Growing Closer to God Through Facebook Prayer
Growing Closer to God Through Facebook Prayer
by PAUL W on JANUARY 28, 2010
http://www.reachingtheonlinegeneration.com/2010/01/28/growing-closer-to-god-through-facebook-prayer/
Prayer is a critical element of ministry and of movements. Whether you minister – paid or unpaid – online or offline, you need a net work of people who pray for you regularly. You need their prayers to help you resist temptation. You need their prayers to help you grow in your relationship with God. You need their prayers to help you proclaim and live the Gospel boldly and with grace.
But, just as important, prayer must be part of your life as well. You need to have a relationship with God. Prayer isn’t an animistic process of saying the right words to get what we want from God. Instead, prayer is conversation and knowing God better is the goal of prayer.
I’ve talked before about how we can get to know God better by engaging the lost. In the last few weeks God has taught me something new – we can get to know God better by praying for others.
Facebook makes praying for others simpler than ever. Here’s how:
(See rest of article…
http://www.reachingtheonlinegeneration.com/2010/01/28/growing-closer-to-god-through-facebook-prayer/ )
Place to make easy but beautiful websites for ministries
I saw this on Brigada the other day. I haven’t used it yet. Have any of you? Share what you think in the comments…
1) The #1 Flashiest Website Around: Clover is Easy, Snazzy, Fast — Yesterday I asked my two sons what they thought about the new Team Expansion website, now staged at CloverSites:
They *raved*. One son (the 20-year-old) said, “Dad, I’ll be a missionary with Team Expansion now that your website is this cool.” 
OK… maybe his comment was tongue-in-cheek (although he *is* actually leading a summer team for us this summer), but the truth is, they really did like it. What’s more, it’s really easy, really fast, and really has a lot of potential. If you’d like to see some of the available features, take a look at:
http://www.cloversites.com/features-for-all-our-church-websites and
http://www.cloversites.com/greenhouse-updates
Those are all included in the base rate of $20/month.
I don’t know of a single, solitary more effective web-authoring solution for the non-web-professional. Just browse to…
http://www.cloversites.com/f/friendsofbrigada
to get started. Remember, even though it’s flash, the folks at Clover have developed a method of showing text to search engines, so your site will be very search-engine-friendly. And there are even more upgrades to come… and you’ll get them all for the same low monthly price once they’re finished.
(What’s more, Clover gives a tithe of all the start-up feel to Brigada… so when you use the best website, you’re also helping power-up Brigada.)
Inquire or comment about this item at…
http://www.brigada.org/2010/04/25_4554
Microsoft Live! Products are Alive and Well! and really Useful
I don’t know how many of you google docs or apps or any of the office live products… but I found this blog post at winvistclub about all the Microsoft LIVE! websites. I never knew how many things there were and most if not all of this is free and handy for what we do…
| Make the best of Windows Live! Have you tried all of these Windows Live Services? You can get the most from Windows and the Web with Live software and services. They are easy to use. These betas help you stay connected and share what you want on the web, your PC, and even your mobile phone. Learn more, download, and try the betas now. Or start with these : |
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Cool new deal, apps on the iphone
I use WordPress, iContact and eventbrite a lot. It is a significant part of my ministry tool kit. Just recently I found that all three have apps on the iPhone. This allows me to make changes, send e-mails, write blog posts, enter people for an event… all sorts of things remotely using my iPhone. So, if there is a student who wants to sign up for an event we are having, I can do it right away allowing them to sign up on my phone. If I need to send am immediate prayer alert while at an event, I can do it to all my prayer partners using iContact. If I am on a trip visiting students, I can blog it real time on my ministry blog using the WordPress App. All the while saving notes, etc. that is accessible on my computer, the web, and my iPhone using Evernote. This is truly incredible!
Making a Video for Promoting your Event
I was recently asked about how to make a simple video for an event. I thought I would post the answer on this blog.
Making a video is actually a process. Honestly, the best way to learn this stuff is play with it and you will figure it out. The general work flow is as follows but honestly, the description makes it seem a lot more complicated than it is. Remember, A rule of thumb is around 1 hour of edit, production time for each minute of video produced.
- Planning your video
- Take footage using your video camera, you can also use pictures and create motion using effects. I use the previous years footage generally for the promo video for this year. You can use digital camera footage. You can use a flip video camera. For best results use a high quality video camera. You can get a decent one for as low as $300. A pro quality one is a lot more.
- Import/capture your video onto your computer, perhaps using your editing software for this.
- Index your footage, I usually have one column for film clip, time on clip and an appropriate name for the clip.
- Put together a storyboard in your mind based on your footage
Use a video editing program to edit your video, cutting pieces of your footage and ordering it as appropriate
- I used Adobe Premiere elements and Adobe Premiere Pro for more complicated videos. Adobe Premiere elements can be had for less than $100 (I actually saw it in google shopping for $68), if you have a mac, you can use iMovie for simple stuff and finalcut pro (very expensive) for more complicated stuff. There are less expensive options, but in my experience, they tend to crash a lot. A free option in windows when first trying is to use moviemaker which comes with Windows, but it only can output to WMV format which if far from standard.
- I recently learned that you want to keep your clips relatively short. A person’s attention span with video clips (scenes without movement) is around 7-10 seconds.
For each video, you have multiple different layers of video and sound, that you can lay down and the software usually comes with built in effects and ways to transition between clips. Using these do the following:
- Choose music and edit into video using the video editing software. Be careful about playing whole copyrighted songs.
- Add Titles for different sections
- Add transitions between each cut and each title. All you usually have to do it drag and drop these in your editing program.
- Add effects… All you usually have to do it drag and drop these in your editing program.
- Render(share) the video into a format that you can use for web(mp4 or flv), or DVD(mpg).
I hope that helps. I would do a Google search for videos to help you with each step. It’s all not too bad… just takes a lot of time. One good reference for learning new things is the eHow website and the dummies.com book series. These are what I usually start with when I am learning something new.
Marketing Where the Students Are
Marketing Where the Students Are: The “average” college student has 87 email contacts, 146 cell phone contacts and 438 “friends” on social networks. Men tend to have more cell phone contacts and women more “friends.” Marketers have become especially interested in this sphere of influence of 671 potential consumers around each student. This is true especially in social networking where almost 40% of college students have “friended” a brand or product online, double the national average. The digital world has many possibilities as college students access more than 14 screens a day – compared with just over 5 for all adults. They prefer text messaging to face to face communication and 83% have visited a website associated with a TV program they watched. More than 60% have watched a TV show online through sites like Hulu or Joost during the past year. (mediapost.com February 25, 2010)
Sticky Notes that you can work with
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StickySorter - http://www.officelabs.com/projects/stickysorter/Pages/default.aspx – Cool new app from Microsoft Office Labs that allows you to create sortable, groupable, moveable sticky notes on your computer that exports to and imports form excel. Great for brainstorming and Strategic Planning using a data projector and saving the results.
How to Convert a YouTube Video to an Offline Format
This comes to us from Brigada… Useful..
Did you ever face that dilemma? You wanted to show a video to an upcoming Perspectives class or to a Sunday School class… but you just weren’t sure you’d have access to the Internet in that environment. So ideally, you’d like to “harvest” the video off YouTube to some format that would play on your laptop solo — sort of like a DVD does, but from your hard drive instead. But you go to the YouTube page and… there really doesn’t appear to be any capability for that.
Well I faced that this past week with several YouTube videos I wanted to use when teaching Perspectives. I asked our I.T. guy for his favorite tool, because — honestly — every time I figure this out, it’s 6 months before I have to use it again and I forget! He suggested a download service from dvdvideosoft.com. It didn’t work correctly on my browser/PC, for whatever reason. (He’s a Mac guy, so that might have been it.) But their free iPod converter seemed to do the trick flawlessly. (Play with the settings until it works for you.)
http://www.dvdvideosoft.com/products/dvd/Free-YouTube-to-iPod-Converter.htm
This URL will “wrap”.. so if you have trouble reassembling it, just go to the Brigada webpage and click on the link we’ll provide you there. Snag that free program, convert the YouTube video to an iPod-compatible video, make sure you have QuickTime from Apple (I know; it was with great fear and trembling that I installed it again. Just make sure you uncheck the boxes that add free things that you don’t want), and you’re in business. The videos played at a fairly high level resolution *and* I didn’t have to worry about bandwidth stall-outs or connectivity in general. Good luck!
Geocaching as an event for internationals
Here is an idea from a colleague, Randy … using Geocaching as a group building event with international students
I knew a couple of people with GPSs, and the youth group from one supporting church had three. A couple of student brought their own. (The ones designed for cars did not work well for this event – they were not accurate enough)
My steps for the event
1. Determine the location of the event and get permission.
2. Scout the area and find the places to hide the caches. I setup 18 plus an example cache. The park I chose also had a registered geocache.
a. Photograph each spot
b. mark and record the coordinates
c. decide what type of cache container you will use at that spot
d. create a name, description, and hint for each spot
3. prepare your cache containers.
I used several types and sizes—magnetic key holder, camping match holder, sprinkler head, fake rock key holder, disposable food container bowl (like tupperware – which I spray painted dull green), 1 foot long 2″ PVC pipes with one end glued on (and spray painted). I got just about all of them at Home Depot.
4. print a log sheet and geocache document sheet for each cache container and place them in the container.
5. Divide the caches into courses.
I created 3 courses out of the 18 caches. Each course had 6 caches to find. This allowed me to start 3 teams at one time, each headed in a different direction. Then I could start 3 more teams 10 minutes later and they wouldn’t easily run into each other. I included the registered geocache on each course so that they could look at this later online.
6. Create a sheet for each course that can be given to the teams. Each cache on the sheet should have the coordinates, size, name, description and hint (cover it with masking tape, so they can pull it off and use it if needed).
a. create a seperate sheet for the example cache
7. Create a master sheet for each course, that you keep – this one has pictures and what the container is.
8. Day of the Event
a. Explain Geocaching and show them the official website
and the registered geocache on the course. You may
have to do this where you can have internet access.
a. Divide into teams–have them pick team names.
b. explain how the game will work
c. do a sample cache together
I created a sample cache in the parking lot
and gave everyone a sample course sheet
with the sample cache data. We all used our
GPSs to find the cache. I used a small cache
hidden under flowers, so that they understood
that the cache could be hard to find. This
also made sure each team could use their GPS.
d. start the first teams – log the time
e. I stayed at the start/finish and teams could call me
for additional help.
f. Log the time when a teams returns.
