Today’s Meatspace Monday is a Guest Post from Brian Barela, a Campus Director for Campus Crusade for Christ. He pitched an amazing idea and I loved the idea. You can also follow him on Twitter.
“A steady diet of walking or running is great for the legs, great for the cardiovascular system, and certainly beneficial for overall health but doesn’t do much for the arms, for example. Swimming is great for the upper body but doesn’t have much to offer the lower body. Put walking or running together with swimming, however, or swimming with cycling, and you’re working all of the body’s major muscle groups for optimal health and greatly improved overall muscular fitness.”–from this article.
As one who enjoys exercise, I’m an avid practitioner of cross training.
I enjoy cycling, as well as yoga and kettlebells (watch a video of them in action). As a campus minister working exclusively with college students, I’m acutely aware that I’m not as much a practitioner of cross training for my overall fitness as a leader. I’ve noticed that many of my most developmental experiences or resources have come from outside of Campus Crusade for Christ; this is not a knock against my organization but rather an acknowledgment that those from different ministries and the business world have much to offer as I seek to reach lost students for Christ.
This October, I attend the Virtual Goods Summit held in San Francisco. The summit focused on how to launch, develop, and market virtual goods, mostly through online gaming. At first and maybe second glance, this would not be a developmental opportunity, as there was no linear connection between virtual goods and college ministry.
However, I left the conference inspired to lead more boldly and with new ways to think about a vital part of college ministry–connecting with students online. Also, the summit was hosted and composed primarily of entrepreneurs. I’m learning that my job is highly parallel to that of an entrepreneur, and gained confidence from seeing and hearing from people who lived and breathed starting and trying new things.
My challenge for Meatspace Monday is this: Initiate via one of your social networks a person from a different field to meet up with you and share either an insight, key developmental experience, or even some of your field’s philosophy.
I’m confident that you will receive much more than you planned on, and may be inspired to pursue that dream or idea in your own field that might be the spark that moves your organization or church forward in seeing Jesus get the glory he deserves in our lives and ministries.
For me, I left inspired to develop a web application that will allow our Campus Crusade staff to share resources more effectively and leverage the vast amount of bible studies, discipleship articles, and wisdom that our organization has accumulated in its 58 year history.
What will it be for you?
"I left inspired to develop a web application that will allow our Campus Crusade staff to share resources more effectively and leverage the vast amount of bible studies, discipleship articles, and wisdom that our organization has accumulated in its 58 year history."
Have you ever considered the possibilities of expanding this type of vision beyond just Campus Crusade, to the entire body of Global Christianity? Imagine the possibilities of having the entire body of knowledge that the Christian community has written over the past 2000 years, from songs to sermons in every language? What if live reports of persecution could be picked up via twitter and broadcast to the entire of body of Believers around the world asking them to pray? What if it were possible for every single congregation that had a burden for ministry in a specific area of the world could communicate, and coordinate activities between themselves and local churches on the ground?
Hey Daniel,
YES!!!! I thought it would be great to build a model that would fit our organization, but could eventually scale to something as large as what you said.
Also, my recent thought would be instead of resources in full, they would be broken down into smaller chunks of information, so that those searching would not have to comb through a full document but rather look at many documents with the same kind of information–an example would be observation, explanation, and illustration in relation to a book of the bible.
I've noticed that this type of data management is not present on some of the more popular Christian resource sites.
that would be epic………………..!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
"reply" button works…! hehe. thanks again brother!
Thanks for checking your moderation que!
yeah. wh00t!
On the technical side with http://www.issacharnetwork.org, I have been running into similar issues. Ultimately you have users, locations, organizations, events, static information (which has already been written), and evolving information (know how and personal experience), and like you said subdivided by topic, and relevance, and relationships that only users will see but that need to be recorded. On top of this security issues must also be considered both, from the innocent user authentication to build user credibility to malicious i.e. direct hacking to gain user information and locations within creative access countries by police and others(http://tinyurl.com/xian-security for a very interesting discussion re:christian philosophy regarding CACs).
In some ways this sounds like a wiki, but quite honestly a wiki is a collaborative editing environment and for this application a touch of social networking combined with a semantic database to handle the multitude of different types of searches which would also seem to be needed. This pushes both Drupal and Wikimedia to its limits and beyond. Any ideas for a CMS?
Where do you think you'll start with your project in your current conception of it as it stands? Have you gotten to check out CCEL Worldwide Study Bible at http://www.ccel.org/wwsb/, as they utilize a by topic approach? You might also look over http://religion-online.org/, they have a by topic breakdown, though they still present the resources as full documents. A third site you might find interesting (I don't know how tech oriented you are) is http://www.semanticbible.com/, in their words "Semantic Bible is an emerging exploration of new applications of markup and computational linguistic technology to the study of Scripture, with an emphasis on practical tools that encourage understanding and personal transformation." Anyway I hope this helps.
Anyone else out there with similar passions for the Global Body of Christ?