I've got that song stuck in my head again...

This morning as I was in the Doctor's office I was listening to the piped-in music on their sound system. Most of the music I have heard in the office I could not name because I have never heard it before. This morning was different, I recognized that one of the songs that they were playing was a recording of Timothy Seaman. You have heard his music too.

The Journey DVD (watch the video) that I helped Bill Jenner, Joanne Jenner, and Carole Newsome produce used three or four songs from a Timothy Seaman CD. Timothy had graciously agreed to allow us to use his music on our DVD. The song that I heard is the one that plays when Tony and Danner have completed their introduction and their are some still shots of the church at Jamestown.

I had another recent music deja-vu experience last week. I was walking to my car in the middle of the day to run an errand and I realized that I was whistling the melody to a recent choir anthem from last Sunday. "It is a good thing to give thanks unto the Lord" is a song that I did not get a chance to sing with the choir because I was in the sound booth but I did get to practice it several times during choir practice.

I was drawn back to reality when as I was leaving the doctor's office I met a WHBC church member who knew me but I didn't quite remember her. I need to improve in the area of remembering names and faces. I'll have to look her up in the church directory and make it a point to say hello to her this weekend.

As I was thinking about my two music experiences it has caused me to think a little bit about a neglected topic on this blog: worship. Our time in worship should influence the rest of our week. We should be humming a hymn or a praise song that caught our attention. We might remember a good sermon illustration. Our time in worship should reverberate throughout the week.

This principle, to me, is a key part of our discussion on contemporary worship. If our worship is able to connect to us on many levels, using all of our senses, then Sunday morning can bridge into Wednesday afternoon or Friday night. We will be changed because worship that involves all that we are will help us to connect with Christ.

The other side of the same coin is that if we are not engaged in worship (and/or if our worship service does not engage us) we can leave worship unchanged and sink back into our normal default mode of existence. We end up with the same empty feeling I had today when I could not remember the name of a church member that I should have remembered.

Worship becomes relevant when it connects us to Christ and with one another. As we move through our faith journey: We'll be able to remember the names of church members, we'll have a new song in our heart, and most important of all we be connected to Christ. And that is all of the difference.

Download a sermon to your PC or portable media player

So, you have just purchased a brand new MP3 player or perhaps a super-cool iPhone and are looking for ways to justify the purchase. The church website has come to your rescue. We have been running a sermon podcast blog for the last month and a half. Here is how you can download the sermon for this week onto your MP3 player using a variety of tools

Downloading the sermons via iTunes
Downloading the sermons via Windows Media Player

ITunes

1. Start iTunes on your PC
2. Click on Advanced | Subscribe to podcast
3. Paste the following into the URL window: http://www.whbconline.org/sermons/atom.xml
4. iTunes will add the sermon podcast to your list of podcasts and will download the most recent post. You can also download other entries (or all of them) by clicking on the Get buttons
   
5. Now that you have the podcasts on your PC, plug in your iPod
6. When the iPod icon appears in iTunes select it and then pick the Podcasts tab
7. Select Sync and tell iTunes which podcasts you want to automatically sync

iTunes will now automatically place the latest podcasts on your iPod

Windows Media Player

1. Windows Media Player is a little harder to use with the podcast. There are a variety of approaches to making it work
1. Download the files manually via your web browser to a WHBC folder inside of the My Music folder on your PC
2. When you start Windows Media Player it will automatically recognize the files you have manually downloaded
3. You can then sync the songs to your MP3 player
   
2. Another approach that is a little bit more automated is to use an approach similar to the one documented on this website. It involves setting up a little bit of software but the approach here can be used to automatically update your device as new sermons become available.

More blog-reading how-to tips

One advantage of a blog over a typical basic website is that your computer can help you to know when something has changed on the blog. Pretty much everyone has a set of favorite websites on the Internet that you visit on a regular basis. It goes something like this.

• Visit website A
• Visit website B
• Lather, rinse, repeat

The problem is that you have to visit each website to see if anything is different. If the site has a sophisticated structure like CNN or ESPN you might have to make several clicks to get to the content that really interests you, only to find that nothing has been updated. You could try making a bookmark to the specific content you want to check each day, but sometimes your bookmarks will point to content that no longer exists or is no longer being updated.

Blogs solve this problem by publishing a special file as part of their content which is called a newsfeed. It may be referred to as an RSS file or an ATOM file. Generally it is always accompanied with a button or text that says "Subscribe to Posts". On our blogs this link is always at the bottom right of the page. A newsfeed is a computer-readable file that describes the content of the blog. Every time a new post is added to the blog, the newsfeed file will be updated. You could think of the newsfeed file as sort of a digital library card catalog that has an entry for each and every entry in the blog, and it is always up to date.

Newsfeed files are very small and can be downloaded quickly compared to the content that may be in the blog. Our podcasts average about 10-15 MBs in size but the newsfeed file that describes all of that content is 15KB. Or about 1,000 times smaller. Newsreader software keeps track of these files when you subscribe to a blog. It compares the downloaded copy on your PC to the copy on the site. It then can decide if new content is available and can download it automatically to your PC (or even your IPOD)

So what happens when you click on the Subscribe to posts link on our blogs?

If you are running a recent copy of MS Internet Explorer or Firefox they will give you a chance to subscribe to the newsfeed using the idea of a bookmark or favorite in the browser. They will even update the list of bookmarks automatically for you. You typically still have to open the bookmark to see what has changed. Also they tend to not help you remember which posts you have already read.

The next better option is a web-based news reader. Google Reader is an easy one to use, here is how to subscribe to a blog in Google Reader

1. Go to the blog in your web browser.
2. Find the link or button for subscribing to the news feed
3. Right-click over the link and pick "Copy Link Location" or "Copy Shortcut" to copy the address into your browser.
4. Open a new browser window for Google Reader
5. Sign in with your Google account. If you don't have one you can easily create one for free. Most people who already have a Google account tend to use Google's free email service
6. Click Add Subscription and paste the address of the blog newsfeed into the provided window.
7. Google Reader will add your blog to the list of blogs that it monitors on your behalf and will display the latest entries of the blogs. It will also keep track of which posts you have read and which posts you have not read.

A good newsreader will make it very easy to see what has changed at a glance and will give you the option of what to read. I hope, of course, that you will read all of my posts, but with a good reader you have the option to skip the ones that look to be boring.

On my next post I'll show you how to fill up your Ipod with Tony's sermons.

So, we have all of these blogs, what can we do with them?

In case you have not noticed we've added a few blogs to the website in the past month. Of course you are reading my blog so I guess you have noticed a little bit. I recently read an excellent book The Blogging Church by Brian Bailey and Terry Storch. This book opened my eyes to the possibilities of adding blogs to our church web site.

Blogs provide an incredible opportunity for our staff and other church members to communicate with folks who discover our website. They can come to our website and see posts about our missions trips, about our facility improvements, about new focuses on family ministry and even hear digital versions of the Sunday sermon.

Here are some thoughts on advantages that blogs have over our other methods of outreach:

• Blogs are not limited by the size of a printed page. We can post a little bit of text or a huge amount.
  
• Blogs do not require that someone receive a piece of paper from the church
• Blogs are discoverable via web search engines
• Blogs can carry digital content such as photos, video, audio
• Blogs can be updated as often as we want.
• Blogs are free. no paper, ink, advertising costs
  

The main advantage is that our blogs become another way for people to get to know Walnut Hills. I'd like for more church members to join our crew of bloggers. We currently have six bloggers updating 5 blogs. Want to join in? See me and we'll talk about it.

Now, what can YOU do with our blogs.

1. You can check them our via your web browser (just like now)
2. You can use a news feed reader to subscribe to the blogs. A news feed reader is a special piece of software that can automatically download the content of a blog to your PC whenever it changes. These tools save a lot of time when you are tracking a bunch of blog sites.
   
1. I use a piece of software called FeedReader. A list of readers can be found at http://blogspace.com/rss/readers The most popular reader is called FeedDemon (I'm trying it out)
   
2. There are also a huge number of web-based news readers such as Google Reader that you can use as well.
3. If you want to download the MP3 version of our sermons you can use iTunes from Apple to subscribe to our Sermon Podcast blog. You can subscribe to the podcast manually via ITunes. Soon you will be able to find us listed in the iTunes store. Don't worry the podcasts are free.

Later this week I will post some how-to notes on how to subscribe to our blogs and podcasts using a variety of tools.

For now, keep reading, and consider joining the conversation.

Ingenuity, you know it when you see it

One of my favorite all-time Super Bowl TV commercials was the MasterCard "priceless" commercial that featured Richard Dean Anderson in a reprise of his MacGyver TV series character. In the commercial he cuts through a thick rope using only a pine-scented air freshener and creates an impromptu zip-line escape using a spare tube sock. He always seemed to find a way to save the day with stuff that was readily at hand.

We've seen ingenuity in children when they turn a empty appliance box into a "fort" or an elementary school teacher who can keep children mesmerized with a good book from her bookshelf. James Naismith invented basketball using a couple of spare peach baskets and a spare ball The ability to make use of handy items is an art form and ministry is no different.

Our current podcast setup is based entirely on stuff we had on hand. Each week the A/V committee makes a tape of the entire service using a cassette tape deck in the booth. In the past these tapes would go to the library and would effectively disappear from the planet. (We have tapes from say the last 10 years or so) Occasionally people would check one out.

Here is how we turn a cassette tape into the podcasts that you hear on our sister podcast blog

1. I grab the tape from last Sunday from the church library
2. I use a CD recording deck in John's office to convert the cassette into a CD
3. I use my PC and Window's Media Player to import the audio track off of the CD as an MP3 file.
4. I import the MP3 file into the free Audacity sound editing tool.
5. I grab the portion of the audio that is the sermon and export it as a separate MP3 file with additional metadata fields that describe the contents of the file. Note: We can currently only podcast the sermons due to copyright and licensing issues.
   
6. I upload the MP3 file to our web site using FTP.
7. I create a post on the Sermon podcast blog so that people will know about the new file.
8. I place the CD in the church library.

So in short, everything we are doing is with stuff we already had on hand. Pretty neat in a MacGyveristic sort of way. However, it could be better.

• The cassette tape drive flips the tape at a random point in the service (usually in the midst of the sermon) so we loose about 5 seconds of audio.
  
• The process takes a long time. It takes as long to make the original CD as it did to record the original service.

The plan is to purchase some better recording gear that will enable us to record directly to CD or to a computer hard drive and a better mechanism for duplicating CDs. In the future we will build copies on cassette tape as an exception and we will primarily distribute CDs and DVDs.

So, look around at the stuff you have in your midst. What could you accomplish if you applied a little ingenuity.

The importance of being prepared...

My wife and I recently attended an event where I saw a bad example of not being prepared in the use of media. The event was a cruise night where representatives from various cruise lines were available to talk about scheduling a future cruise.

The event basically had four components:

• Food
  
• Tables with brochures on sailings staffed by cruise line representatives
• Travel agents on hand who could book a cruise, research prices and availability
• A large meeting room with a video projector and sound system where each cruise line made a presentation on their particular brand.

This is the second event that we have attended with this organization. Last years event was very nice but was held in a crowded venue. This year's event was in a new facility that had plenty of space for the event.

We showed up and grabbed some seats in the presentation room to sit through several of the presentations. We had three or four lines that we were interested in, so we hopped in and out of the presentation room to get some food and pick up brochures. The first presentation began with a few words from the cruise line representative and then they started a DVD video. The volume level of the DVD video was extremely low. This room was as deep as our church sanctuary but the volume was only good enough to cover the first 5 rows. The rep starting fiddling with the PC playing the DVD but could not make the volume loud enough.

The second representative begins their presentation. I had decided that it was maybe "operator error" and that the later presentations would be better. The second presentation played with no audio. The representative did their best by talking over the video in an impromptu "slide show". The third and fourth presentations were without video while the owner of the laptop frantically tried to download software drivers on their PC because of the audio problems and because some DVDs would not play.

As a media guy a nice event became irritating to me. The technical problems that were experienced should have been sorted out prior to the start of the event. I felt sorry for the cruise line representatives who showed up one after another with no idea that their DVD videos were not going to play. As a visual learner, I would have gotten more out of the video presentations than I got out of the verbal presentations as the representatives made the best of the situation.

Think about what we do in church. Do our events ever have the sense that they were just thrown together? Do we have technical issues that could have been anticipated and resolved before the event starts? Could we schedule a dry run to make sure everything is working? Often times our level of preparation will determine the quality of our presentation.

Welcome to the WMT Blog

After several weeks of pestering the church staff about blogging I have decided to join the fray by starting my own blog. I have intentionally picked a narrow area of focus for my blog - Worship, Media, Technology. As you can see there is nothing narrow about these areas. I figure that if I pick such a broad topic area I have license to blog about just anything!

Jesus taught his followers using parables. His parables used simple language and illustrations that resonated with his listeners. The timelessness of a good parable is evident in the fact that many parables still speak to us even though our frame of reference is different.

As the church seeks to minister to new generations we need to be fluent in their language(s). Our church is a mix of digital natives and digital immigrants. The younger generations see and process the world about them in a much different way than we did. Many of us can remember when there were no computers, no cable TV, no cell phones. Our younger folks have always had these devices and are often the ones we ask for help in setting up our voice mail, contact lists, etc. Apple has a good list of these differences posted on a website aimed at educators who are dealing with these broad cultural shifts.

This blog is about our journey to become fluent in new means of reaching folks, wherever they might be in the native-immigrant continuum. I'm hoping that through this blog you will gain an appreciation for the method to my madness as we seek to discover new ways of reaching the folks that we encounter.

About the blog and where I'm going:

• Worship - I am a musician, I sing in the choir, I lead worship for our youth. From time to time I will talk about worship subjects
• Media - I am the chair of the church audio/visual committee, I am the church webmaster, I work with teenagers. From time to time we will talk about how to use media for ministry
• Technology - I am a professional software engineer, I'm the guy you find when your computer will not start up. From time to time we will talk about how Technology will be a way to reach others.