Mikel Berger’s Bailiwick

OK, Adam I’ll play your silly little game. Looks like we have Janet to blame for this.

5 interesting things about me…

1. I once played Little Michael in our middle school production of Peter Pan. I had to wear red footie pajamas on stage in front of everyone. Thankfully, I have no pictures like Adam does of his acting career.
2. I’ve helped train search and rescue German Shepard Dogs. I have an uncle in Idaho who is the coroner for Blaine County (the Sun Valley area where Bruce Willis, Demi Moore, Arnold, etc have homes). He is on the county’s search and rescue squad and trains the dogs to find people lost in the mountains. So one time when we were there visiting him, he takes me and my brother out in the middle of no where on a 90 degree day with his group and all their dogs. He tells us to walk down a trail, over a bluff, and then to split up and go different directions off the trail at least several hundred yards, find some shade, and wait. I sat alone in the mountains for a couple of hours. It was simultaneously one of the most boring yet most exciting things I have ever done. It’s the main reason we have a dog that is part Shepard.
3. I like most all music, really everything except rap. But even to that exception there is an exception. I’m secretly an Eminem fan. I don’t own any of his music, but if I happen to catch it on the radio I’m always fascinated by it. His rhyming ability is just phenomenal. I obviously don’t listen to much rap, but he’s the one rapper I know that doesn’t just rap about how many girls he sleeps with or how expensive his jewelry and cars are. He writes about his relationships with his daughter and ex-wife, his childhood, his business, etc. He is obviously very passionate. I don’t agree with his responses to a majority of those issues, but I appreciate that he addresses them. I enjoy his creations on several levels but am then reminded by his responses of the sinful, fallen world we live in and that is how I would respond also (though not so poetically) if it wasn’t for Jesus. So when I do catch one of his songs on the radio, I enjoy it and then I try to stop and say a pray for him. I pray that God would draw near to him and show him that Jesus is the answer for all the painful things he writes about and that he would use those talents he has to glorify his creator. I’ve started to have a similar appreciation for Nickelback with songs like Rockstar (sarcastic social commentary) and Never Again (anger against domestic abuse).
4. I’ve attended somewhere in the neighborhood of 400 high school basketball games in my life (about 20 per year for the first 18 years of my life, a few here and there while in college and after, and then about 20 last year when I kept stats for Delphi High School). I was born in December on a Friday evening (about the time the JV game usually starts). While I didn’t make it to a game that night, I’m told I was there a few weeks after that. My uncle was the coach at South Bend Riley and up until I was in high school we followed the team wherever they played. In high school I played for NorthWood in Nappanee, IN. So I was at all those games (and then married my coach’s eldest daughter because I just couldn’t get enough of the guy). College was hit and miss but I usually got to several games a year, usually at NorthWood when we were home but also occasionally at Mishawaka where my cousin is the head coach. Then last year I got back into following a team by keeping stats for Jessica’s school (Delphi) where this year I am a volunteer assistant coach. If you think 400 is a lot, my father-in-law has WON over 400 games in his coaching career. I don’t want to attempt to figure up the number of games he has attended once you count his childhood, games he’s coached, and games he’s scouted.
5. I really enjoy my job, but sometimes I wish I was a farmer like my dad. While I realize the results of my labors have a real impact, technically I push buttons that make lights (the monitor) and magnets (the hard disk) change. With farming there’s something tangible that is very satisfying when you can stand at the end of a field at the end of day and see a field that is freshly plowed and ready to plant. Then going inside to take a shower, not realizing how dirty you, and seeing the the dirt flow off your body.

Looking back at the list, maybe not so interesting, maybe more 5 odd things about me. But with me the line between interesting and odd is a fine one.

I’ll keep the pyramid scheme going by tagging David, Alicia, and back to Whipple Words but this time Ben needs to answer.

Today I had to drive up and back to Chicago. So I loaded up a bunch of podcasts for the drive. The first one in the list was a Mark Driscoll lecture called Continuous Worship: Idolatry. Listening to it I was reminded a lot of the class that Ben Whipple taught during the KSBC summer institutes in 2006. The main point I got from both is that humans are designed to worship and are always worshiping something and a lot of times it isn’t God (i.e. idolatry).

Driscoll got into the issue of styles of worship music and how they are so unimportant but a hangup for so many people. I can relate to that because a lot of the churches I’m familiar with have congregations where the preferred styles of music often fall along generational lines.

Sometimes I think I can get self-righteous when I complain about how those older people are so inflexible and that worship styles don’t really matter. It’s easy to point out someone else’s inflexibility when the style that we would be changing to is more of your own preference.

I’m not totally ready to let the inflexible crowd off the hook. So I wondered how does my generation keep from growing inflexible as we age and become leaders in the church with the responsibility to decide the worship style?

So here’s one idea I want to throw out there for some feedback. What if we had a Sunday morning service with absolutly no music? No worship band, no choir, no congregational singing, no music at all.

Driscoll made the point that you shouldn’t need a certain style of music to feel that you connected with the God or that the service was good. Regardless of the style we have, it will always be someone’s preference. So what if we removed it all just for a Sunday? What would we do with the extra time? Longer sermon? More scripture reading? A drama? Get out early?

I know it’s a crazy idea and I vaguely remember hearing it somewhere else (a very quick google didn’t turn up anything but there are no new ideas). So feel free to rip it apart in the comments or shoot me an email.

Mars Hill Church in Seattle just launched an interesting addition to their site. You can ask Pastor Mark Driscoll anything and vote on what other questions you want him to answer (sort of in digg style).

[Update on 10/3/2007] : Looks like I stumbled upon the Ask Anything site before it was supposed to be public knowledge and they are still working out the bugs. So I’ve removed the link but I’ll post again when they let me know the site is ready.

[Update on 10/14/2007]: According to Sam Barrett, tt looks like the Ask Anything site is now live.

This and Piper’s “Ask Pastor John” podcasts (http://www.desiringgod.org/ResourceLibrary/AskPastorJohn/), I think, address the same issue that a lot of pastors seem inaccessible and unwilling to answer the hard/difficult questions. We’ll have to see how Pastor Mark Driscoll responds.

Some background: In September of last year I started a blog for my Adult Bible Fellowship (i.e. sunday school) class at church. My hope and the hope of the teachers of the class was that the blog would be a good way to have a conversation with those in and outside the class in between our weekly meetings on Sunday mornings. While it hasn’t been a total bust, we haven’t had the response that any of us expected (though honestly, I wasn’t sure what to expect). The following are my thoughts based on an email I wrote to one of the teachers asking if there was anything he could do to get people to use the blog more.

I’m posting an edited version of the email here to explain a bit more about why our class has a blog and to see if anyone has any thoughts that might be beneficial.

I was prompted to finally get this posted because of Adam Hoagland’s Facebook post today.

Executive summary: Don’t worry about the comments being low, keep blogging. We probably need a better tool for the kind of potential for discussion we’re envisioning. I don’t know what that tool is yet. We all need to work through this together.

I’ve really been trying to figure out how we’re to use a lot of this technology and ways of communicating in a God honoring and glorifying way. This is because of the Builders Blog but also because of the redesign of the main church web site.

I don’t have any hard stats to back it up, but I think most blogs have a very low commenter to readership ratio. So the blogs that have a lot of comments most likely have an exponentially higher readership. We’re targeting a comparatively much lower number of readers, so we shouldn’t expect a lot of comments (unless we change what we’re doing, see below).

I don’t know that I really realized it when we started the blog, but I think there are two separate and possibly incongruent goals.

1. Having a publicly available archive of what we have been up to and talking about. This benefits those inside our church and outside, those wishing to join and those who might just be encouraged by reading but have no plans of joining (i.e. they are outside the Lafayette area).
2. Having a way to foster conversation and learning outside of Sunday morning. Again, I think this benefits those inside the class and outside. The best example of this is the translation discussion. The arguments made were fairly well thought out and insightful. At least in part I think because people had time to do research and think through a complex topic. They aren’t able to do this on a Sunday morning.

One note about the translation discussion. We had a lot of comments (a lot at least for us). But I was wondering how many individuals we actually involved. I counted 14 people that made 45 comments. The encouraging thing is that we had involvement from all the different types of groups we’re discussed reaching.

Builders, Builders Teachers, Other KSBCers, Outsiders

One theory I have is that the “openness” we have with the blog fits #1 perfectly but hurts #2.

In the same way that our church has open events (Sunday morning services, fellowship activities, picnics, 5k runs, etc.) and closed events (small groups, one-on-one meetings, theology class, etc.), we need online tools appropriate for each need.

So the comments are low and will remain low because people are leery about commenting without fully thinking through things. They don’t want to have their half-baked ideas available for all the world to see now and into the future. And I can’t blame them. While some people do need to step out of their comfort zones, it might not be wise for any of us to step that far out. However, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have a place for people in our class to discuss their half-baked ideas to help get them fully baked.

I see the 3 commitment level that KSBC promotes in the offline world, taking shape in the online world like this (I split up Sunday morning into two pieces):

· Sunday morning services -> ksbc.net (large community, I don’t know everyone and not everything applies to me)

· ABF -> Builders blog and email list (smaller community, I know most people, most things impact me in some way)

· Small groups -> Email list (Intimate community, open, I can share anything) – there are some new tools that could be a better fit for this area (youversion.com, closed facebook group, mychurch.org).

· Serving -> Personal blogs, IM, facebook, myspace, twitter, youtube, SecondLife, World of Warcraft, etc – you talk about your faith, your church, represent Christ, etc. in whatever online environment you happen to belong to.

All of the above though, assumes people are even regularly checking the site. This is not a problem for me. I’ve been using an RSS reader for about 3 years now and it’s the only way I keep up with things that are going on. I hardly ever check the builders blog in my browser. My RSS reader tells me whenever there is something new available. So that there was a lull for a couple months wasn’t a problem. When you made the post on August 2, I knew that same day even though I hadn’t been to the site in months (other than to post the retreat info). You described it as hip or savvy. I think I like those terms, I would have described it as geeky. So maybe I just need to teach people how to use an RSS reader and we’ll pray they get in the habit of using it.

One thing people probably already have the habit of is regularly checking their email. There is an option to subscribe to the blog via email instead of RSS. So maybe I just need to sign everyone on our email list up for the blog. Though I think email is losing a lot of its effectiveness because of spam and email getting used for everything. So our message gets lumped in with all that.

Some people will wonder then why do I have to subscribe to the blog AND the email list? The benefit of the blog over the email list is that it provides a historical archive for someone new to the class to catch up in addition to the “openness” I mentioned above. The benefit of the email list over the blog is the more private nature where we can share things like prayer requests, contact information, coordinate schedules, etc. So it’s just a matter of you deciding is the information I have to get out more appropriate for the blog or for the email list.

Another thing I want to encourage you teachers to do is more things like Matt’s I-35 collapse post. I didn’t comment and I probably should have, but it was a reminder to me of two things. First that this very national, somewhat distant tragedy hit very close to home with someone I know pretty well and I hadn’t made that connection. I don’t know why when I heard Minneapolis I never thought to drop Matt an email to say “Hey, you know anybody involved with the bridge collapse I could pray for?” I probably overlook those types of things a lot. Second, the actual content of the post was a valuable and timely reminder. The blog isn’t restricted by a number of words or time like our Sunday morning meetings. So please, whatever is laid on your heart but isn’t appropriate or can’t wait for Sunday morning, use the blog. Another side note, I wish PDW, Paul Briggs, and a lot of the other leaders in our church had their own blogs (a personal blog or for a ministry of theirs) for this very type of thing. I’d like to have their thoughts in context with John Piper’s, Matt Borg’s, and the national news media. It is encouraging to see that current and former church interns Jared, Adam, Ben, and Dave all have blogs. Now if we could just get the older more experienced church leaders to blog. John Piper can blog, our former assistant pastor Dave Cortner has a blog, so I don’t think there is any age limit

And of course, some people just don’t care enough to think about God outside of Sunday morning. That’s a way bigger issue that can’t be solved by technology. We need God to put a passion in their hearts for Himself.

Scoble has an interesting interview with University of Michigan CS professor Dr. Elliot Soloway. I don’t agree with everything but the ideas and optimism are really interesting. The conversation is mostly focused on K-12 and they even get into the shortage of girls in IT issue.

Back in the Internet bubble days, online grocers were one of the poster boys for bad business ideas that received massive funding. Amazon is getting back in the game with AmazonFresh and of course some people are wondering if we are in the next Internet Bubble. What I do not understand is what is so difficult about being an online grocer. Schwan’s has been doing it for years, even pre-Internet.

A good friend of ours is going to South Africa to teach for (at least) two years. I helped her get a website setup as she’s now started the process of raising funds and also for her to use while she’s over there.

The site is pretty basic so far but now that’s it’s ready, we’ll both be adding a lot more stuff soon. Anyway, head on over to tonyasmall.com.