In it you will find the classic line, ‘It’s Mabo, it’s justice, it’s law, it’s the vibe, and, uh … No, that’s it. It’s the vibe’

The movie is an Australian classic.

If you call yourself Australian, and you havent seen it. Well. I think you know what the means.

The beginning of the quote mentions Mabo. More specifically, Eddie Mabo.

Eddie Mabo was an Aboriginal Man who fought for native title in Australia.

I’m very excited that the ABC have made a feature series about him.

Here is the trailer. Watch it.

I’m a little excited.

While we were there we did lots of driving. I decided I would take advantage of this by playing around with some time-lapse video.

Here is my first attempt.

Highlights include the Ebor falls and us changing a tyre on my car because I put a nail though it. Exciting stuff!!

I took a few photos during the week.

Here are some of them.

One of the great things about walking through Sydney UNI is when student elections are on. Last year my favourite slogan was “Zac to the future”. This slogan perfectly utilised the “Back to the Future” logo. I was so proud.

Anyway, student elections are coming up again. Here are some of the posters. I’m sad the Zac isn’t running again this year. It could of been brilliant.

If you are in youth or children’s ministry this might excite you.

When I was a youth group leader I had to prepare talks, prayers, supper to eat and games to play at the beginning of the meeting. Usually the latter of these things were done with much less preparation than the first things. Your experience might be the same.

It’s probably a good thing. Preparing your talk and the prayers should demand much of your attention. You don’t want to say incorrect things while you teach the kids. The games were usually under prepared, and not really thought out.

To fix this problem, my friend, Calum has created an iPhone app. It’s called “Group Games”.

The app is brilliant. Simply put, it helps you prepare for the game time of youth group by providing you a list of games that you can play easily, with or without resources. I especially like that way that you can select a game using a search involving the size of the group and the time a game is needed to run.

If you are involved in youth or children’s ministry, you should definitely check it out.

;

I’m giving 2 copies away for free. The first 2 comments win. Simple.

It’s that time of year again. The time of year I am talking about is when all of Moore College put down all of the books about systematic theology, and goes out to do MooreMission.

This year MooreMission is bigger and better than ever. A friend and I have built a website to be the online hub for blogging and tweeting, and Anglican media are getting involved too.

I’m especially looking forward to Mission this year because:
a) Kirsty is coming along
b) We are heading to country NSW (Glen Innes, Guyra & Emmaville)

Tomorrow we are driving north to spend a night with Kirsty’s cousins in Coffs, before continuing on to Guyra on Saturday afternoon.

If you want to keep up to date with what is happening you can:

a) Follow all the action on twitter by looking at #mooremission
b) Head over to the website

Here are 13 terrible print ad’s that I doubt will ever be made again, for good reason.

Easter is one of those times in the year where churches try to connect with those in their community who do not usually go to church.

In my experience, churches try to do things differently during Easter and Christmas. Sometime this involves singing different songs, having a special focus on welcoming and follow up of new people. Lots of churches try to show a video or two during the service.

If you want to do things differently, visually, he are some handy resources you can use. They are all free.

The Easter Story, by The Bible Society

You can download all of these for FREE by logging into vimeo.

Interactive Stories, by Church Media Videos

This is a little program you can download to use in your kids’ spot. It basically works as a animation creator. It is FREE, and is great for teaching bible stories to kids.

Easter at CreationSwap

This site has heaps of FREE resources. They are all still images, vectors and powerpoints.

Here is the link for their easter reasources.

Mirror Mirror by New Spring Church

This isn’t free. But it is brilliant. Might give you an idea for a video you could do yourself.

Easter, by Bjorn Amundsen

This video is a visual manifestation of some poetry by Sharon Irving.

You can download if from vimeo here.

Let me know if you have seen anything else out there. Ill be happy to add it to this post.

*** Update. Some extra resources. ***

The Last Supper, by SandBible.com

These videos aren’t free, but If you are in Australia you will be supporting a great Christian content producer.

You can see all their Easter videos here.

The other day I wrote a post, about how Christian organisations could use digital and social media. I thought it would be a good idea for me to write something, kind of as a follow up, about how you could use twitter as an individual.

I have been on twitter for 3 years. In that time I have sent over 5000 tweets. I got a twitter account because it was something new, and another way to keep in touch with friends. If you are on twitter, your story might be similar. At first I didn’t really know what twitter was even for. I had facebook, is was 2009, facebook was big.

In those three years I have seen lots of different ways that people use twitter. Firstly, I don’t think there is a set way to use twitter, but there are some different approaches that I think are better, especially in relation for how Christians use twitter. Firstly, I don’t think there is a set way to use twitter, but there are some different approaches that I think are better, especially in relation for how Christians use twitter.

With that in mind, I think I have seen five main ways that Christians use twitter.

First: Using twitter for broadcast

This approach is often taken by pastors of large churches, mostly from the United States. Im specifically thinking about John Piper & Mark Driscoll among others. This approach often has very limited one-on-one engagement. Most of these people have over 50,000 followers, which can make one-on-one engagement difficult. These people generally use twitter to broadcast their events, publicise the release of their new book or to write daily reflections. Given their influence and follower count this could be a good way to use twitter as one-on-one engagement is hard and very time consuming.

With everything there are exceptions. In this case, the exception to this is Ed Stetzer. He has 54,000 followers, and on the most part he is really good at engaging with people who mention him. Ed recently came to Moore College to give a lecture on how churches can engage their members in meaningful ministry. There were lots of tweets going back and forth between Ed and some of the students at Moore College. Some of it was people thanking him for the lecture, some was just humour. Regardless of the content, he responded, either giving thanks for the feedback or joining in with joke that was made.

Second: Using twitter as facebook.

The second approach is this: people use a feature in either facebook or twitter which automatically cross posts to either platform.

It works like this: If you post something on facebook, facebook will automatically post that status update to twitter. There is also a feature in twitter which can cross post your tweet to facebook. This approach makes using social media a little easier. Just like the first approach, this approach often means that engagement with others is limited. In many ways it is similar to the first approach. People broadcast what they want, but because they are only really using one platform, their engagement with BOTH platforms are limited.

Third: Not using your twitter account at all.

The third approach is fairly simple. You set up a twitter account a while ago, you sent some tweets, then you stopped sending tweets. No engagement because you aren’t actually using the account anymore. Fairly simple.

Fourth: Using twitter to engage with other Christians.

The people who take this fourth approach usually like to use twitter, and they have seen the benefits that it has for building friendships and community. They send tweets around the topics of Live sermon tweets, things that are happening in their lives e.g ‘my train is running late today’ & ‘thankful for a great catch up with a good friend today’, posting bible verses from apps like the ESV iPhone app to talking about sport, food and music they like.

These people generally enjoy a high level of engagement with Christian brothers and sisters. Usually around the topics I mentioned above. These people usually follow Christians alone, and are followed by Christians alone.

Fifth: Using twitter to engage with everyone.

This last approach contains almost everything from approach four. The main difference is that there is a much wider scope of the topics that they will tweet about. This is particularly powerful because they enable the Christian voice to be heard in a space in which it might not be heard otherwise. These broader topics might include the current poker machine debate, the legislation to get SRE (Special religious education) out of public schools (in NSW) or they might be able to speak into Gay marriage debates and engage helpfully with people on the issue.

If done correctly this person follows plenty of Non-Christian people, and in-turn, they are followed by lots of non-christian people. They are able to keep up with how people, yes people, are currently thinking about the world. Which will help as this person seeks to practice apologetics.

How I use twitter:

I think the fifth approach is the best way for Christian people to be involved on twitter. Personally I actually follow more Non-Christian people than Christian. This is because of a few reasons. I think alot of Christians use twitter for broadcast, plenty of Christians also do the facebook cross post thing and lots of Christians don’t use their twitter accounts at all.

These approaches usually mean that Christians don’t generally engage with people in a meaningful way. I’m all about using twitter to engage with people and I think that twitter presents a huge opportunity to engage with real people about real issues. I love having the opportunity to engage with people that I might not of been able to otherwise.

Recently I got to have lunch with someone who I only know through interaction on twitter. This person wasn’t a Christian, and over lunch we got to chat about his family, politics and then Jesus. It was a conversation that would not of happened if I hadn’t of engaged with him like a normal person. If I hadn’t of shown interest in him as a person.

I have heard of lots of examples just like this. Gospel conversations happening through interaction and engagement through twitter.

In Conclusion

The temptation for Christians is to rubbish the possibilities of technology, or to simply ignore the possibilities all together. This could because they don’t even see the possibilities of what this technology could achieve. Technology has a huge possibility for furthering the message of Jesus. Christians need to make sure they are not a barrier to that happening.

So at this point, I want to encourage you to think about how you are going to use twitter. I would like to encourage you to think abut how you can use things like twitter better. To use twitter within your means. To use twitter realistically. If you aren’t John Piper don’t use twitter like John Piper.

Finally

If you are someone who would like to know more about how you can use Digital and Social media, some of us at Moore College are planning on running some Digital Ministry training workshops over the course of the year. If you’re a minister and would like to attend a student-run workshop, we’d love to have you.

You can register your interest on the form below:

Recently, I inadvertently started a passionate discussion around the topic of tweeting during sermons with this tweet.

This morning John Woodhouse is continuing his series in 1 Timothy. You can follow tweets at #MTCchapel – esv.to/1Tim6.11-16. ~ @stevenst

If you want to, you can read all about it here.

In this post I wanted to outline some of the back story and strategy around how my college uses social and digital avenues to further the gospel and the appearance of our college. I don’t write this so you will think we are doing digital and social really well. As you will see further down, we are just having some fun and trying new things. I write this so that you might feel encouraged to try some new things at your church or organization.

On a personal note. If you are serving as a pastor or minister in a Church, I believe you need to have a plan about how you will engage and approach the areas of social and digital media. If you church doesn’t have a plan, it can lead to un-welcomed and un-engaged people. I have found  this, this and this to be very helpful as i have done some thinking about these topics. The plan at your church might be to not engage in these ways. I think that is actually fine, I’m thankful that you have given it thought.

Anyway, back on topic. I go to Moore College. Our twitter handle is @moorecollege if you want to follow us. The twitter account is run by a team of students and faculty. Our team is made up of @thebiblebasher, @const500, @delantyj, @timmyclemens, @WatchmanJames, @katiebolton and myself (@stevenst). The account was started on the 21st of April 2009 by ‘all around nice guy’ Dave (@davemiers).

First the back story.

Each year Moore College participates in an event which we call Moore Mission. Simply put, groups of students and faculty are sent out to various parts of Australia (and occasionally the world) to partner with churches in running local missions that proclaim Jesus.

In the past (up until 2011) there had been fairly good engagement individually on social networks about mission. The social networks that were implemented were the student run mission blog and individual peoples use of twitter. The topics of the tweets included things like prayer requests, encouraging stories of people learning about Jesus and some included personal tweets about things that individual students were learning from their experiences. While this engagement was good, it had no real traction in the wider college community. This lack of traction was partly due to the college not utilising its social networks to raise the profile of the exciting things that were happening during the mission and therefore the profile of the college.

It left some of us (students and faculty) asking the questions like, ‘Why we didn’t utilise these networks better?’, ‘Why were there no re-tweets from the college account’. These questions continued which lead some of us to another question, ‘How can we do things differently moving forward?’

Second, The strategy.

What happened after was the identification of several students who had professional backgrounds in digital and social media. This group were given the ok to try some new things on the web with the hope of a) increasing the online presence of the college and its activities, b) give a glimpse of the day-to-day college experience and the great things God has blessed students with; as well as the work He is doing through Moore College, and c) explore new ways of using digital and social media with a view to educating others about these things by example and formal training sessions.

While these aims may broaden in the future, this is what we are currently trying to do and we’re having fun asking ‘How can we use technology for the glory of God and the building-up of His Kingdom?’.

The article I linked to at the beginning of this post related to something we tried to do 2 weeks ago. It was related to the use of twitter to write notes and reflections from sermons and other activities where teaching is involved. While there has been some passionate discussion around this topic, I see it as a positive that people in Sydney are starting to think about how social and digital media can be used by churches. I say Sydney, because, for some reason, we seem to be a little behind the rest of the world on this stuff. If you are a pastor or a ministry leader, can I encourage you to think about the areas of social and digital media? Even if you decide that you wont use it. A non existent twitter account is better than one that is never used.

If you feel like you need some help in these areas, we are planning on running some Digital Ministry training workshops over the course of the year. If you’re a minister and would like to attend a student-run workshop, we’d love to have you.

You can register your interest on the form below:

He, along with a few others have recently started a new church in Wollongong, NSW.

They desperately need some stuff to be functional in a new building that they are moving into.

Watch the video below. You might even be able to help them.

please help from Dan Godden on Vimeo.

It is also raining and cold in Sydney.

This video just made my day.

Mr. Happy Man from Matt Morris Films on Vimeo.

It has been a while since I posted anything of any real meaning on here. That is largely due to an almost non-stop summer of activity. Here are the quick highlights.

• We finished up at family church in mid December.
• Christmas happened.
• Tyro has been mental. See some of the stuff we have been doing here.
• We went on beach mission. We were the cooks. It was mental. Good mental, but still mental.
• A bit of time was spent getting ready for college starting again.
• Kirsty started a new job.
• I started a new job as a student minister at an Anglican Church in Cammeray.
• Australia dominated in the test series.

Pretty much sums it up. Normal service will now resume.