Saddington’s Heroes at 8bit have done it. Someone with a voice in the modern Christian community finally stepped up to the line. Finally, someone with some pull has called out the pink elephant standing in the room for years.

Don't be a Social Media Troll.

Finally, someone has called BS on the Church using Spiritual Social Media, defaming the name of Jesus in the name of being hip, or by creating “Christian-safe alternatives”. Read it here.

Social Media is all about connecting to each other, not a pseudo-identity behind a corporate (or nonprofit) name. There is something inherently wrong about jumping on board with a concept just because it is the newest fad. When a company or nonprofit (or worse yet, church) uses their Social Media presence to simply market themselves in a new way instead of as connecting point, it’s BS. If you take the social part out of Social Media, it’s simply media.

Here’s a great example of Social Media like it should be. A couple weeks ago,

(Credit: National Geographic)

So let’s assume you have a wonderful library chock full of theological texts, doctrinal dissertations written by the patriarchs of Christianity like Spurgeon, Calvin, Luther and others. Let’s also assume you have several expanded concordances, Bible dictionaries, multi-volume commentary sets, Bible maps and various other study tools. Oh yes, don’t forget your Greek and Hebrew interlinear Bibles too! You definitely have a posh library and study going for yourself.

And then you wake up.

Now you realized that you are, in fact, just like the rest of us in that you do not have a library like the one listed above. The fact is, my grandfather was a well-read minister for over sixty years, and his library never amassed to anything like that! (I do have his copy of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs from the 1920s although!)

Enter Logos Bible Software.

Logos is simply the most fantastic Bible study software I’ve ever seen. It literally is a seminary library on your computer. Even a basic package, such as the Bible Study Library, includes 200 titles valued at roughly $4,500 in print equivalents! Upgrade to a Scholar’s Library: Silver Edition (like what I use), and you have access to 750 texts worth over $11,000 in print! Each book is fully indexed so you can search it just like you would a Google Docs document. Speaking of Google Docs, you can highlight and annotate your references. Logos will keep track of those too, and they will show up in relevant searches too.

Finally, we come to the best part of all:

The other day, I wrote about 5 Core Elements to Be a True Online Expression of Jesus. I’d like to think it was a good article, and you should read it and leave a comment. Now. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

Jane Jetson's all over telepresence!

All caught up now? Good. One of the terms I threw around was telepresence. While I would love to say I coined that word gilded in its shiny pants goodness, I did not. The first time I saw it was in SimChurch by Douglas Estes. In the book, he describes this theological concept of togetherness as described in Acts 4:32, but in the context of doing it online. His summary of the concept of telepresence is thus,

Today is a vision dreaming sort of day for me. The worship gathering with our local church body was fantastic and intimate. I even had the pleasure of doing lunch with a good friend afterward. All in all, it’s been a pretty good day if you ask me!

At lunch, we chatted about the upcoming Online Campus we’ll be launching. Since the gears are turning, I’ve been mulling over a few elements which I believe define an Online Campus. While this is not a conclusive list, it is the very bare minimum five requirements to become a functional, biblically ecclesiological expression of Jesus.

(Credit: Doug Shelton, CreativeMYK)

1. Be in sync with the church’s vision. Habakkuk 2:2f

This is the first and foremost requirement. If an Online Campus is not

In reading the articles posted on this site, it’s pretty hard to miss the fact that God has called me into online ministry. What that looks like exactly is, well, figuring that out is half the fun! If you want to join me on this adventure, why not subscribe to my RSS feed, or contribute through the comments below.

(Credit: Todd White, CreativeMYK)

As part of my serving at our local church (and I am strongly convicted that any believer should be part of a local, physical expression of the Church), is working with the Media Arts Team. Specifically within that Team, I am helping to birth a fully functional digital campus for the church. While thinking about what that may look like, and thinking about ministry in general within the local church, this thought came to mind:

When you spend a lot of time finding people to attend your ministry, you are really putting on an event. But when you put on an event to fulfill the needs of your people, you are then doing real ministry. (Tweet this idea!)

Let’s unpack that a little bit.

Well, today is a memorable day for me. You see, I have these certain milestones set up for the accomplishment of this site. Some of these milestones include my first book preview to help the author generate hype (coming soon by the way), 100 hundred posts and comments, 100 unique visits in one day, things like that.

Today’s milestone is the first milestone ever reached, my first

Interesting triad of words, huh? Microsoft Word’s spell check thinks so. As does the spell check built into Firefox and Google Chrome (what? You think I’d use Internet Explorer?). While there may not be a single spell check known to the common man that would recognize that triad up there, still I chose to use it as the title to this blog. And in case you were wondering, yes, they are real words…technically…just not in the English language.

So what is Acta, non Verba? In its simplest form,

My life (and wife) in boxes.

Moving day finally came! I always find it amazing how much space we want to use as personal space versus how much space our possessions take up when packed. I have always been very thankful for the spacious apartments we have had. We have used that extra space to house missions kids, provide a crash for displaced friends, house traveling/visiting parents, and to fulfill the ever-present need for a little extra storage space. What will our next place look like? No clue. All I know is 90% of our possessions will be in a storage unit for the next several weeks. Oh well, I have my wife and Bun-Bun to keep me company, and that’s the important part.

What’s been your biggest or scariest move? If you had to put most of your stuff into storage for several weeks, what would make the cut, and what would get boxed and hauled?