The Office Curmudgeon

This week I had the honor to attend RefreshCache, the first annual Arena developers meeting. It inspired me to post on my blog after a long, long hiatus.

Inspired
Having the opportunity to interact with some of the most talented and God loving software developers and thinkers is beyond words. The event was inspiring in of itself, but there were some great highlights.

I was inspired by the hospitality of Nick Airdo and his family, and Nick’s leadership. Nick talked me into staying at his place rather than holing up in a nearby hotel, and I was blessed by that. Nick’s leadership within the Arena community impacts people deeper than he realizes, and we are all thankful for the spirit and energy he brings.

I was inspired by Jon Edmiston and the vision he brings to community software development. His gifts as a visionary are a blessing to this band of developers, and I wait in anticipation for the fruits the upcoming projects will produce.

I was inspired by each individual that attended, and by the sheer fact that God has stationed every one of us in this particular community, and with individual skills that combine to create something greater than each of us.

Learned
It was impossible not to take away a great deal more knowledge than one came with. One can not replace the power of physical presence and person-to-person interaction and learning. The off-the-cuff topics that spiral into deep learning opportunies are highly valuable. I enjoyed the ability to commiserate with my peers about common frustrations, as well as celebrate in successes. This was invaluable.

Thankful
I am thankful for the blessing and direction God has provided in my life, for how He has brought me across a path to this place, gifting me uniquely in the circles I now find myself.

I am thankful for the Arena developer community.

I’ve become very bad about reading anything, but Clif put up a post that sparked my interest and it actually sparked a post of my own. I read some of the other posts Clif linked to, and I recognized some old rhetoric applied to a new subject. The new subject is online communities, with the old rhetoric being how destructive “online church” could be to Christian community.

The old rhetoric, believe it or not, was aimed at sermons available via on-demand audio and video. I read posts and heard conversations about how this enabled people to sit at home and watch the sermons rather than “going to church!” People were essentially asking, “What if people stop coming to church,” or to freshen this question, “What if people stop having a full and authentic Christian life?”

My opinion is that this thinking is founded in fear. Fear that providing a church experience consumed while sitting at home will create some new sub-human mutant race of almost-Christians with hideous skin quality and large eyes adapted to viewing 320×200 video in low light who sit around in tattered underwear. Aaaaahhh!

I am certain that just as many people were fearful of projectors in the sanctuary and on demand audio streams as are now fearful of churches providing fuller online experiences.

So what have churches learned from providing sermons online? I can tell you that Resurrection has found that it reaches people in ways no one could have ever imagined. People around the world, not just in the nearby state, are able to connect to a Christian message and find the narrow path, some for the first time. I wish I could post the hundreds of positive, uplifting thanks we have received by providing this service.

I will suggest that if you are out there discussing the negative ramifications of providing church experiences online, you must recognize that you can not imagine all the amazing and powerful ways God may use that experience.

Acts 5:38-39 – “Therefore, in the present case I advise you: Leave these people alone! Let them go! For if their purpose or activity is of human origin, it will fail. But if it is from God, you will not be able to stop these people; you will only find yourselves fighting against God.”

I admit that fear aside, the remaining question needing an answer is whether an authentic community born and maintained solely online can be a theologically grounded authentic Christian community. If inauthentic online Christian communities could exist, should we be paralyzed with fear that they might happen? Can’t they be horribly inauthentic offline as well?? What might also happen is that God uses those experiences in profound ways that we could have never imagined. Do this for godly purposes, not human purposes. Leave the imaginary sub-human mutant Christians behind and hand it over to God to throw down or lift up.

Steal-proof Cable

Ok, I have to brag on my co-worker a bit, because I can’t get him to blog on this himself. This morning I came in to find one of extra long networking cables outside our office door. How did you get that returned, you may ask? Why did it not walk away, but get returned outside your office door? Pictures are worth a thousand words.

Let’s break down how Jeremy steal-proofed this girly bad boy. 1. He used a displeasing color. Few people look at a nearly flourescent pink cable and think, “Oh I gotta have that.” 2. He terminated the ends with jacks, not plugs. Looking at it, the novice would surmise that won’t work for them. 3. He finished the cable with ridiculously short jumpers, which no one in their right mind really needs. “Ooo, that would work perfect for my … nothing?”

Evil Genius at Work

This week I have returned to writing after hiatus. A return prompted by my trip to the CITRT held at Seacost Church in Charleston SC. I am joined by Clif Guy and Jeremy Grabrian from our team at Church of the Resurrection, as well as Jeremie Kilgore . For more links, because I’m incredibly lazy and Clif did all the work for me, see Clif’s post.

For your enjoyment, I’ve been tweeting only the pointless and mundane events as they happen. :-/ Hopefully I’ll have more interesting stuff as I get back into the swing of this. [Update] But at least it’s not as boring as what JKilgore is doing on 12 seconds. C’mon man, your world can’t revolve around Tony Dye.

Tonight we toured Johnson Ferry Baptist Church. Their network was highly impressive, with a lot of enterprise class hardware in it. It seemed way over engineered, but their network admin said they were overloading the previous gear.

If you a reader here, watch my twitter and blog for more updates of the conference throughout this week and next.

I just got off the phone with a staff member who told me about her experience buying a new laptop. She said that she and her husband were looking at a PC, but everyone has told her that she won’t like Vista -including the sales people she talked to. She said, “Why would I buy something if you’re telling me that I’m not going to like it?” The sales person said, “Well, we have Apple laptops.”

She ended up going with a Mac, of course, and loves it. The store where she bought it offers a 1 hr per week tutoring service for $99 per year, and she’s thinking about doing that to get up to speed with the change from Windows to OS X.

Microsoft is losing.