Collide Magazine

Environmental projection at its best – eat your heart out Camron Ware! (via Gizmodo)

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Smart people who research stuff for a living have observed that the lonely and rejected perk up when discussing their favorite TV characters and shows, according to this article. I recommend reading the full piece, but here are a few nuggets:

• “[The research] supports the “social surrogacy hypothesis,” where technology provides a sense of social belonging when real social connections are lacking.”

• “… taken together, four new studies indicate that even relationships with nonexistent fictional characters can affect people in very real ways.”

• “Students who spent time thinking about favorite TV programs seemed protected against drops in self-esteem and increases in negative mood.”

For me, a couple of observations come to mind. First, isn’t it ironic that while watching TV may help assuage feelings of loneliness in the short-term, watching TV won’t actually help you form the kinds of social relationships and connections that tend to provide a long-term remedy for loneliness? Isn’t that like saying a new study finds that comfort food helps put our minds at ease when we get stressed about weight or fitness level?

Second, how should the Church respond to these kinds of findings? Make more of an effort to befriend and show love to lonely people? Make an effort to create compelling TV characters, knowing that people are going to connect to them? What do you think?

I recently acquired The Welcome Wagon’s aptly-titled album Welcome to the Welcome Wagon and I love it. If you like Sufjan Stevens-esque, lo-fi, rustic, indie gospel flaor, then you’ll love The Welcome Wagon, too.

Anyway, I was digging around for a little more info on the band when I came across this interview with The Welcome Wagon’s Thomas Vito Aiuto on Stereogum (a good music blog). It turns out that the band is comprised of Aiuto–a Brooklyn-based pastor and church planter–and his wife Monique. Aiuto does a phenomenal job articulating the Christian faith and the values of his church, Resurrection Presbyterian Church.

Here’s a good snippet about Resurrection’s website from the interview:

STEREOGUM: I went to the church’s website: You have an active community section with classifieds, etc. You also invite people to your home for Home Groups. Is this something unique to your church? It seems like you’re providing a kind of full-time community that moves beyond just the mass, or whatever.

TVA: Home groups are not unique to our church. They simply provide a format for our church to be a community of love for one another, and for the neighborhoods we live in. We hope that our worship of Christ on Sunday spills over in to relationships of care and service, and organizing home groups is one way to do that. Our home groups usually meet once per week in one of our members’ homes, and they end up being a place for people to talk and share a meal, pray, study the Bible and reflect thoughtfully on who God is, and who God is calling them to be.

STEREOGUM: Does a strong web presence — streaming sermons, etc. — help with attracting new members?

TVA: I think that it does. When someone new comes to the church and I ask them how they found us, they often answer that they found info through the web. So we want to let people know that we are here in as many ways as we can.

Read the rest of the interview here.

I’m curious–do you find, like Aiuto, that visitors to your church stop by your website to check you out before they ever darken the doors of your building?

I’m afraid I’d run out of stuff to blog and write articles about if it wasn’t for the Digerati team at LifeChurch.tv. Those guys do such great and have so many great projects going (YouVersion, One Prayer, ChurchMetrics.com, VideoTeaching.com, etc.) that I’m always amazed at their latest release and giddy with anticipation about what they’ll do next. Last year, Terry Storch was kind enough to tell me about the design and development process behind the original YouVersion (read the article here) and I’ve been curious to see how the LifeChurch team would find new ways to facilitate “Scripture engagement” via the site and mobile applications.

On Friday, I saw Chris Merritt tweet that YouVersion 2.0 was live and I was really pleased with what I saw. Along with some great new features (for example, the parallel feature), the user interface has been significantly upgraded. To me, the reader is much cleaner and easier to navigate, and my guess is that those improvements lead to increased utilization of the social/community features that make YouVersion so special in the world of online Bibles. I think the screenshots below speak for themselves, but be sure to check out the new YouVersion and see it with your own eyes.

It’s time, once again, for the Upfront Week in Review:

• Mashable compiled a list of the fastest growing social sites on the web.
• Should you be God’s friend/fan on Facebook?
• Are you marketing The Church or just your church?
• Oprah’s recent adoption of Twitter has created a tidal wave of growth.
• Inside the minds of Twitterers – a brief survey of Twitter users.
• Nintendo’s Game Boy hits the big 2-0.
• Yahoo! finally pulls the plug on GeoCities. Yes, that GeoCities.
• Are you addicted to Facebook? Here are five clues to show you the truth.
• Apple’s App Store official hits 1 billion downloads.

Happy Weekend!