Collide Magazine

One thing I enjoyed about Echo last week was the opportunity to catch up with Camron Ware, who taught a breakout session. From what I hear, a lot of Echo attendees were eager to hear Camron teach about his approach to projection, and they weren’t disappointed (see examples of his fine work above). Recently, Camron started a blog (finally!) at his site, VisualWorshiper.com, and I realized that I forgot to give him a proper welcome. If you’re interested in consistent inspiration in the lighting and projection department, add Camron’s blog to your RSS reader ASAP.

I’m curious: As a generally tech-savvy audience (you at least know how to navigate to a blog), what do you think of podcasts? Do you subscribe to a bunch of them? Do you look to them for entertainment, information, or something else? Or are you over the podcasting craze and instead spend your time listening to music? Are you constantly looking for new podcasts to add to your library or is your library clogged with a ton of feeds you never listen to? If the entire podcasting medium disappeared tomorrow, would you be bummed or would you even notice?

Please share your thoughts below.

Remember when Jesus said to love our enemies (Matthew 5, Luke 6)? Growing up I always assumed he meant I should love the kids who made fun of me in high school. Last week I was thinking about that passage and realized that the audience Jesus spoke those words to knew a lot more about enemies than I do as a comfortable, affluent American Christian. As it turns out, Jesus’ audience of 1st-century Jews were condemned by the Pharisees, exploited by tax collectors, and violently oppressed by the Roman Empire. What a radical, scandalous instruction Jesus gave them when he said, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” (more…)

We won a Webelujah award! (Try saying that three times fast.) I just found out via email that Prodigal Son Magazine has bestowed a Webelujah on a our brand new website. “The Webelujah awards,” the email reads, “honor the best of Christian web design in categories such as music, social networking, resources, clothing, missions an more.” The complete list of winners and nominees, which includes some of my favorite sites, can be found at Prodigal Son’s site here.

Having never won an award before, this acceptance speech thing is new to me. In short, I’d like to thank God, Prodigal Son Magazine, the whole team at Church Media Group, Starbucks, and our wonderful readers. For a much better speech, here’s a random Bono speech for your enjoyment:

In the last few months, I’ve become a big fan of Twitter. I even blogged about my new love here. Last week, however, I was really frustrated by Twitter. The service was down … again. The outage lasted several hours, and as soon as the site was back up, the Twitterverse erupted with complaints about the platform’s lack of reliability. The irony: Twitter is completely free to its users. The problem: Twitter’s user-base is a tech-savvy lot who are big on information, connectedness, and instant gratification.

Even though Twitter is free, the “you get what you pay for” mindset won’t cut it for Twitter’s users. If Twitter doesn’t get its act together, users will surely continue to complain at the top of the lungs, and eventually abandon the service in favor of something more reliable. (Read Bill Seaver’s thoughts on the matter here.)

To me, the lesson here is simple: Just because your service/product/site/whatever is free doesn’t give it the right to stink. In an ad-supported world (TV, Internet, radio, etc.), tons of things are free (Twitter, Gmail, AIM, Blogger, YouTube). But that doesn’t mean those things should target mediocrity. Novelty can attract a crowd, but it takes excellence to keep the crowd.

Hopefully, you’re putting this into practice at your church. After all, your services are free (except for that offering plate), but that doesn’t mean “good enough” is good enough, right? You can invest in postcards, door hangers, billboards, and micro sites to promote your upcoming SEX series, and you just might attract a crowd. But if you don’t invest in your message (or the music, media, or childcare), the crowd won’t be back just because the service was free. In fact, the crowd may even start complain on their way out the door, which I’m sure the Twitter team would tell you is slightly embarrassing.

Regardless of what you charge for whatever it is you do, try to do it well.