Every once in a while, there are people who come along who have a great vision to reach the world. They are the people who begin movements. If you get a chance to work with people who have great vision, you shouldn’t let that opportunity slip away.
This week, we are visiting with Randy and Lynn Smith. Randy is the founder and president of Youth Ministry International. We’ve been hanging out, talking about current ministry, and also dreaming a little about the future. They are people with great vision.
Sunday, Randy was invited by Daniel Jimenez, the director of the Mexican Baptist Theological Seminary, to speak at AME Baptist Church, both in the service and in the Sunday School hour.
Wednesday, he’ll be speaking in my youth ministry class, inspiring this generation of Mexican youth workers to reach, disciple, and care for young people. Randy is a great guy with great vision, and Lynn has shared the vision during their 42 years of marriage.
It’s going to be a good week with him and Lynn.
I saw this on twitter the other day, and it made me think about the use of social media in missions.
My job as a missionary has many different aspects. I spend most of my time training youth workers (both formally and informally). I spend a little of my time working with young people (not as much as I used to). I also try to inspire people to be involved in missions.
Some parts of what I do are easier to talk about on social media than to actually do, especially given the culture in which I work.
Right now, for example, twitter in Mexico isn’t very popular. Facebook is coming of age in Mexico. But it would be weird for me to try to convince people here to use twitter so that I could connect with them and train youth workers through twitter. Could I do it? Probably. Would it be very effective? Right now, probably not. (Maybe in the future).
The part of my job that has to do with inspiring people (mostly in the United States) to be involved in missions (either by financially supporting, praying for, or considering going to serve in a foreign culture, among other things), is a little easier to do using social media. In fact, I believe social media has made this part of my job easier. I no longer have to be in the United States to remind people to be praying for our family or ministry.
But this part of my job basically requires talking about what I do in Mexico and Latin America. To answer Tony’s question, talking about what I do (using social media) to those in the United States and elsewhere helps me be able to do what I do in Mexico and Latin America.
I am definitely interested in using social web to train youth workers. In fact, we have a social network (in Spanish) set up on Ning that has various members from all over Latin America. We use it to help them with their ministries. I’m sure we could use it better.
As always, I need to continue thinking through the question. But for some parts of my job it is easier to use social networks than others.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. Leave a comment and let me know what you think.
Andy Stanley, in his book Communicating for a Change, talks about a thing called “the preacher’s burden.” He says it’s the thing that “if you don’t preach it, you will die.” The thing that your audience has to hear.
I was supposed to preach on Friday in chapel at the Seminary, and I had prepared like never before. I had studied the passage. I had prepared my outline. I had boiled it down to one thing. I had the perfect illustration. Then the phone rang.
It seems there is someone in town that the Seminary wants to preach on Friday instead. The guy is part of an organization that helps the Seminary a lot, and they called me today (Wednesday) to let me know that they want him to preach on Friday, the day that has been on the calendar for me to preach since the start of the term.
So what do I do with the burden? I am convinced the Seminary students, professors (including me), and administration need to hear the sermon I was going to preach. I have the burden. I might explode if I can’t tell them what I felt God had told me to say.
They tell me that I will get a chance to preach next term. It will be my turn again, I’m sure. But in the meantime, I guess I have to put into practice the concept that God taught me and gave me a passion for while I was preparing to preach. Could it be that the message was more for me than for the Seminary students?
So what do you do with the preacher’s burden when it turns out that you don’t get to preach it? Are there other ways to get the message out?
This is the third year we’ve watched March Madness online, so we’ve got lots of experience watching sports online. The NCAA gets it right with their presentation of MMOD.
This year, they ditched the sign-up and waiting in line thing. You just go to the site and click whichever game you want to watch and bang, you’re in.
Lots of other events and programs that are available online in the United States are not available if you live outside of the United States. I’m grateful that, at least for now, the NCAA has allowed us to watch just like everyone else, without having to do things like hide an IP address (which I’ve heard slows down your internet connection).
Live streams of games come in different qualities, too. You can choose which quality you want to view the game in based on how well it streams on your computer. We are stuck watching the lowest, or “fair” quality because we have somewhat slow internet, but the option of HD is there.
I noticed yesterday, too, that you can watch every game archived. The entire tournament is online and on-demand. So if you missed your favorite team’s first or second round games, you can watch it online.
This year, they will have every single game online, too, including the final four and championship game. That’s pretty exciting because it means that, no matter where you are, you could watch the games. We get the final games on TV here, but it’s good to know that I could watch it online if I wanted.
There are a lot of other features on the site, like watching the games live on your iphone and remixing highlight reels. Thanks, NCAA, for making it a great experience on what many basketball fans call “Second Christmas.”
I just finished reading “Communicating for a Change” by Andy Stanley. I read the entire book on my iPhone using the Kindle application. Here’s my review so far of the app. Maybe later I’ll give you my thoughts on the book.
3 Things I Love about the Kindle App:
- Availability of Books/number of titles/cost of books: They say that there are over 245,000 titles available. Since I can’t just go to the bookstore and pick up the latest books, I can at least browse the kindle store and buy the books I’d like to read.
- Ease of download/use: Within 60 seconds after buying the book on Amazon, I can download it to my iphone. There’s no waiting for it to be shipped to my house. It’s automatically there.
- Location – my iphone is always with me: I’ve always got my phone with me, so I can always have a book with me. I can read anywhere.
3 Things I Hate about the Kindle App:
- No easy way to comment or write notes: I like to write notes or comments about the things I’m reading, but this isn’t very easy with the Kindle app. I would love it if they had a way to write notes in the app itself and then email myself the notes I took on the book. It’s not even that easy to bookmark pages for future reference. It puts some weird location thing on it, making it difficult to really know what bookmark is what (click the picture to the side to see what I’m talking about).
- A little hard on the eyes: After reading for a while, my eyes were really tired from looking at the screen. You can change the size of the font, but I think it has to do with the lighting of the screen.
- Use of gestures instead of just tapping to turn the pages: In order to turn the page (which you do a lot because of the size of the screen), you have to swipe the screen. I’d rather just tap one side of the screen (like you can do on the Stanza app). It would be easier and cut down on the carpel tunnel syndrome I’m bound to get.
3 Things I wish they would add or Change:
- A search feature: Sometimes I remember something I read, but I can’t remember exactly what or where it was. I wish there was a way to search the book on the Kindle app. That would make it easier to look up things that I want to use later.
- Notes feature or a way to organize bookmarks: If I had a better way to organize the things I found interesting in the book, it would be a better app.
- Better page numbering system: For some reason I like to look at the number of pages that I’ve read or the number of pages that are left in the book. I would love to see the Kindle app let me know those things in a language I can understand, instead of some weird location system that they are using now.
Overall, I like the application, and I’m looking forward to reading more books on it. There are always improvements that could be made, but I’m happy with my experience so far with the Kindle App for my iPhone.
