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Jeremy Smith

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Caught Being Dishonest On Twitter [Video]


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The ChurchMag beat includes technology and how Christians can best use it or how it impacts the Church. One big thing we promote indirectly on a regular basis is to keep it honest. Whether you are a Christian organization online doing shady things or gossiping via Facebook groups. We’ve covered it.

This video by Marques Brownlee is actually a Twitter trend that has gone viral where he sees people tweeting Android or Microsoft branded tweets via an Apple product.

Oops

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People Want Your Brand to Participate in Their Transformation [Building A Storybrand Book Club: Chapter 11]


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[This post is part of a Book Club book series where we take a deep dive into Building A StoryBrand by Donald Miller. To check out all of the posts, view the table of contents here]

Can I have a moment of utter honesty here? Like, I’m going to step on people’s toes? I feel like the Church as a whole is being hurt by church marketing. It feels like a rat race to the top. I see so many blog titles to include “How To Get Your Church More Influence” or “Top 4 Ways To Get Your Social Media Posts Seen” or “The One Way To Get Your Newsletters Opened.”

It feels self-serving and silo driven where my church is pitted against your church with potential and current congregation members as the “number of sales.” Yuck.

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Can We Teach Computers Emotions? [Video]


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As time goes on, we see Artificial Intelligence slowly moving from simple “if this, then that” commands, which are not AI, but simple decision matrix, into much more powerful technologies. Some speculate that a self-learning AI either is already here or is coming very soon.

That said, the things being put into cars are not what we would call true AI, because we as people are still holding onto the moral decisions, instead of a computer. So what’s missing that computers need to learn for true AI to be working? Emotions.

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Is This The Best Way To Compare Online Giving Platforms?


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We promote a strong sense of stewardship for churches. When we see a church drop tens of thousands of dollars all to have Apple laptops to watch YouTube videos, writing on WORD, and running their preferred Bible software, we get concerned about stewardship.

While being wise with how we spend money and other church resources has to do with stewardship, it is not the sum of it.  There are other areas of we could be better stewards. One of those is with online giving platforms we use. This is because there are processing costs involved with each platform. How do we choose the best online giving platform? What is the best way to compare these online giving platforms?

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Creativity, Inc [Saturday Morning Review]


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Going into this book, I’ll say that it is not what I expected, it was so, so much more. I anticipated reading about a biography of Ed Catmull, co-founder (with Steve Jobs and John Lasseter) of Pixar Animation Studios which had humble beginnings and went on a roller coaster ride.

30 pages in, I realized there was so much more to this. While it talks about how everything that happened at Pixar, from beginning to end and how they created their videos to being sold to Disney for billions of dollars, this book is actually a leadership book. And to be clear, it’s not one of those “you need to do it the business way if you want to succeed” how-to books, but a fresh perspective that had me writing down quote after quote and idea after idea of how I can lead well but also look at business better.

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Captain Marvel (Spoil-Free) [Saturday Morning Review]


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Captain Marvel is the latest in the Marvel Cinematic University series as we head into Avengers: Endgame. It should be noted up front this is not a full review as I feel there are several needed comments that will spoil this article and we are going to keep the spoil-free expectations.

This is the perfect setup for Avengers: Endgame. I foresee this not being the best Marvel movie this year, but it might not be the worst either. I hear story after story of fathers taking their daughters to the movie, inspired and proud to be a nerd when their child decides they want to be Captain Marvel. Of course, this comes well after Wonder Woman, so it might very well late in the game with that.

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