I’ve decided to retire www.igeekrev.com and move my blogging over to www.shawncoons.com. So please look there for more of my “radical and expressive” views. Or you can subscribe to the RSS feed: http//www.shawncoons.com/?feed=rss2.
Thanks!
Calling all Prebyterian bloggers, Tweeters, and other Web 2.0 junkies or wannabes! It’s time to do General Assembly - Web 2.0 style. Here are a couple of ways I envision:
1) Let’s have a Presbyterian bloggers event. I don’t know when, I don’t know where, but I would be pumped to meet other bloggers face to face. Does anyone local know a good place that we could hang out or does anyone have access to space that we could inhabit for a moment?
2) Twitter. I’ll propose that we use the tag #GA218 for GA tweets. That way we can follow what’s going on with Tweetscan.
3) Live blogging. I’m new to this and the only service I’ve used is shiftedit. I’ve started a liveblog here. It’s possible (probable) we will want multiple liveblogs for various meetings. It’s also possible (probable) that one of you knows a better way to do this. If so, speak up!
Ok, bloggers! It’s time to start the Midnight Bark! This will only work if word gets around. If you think this is a worthy endeavor then share the linklove and drop a post on your blog spreading the word. I’m happy to start compiling a list of all the bloggers that are going to be at GA, so that we can get connected and follow each other’s experiences.
Disclaimer: I’m on Bruce’s team and oversee the Facebook group.
Bruce Reyes-Chow is running standing for moderator of the 2008 General Assembly, and in a post today he writes about some of the reactions he has gotten so far. He writes that people are telling him the following three things.
Bruce does a wonderful job of discussing these on his blog, so I’m not going to add much too what he has written. But since I’m a blogger, and riffing on other people’s material is what I do, let me say a couple things.
1) Bruce is exactly right when he says that speed, connectivity, and transparency are all characteristics of the upcoming generations and we need to embrace that fact if we want to be the church of upcoming generations.
2) More information is good! How much have we really known about past moderator candidates? I’m willing to bet that because of Bruce’s efforts all the candidates will be better known by more Presbyterians. Bruce writes about the other candidates, and he links to their websites and other articles about them. Through Bruce’s blog, conversations, Facebook group, and connections more young Presbyterians are learning not just about the position of moderator, but about General Assembly itself. I guarantee there are young Presbyterians learning about General Assembly for the first time through Facebook.
It seems to me that information about candidates in the past has been limited to those already on “the inside.” If you weren’t a reader of the Outlook, Presbyterians Today or another Presbyterian flavored publication would you even know who the candidates were? And what would you know about them if you could name them? I wonder if people are threatened by Bruce’s stand as moderator because he is opening the process up to all sorts of Presbyterians unintentionally excluded before?
If you’ve been to a General Assembly before then you know that age-wise it is heavily skewed to the older side. Most Presbyteries seek gender and ethnic diversity in their commissioners, but most Presbyteries neglect age diversity. In fact, I’d guess that most Presbyteries have a formal or informal seniority criteria that tends to exclude younger elders and ministers. So it is no wonder that people are threatened when hundreds of young Presbyterians take an interest in General Assembly.
But it shouldn’t be threatening. It should be exciting and hopeful. Wouldn’t it be great if General Assembly made headlines this year? Not because of a divisive vote or issue, but because we sent a strong message that younger generations aren’t the church of tomorrow, but rather a vital and important part of the church of today.
Jim pointed me towards the Smart Pastor blog, and as I was poking around the site I found this wonderful post on feed readers. If you read blogs (and you do) then you should use a feed reader. I use Google Reader and find it so easy to stay up to date with my favorite blogs and read them quickly. The only problem is that it makes it very simple to add more blogs to your reading list. I’m currently following about 75 different blogs.
How many do you read?
I’ve got a lot to blog about and no time to do it. I’m trying to catch up after being away for almost three weeks. My evenings lately have been spent having cool, engaging and fun conversations with Karen Sloan (author of Flirting With Monasticism) and Neal Locke. Both of these fine people are staying at our house while they attend the Presbyterian Global Fellowship conference here in Houston. It’s cool because they are two of the folks behind Presbymergent.org, and so I’m keeping them up late in my further attempts to try and grok the whole emerging thing.
Hopefully, I’ll make the time to blog about some of this soon.
Idea #1 from 101 blog ideas for us pastor/geek/blogger types on Bruce’s blog.
I began to blog in the summer of 1999. This was before we knew what a blog was. Here is the opening page of the Shawn Chronicles. The actual entries have been corrupted somehow, most likely by internet gnomes or nargles. At that point I blogged completely to get an audience and have my pontifications heard. After that I was on LiveJournal ever so briefly and created another Wordpress blog entitled “If I Was Pope.” But once again, I started both of those mainly because I wanted people to listen to the Important(tm) things that I had to say.
Jump to this past couple of years. I started a podcast and the podcast led to a Web 2.0 Presby news site. Through this process I found myself reading and thinking about a hosts of issues and stories that hadn’t crossed my path before. And I really started getting into other people’s blogs, especially other pastors’ blogs. Somewhere around this time Bruce wrote a great post about why pastors should blog that made a lot of sense to me.
So I decided to give it another go but with some different reasons this time. I no longer write to be heard. My first reason for blogging is because I have thoughts/ideas/rants/etc. running through my head and this gives me a good way to process them and put my thoughts in order. So why a blog instead of a personal journal? Because conversation is good. My blog allows me to create and continue conversations with other people who I may or may not otherwise interact with.
While I am writing first for myself I am not writing only for myself. I hope I have something to offer others, even if it is just an occasional, insight, idea, or interesting link. I enjoy reading other people’s blogs and getting to know about them, what they think and what they do. So I don’t think it is a huge stretch to believe that there might be at least one person out there who has mild interest in what I have to say.
I’ve also been convinced that there are good professional reasons why pastors should blog. I believe it allows congregation members to know their pastor better and be seen as more of a real person rather than just a the guy in the funny dress on Sunday mornings.
In summary: Why do I blog?
Bruce wrote a post on his blog that has 101 blog ideas for us pastor/geek/blogger types. I’m considering working through all 101 ideas on the list. I’m itching to start with the first one: Write a post…that explains why you blog. Unfortunately, I can’t start it now because our youth group is at Montreat and I need to go drive one of our youth to the next activity. She dislocated her knee last night while dancing. The funny thing (if there is a funny thing) about it is that she’s Baptist. So she told us, “This is why Baptists don’t dance.”
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