Archive for April, 2008

Communication Revolution, Part 1:: Text Updates

by Tim Schraeder on 04/24/2008 in Church Communications, Examples, Social Media with 6 Comments

So, it’s been awhile since I’ve written about communications on my blog… mainly because I’ve been rethinking and restructuring the way we do communication at Park.

Here’s some vitals on us… Park is made up of about 60% singles and our average age is 31; our largest ministry is our young adult ministry (ministry to 22-34 year olds); and pretty much everyone who attends our church works in the Loop and lives in the city of Chicago. Most of the people who attend our church come for about 2 years on average. They come to the city to go to school, start their jobs and before you know it they are transferring jobs or schools, or they are getting married and moving the suburbs. Our people are high-energy, motivated, educated, and urbanites to the core.

The last year that I’ve been here, I’ve been watching, learning, and figuring out different ways we can better communicate to our people in a way they can connect with.

So, just a week or so away from my one year anniversary of coming on staff at Park, the Communication Revolution is beginning. Over the next month or so, I’ll be sharing some of the things we are doing differently here including a new logo, new website, new print philosophy and more!

But for today here’s Part 1 :: Text Message Updates

I text more than I call people on the phone on any given day. I’ve actually lowered my cell phone plan to the lowest amount of talk time and the maximum number of texts I can send. That’s just how I communicate.

Gone are the days of a phone tree or calling service… yes, people still use it.

We’ve been using email to communicate to people at Park and it’s worked well for us, but the problem with it was that we started to send too many. Way too many. And even though we’ve cut down the number of emails we send, watching the stats, we’re seeing a lot of them go unread.

The solution? Well, we’re continuing to streamline the emails we send out, but needed another way to get news out to our people, and this Sunday we are introducing text updates to our church.

We found a great texting service that costs next to nothing and enables people to text the word “PARK” to a number and be added to our list (we can also manually add people or they can sign up on the web). At any point, we can shoot a text to anyone who signs up to remind them about major things that impact the entire church like church service
time/location changes (which for us is a normal occurrence), major
events, emergencies, and reminders (Daylight Savings Time, etc.).

To promote it to our church this weekend, me and Park’s new media director, Jason Widney, put together this small ‘commercial’, following Apple’s lead. Check it out:

FYI for non-Park people, Jackson Crum is our lead pastor.

It will be interesting to see how it’s received this weekend, I’ll let you know. But, we are pretty excited about it and the potential it has to help us better communicate to our church in a way they connect with.

Moby

by Tim Schraeder on 04/23/2008 in Chicago, Music with No comments

My friend Paul randomly emailed me yesterday and said Moby was doing a free concert in Chicago last night. So, after hitting the gym and grabbing dinner, I headed up to Wrigleyville to SmartBar to check it out.

Apparently it was a myspace secret show, but it wasn’t much of a secret… the line to get in was all thew way down the street. Fortunately, Paul and his friend had been in line since about 9 PM, so when I got there at 9:30 we were almost right at the door.

It was a pretty crazy experience. Moby is an incredibly talented musician/DJ/entertainer and the show and the crowd were very interesting.

I think the thing that struck me the most was seeing the people respond to the music. Music does something to people. It moves us, literally, but it also sort of takes us to another place. It brings connection to something. As a Christ-follower, I guess you’d call it worship… and seeing people dancing and raising their hands I couldn’t help but think about the fact that we are all spiritual beings who are created to worship something.

As Louie Giglio says:

We’re created to worship. That’s why you and I are going to spend our lives declaring the worth of something. As a result, we’ve got to make sure the thing we declare to be of greatest value is really worth after all. For me, I’ve got to keep making sure that what matters most – matters most to me. The same is true of you. It’s imperative that you find an object worthy of affection. It’s essential that you find a God worthy of life’s devotion. You only have one life. And you only have one life of worship. You have one brief opportunity in time to declare your allegiance, to unleash your affection, to exalt something or someone above all else. Don’t waste your worship on some little god, squandering your birthright on idols made only with human imagination… and carefully evaluate all potential takers.

Pretty deep moment for a Moby concert I know, but I was just struck with that as I looked at the crowd and took in the whole experience. People are desperately seeking to find something to take them somewhere, and I pray they find the Someone who will… Someone worthy of their worship.

The Return of the Prodigal Son

by Tim Schraeder on 04/14/2008 in Books with No comments

I just finished what I think is going to be one my favorite books of all time, The Return of the Prodigal Son by Henri J.M. Nouwen. It could just be where I’m at in my life right now and what God is doing in my life that made it such an important read for me, but either way, it’s sparked something in me that’s just messed me up (in a good way).

The book centers on the story of the prodigal son and Rembrandt’s painting of it.

This sums it up for me:

[The father] sees far and wide. His seeing is an eternal seeing, a seeing that reaches out to all of humanity. It is a seeing that understands the lostness of women and men of all times and places, that knows with immense compassion the suffering of those who have chosen to leave home, that cried oceans of tears as they got caught in anguish and agony. The heart of a the father that burns with an immense desire to bring his children home.

Oh, how much would he have liked to talk to them, to warn them against the many dangers they were facing, and to convince them that at home can be found everything that they search for everywhere. How much would he have liked to pull them back with his fatherly authority and hold them close to himself so that they would not get hurt.

But his love is too great to do any of that. It cannot force, constrain, punish, or pull. It offers freedom to reject that love or to love in return. It is precisely the immensity of the divine love that is the source of the divine suffering. God, creator of heaven and earth, has chosen to be, first and foremost, a father.

As Father, he wants his children to be free, free to love. that freedom includes the possibility of leaving their home, going to a “distant country” and losing everything. The Father’s heart knows all the pain that will come from that choice, but his love makes him powerless to prevent it. As Father, he desires that those who stay at home enjoy his presence and experience his affection. But here again, he wants only to offer love that can be freely received. He suffers beyond telling when his children only honor him with lip service, while their hearts are far from him. He knows their “deceitful tongues” and “disloyal hearts,” be he cannot make them love him without losing his true fatherhood.

As Father, the only authority he claims for himself s is the authority of compassion. That authority comes from letting the sins of his children pierce his heart. There is no lust, greed, anger, resentment, jealousy or vengeance in his lost children that has caused immense grief to his heart. The grief is so deep because the heart is so pure. From the deep inner place where love embraces all human grief, the Father reacher out to his children. The touch of his hands, radiating light, seek only to heal.

Here is the God I want to believe in: a Father, who from the beginning of creation, has stretched out his arms in merciful blessing, never forcing himself on anyone, but always waiting; never letting his arms drop down in despair, but always hoping that his lost children return so that he can speak words of love to them and let his tired arms rest of their shoulders. His only desire is to bless.

The Father wants to say, more with his touch than with his voice, good things of his children. He has no desire to punish them. They have already been punished excessively by their own inner or outer waywardness. The Father wants simlpy to let them know that the love they have searched for in such distorted ways has been, is, and always will be there for them. The Father wants to say, more with his hands than with his mouth: “You are my Beloved, on you my favor rests.”

The Meaning of Sin & Faith

by Tim Schraeder on 04/01/2008 in Books with No comments

I’m almost done with The Reason for God by Tim Keller and I have to tell you, it’s a fantastic read. It outlines some hard questions of the Christian faith and goes on to explain the truth of why we believe what we believe. He did an awesome job defining sin and faith that really made sense to me…

Quoting Soren Kierkgaard, he says:

“Sin is: in despair not wanting to be oneself before God… Faith is: that the self in being itself and wanting to be itself is grounded transparently in God.”

He goes on to say:

Sin is the despairing refusal to find your deepest identity in your relationship and service to God. Sin is seeking to become oneself, to get an identity, apart from him.

Everyone gets their identity, their sense of being distinct and valuable, from somewhere or something. Human beings were not only to believe in God in some general way, but to love him supremely, center their lives on him above everything else, and build their identities on him. Anything other than this is sin.

Most people think of sin primarily as “breaking divine rules,” but the primary way to define sin is not just the doing of bad things, but making of good things into ultimate things. It is seeking to establish a sense of self by making something else more central to your significance, purpose, and happiness than your relationship to God.

Everybody has to live for something. Whatever that something is becomes “Lord of your life,” whether you think of it that or not. Jesus is the only Lord who, if you receive him, will fulfill you completely, and if you fail him, will forgive you eternally.