I was watching the pre-show about THE NINES the other day, and watching the viewer counter. At one point it rose to 310 simultaneous viewers. Not bad as an indicator of an event that only began to be publicized 6 weeks earlier! Here’s some other info:

• The schedule assumes 9 hours of transmission – there’s 8.62 hours of raw footage already. I must say I’m a little surprised, since there are some 75 speakers, and who ever heard of anybody that ever got up into a pulpit to speak for less than the allotted time! My guess would have been for 75*9/60 = 11.25 hours – but they’ve got the files.
• Some 7,000 people have signed up to watch. And if I’m any indication, that only includes the signer-uppers, not all the additional people who are going to show up by invitation to watch.
• There will be some live cut-ins at the top and bottom of each hour – sounds like the Catalyst conference is going to do some advertising then.
• There is no schedule for the day yet – they may push one out during the day. This is a bit disappointing – while I want to find new people to listen to, I’d also like to know when people I’ve heard of (but never actually heard) will be on.
• It will be pushed at streaming quality (500 Kbps), not at satellite quality for most people.
• Recordings will be posted after the conference.

I’ll probably be blogging the conference here at Praise Christian Fellowship in CT – let me know in the comments if you’d like to join us.

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Imagine compressing the most important things you wanted to say to anyone into 9 minutes. If you were a skilled communicator, it would be a powerful message, wouldn’t it?

Now imagine sitting down with some of the best leaders in today’s church and hear what their “9 minutes” were. That’s the idea behind THE NINES. THE NINES is a free one-day conference that will take place totally on-line. It is designed for all current and potential pastors, church staff members and ministry leaders who want to be motivated and stretched in their leadership.

Over 6 dozen of the country’s best evangelical Christian leaders and communicators have each been given the opportunity to speak for a maximum of 9 minutes. At 9 minutes, you know each talk will be both intense and very specific.

THE NINES is an internet broadcast to be held on 9/9/09 at 9:09 Central (that’s 10:09am Eastern). These messages will help you and your church navigate into the future; each one will last a maximum of 9 minutes. Find out more at their web site here, and see their list of over 70 speakers – there’s the names of some impressive people whose books, blogs and tweets I read:

• Alan Hirsch (Forge Mission Training Network)
• Anne Jackson (FlowerDust.net)
• Dan Kimball (Vintage Faith Church)
• Dave Ferguson (Community Christian Church)
• Dino Rizzo (Healing Place Church)
• Ed Stetzer (Lifeway Research)
• Eric Bryant (Mosaic)
• Geoff Surratt (Seacoast Church)
• Greg Surratt (Seacoast Church)
• John Ortberg (Menlo Park Presbyterian)
• Larry Osborne (North Coast Church)
• Mark Batterson (National Community Church)
• Mark Driscoll (Mars Hill Church)
• Neil Cole (Church Multiplication Associates)
• Perry Noble (NewSpring Church)
• Pete Wilson (Cross Point Church)
• Scott Hodge (Orchard Valley Church)
• Scott Williams (LifeChurch.tv)
• Steven Furtick (Elevation Church)
• Troy Gramling (Flamingo Road Church)
  … along with 54 others that I’m looking forward to finding out about for the first time.

Praise Christian Fellowship is hosting THE NINES at 52 New Hartford Road, Barkhamsted, via internet feed. We’ll bring in lunch (bring a $5 donation to help cover costs) since the conference goes straight though the day. We’ve only just heard about this a few days ago, so unfortunately it’s pretty short notice. If you’d like to attend, please let us know in the comments .

Thanks – hope you can join us!

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How do you write an entire book about one simple thing? Dave Ferguson’s (@DaveFerguson) The Big Idea: Focus the Message, Multiply the Impact is a book about one thought, and you’d think it would be pretty hard for the author to get past the first chapter – after all, that’s a lot of extra writing to go through once you’ve presented your single thought.

It might be a simple thing, but it’s also profound yet counter-intuitive in today’s church – just say one thing at a time. Say it to everyone. Say it clearly and loudly. Strip away all the competition to it. Get everybody on board. Drop the busy-ness of multiple programs whose schedules and resource requirements conflict and simplify everything into a more-easily-led approach.

The Big Idea reminds me of a business book I read some 10 years ago – Jack Stack’s brilliant The Great Game of Business – a brief set of profound truths backed up by the mechanics of how to build them into the daily business structure. That was one of the most exciting business books I’ve ever read (and I’ve read a bunch) – head and shoulders above trivial feel-goods like ‘The Apple/HP/IBM/Microsoft/Starbucks Way’.

What Stack did, and what Ferguson has also done, is to flesh out the mechanics of the process in subsequent sections. This is a good approach – techies (like me) connect to a structure through the blueprint; those who need help understanding (also like me) appreciate the explanation of the details that make an example of it work.

Unfortunately, churches with a more traditional and committee-driven structure will not be fully free to indulge in this approach. But I’ve talked about this concept to several pastors, and those who were positioned to take advantage of the concept got very excited. The idea of replicating a single idea throughout the entire congregation has a dynamism that can be both exhilarating and freeing – a permission to follow the vision of their heart.

An excellent book – worth a re-read once in a while.

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Just finished reading Sticky Church (Leadership Network Innovation Series) by Larry Osborne (@LarryOsborne). When I started I was very resistant to his idea of small groups following the sermon each week. It seemed to be very limiting; if you were into something else (a book-by-book Bible study, for instance, or following a great speaker’s videos and discussing them (my small group has  just finished Mark Batterson’s Wild Goose Chase: Reclaim the Adventure of Pursuing God and is now on his In a Pit with a Lion on a Snowy Day: How to Survive and Thrive When Opportunity Roars)), then you were in the position where the church was pretty much dictating what your group should study.

As I continued reading, however, I have to say that the points he made resonated:

• Page 91 – the need for the church to take real life into account – people are busy; today’s world demands it; the new (& reversed) Christian pop analysis along the lines of ‘Busy hands are the devil’s playthings’ is not universally true;
• Page 94 – the need to control how much ‘stuff’ the church makes available for people to do. When the opportunities for events are moved onto the calendar, is the church leadership protecting its highest priority – or is it the church’s highest priority to be the busiest place in town?;
• Page 110 – small groups don’t run continually – they last for 10 weeks – and they have an easy exit strategy. However, once you have the relationships built, you may be with those people for many years (he calls this Mayberry, USA);
• Page 111 – small group leaders act as pastors to the group – when life throws a crisis, they’re in there for their small group members who need them.

Somewhere between chapters 5 and 12 I came to realize that he was talking about a rather different type of small group to the ones most churches have – these are mini-churches, people deeply committed to looking after one another, to the point that they do their own baptisms, even the hospital visitations. I also came to recognise the rationale behind the approach. Would it work across the board? Of course not, any more than the Chu method would (and indeed, Osborne is quick to point this out himself – every church is made up of a unique blend of people, cultures, economies, ages, and so on). But it has clearly worked for his church, and I’d love the opportunity to spend a few weeks there.

One thing I would have a real problem with, if I were at this church – the idea of  deliberately ‘hamstringing’ personal growth opportunities in the event that they get in the way of the small groups. The North Coast U. is crippled down to courses that consist of a maximum of 4 evenings.  The author makes the point that the average person can’t afford more than two meetings for church per week, therefore the church intentionally puts North Coast U on as a third meeting in the week! That’s just wrong. Now based on what I’ve read in the book, there are three alternatives they could use to support those people who wanted to know more – (1) they could run the school during the summer; (2) they could divert a group that was interested into the school for a 10-week session – this would also give the leader and the host an apparently much-needed break – or (3) the small groups are running for 10 weeks at a time – there would certainly be room to fit the course in between them. (Clearly this hit a chord in me!) This deeper education is something I think should be available in a church, and I think is denied to its members’ detriment. Too many of us do not know the Bible on anything but a superficial level. We therefore remain ill-equiped for either personal understanding or apologetics – and we’re missing a vital pillar of support during times of crisis, where we’re questioning rather than moving forward. However, the school is not the point of the book; I expect they redeemed it somewhere along the line.

I have to say I’m glad the author spent some time debunking some myths, including ‘divide to multiply’ – tried it and seen it fail – and challenged the standard views in a few other areas.

All in all, a great book with a great message. Interestingly enough I moved straight on to Mark Waltz’s book Lasting Impressions: From Visiting to Belonging, which notes that Granger Community Church takes almost the exact opposite view of small groups. The mindset is the same however, and as noted above, Osborne makes the point that no one way is correct for every church.

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It’s been a while since I last blogged, because I’ve been building a free Twitterbot to serve the text of Scripture verses over Twitter – something I’ve wanted to do for nearly a year. It’s finished now; I’ll get into the technical aspects in another post, perhaps, but for this post I want to tell about how to use it. The basic idea is simple – send a Twitter message containing the reference to the ‘bot (whose name is ‘votd’) and it will reply with the text.

Step 1 is being on Twitter. If you’re not a Twitterer yet, this step is fairly easy…go to http://Twitter.com and sign up. That’s all.

Step 2 is to type in the reference like this:

@votd john 11:35

After a while votd will wake up (it does this once a minute), see your message, interpret it, reply to it, and you’ll see this come back on your Twitter client:

John 11:35 - Jesus wept. (KJV)

In its basic form, it’s really that simple.

Verses that are longer than 140 characters (Twitter’s message limit) are wrapped into 2 (or 3, 4, 5 or even 6) messages.

By connecting to the Blue Letter Bible’s site and using the interface they provide to other sites, their translations are also available. If you want to read your verse in Latin, try

@votd john 11:35 vul

And it will come back with the Vulgate translation – BLB has 14 versions that they make available this way (besides the KJV which I have on my own site).

If you want to set a different version to be your default translation, type this:

@votd pref rsv

… then when you send in a verse request without a version, votd will use the RSV.

You can also subscribe to the automatic transmission of the verse of the day (that’s why it’s called ‘votd’, after all!) this way:

@votd pref votd=on

And, starting that night after midnight EST, votd will Twitter you the verse of the day, each day, until you unsubscribe.

Finally, if you’re not sure of your settings, or you want more detailed help, send this:

@votd ?

And votd will tell you what your defaults are and where the help page is.

Pretty nifty, no?

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Here’s another group of Twitter tools – this one for bloggers:

Twitter Username – by TechDebug/Lantrix

This converts any Twitter ‘@username’ string on your blog post to a link to ‘http://Twitter.com/username’, so that readers can follow that user or read their feed. This is running here, (temporarily, and will probably be deactivated because of the …)

Downside: It only works in the main post – not on comments or in the sidebar, which is disappointing – why wouldn’t the blogger want all occurrences identified and linked?

Twitip-ID – by Andy Bailey

This WP tool allows the blogger to add a Twitter field to the comment form, so the commenter can be reached that way.

Downside: Ever since WP 2.7, comments are not built by the code inside the comments.php file, so the documentation needs to be upgraded.

TwitterSplit and TwitterSplitter

When you twitter an interesting link to something, you send that URL as <your URL?interesting link>. When a user clicks on the URL you sent, it shows the interesting link in a frame with your banner on top.

Downside: Since I hate iframes and see it as just another cheap advertising trick, I can’t really recommend this one. But it’s a clever idea.

Twittar

Some people have a Gravatar – an icon that many types of blog engines support. For those that don’t have a Gravatar but do have Twitter, this plug-in pulls the avatar from their Twitter account (actually, it gives precedence to the Twitter avatar).

Downsides: Again, since WP 2.7, comments are not built by the code inside the comments.php file, so the documentation needs to be upgraded. Also, according to the comments on the site, it apparently loads slowly.

Bird Feeder – by Andrew Jaswa

When TwitterUpdater died (when I switched to WP 2.7), I found this plugin to send a Twitter message whenever a new post was published. Rock solid – does just one thing very well.

Downside (minimal): Doesn’t deal with all the events that TwitterUpdater did, but then I don’t use the other events either.

Tweetbacks – by Dan Zarrella

This tool is in beta right now. It works a bit like a pingback or traceback for your blog. Install it, and when someone references your URL in their Twitter, that Twitter will show up above your comment section.

Downside: The js code is hosted on Dan’s site, and things are getting very slow. So…

Quak Back – by Jeremy Hilton

…took the original code, improved the speed and made it run on the blog’s server. Then…

TweetSuite – by Dan Zarella

… turns the TweetBacks concept into server-side calls, along with a raft of other Twitter tools. An excellent concept, which I suspect will be improved and expanded over the next month or so. This one is now running on this blog – I’ve turned off Bird Feeder since that functionality is included here.

There’s a large listing of other Twitter clients and applications here (it’s not complete – it doesn’t have some of the ones in this post, for instance, but it’s a lot more complete than my little list!), so I won’t try building anymore lists – although if I find something I really love, I may document it at some time.

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