Faith at Work March 21, 2008
Posted by Steve in : Internet Resources, DifferenceMakers, Entrepreneuring, Fanfuego.com, Faith at Work , add a commentAs I get ready to transition out of Park with the soon-to-open new ministry center, I am reflecting a lot on my new role as the CEO of a new company FanFuego.com, the leading multi-sport social network for sports fans, and my leadership style and faith at work. I came across a great article in the New York Times from a while back that looks at the issue of faith in the marketplace, including an interesting inside look at Christians working at Intel.
The article talks about many examples of faith in the marketplace and has a seciton on the reporter’s visit where sixteen engineers and programmers sat around a table during lunch hour, eating pizza and sandwiches from the company cafeteria and discussing the Book of Ruth. William McSpadden, a 43-year-old design engineer, father of five and hardcore weekend soccer coach, led the Bible study. He describes the 200 or so local participants in the Intel Bible-Based Christian Network as ”about half conservative Christians, even fundamentalists, with the rest being Presbyterians, Methodists, Catholics and the like.”
Intel has been in the forefront of public corporations that brought religion into the mix of their employee groups, thanks in part to the fact that one of its corporate heads, Patrick Gelsinger, its chief technology officer, is an evangelical Christian who has written a book on faith and work. The Bible network became an authorized company affinity group in 1997. There are four Bible-study sessions per week at the Intel - Jones Farm campus, where 4,700 of the company’s 15,000 employees work, plus special events and a monthly faith-at-work community-outreach gathering at a local Borders. ”When I started at Intel in 1983, we had an informal Bible-study group,” McSpadden says after the Bible-study meeting as he erases the whiteboard and his colleagues head back to work. ”The company probably didn’t even know it was going on. Its being formalized basically makes life easier. It means I can book a conference room without feeling I’m going against company wishes.”
Take a read here.
Barna — A New Perspective on Unchurched March 6, 2008
Posted by Steve in : Breaking News, Church, Urban Church, Methods & Strategies, Missional, The Cultural Conversation, Internet Resources , add a commentAccording to a new study released by The Barna Group, popular measures such as the percentage of people who are “unchurched” - based on attendance at a conventional church service - are out of date. Various new forms of faith community and experience, such as house churches, marketplace ministries and cyberchurches, must be figured into the mix - and make calculating the percentage of Americans who can be counted as “unchurched” more complicated. The fact that millions of people are now involved in multiple faith communities - for instance, attending a conventional church one week, a house church the next, and interacting with an online faith community in-between - has rendered the standard measures of “churched” and “unchurched” much less precise. According to Barna, one way of examining people’s participation in faith communities is by exploring how they practice their corporate faith engagement. Unveiling a new measurement model, Barna identified the following five segments:
Unattached - people who had attended neither a conventional church nor an organic faith community (e.g., house church, simple church, intentional community) during the past year. Some of these people use religious media, but they have had no personal interaction with a regularly-convened faith community. This segment represents one out of every (more…)
Now Get 20 Million Minutes By Email! March 6, 2008
Posted by Steve in : Breaking News, Internet Resources, Entrepreneuring , add a comment
Are you flying around all week at work and would rather have any new posts from 20 Million Minutes sent directly to you by email or RSS? After a number of requests, we have now added both of those options to the 20 Million Minutes blog! All of our feeds have been migrated to Feedburner, which provides better options for you.
EMAIL:You can get an email sent to you whenever there is a new post. Just click here to go the the Feedburner feed and put in your email to get 20 Million Minutes delivered by email. Then, whenever a post is made to this blog, you will receive an email, right to your desktop once a day. It is that simple!
RSS FEEDS:
For those of you who are more tech-savvy, and are using a newsreader program to aggregate your information feeds, you can add this manually to your RSS news reader with the following URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/stevelavey or click here to go to the feed page and just click on the graphic of your new reader for easy, one-touch adding of this feed to any of the popular newsreaders (yahoo, google, newsgator, etc).
PASS IT ON TO YOUR FRIENDS!
If you know of someonethat would like to learn more about the city, faith and culture, church growth strategies, multi-site churches, etc, please pass on this post to them.
Get Rid of Those Catalogs — Easily March 5, 2008
Posted by Steve in : Breaking News, Adaptive Reuse, Internet Resources, Culture and Faith , 2commentsMy wife and I are studying “Restoring Margin in our Overloaded Lives” in our small group study and what a time a personal reflection — we are looking at all the things that barrage and steal away our time and our attention.
Sue got wind of this site that let’s you opt out of catalogs you receive in your mail almost every day. CatalogChoice.org is a free service that allows you to decide what gets in your mailbox so use it to reduce your mailbox clutter, while helping save natural resources.
Who They Are
Catalog Choice is a sponsored project of the Ecology Center. It is endorsed by the National Wildlife Federation and the Natural Resources Defense Council, and funded by the Overbrook Foundation, the Merck Family Fund, and the Kendeda Fund.
Their mission
The mission of Catalog Choice is to reduce the number of repeat and unsolicited catalog mailings, and to promote the adoption of sustainable industry best practices. We aim to accomplish this by freely providing the Catalog Choice services to both consumers and businesses. Consumers can indicate which catalogs they no longer wish to receive, and businesses can receive a list of consumers no longer wanting to receive their catalogs. If you can believe it, the Catalog Choice community has already opted out of 8,072,914 catalogs, improving their lives, and conserving our planet’s natural resources!
Background on Catalog Shippers
While catalog shopping may provide some environmental benefits, the millions of unwanted catalogs Americans receive in their mailbox represent a significant environmental burden, devouring natural resources, generating pollutants, and clogging municipal waste systems—for something that quickly ends up in the trash or recycling bin. While catalog companies make it easy to receive a catalog, consumers frequently find it frustrating and time consuming to get their names off these mailing lists, especially when they receive catalogs from multiple direct mailers. The industry mails more than 19 billion catalogs a year to Americans—approximately 170 catalogs for every U.S. household !
Do it NOW - Clean out your mailbox! Click HERE
Illinois — In the High Tech Leader Pack May 13, 2007
Posted by Steve in : The City, Chicago, Technology, Internet Resources , add a commentAt Park Community Church, we believe that Chicago (and Illinois) is the most important place to live and minister. It is a place that attracts people for job opportunities, access to culture and the arts, educational opportunities, and quality of life. However, the continued success of Chicago as a global city that influences the world is somewhat dependent on the future job environment and the ability to retain college graduates as the next generation arrives to continuing renewing and regenerating Chicago.
So I was glad to see that Illinois ranked 7th in the nation in a recent report on high tech employment. The Chicago Tribune reports that the Cyberstates 2007 survey, which focuses on employment activity in both 2005 and 2006, ranks Illinois seventh nationally in terms of the number of high-tech jobs. In Illinois, more than 200,000 people had some kind of tech-related work, an increase of 1,200 jobs in 2005. (National employment data was available for 2006 but state-specific information from the Bureau of Labor of Statistics lags by nine months, the survey notes.)
“Chicago is a fabulous place to live and attract talent,” Kelly Smith, vice president of corporate marketing for Navteq, the digital mapmaker. said, noting that the city’s central location helps employees travel (more…)
Lyrics on Line April 30, 2007
Posted by Steve in : Internet Resources , add a commentAre you looking for the words to a song that seems to jangle around in your brain but the song is 20 years old? Well the next time you’ve just got to find the lyrics to Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven“, click on over to LyricWiki, a large and growing database of over 200K lyric pages. While the Christian section has a long way to go, you can search by artist or title, with lots of background info.
ht: Lifehacker
