on my laptop's port replicator
• The camera application is clunky
• The folder structure is confusing - Microsoft still isn't consistent in folder naming

Overall? Thumbs up! I've entered the modern world.

Last vacation post!

I know the vacations of other people are not particularly interesting, but please indulge me just one more post before I return to the usual church IT theme of this blog.

After Big Bend, we proceeded to San Antonio. My son took this picture of Laura and me eating dinner at Casa Rio on the famous San Antonio River Walk. Note the shirt I'm wearing!


From San Antonio, we continued to Galveston, the Gulf of Mexico island community south of Houston at the mouth of Galveston Bay. I took this picture of the beachfront just a block from our motel.


On the way home we stopped at the Oklahoma City National Memorial. Laura took this picture of a statue outside the Catholic church immediately across the street from the site of the destroyed Murrah building. The statue is of a crying Jesus with his back to the site.


So that was our Texas sampler vacation: 3700 miles from Kansas City, via Little Rock to Fort Worth, Big Bend, San Antonio, Galveston, and back home via Oklahoma City. Texas is a HUGE state with an AMAZING variety of cultures and vistas. It's a great vacation destination because it has something for everyone: major cities, remote mountains, the ocean, and Tex-Mex food everywhere!

I will be back in the office on Monday after three weeks away. I must admit, I'm not looking forward to it. Vacation is more fun than work!

Off the grid

When General Assembly was over, we proceeded to the next destination on our 2007 driving tour of Texas: Big Bend National Park and the surrounding area. Big Bend, so named for the sweeping curve of the Rio Grande that forms the rounded border between southwest Texas and Mexico, is as little-known as it is spectacular.

We stayed in Terlingua, gateway to the park and famous for the International Chili Championship, held there in November each year. Terlingua, home to fewer than 300 people, is the most remote town I've ever visited. It's not on the way from anywhere to anywhere so everyone there either lives in the area or went there, like us, very much on purpose.

Our accommodations were at the Chisos Mining Co. Motel. I wish I could say I recommend it. We had no phone, no TV, and no Internet service. Terlingua has no digital cell service. And then, to make our "off-the-grid" experience complete, there was a total power outage throughout the entire Lajitas/Terlingua/Study Butte area from 4:00 pm the last evening we were there until 8:00 am the next day just before we checked out. According to the locals, the power there is unreliable. Heh. They claimed power was out everywhere south of Ft. Stockton, but we can't confirm that. At the very best the closest town with power was 70 miles away (Presidio) or 80 miles away (Alpine).

We had to scrounge for dinner since no restaurants could serve and then do our best to sleep with all the windows open since the air conditioning was out. As you can imagine, though dry, Terlingua is a very hot place in late July. It wasn't a pleasant way to end our stay in Terlingua, though I'm sure we'll remember it for a long time.

Did I mention Big Bend is spectacular? Here are a couple of pictures I took:

Rio Grande with Mexican cliffs in the background and Texas to the right of the river

Moon over the Chisos Mountains, taken from our motel in Terlingua

New RoundTable friends

At General Assembly I attended some technology workshops and met three new church IT people.

Christopher Higgins is the Manager of Internet and New Media for our denominational headquarters. He's responsible for www.disciples.org.

Nathan Hill is a student at Wesley Theological Seminary and works with youth and young adults for the Christian Church Capital Area Region. He blogs at disciplesX.com.

Jeff Champeau is an uber-volunteer for First Christian Church of Norman Oklahoma. He makes his living as a LAN/WAN technician for the headquarters of Sonic Drive-in restaurants in Oklahoma City.

I told all of these guys about the Church IT RoundTable. Jeff said he would try to get away from work and come to the Fall RoundTable. Cool! We'd love to have Christopher and Nathan too. The more the merrier!

General Assembly is a family affair

General Assembly of the Christian Church is a family affair for us. My dad was a DOC pastor and his sister Marje also married a DOC pastor, Mickey. Uncle Mickey also had brothers who were DOC pastors. Each of them had children that are DOC pastors: my brother, Greg, and his wife, Karen; my sister, Mary; my wife, Laura; my cousin, Michael and his wife, Jennifer; my cousin Marci married a DOC pastor, Dan; and my 2nd cousin Shannon married a DOC pastor, Kevin. Is that ridiculous, or what???

At the closing worship service, the following members of my extended family were in the house.

l to r: niece Elizabeth, daughter Beth, niece Judith,
wife Laura, son Rob, brother Greg, niece Kimberly

Kevin and my 2nd cousin, Shannon

Jennifer and my cousin, Michael

Celebrating New Churches at General Assembly

At the end of the evening worship service on Tuesday, there was a brief celebration of the new Disciples of Christ congregations established since 2001 and a prayer for the planters.

Those planters who were available that night went up on the stage with Rick Morse, the head of our new church organization. To Rick's right is Sharon Watkins, the head of our denomination. If you look closely, you'll see that the third person to the right of Sharon is Laura in her Living Water shirt!

2020 Vision

On July 15 I preached at Living Water because Laura was out on a mission trip. I talked about the new church movement within Disciples of Christ. We have the most active and dynamic new church initiative of all mainline denominations. In the sermon, I mentioned two key people in our new church movement: Dick Hamm, the former head of our denomination who cast the 2020 Vision which included the goal of 1,000 new congregations by the year 2020; and Rick Morse, the wild-eyed spiritual entrepreneur who took on the challenge of making this vision become a reality and leads our New Church Ministry Team. Read a recap of my sermon or listen to the MP3 here.

Little did I know when preaching that five days later at the National Evangelism Workshop, a sort of pre-conference prior to General Assembly, I would be in a breakout session with Dick, Rick, and about 10 other people. Very cool. After the session, I invited them to come to the Living Water site and listen to me talk about them!

State of the Church

Sunday night, the head of our denomination (we use the fancy title "General Minister and President" or GMP for short), Sharon Watkins, spoke on the State of the Church. Though flawed in some ways (for example, it was too long and too repetitive), her message was very powerful and motivating. She showed great leadership by pointing out many positive accomplishments of the last two years, including an impressive response to the Katrina disaster which occurred just a few weeks after our last General Assembly. Her theme was that Disciples are "choosing life" - a reference to Deut. 30:19-20. It was evident that she had spent weeks preparing her message of hope and encouragement and the response she received was enthusiastic. Way to go Sharon!

After the State of the Church, those of us who hung around enjoyed a brief concert featuring outstanding Disciple musicians from around the country. We heard some terrific original music from these artists in a wide variety of styles. It was a wonderful celebration of musical creativity and spiritual vitality. I believe they made a CD of the concert. If so, we should get it!

Sunday at General Assembly

Sunday morning we attended the youth worship service in the main auditorium at the Fort Worth Convention Center. It was the best worship service we've ever experienced at General Assembly. It was so good, in fact, that Laura bought a DVD of the service so we can show it to Living Water when we get home.

Keith McAliley was masterful leading worship from the piano

Stacey Spencer was off the hook in his message on 2 Kings 7:3-20
Read the report in Disciples World here

After the service ran into some of Rob's and Beth's homies from
Kansas City outside the main entrance to the Convention Center

Sunday evening Laura organized a dinner for the Bethany Fellowships at one of Fort Worth's most famous restaurants, Joe T. Garcia's. The food was even better than I remembered. The service was outstanding. And though it was a little hot to be seated out on the patio, a grand time was had by all. And it didn't rain until dinner was over!

Bethany Fellowships dinner at Joe T. Garcia's

In Fort Worth for General Assembly

Our family has been in Fort Worth since last Wednesday for the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) bi-annual General Assembly. I'm a life-long Disciple. My dad was a Disciple pastor for 40+ years; my sister, brother, and sister-in-law are DOC pastors; and now my wife is a DOC church planter. Yes, I'm a church nerd even when I'm on vacation!

On Thursday we're driving down to the Big Bend area. Will be there for 3 nights. Then San Antonio for 2 nights and Galveston for 2 nights before returning to KC. It's a driving tour of Texas in the hottest weeks of the summer. Are we nuts? Actually, the weather hasn't been bad at all compared to other Dallas-Fort Worth summers I've experienced. I hope it holds up.

l to r: my son Rob, age 15; my wife Laura;

my brother Greg (also a DOC pastor); my daughter Beth, age 18

Selling an idea in your church

A few days ago Guy Kawasaki reviewed the top 9 stories that people like to talk about as explained in a new book by Lois Kelly. The idea is to use these types of stories whenever you're trying to persuade people to believe something or do something. In my experience, we IT people aren't especially good at marketing and selling our ideas. I'm going to learn from this post and keep these stories in mind as I have opportunities to persuade. I think particularly powerful in a church setting are #1 - stories about aspirations and beliefs, and #6 - personal stories.

Best Christian Workplaces

Church of the Resurrection got a very nice write up in the July 2007 issue of Church Executive magazine regarding the Best Christian Workplaces survey and what we've been doing over the last few years to improve our human resources process. Our own Dan Entwistle (one of our top two executives reporting to our senior pastor) was featured with a big photo on the cover. Go Dan!

Dare I say this is going well?

This week we finished the process of converting our year-old Dell 2950 server previously running Win2K3 x64 to our new VMware ESX insfrastructure. We had SQL Server 2005 on that server and virtualized it. Unfortunately, we saw a Shelby performance drop around 50% when we moved the database to the new virtualized server running SQL. So now we have some tuning to do. Other than that, this has been the smoothest major server upgrade project I've ever seen. Many thanks to our ESX consultant, Cameron Shove, for making that possible.

The next step for us is to virtualize three older physical servers. These are old enough and/or have significant enough issues that we aren't going to try P2V. Instead, we are building virtual servers from scratch and migrating the applications and services. We have a good start on virtualizing a terminal server and an Exchange server. Last to get virtualized will be our main file server.

When the project is complete by the middle of July, we will have only one remaining physical Windows server in our central campus data center - a server that will run ARCserve with disk and tape backup storage. All of our production will be on approximately 13 virtual servers running on the two physical Dell 2950s sharing the Dell/EMC AX150i iSCSI SAN. It's going to be sweet!

Technology Vision (reponding to Jim Walton)

Jim Walton posted this morning about technology vision for the church.

My thinking on this rests on two important principles:

1. Mission/Vision alignment is more important than any clever statement you might create.

2. Too often, mission/vision/purpose statements are "we" centric. They talk more about "us" and what "we" do than they do about those we serve.

To illustrate, Church of the Resurrection's purpose is: "To build a Christian community where non-religious and nominally-religious people are becoming deeply committed Christians."

Correspondingly, our IT Department's purpose is: "To build a Christian community where non-religious and nominally-religious people are becoming deeply committed Christians. We do everything possible to fulfill this purpose directly and to help Resurrection's other ministries make effective use of technology as they also strive toward this purpose. Our users' mission is our mission. Additionally, we take very seriously our responsibilities for information security and high availability of all of the mission-critical services we provide."

This purpose is perfectly aligned with the church's purpose and it puts the priority on those we serve. Our vision for technology is to be excellent at fulfilling this purpose.

For church IT, I believe in serving first and leading second. If we start by earning a reputation for excellent, high-touch service, then when we are called upon to lead, we will be much more persuasive and effective.

What drives your church?

Seth Godin says most successful organizations are driven by something. Then he goes on to list a number of drivers. So I'm reading the list and nodding, when suddenly, this jumps out:

SUBSCRIPTION DRIVEN: How do we transform a stranger into someone who uses what we do, all the time. Intuit, certainly.

(He means that the company Intuit is an example.) This seems very much like things I've heard from Adam Hamilton, our senior pastor. To help people become deeply committed Christians, first we need to get them to try us and then we need to get them to become a regular. Spiritual growth comes out of habitual practice of the spiritual disciplines that we offer in our churches. We need to convert people from occasionally picking up a copy from the news stand into every week subscribers.

Bowling nerds!

My boss took me and my senior staff peers in the Operations Division bowling a couple of weeks ago. What a nerdy looking group! Turns out, Kelly was a bowler in high school, so she smoked us. I broke 100 both games, which isn't bad considering it's been a few years since I last bowled.

Left to right: Dick Cooper, Director of Facilities; yours truly; Susan Bell, Director of Guest Services; Kelly Williams, Director of Finance; Brent Messick, Managing Executive Director and CFO (our boss); Lisa Viehweg, Human Resources Director, Nancy Hines, Director of Resurrection Resources (book store manager); Travis Morgan, Director of Operations for Resurrection West

Smartphone advice

I got some good smartphone advice when I asked for it a few weeks ago. Thanks to all of you who commented. Despite that good advice, I am still undecided. Here are my priorities (in this order):

1. Must work with Sprint service

2. Must be able to do EVDO Rev. A

3. Must be able to do phone-as-modem, preferably via Bluetooth

4. Must be easy to use as a phone

5. Must be easy to synch with Outlook and relatively straightforward to use for PDA functions

6. Must be easy to carry, preferaby in my pocket (as small and light as possible)

E-mail is fine, but it's not the killer app for the way I use/intend to use my phone. I'm sure it will be cool to have a camera in my phone, but I don't expect to use it much. WiFi is nifty, but not a requirement. Ability to run various 3rd party applications could be cool too, but again not a requirement.

With all of that in mind, should I buy the new Mogul (story here, details here)?

Shooting yourself in the foot

Er, I would have gotten your e-mail about SonicWALL acquiring Aventail, except my SonicWALL anti-spam software (MailFrontier) junked it!

The media at Kelsey's memorial service

The memorial service for Kelsey Smith was this afternoon.

Nick Kastelan, one of the guys in our media department (Saving Grace Productions - SGP), had worked in TV news in Kansas City before joining our staff. He and Peter Metz, our Director of Communications, handled media relations for the visitation last night and the service today. Working with our facilities and security teams, they did an awesome job with the media.

They selected a perfect location where the media could have the access they needed without being in the way. They blocked off the street between our two main buildings, making it available exclusively for the TV trucks and other media vehicles. This street is conveniently located outside our backstage entrance, right next to our video control room.


SGP generated a live audio/video feed from the output of our audio mixer and video switcher and hooked it to a distribution box in the control room. Each of the TV stations ran their own heavy-duty cables from their truck, along the ground, under the door and into the control room. The complete service video is here. You can see news reports using our video here, here, and here. The family allowed one local reporter inside the building. You can see his report here.

SGP also set up a media room backstage where print media people could watch the service on video monitors. We provided power strips and they had access to our guest WiFi.

This was an excellent way to handle a very delicate situation. The media were able to get the content they needed without being visible to mourners inside the building. I attended the service myself and never felt I was on display because the only video available to the media was determined by our video director in our control room.

Today I saw a very special example of the use of technology in ministry. Props to SGP!

Kelsey's service will be at Resurrection

I mentioned that my wife, Laura, was the only pastor present on Wednesday afternoon when Kelsey's family learned that she had been found murdered. A few minutes later, pastors from the Smith's church, Hillcrest Covenant, arrived. Laura quietly suggested to them that when it came time to begin discussing memorial service plans, the family should consider having the service at Church of the Resurrection. At the risk of sounding immodest, I truly believe Resurrection is the only church in the area with the capability to handle a funeral like this. Our main sanctuary seats 3,000+ and we have extensive video production capabilities to be able to generate a pool feed for the media while keeping them mostly out of sight.

Wednesday afternoon I let our upper management know that the suggestion had been made. On Thursday morning several of our staff came to me and said that all of the teams required to support the service were on board and eager to help, if asked.

Then Friday the word came that the family had decided to take our suggestion. Normally, the church has fees for outside funerals, but they were completely waived in this case, even though a huge effort will be required. This will be a major event in the middle of the work day (2 pm Tuesday) when volunteer availability will be low.

The planning began immediately Friday, showing great foresight and attention to detail. Our experience with the Ali Kemp funeral five years ago has been invaluable. From traffic, to parking, hospitality, facilities, security, and A/V we have vast expertise and resources to handle every detail so the family and friends can simply be in the moment and celebrate Kelsey's life. This is the Body of Christ functioning as should (but too rarely does) - joining together across congregational and denominational boundaries to serve in a very special way in a time of great need. Although I will not have a personal role in any of this, I have never been prouder of Church of the Resurrection than I am right now. It is a special place to serve.