Category Archives: Commentary

Tech and Presence

ConvergeSE Friday sessions

This past week, I was able to attend the ConvergeSE Conference. But rather than being there in a capacity of thought-leader, presenter, or even regular attender, I was there as a sketchnote artist. Sketchnotes are drawings that include text and graphics that are done during the course of attending meetings, bible studies, workshops, or nearly anything where you have lots of information and its just better to engage both sides of your brain while listening. I listened to the presentations, but kept my finger more or less on the pulse of what was happening around me. Being around the Columbia Museum of Art and their collection tends to make you a bit more reflective.

ConvergeSE is a conference where it seemed that in part, many web developers, graphics designers, and mobile/web designers were there to connect and get a refresh. The talks that I attended were techie in part, but mostly seemed to serve the purpose of helping the creatives who were there to refresh a bit in an industry where not only things change quickly, but its easy to be distracted by things that don’t matter as much.

What was interesting is how you could parse the attendees into two groups: those who connect and those who were present. The connectors I saw talking often to different people and moving from place to place a bit faster than I. The folks who were present were a bit more solitary in sections, but seemed to just float along the stream catching connections as they happened, and embracing Columbia, SC when it poked different. The tech that connected these two groups usually came in some Apple-tinted flavor, but it always seemed to have something mobile nearby.

I found myself at one point sitting outside at one point just listening. I followed one group to a point, then moved my attention to another. I was grabbed by a few familiar faces, and later dropped off to be engaged by faces that might be more familiar in my future. I watched how people wandered between meetings, and how a few others spent the time right before a speaker started setting up their laptop/mobile or grabbing another quick bite. Listening, sketching. And generally just embracing something that doesn’t seem to be a part of design and development practices for many… contemplation, or reflection.

I got a lot of ideas about how to not use paper laynards, how to keep devices charged wirelessly, and how those beautiful paintings should have come home with me digitally. I thought about how to remain connected with a few new persons, and was sparked to create something for the church community here that isn’t always afforded… a chance to express and entreprenural spirit.

Connected technologies afford us a lot of things. But, if we don’t remain aware of the presence of how our lives intersect with others, and the opportunities that open up to us in that, then this tech is nothing more than just a connect to a stream. A stream where others just pass around. But we are there with a life jacket or directions to shore… being a presence towards something more than just another way to connect.

Securing the Doors Around Here

Update: the HTTPS piece talked about here has been turned off for the moment as it was the reason for the downtime today. It will come back. So please take note of the below as a bit of a preemptive note.

As if there isn’t enough news going around these days about data, access, and security, one of the more recent pieces that has sounded an alarm is the news of a botnet (automated scripts that act like tiny computers within programs) that is aiming to use WordPress-powered blogs for generally making a bit of nasty noise around the web. Since MMM is among many faith/tech sites that uses WordPress, we’ve been going about adding some measures of security to the site here – and its noticable that it will have an effect on how you consume information around here.

If you are coming here direcly by typing in the URL (as about 45% of our visitors do), you will have noticed a note about the security certificate for the page, and then you would have noticed that we are now running the site with SSL enabled. You notice this specifically by the https:// that is in the URL field of this page. That’s the biggest piece of friction and has actually resulted in about 2/3 of the traffic that we normally see in that organic fashion going away. Crazy drop I know, but if it means that the information here remains usable in a secure manner, that’s going to have to be the case.

Enabling SSL, along with a few other features behind the scenes, happened to be enabled by the use of the WordPress plugin Better WP Security. Better WP Security enables all kinds of neat features that you would normally need to know a bit about network security to implement, while also adding some semblance of sanity through log reviews, IP blocking, and site database backups. Being that MMM is no stranger to strange visitors, this is a very important measure of security that we needed to implement, and frankly probably comes at a great time. Our server admin also considers it a good thing to add, even though its not necessarily the route they would have gone with (they are admins, they know things too).

The SSL tweak has broken pages for a number of visitors. The biggest break is actually on the side of our RSS feeds. You will need to check your feed address – its needs the https:// then mobileministrymagazine.com/feed in order to work properly. Yes, I’m still using Feedburner (feeds.feedburner.com/mobileminmag – I think that’s it), but if that service was also to be cut off by Google, you need to know how to get our content in the most direct way as possible.

For those of you not coming to MMM through any of our apps/experiments, you can still get to MMM content through our HTML5/jQuery web app, or by the (only?) mobile ministry portal out there – MobMin.Info. Either one puts our content in front of you in a mobile-friendly, quick, and contextually-relevant manner. Who knows… we might just let those stay as the entry points while the rest of the web works itself out.

Other than that, content will still flow to and through our Twitter feed (@mobileminmag). And there will also be a slew of content posted by others at Twitter, Pinterest, and other social media outlets if you search for #mobmin. There’s a growing body of conversations and works happening, and MMM is proud to be a part of that conversation.

I’m sure that our folks who work in the mobile security space will have more to add to this thread, and that conversation remains open here and other places. If anyone has continued advice for MMM, please don’t hesitate to drop us a line.

For some other tips on how to secure your WordPress blogs, visit this recent article at Internet Evangelism Day – with IE Day coming up in a few days (April 21st) this makes even more sense to be on top of for your ministry communications.

[Video] April Mobile Minsitry Notes

As we’ve done the past months, here’s a video(cast) about those things related to mobile ministry. We talk a bit about the Mobile Ministry Forum, as well as some newly acquired tech and how that’s being used here at MMM. Take a peek and let us know what you think of these videos.

Watch previous months videocasts:

Also, you can check out other videos about mobile ministry.

How Do You Keep Up with Mobile Ministry

Mobile Minsitry Magazine al version loaded on Kindle Fire HD, via Twitter

Of the major news items to hit the internet in the past weeks, the shutting down of Google Reader seems to have hit many journalists, bloggers, and information gatherers pretty hard. Google Reader is a website by which you can collect website subscriptions and view them all in one place. Google Reader is based on a technology called RSS (developed by Dave Winer) that’s pretty much a core feature for many kinds of applications around the web (Facebook newsfeeds, Flipboard, etc. all use RSS or its technologies in whole or part).

With Google Reader shutting down though, its going to become a bit harder for some folks to keep up with those things happening in spaces they pay attention to. I’ve thought about this as it relates to mobile minsitry – which would be described by many as the long-tail of faith-based conversations, mobile, or technology new. Long-tail means that it happens at the edge, and there’s not a great maiinstream media component to it. Those whom are involved in keeping the subject handy are few, and therefore the audience is usually made up of people who go out to find the source, more than news driving them there.

Google Reader has been a key component towards following up on many news bits that make it here. But, I’ve started to take steps to ween myself from there as I look for a better solution that fits my multi-device lifestyle. Part of my solution has been to invent my own RSS reader. That’s something that’s going along well, but I clearly don’t have the coding chops to make Google Reader, so I’m working along the features that I want, and the features that I can build. Doing so had me thinking about the audience here, and what you all might do.

We have this property called MobMin.Info which is a portal page towards those things about mobile minsitry – and it could be updated to point to RSS feeds of the sites featured there, in addition to being more dynamic towards showing the latest articles from those featured sites. Having coded something similar to this on my personal site, I see where it could work, and where it could probably cause a problem for some folks.

And for MMM, we’ve got this HTML5-based, dynamic landing page that does similar. The only real issue there is that it only points to content here, and only to a snippet of the latest posts. It does hav e a working search feature though. That could be something.

Still, that’s solutions made for one person, not a movement. So, the question stands: “how do you keep up with mobile ministry topics?” And what could be done better if you have stopped doing so?

Perhaps there’s an answer out there that doesn’t look like anything proposed,, but gives us all something to look forward to as information and connectivity become even more embedded into how this space evolves.

Multi-Lingual Digital Libraries

Responding to a friend’s email, we were asked what might be some of the best multi-lingual digital libraries? First, a small listing, then some reasoning to why this isn’t a separate page on this site (unlike the way we’ve done apps, resources, and services).

Reasons Why This Isn’t A Separate Page

When this question was asked, I remembered a conversation with the late WS Keel as to why this wasn’t out there already? Why is it that people have to search  far and hard to find a semblance of a library of digital content that works with various connected and mobile devices? My answer to him was quite simple: “a digital library is of no good use when there’s nothing to read it on.” MMM took the approach of pointing to mobile containers for this content. And left it to the greater digital-enabled Body to develop the hooks to connect content into these and former relevant media spaces.

The other reason that you don’t see this as a separate page is that there’s really not much in they way of local content except by a few providers. When you speak of audio content, much of it comes through Faith Comes By Hearing. They really are the leaders of audio biblical resources in this respect. That also means that if there’s work being done, its either under their umbrella, or overshadowed by the legal and logistical issues of being a small fish in a big pond.

Lastly, and most importantly, the legal issues. Instead of writing this again, I recommend the Copyright and the Kingdom (slideshow, PDF) from Tim Jore of Distant Shores Media.

Now, if there’s enough buzz from this post (probably from those libraries that I’ve missed), to make this a page to itself, I’ll do it. But, until the Body gets it together in several facets, we’ll continue to have a hard go of things finding not just multi-lingual Christian resources, but simply finding resources at all.

Content Submission

If you create content and would like to submit it for inclusion into any of these libraries, let me recommend that you do so to open libraries such as Open Bible Stories, Project Gutenberg, and Open Church. Its not that the others aren’t good, its just that they aren’t open to all of the world (yet).

Tweets, Analytics, and Reflections

Its been a nice and busy week technologically and spiritually. Concerning mobile tech, we saw in introduction of the Samsung Galaxy S4 as the headline for the week. Concerning those things spiritual, the Roman Catholic Church introduced its new pope, Pope Francis, an Argentinean. Lots to think about, and amazingly enough, it took a tweet and some analytics to put it to the forefront.

Perhaps its not right that the tweet should have started things, but or brother in the faith @bibliata pointed to this TwitPic by @JayCaruso:

Share photos on twitter with Twitpic

Now, @bibliata tweeted that this is a picture of mobile ministry. My response is that its merely a picture of using tech to capture a moment. Ministry hasn’t happened yet. You see, when I saw that directed tweet, I immediately thought of James 1:23-27. That idea of ministry being derived from one of the clearer passages of Scripture which detail the outcome of this faith. Amazingly, these are the standards that Pope Francis is being painted towards esteeming the most.

That didn’t motivate much in the way of anything. I’m actually stalling from two projects as I write this. But, I turned towards MMM and took a peek at the analytics as we had a spike a few days ago (that Google-juice caused by Hacking Imaginations was pretty sweet to a lot of folks). And saw some other things that just pointed at some of the contrasts demonstrated with Samsung and Pope Francis.

Technology Ratchets was a piece that still rings as a mark of the disruption that mobile tech can be in various capacities. Samsung clearly realized it, and designed the SG4 around it. But what about the church. Pulling something nearly prophetic, the rise of the church in Central and South America isn’t just a matter of changing economies, but a changing view of what matters the most in all communities (relationships, family, and consistent beliefs demonstrated in daily actions). Its not just what you swing, but how what you swing effects your life and those around you.

We have been playing with augmented reality (#AR) pretty often this year, and our experiments with Layar have been something to behold. Sure, we can do neat things here at MMM, but the value of it isn’t going to make sense until its applied to your life. Samsung’s GS4 has so, so many features. Many of which that I can look at and say “I’d use that,” and “hey, my Nokia N95 used to do that.” But, its really all about what gets life done. I hope that Pope Francis is adamant about pointing that the Holy Spirit is the best life companion any of us could have, while admitting the Babel effect that having a companion in your pocket can cause.

That’s where the next piece in our analytics makes things even more interesting. Our insistence that if you are going to go mobile that you should embrace its unique characteristics isn’t lost on some folks. There are a number of folks that I’m coming across who tell me things like “I don’t have a PC, can I just show it to you on my phone,” and that kind of activity makes me smile. Of course, these are people to whom public services such as libraries or personal commodities such as owning a tablet or a laptop isn’t normal. They really do everything on their mobiles. Samsung seems to recognize this in their latest, does the church continue to understand and navigate to a similar communicative state?

Lastly, there was a piece last year where I talked about the beginnings of the All Books Project and this idea of spatial interfaces. Interfacing not only with content in a linear manner, but one that also takes into account context and physical space. Its pretty hard to wrap your mind around, or, you can just take a look at some of the neat features in that new Galaxy 4 mobile and start from there. Interacting with your mobile in space… and then what? What happens next? Who’s life is impacted by your ability to take a photo on both sides of the lense, or with whom do you share that gallery of images from your missions trip? How do you show someone who needs to better manage their health how their mobile can participate with that? Or, do you leave them to that part of their life’s space without accountability?

It was only a tweet and some analytics, but it got me thinking about the two main news themes of this week. New tech and new positions are good. Lives that empower others are better. What’s in your hand that can change the world around you?

Four Places to Start Building a Mobile Strategy

Always nice to pass through leaders of thought and action in the business community and find avenues of shared interest. One of the latest of these shared interests is in the area of mobile strategy. Mobile strategy, or the behavior and processes used to instigate some kind of activity which uses mobile technologies (devices, services, and/or experiences), is a hot topic. However much we know that mobile can be a part of efforts, we sometimes just find it hard to get a starting step as to what would work. Thankfully, its not all that hard to figure out some of these. The folks over at the Harvard Business Review have recently posted on the topic, and here are four of their ideas for a starting point for mobile strategy:

  1. Use the power of mobile-at-retail and re-think the impulse purchase

  2. Get in on the ground floor of mobile video
  3. Amplify TV spend through integration
  4. Monetize mobile media


Now, you’d need to go to the article to read in detail how these would come into play for developing a mobile strategy. Its only right to say that these found might not be the four you’d choose if you are also thinking in the framework of a mobile ministry context.

What might be four areas that you’d choose in terms of creating a mobile ministry strategy? How would any of them differ from what HBR has posted? How might you leverage some of the same lessons from the items HBR has posted for crafting your strategy?

Mobile Churches Are/Aren’t Global Churches

A good brother in the faith, who also has a unique niche towards social media use in ministry recently published an article titled Mobile Churches Are Global Churches. I happened to be in the midst of travel when reading it, so I had to hold my pause on the title until I got to reading the piece. When I did, I didn’t so much see how mobile churches are global churches… but I didn’t see how they aren’t global either.

Caston starts off his article with the analogy of the oft-connected believer:

With more smart phones, tablets and other mobile devices being produced and sold than ever before, people are staying connected, from the office, the dentist, the chiropractor, the grocery store, and everywhere else that their busy day takes them. If not already the case, there will soon be more mobile internet users logged on at any given time than those using stationary personal computers and laptops combined.

Its a pretty normal thing in developed nations to see people connected to several streams of content via various computing devices. Depending on the region and the level of economic development (economic class), how those mobiles are being used to stay connected, informed, and entertained does indeed vary. The question that sits there for ministries is whether the person who is always connected looking for a specific engagement (or brand) of faith, or is faith seen in a distinctly separate space from places they would consider mobile (or other connected) technologies to be useful. Ministries would like to say “yes, everyone is looking to connect to God always and its our job to make sure they have a road into spiritual transformations by whatsoever media we can use.” That might be the right perspective for a ministry, but how about for the consumer (re: believer who doesn’t create content, just consumes it).

Caston then goes into the one of the frequent entry points people have towards doing something on their mobile that’s not simply talking on their phone (remember, we are talking about developed nations that have a consistent communications infrastructure and many media channels for their audiences): mobile websites. His perspective here implies that every public facing ministry needs to have a web presence that’s accessible on a mobile device. However, the first segment of the population that is spoken to are those who already have a website:

To do this, you will have hire someone to reformat your site for a variety of devices. You can then employ a “sniffer” program that will immediately detect what kind of device is accessing your site, and it will present the most readable site format for that particular device, whether it is a PC, laptop, cell phone or tablet.

Now, I’m not opposed to hiring someone for the purpose of redesigning a website, nor am I opposed to seeking consultation towards what might be the best methods to apply within an existing website to make it mobile friendly, I don’t think though that you first look at hiring someone for this. There are plenty of resources and guides, and even better, there are several web services that for free to low to high costs, can give you the tools to make your ministry website mobile. Sometimes, that includes getting a mobile app or two made alongside it.

But, none of it guarantees that you will get global Gospel penetration, only that those who know to search for you will find you. And if your content is only written to your local faith community, well, you can have it on a mobile, but it will only be a local church being served.

Caston’s article finishes with a look at some location-based (LBS) activities which can be done on a mobile which are able to ignite some of that mobile juice that marketers tend to love a bit more than the rest of us ;)

Certain applications allow a user to check in, via the GPS feature in a smart phone, virtually broadcasting where that user is. This allows nearby businesses to send them coupons and discount offers, along with letting their friends know where they are, in case they happen to be nearby and want to connect. When people check in to announce that they’re attending your church services or special event, this brings a great deal of positive exposure for your organization.

Personally, I’m only a fan of location-based services when they add definitive contextual value to something that I’m doing. When we level up that experience beyond small groups to community-sized levels, we’ve got a lot more to consider rather than just being the target of a broadcast by that community manager.

We’ve also got to consider that there are others who would appreciate that information for their efforts, that there might be device or service constraints that aren’t apparent when we get started (for example, have you ever tried unsubscribing from some of these services), and that there are some legal issues that we have to answer as a community as there are personal and civil liberties which come into play once we start allowing for the recording of demographic data.

The other side of things is that LBS as a genre isn’t a global poke, its always a local one. And its always one that should meet the person in a specific context without taking or offering anything else. Normally, LBS services fund themselves either by reselling the user’s demographic information, adding ads (costs for posting ads and selling analytics from those ads), or by freemium models (free for some time or small set of features, then you pay for more). While the service availability might be global (for example Nokia and Google’s mapping services), the relevancy of that information is always right now and local. How much does your faith community publish about local events that you need a dedicated service on your mobile for just what they would recommend? Or, would a city guide be a better place and avenue for this content? Is your faith community’s mobile efforts being put towards being in those existing databases, websites, or app directories?

That all being said, is going mobile a prescription for making faith (or a faith community) global? No, not really. Global considerations are a lot more than mobile websites and LBS. If you are looking to utilize for a global impact, here are some of the items you need to consider as being truly global issues of relevancy:

  • supporting multiple languages in text, audio, and video content
  • marketing and building for least common mobile experiences (SMS, MMS, WAP, Web, then App)
  • less reliance on reading content and more on visualizing content (less text more story)
  • is your audience subject to religious enabling or persecution because of what you’ve produced that they would consume
  • will you travel to those places your content goes in order to meet the people whom you say your global content is for
  • how many people are included when you say the global church; do you talk currently to any of them

Jason’s article is solid enough to start the conversation. The thoughts here should continue things along that end and endear you or your ministry to not just consider going mobile because others are doing it, but because you’ve got a clear and defined plan of utilizing the best and unique features of mobile to live a Gospel that’s present and relevant beyond the screen and keypad.

Rethinking The Purpose

Its been a bit quiet here as work and new tech has taken up a bit more time recently. But, that time away hasn’t really been spent away from some of what makes MMM tick. It got to a point one day that the thoughts about this #mobmin space started to overflow. Of note, this tweet:

I’m spending more and more time with people who are asking for Christians to live in such a way (especially with one another) that its unmistakable that Jesus Christ is the Son of God. That’s hard to tell when so many people are heads-down on their mobile devices, nodding approvingly to sounds no one else hears, or forwarding along the next social meme. I’ve got people pulling up their phones to show proof of banking transactions, but processes asking them for paper. Or, cases where folks lose ID cards, and it would almost make too much sense to use a Foursqure-like service alongside some kind of visual verification kiosk instead. Folks are either asking or being subjected to the lack of thinking through tech, and I’m seeing it and wanting more to spend the time addressing those, rather than making yet another app/service.

I don’t wonder about what is or isn’t happening in this space anymore. Only if we are paying attention to what we are doing with it, and the outcomes from it. If we aren’t, will the things after mobile also point out one of the major blindspots that we neglect?

Are we truly using computing to point and enable one another towards living in God? Or, are these Godly distractions from something more important to address?

Resolutions Checkup for March ’13

march 2013 calendar 1

February has that tendency to move oh-so-fast. And even then, its one of those months that can just roll past without so much of a peep. Still, we’ve been able to see some progress on our resolutions:

  1. Explain, emphasize, and demonstrate the theological underpinnings to mobile ministry
  2. Detail and expand on knowledge of Non-English Language/Cultural expressions of mobile ministry
  3. Increase number of and collaboration with ministry partners
  4. Refine and release v2 of the Mobile Ministry Methodology
  5. Embed Mobile, Not Mobile As Layer

For the first one, the work getting ready for a summer course that we are teaching and the Digital Literacy Project are making some ways forward there. I’ll have to push better on number 2, but a late addition of the Bible app Web Evangelismo (Android and iOS) is a good sign. An upcoming meeting with some folks from the MMF later this month will be a better gage towards number 3. Number 4 will take some time – purposely. And the last one, well, you’ll just have to wait and see ;)

How are you doing with your resolutions? We are three months into things, hopefully you are also making some decent progress.