Digi Something

According to this article, 9-year-old Grayson Wynne was hiking with his family in the Ashley National Forest last Saturday when he became separated from the group. He didn’t realize the group of about 15 had stopped to adjust the saddle on a horse. He kept walking ahead of the group, then diverted onto a smaller, side trail.

Lost and alone, he started thinking about television, specifically Man vs. Wild and its host Bear Grylls.

In Man vs. Wild, Bear Grylls intentionally gets lost in extreme outdoor environments, then gives tips on how to survive in that situation.

Grayson applied those lessons by tearing up his yellow raincoat, even though it had started to rain” and tying the pieces to trees to leave a trail. Then, when night came, he built a shelter. After waking up the next morning, he decided to follow a creek. His thinking was that it might lead to a lake, and there were more likely to be people around a lake.

As he approached a meadow, he heard a helicopter. He ran out waving the small piece of his raincoat that was left, but before it saw him he was spotted by members of the search party who were on horseback. They had been following the trail he had left behind. Grayson made it through his 18-hour ordeal uninjured.

It’s incredible that a 9-year-old could take the lessons from the TV show and apply them that effectively. He may very well have survived being lost in the forest, but the things he did based on what he saw on Man vs. Wild certainly made it easier for people to find him.

Watching television really can save your life.

Digi Quest

As Kevin Hendricks from ChurchMarketingSucks.com has pointed out, the Southern Baptist, Foursquare, and Episcopal denominations are all currently running some variation of the “I am/We are [insert denomination name here]” advertising campaign.  As I think about it, I find myself asking “is this a good idea?”

Don’t get me wrong.  I don’t have any kind of issue with churches or denominations advertising.  Advertisements have the potential of encouraging people who are interested in Christ to walk into a church for the first time, and they can encourage unconnected Christians find a place where they can belong.  Both of those are good things.

However, I’m not sure that doing it in a way that emphasizes the differences between churches is necessarily a good thing.  When we focus on the differences between us, we destroy the unity that should bind us together as believers in Jesus Christ.

I believe that having different denominations and different kinds of churches and churches that have different focuses is a good thing.  Different people respond and connect with different types of ministries and different kinds of pastors.  If every church looked and sounded the same, then only people who connected with that style of ministry would be affected.  There would be a lot of people who would drift away from the church, or who would never walk into a church in the first place.  To me, this is part of what it means for the church to be the body of Christ.  We need arms and eyes and livers and ribs.  The body needs all of the different parts in order to operate effectively.  In other words, we need all of the different parts of the body of Christ to work together in order to reach as many people and to have as big of an impact on the world as possible.

When we focus too much on what makes us different than every other brand of people who identify themselves with Christ, it seems to me that we start fall into the trap of saying “because you are not an eye, you have no place in the body.”  Certainly there comes a point where the differences are so great that we are no longer part of the same body, but I think churches are often too quick to reach this point.

And it is certainly true that people outside the church wonder why those of us inside the church can’t get along.  People who don’t know Jesus probably couldn’t tell you one difference between the Baptists, the Episcopalians and the Foursquares, and they probably don’t care.  And if those of us inside the church spent a little more time focusing on the things we share in common rather than on what makes us different, it would be easier for all of us to affect the world around us for the sake of Jesus.

According to this article, Kimberley Vlaminck, an 18-year-old from Belgium, is claiming that she fell asleep while having her face tattooed, only to wake up and find 56 stars permanently inked on her face.  You can see her “after” photo here.  She is now suing the tattoo artist claiming that he “misunderstood” what she wanted.  She claims she only wanted 3 stars.

The tattoo artist claims that she is merely experience buyer’s remorse and is only upset because her boyfriend dumped her after he saw the tattoo.  While the artist, make sure you check out his picture here, maintains Ms. Vlaminck asked for all 56 stars, and he has a witness to prove it.  Still, he doesn’t want an unhappy customer, so he has offered to pay for half the cost for the procedure to remove them.

I certainly am no expert on receiving tattoos on the face, but how do you fall asleep while someone is using needles on your face?    It would seem to me that the process would involve some discomfort — enough to keep you awake.  If the needles weren’t enough to keep you awake, you would think that the interest in making sure that the tattoo was turning out right would keep her up.  This isn’t some private tattoo that only she and her significant other would see.  It’s on her face.

I don’t care how tired you are, or how certain you are the person permanently marking your body knows what you want, you just have to pay attention.   Even assuming she’s telling the truth, all she would have had to do is say “Dude, I said three.”  Of course, that requires you to believe that she was telling the truth…

As I mentioned, in his blog College Ministry Thoughts, Chuck Bomar, the head of CollegeLeader.org, has started a discussion about what it means to be connected.  There seems to be an increasing number of younger adults who don’t feel “connected” to the church.

As Chuck mentions, a number of the common methods used to determine whether or not a person is connected don’t seem to work, especially with younger adults.  I think the biggest reason for this is that what it means to be connected is a very subjective thing that varies from person to person.

For one person, attending services and showing up at a home group meeting twice a month is more than enough to feel connected.  I certainly can imagine parents with a couple of children who have very little social interaction with other adults finding a twice a week small group as being a great connection.

On the other hand, there are people who feel like they can’t develop a relationship in that time.  For them, being connected means finding a place to belong, a place where they find a place where people can invest in each other’s daily lives.  Going someplace for an hour and a half, once a week, then going home isn’t going to create that sense of belonging, and without that belonging, they feel little connection.

I think that a person is connected if they truly feel like they belong.  If that’s an accurate definition, then there is one problem with it – it is extremely hard to measure.  There is no universal measurement that we can use on everyone at a church or ministry to determine whether or not they are connected.  It means that we have to spend time talking with them to know whether or not they feel connected and why they feel that way.  That can be a very time intensive job.  And it’s a job that has to be done repeatedly, since just because someone feels connected today doesn’t mean that still will three months or six months or a year from now.

On the other hand, spending that time with people will help those of us who are ministry leaders to determine ways to improve our ministries so that people will feel more connected.  Also, if we spend that kind of time with people, it is likely that they will feel more connected themselves.

Chuck Bomar, the head of CollegeLeader.org, recently started a discussion about college age adults feeling disconnected from church.  However, before we can figure out how to reverse this trend, we need to define what it means to be connected.

Before we can really begin to explore what it means to be connected, we probably need to discuss things that are that aren’t necessarily indications of being connected.  In a post on his College Ministry Thoughts blog, Chuck suggests four things that are probably not good indicators of being connected:

I don’t think attendance in a church service defines connected. I don’t think being involved in a small group put on by our college ministry defines connected. I don’t think serving in a ministry defines connected. And, I don’t think attending events defines whether or not someone is connected.

Churches often use these, or other things like them, to determine if someone is connected.  But I agree with Chuck that doing one or more of these things doesn’t mean that a person feels connected.

There are many people who attend services or are otherwise involved in a church out of inertia or because they feel like they should.  People can participate in services or activities, and even participate in ministry, but not feel like they are connected.  In fact, I can say that there have been times when I personally have attended services and worked ministry at a church but did not feel connected.

So if these aren’t good measurements of “connectedness,” and I agree with Chuck that they aren’t, then what would be some indications that a person truly is connected?  Any ideas?

I enjoy a good, fast-paced word game.  Thanks to YSMarko, which unfortunately is no longer updated, I found this one called Deep Leap.  The game is Scrabble-like.  You start with 4 tiles, and tiles are slowly added to your rack.  You type words created from the letters in your rack.  If you have more than 9 tiles in your rack, the oldest ones disappear.  You earn points by using your letters, with multipliers for word length and the number of consecutive words that appear in the dictionary.  You lose points for letters that you don’t use before they expire or for typing words that don’t appear in the dictionary.  Games are only 75 tiles long, so that can be played in just a few minutes.  It’s kind of addicting.  Give it a try.  But if you can’t stop, don’t blame me.

I recent Stumbled Upon this fun little quiz. It shows you the picture and asks you to identify whether the person invented a computer programming language or was a serial killer. It’s kind of amazing how not obvious it is. I got 7 out of 10 correct.

According to this article from CNN.com, the Nielsen Company, which measures ratings and other television-related information, estimates that approximately 3 million people were not prepared for the conversion to digital television.  Additionally, the FCC reported that over 317,000 people called it’s help line.

This is not something that snuck up on people.  It wasn’t like television stations turned off their signals with no warning.  This has been coming for years, and yet 1 in every 100 Americans was not prepared.

I don’t know exactly when stations started broadcasting commericals and public service announcements about the switch to digital TV, but I know that I saw my first one late in 2007.  I remember thinking, “it’s over a year away.  They sure are starting the commercials early.”  Those commercials have been commonplace on network TV.  Rarely has a day gone by that I didn’t see at least one.

Yet when the original deadline was approaching in February, there were so many people who weren’t ready (Nielsen reports that it was a little over 6 million), they extended the deadline.  After the extension, the commercials became even more omnipresent.

I will admit that over the last 3 months or so the commercials have improved.  In the early days, the commercials said things like “make sure you are ready,” without saying who needed to be concerned and who did not.  The more recent commercials have been clearer.  They made it clear what people would be affected and who would not be.

If the commercials and reports in the news media weren’t enough, all of the affected channels ran a number of tests.  All people had to do was to turn on their TVs during specified periods of time, and they could see whether they were ready or not.

In spite of all of the commercials, all of the stories in the news media, all of the tests, and even direct mail advertisements from cable, satellite tv, and antenna companies, 1% of the U.S. population wasn’t ready.

This has been well-publicized public knowledge for over 18 months.  The TV stations all talked about it.  The news media covered it in detail.  Companies took advantage of it as a marketing tool.  And still 3 million people weren’t prepared.

I just don’t get it.