Folks will be able to access the Bible in a new way. “Bible Navigator X” will be downloadable through the “Indie Games” channel of Xbox.com.

Our good friend, and former co-worker, Aaron Linne is the executive producer of digital marketing for B&H. He’s been the champion for this technology and says “The Xbox isn’t just secular entertainment anymore. We can use technology that other people developed to study Scriptures through a new medium. Some people are just more comfortable with a controller in their hands than a book.”

In fact, users will have access to both the Old and New Testaments, and be able to perform the following tasks:

1. Browse through and read the Bible
2. Bookmark verses or passages
3. Conduct a word search (concordance-like)

In addition to all of the great features, Linne says, “Certainly it’s convenient to be able to quickly pull up a Bible verse on your television at home, but this is also a great tool for youth ministers who teach in youth spaces that already have Xbox consoles in them. It’s a quick way to create teaching aids from equipment you already have.”

“Bible Navigator X” will cost just 400 Microsoft Points ($5). That’s a steal (if it’s OK to steal the Bible).

We’ll make sure to feature this new technology as we find out more, and test it out on our own Xbox 360’s.

For more information about “Bible Navigator X” on Xbox 360, visit BibleNavigatorX.com.

Although many churches have continued to expand their staffs in this arena, I’ve observed a tendency to ignore one critical role on these teams: Project Manager. Maybe it’s just because most ministry-staffers are used to pulling double duty, but it seems as if project management falls by the wayside in the name of rushing to get things done quickly.

Although it may not be the first “critical-to-staff” position that comes to mind, project managers can be a valuable asset for three specific reasons:

• Someone “owns” the project. Rather than being passed around to different leadership teams with little accountability, one person can “own” the project and be responsible for organizing its progress and seeing things through to completion.
• Someone is mindful of and enforcing deadlines. Without project ownership, it can be all too easy to miss a deadline or leave out critical components simply because one hand isn’t talking to the other. The project manager has a bird’s eye view of progress/looming deadlines, and can remind specific areas of their requirements for a project.
• Other resources can be freed up to do what they were hired to do. For many creatives, planning meetings and flow charts are akin to back-to-back root canals. Project managers can take a lot of the administrative pressure off of your creative folks and enable your team to focus on the tasks God built them to do.

I realize not every staff has the luxury or capacity for specific project managers, but even assigning these tasks to a solid member of your current team will make a huge difference in the success of your next big project. It’s too important of a role to be overlooked.

How do things look at your church or ministry staff? Do you feel like your team has the members it needs?

• Playing Fantasy Football for money. Because it’s not gambling when you’re just “making things interesting.”
• Praying that God will fix a situation as long as you’re not part of the solution. Because being a “prayer warrior” is about as far has God has called you to go…
• Church Hugs. Because there’s a lot more strategy involved beyond the “A-Frame” (that’s a rookie move, son.).
• Making Purple - 11 Ways to Stop Camp Kissing. Because making members of the opposite sex swim at separate times just isn’t cutting it any more.

Take a look through their site if you’ve got a few minutes to burn today… These guys definitely gave me a few good laughs. Got one to add to the list? Pass it on in the comments below.

The report I received from Duncan Robinson is awesome.

The Biggies

• 10,000 to 15,000 folks came out this year (compared to 8,000 last year).
• Over 100,000 pieces of candy were handed out.

Strategy Takeaways

• They partnered up with the City of Maricopa, Walmart, and some other local businesses.
• I like how the event is named “Maricopa Trick or Treat.”  It shows the church places the community first instead of “Church of Celebration Trick or Treat.”  They literally came out to “love on” the community.

More Information

• Read about this “Epic” event on Duncan Robinson’s blog.
• A Successful Fall Festival
• View the photos

Your Church?

Use the comment form below to share how your fall festival turned out.  What worked?  What didn’t work?

Unified Comments

This is more of a wish than anything, and one that I’ve mentioned several times on Media Salt before. I’m playing around with a revised version of longhollow.com where all news, events and online messages have comments enabled and users can gather around these pieces of information and talk about it. This sort of functionality is already very successful on our Facebook Fan Page, and I want to carry that over to the main site.

The only issue is that I want users to see and contribute to the same stream of comments, no matter what site they’re on when they view them. It’s annoying to me to have two separate conversations going on about the same thing. For a while I thought Google’s Wave might be the answer to this, but I’m not sure if it’s intended for this sort of functionality.  Maybe through Facebook Connect somehow?

A Real Small Groups Tool

Whew, this is a big one. We use Fellowship One’s “Web Link” tools to allow many of our Small Group Leaders to update their own rolls and send email blasts to their groups. That’s about it. We have very little control over the look and feel of this experience, and there’s really no incentive for Small Group members to gather there when they’re online.

What I would like to see is a specific tool built around these groups where users could talk, share photos, plan events, share prayer requests, etc. Ideally, users would be able to login through Facebook Connect and receive information from their groups however they like (RSS, email updates, etc). I realize as I’m typing this that this all sounds pretty similar to Monk Development’s Cobblestone Communities (although I’m not sure if that’s exactly what I’m looking for).

What I’m weary of doing is creating yet another login and closed off site that users would have to go out of their way to access every day. Whatever solution we land on, it’s needs to easily fit with users as part of their daily online lives.

A Better Way to Handle Contacts

Here’s another piece of functionality that’s built into Fellowship One, but doesn’t work well for our team in every day church life. We’re looking for a better way for us to manage the various contacts we receive during weekly ministry activities. Ideally, a contact item could be entered into the system, assigned to a specific individual as a middleman, who could then intelligently assign the contact to a lay person or deacon who could do the legwork and make the personal touch. In our experience, Fellowship One’s solution (along with others) falls short when you want to assign contacts and follow-ups to somebody outside the staff. Maybe we’re just doing it wrong, but I’m convinced someone could come up with a better solution.

Does your expertise speak into any of these issues? What projects are you hoping to tackle over the next year or so?

The challenge was on when Cleve said he needed events on the new Chapel.org.

Well, I’ve never known a challenge I wasn’t up for, so I had to find just the right solution that would solve all the problems that you traditionally have with multi-site church calendars. We also had to create an interface that everyone could easily use, and with great flexibility.

I’ve fallen head over heels for anything with the word Google on it, so the choice was easy. Google Calendar!

This solution still posed several issues. I’ll dissect all of these below and explain exactly how we overcame them.

Google Limitations

• Tagging or categorizing events is not currently supported via the interface.
• Custom event fields are available through the API but not visible, and cannot be managed in the public calendar interface.

Challenges and Solutions

Setup calendar with categories on Google

Since Google doesn’t support tagging and/or event categories, we had to set up a calendar for each category combination that we wanted to view on the site. This seems like quite a bit of work, but in the end it offers the most flexibility when editing permissions — customizing who has access to edit any of those different groupings of events.

Examples of the calendar list:

• Barrington - Campus Events
• Barrington - Compassion
• Barrington - Kids
• Grayslake - Compassion
• Grayslake - Small Groups

Import events into ExpressionEngine database

This was definitely the most challenging, but Google and Zend have already done some really nice work, and I take no credit on the core of how this works. I basically put together some pieces of the puzzle that best fits the needs of Chapel.org with ExpressionEngine.

Here are the tools I used in order of how they were used.

• Google API: This is a great API (could use a bit more docs) that allows for almost anything to be done to any calendar. From login to log out you can accomplish it with this web service API.
• Zend PHP GData library: This library provides simple and easy objects that can be used in PHP to hit the Google API without having to write all the web service calls.
• Custom Google API Module (simplified chapel.org event feed and account management in the ee admin): [CLICK HERE for a full details  and sample code]
• An enhanced version of XMLGrab: XMLGrab lacked the ability to update existing entries so I had to add the update capabilities. I also moved the category inserts so it runs for both additions and updates and cleans out the previous assignments first. Finally, I expanded the category attributes to the tag so you can add categories from multiple locations in the xml, and expanded the insert and update of date fields so that they get added to ee with a fixed UTC timezone. This could certainly be pushed out to the tag, and would allow for more customized solutions.
• Cron Job: I added cron job to host the account that runs the url of the template containing the XMLGrab tag. The XMLGrab tag has a url attribute of the template that contains the Custom Google API Module tag. Custom Google API Module tag has a account attribute that contains the alias to the account in the module table which allows the module to login and build the xml.

Sync events with Categories

The XMLGrab wipes out and reloads all categories every time it inserts/updates events in the ExpressionEngine weblog. All new categories are added during this process. However, because of a bug (which I’ve yet to successfully track down) these new event categories will not show up correctly using the weblog module tags in my templates.

In order to avoid this issue:

• I preload ExpressionEngine with all the categories I know of.
• I allow XMLGrab to do the inserts anyway (should be rare if ever).
• During the insert I send an email to myself explaining what category was added.
• I manually delete and re-add the new category using the ExpressionEngine admin interface.
• I manually re-run the XMLGrab job.

Allow custom fields for events within Expression Engine

This has not been implemented, but you’ll notice it will be rather easy to do when the time comes.

• Create a second weblog for the EE Event Info.
• Add the fields you’d like to have available for each event.
• Use the Playa Field Type to allow multiple events to this metadata entry.

Disappointed that nobody gave you your favorite candy over the weekend? Despair no more… today’s your lucky day. That’s right, I have 15 invites to Google’s (debatably) useful Wave beta, and if you act fast, one of them could be yours!

Want one? All you have to do is leave a comment below telling us a creative way you think the Church could take advantage of Wave’s unique communication abilities. If you’re one of the first 15 to respond with a qualifying comment, you’ll get one of my invites; it’s that simple.

Be sure to leave a valid email address when you comment so we know where to send the invite; good luck!

Winners

Invites have been sent to the bolded names in the list below. If your name isn’t bolded, that means you’ve won, but I need an email address so I can send you an invite. You can send that email address to us at hello@mediasalt.com. If you haven’t responded in 24 hours, I’m going to give your invite to someone else!

• Aaron
• Phil
• Jack Minardi
• Josh Boone
• Scott Horberg
• Dave Hamilton
• Danielle Bean
• Dan Kassis
• Jenn Mathis Davis
• Adrian
• Jimbo Stewart
• Jeff Clark
• Beau Waldrep
• Anthony Bliss
• J.Mac Brown

It looks like the invitations won’t be sent instantaneously. Here are Google’s notes from within Wave itself…

Invitations will not be sent immediately. We have a lot of stamps to lick.

Thanks for all of the great comments everyone!

Giving Kiosk Pros

• Your giving isn’t limited by the location of your checkbook. A good chunk of our people just don’t carry their check books any more; if God prompts them to give during a service, they’re pretty much out of options unless they remember to do it online when they get home.
• It can still be an act of worship. Most kiosk vendors give the donor a receipt that they can drop in the offering plate when it’s passed around, so there’s still a connection to the act of tithing. Pretty cool.
• It can link up directly with our church database. This is a huge win on the administrative side of things; whenever someone gives at a kiosk, it’s automatically listed on their people record along with their other giving throughout the year.
• You can limit transactions to debit cards. This is a big deal to many churches like ours who offer financial counseling ministries and want to teach their people to live responsibly.

Potential Negatives

• Perception among visitors. Would it be a turn off for a visitor to see a few giving kiosks in the lobby whenever they come in? If we do install some, I think we’ll put them in locations that don’t scream “WE WANT YOUR MONEY!!!”
• Visibility. In a few of the demos I’ve seen, the amount given is shown in huge letters on the screen after a transaction is complete. That’s almost worse than someone making a show whenever they drop a Benjamin in the offering plate…
• Lines. We push hundreds of people through an increasingly small lobby space between services at our main campus; would a few kiosks be enough to handle demand without creating a logistical nightmare?

What do you think? Do you have any wisdom to add to the conversation? We would love to hear it in the comments below.

I’ll be facilitating a couple of breakouts with my wife Katie Persinger, and Katie Moon, from Fellowship Church.  We’re leading discussions on communication for the multi-site church — “Controlled Chaos.”

It was just revealed there will be a portion of Cultivate streamed live.  All you have to do is go to http://www.cultivateconference.com, starting at 9:00 a.m. CST.  Here’s the lineup:

• 9:10-9:50 AM — Phil Cooke
• 10:00-10:40 — Kem Meyer & Kent Shaffer
• 10:55-11:35 — Michael Forsberg & Tim Schraeder
• 1:50-2:30 PM — Clint! Runge
• 2:40-3:20 — Brad Abare & Maurilio Amorim
• 3:35-4:15 — Terry Storch & Bobby Gruenewald
• 4:25-5:05 — Jon Acuff

In addition, Cynthia Ware is doing some behind-the-scenes interviews with various facilitators throughout the day.

If you talk about cultivate on twitter, use hashtag “#cultivate09.”

Enjoy!

Fairhaven Church (Centerville, Ohio) recently contacted us about a job opening for a “Director of Communications” and asked us to spread the word through our audience. Do you think you’re up to the challenge? Check out the details after the break.

Fairhaven is a church of 4000 folks that are just about to begin their first satellite campus. Their communications team still reports directly to the Executive Pastor, so they’re looking for someone to come in and take charge. If you “eat, sleep and breathe communications” and can manage web, print, advertising and other communications responsibilities, this might be the job for you.

You can get more details and apply for this awesome position here; be sure to tell them that Media Salt sent you!

Do you have a job opening that you would like to promote through Media Salt? Feel free to email hello@mediasalt.com and we’ll help you spread the word!