A Change of Pace

It’s summer in North America, and that means life looks a little different for many of us. Your team might be traveling for mission trips. Your youth might be busy with camps and events. Your kids might be out of school. Families in your church might be taking vacations. I hope you’re also breaking from your normal routine and finding time to relax and recharge.

You might have noticed we’re doing some of that here on Swerve too as we change our normal posting schedule. While we won’t be blogging as frequently this summer, we’ll still be around to share what we’re learning. In the meantime, we’ll be featuring some of our favorite posts from the past.

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Stuff Christians Like - Winners!

We’re happy to announce the winners of the Stuff Christians Like book giveaway! We randomly chose winners by drawing from comment numbers. Here they are…

18 Joey

52 Bethany

98 Kevin M

114 dale

242 Troy Pomeroy

Congratulations to each of you! We’ll be in touch to get your information so we can send the books out to you.

If you haven’t had a chance to pick up Jon’s book yet, don’t miss out!

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And the Winners Are…

Today has been packed with all kinds of excitement around the launch of Craig’s book. Mardel was a full house tonight for the launch party—thanks to everyone who stopped by!

Thanks also to the hundreds of you who tweeted, blogged, and commented to enter the book giveaway. We’ll end the suspense right now and announce the 10 winners of The Christian Atheist…

• Stacy Wood Schindler
• Josh Brienen
• John Frey
• Arthur Shadwick
• Vikki Huisman
• Lukas Targosz
• Veronica Brown
• Santos Samayoa
• Stephanie Hennessy
• Frank Cocilovo

Congratulations to all of you! We’ll be in touch to get the book sent out to you.

We hope the rest of you still have an opportunity to read The Christian Atheist! You can order a copy at any one of these booksellers:

Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, Christianbook.com, and Mardel

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Social Media Leveraged to Build Kindergarten

This week, a pretty cool thing happened over at the Stuff Christians Like blog. On Monday, Jon Acuff shared an idea with his readers: let’s raise $30,000 to build a kindergarten in Vietnam. He hoped to reach that goal by December 31. Instead, it happened in 18 hours. From 5:00am to 11:00pm, readers donated the full $30,000 so that 240 kids in Vietnam could go to school. Building on the momentum from the overwhelming response, they’ve set their sights on building a second kindergarten by his initial goal of December 31.

It’s great to see social media being used effectively to engage people in causes, particularly financially. There’s a lot we can learn from this.

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Technology Boundaries

I believe one of the biggest distractions for today’s families is an overemphasis and reliance on tech toys.

If you can’t eat dinner with your family without checking your blackberry or twittering, you have a serious problem.

I’m convinced one of the most important things we can do is set boundaries from technology.

Some things you might try:

• No tech interruptions during family time.
• Take consistent blogging or twittering vacations. (Guest blogs work great.)
• Fast from email on vacations.
• No surfing the net in the evenings.

Please describe your struggles. More importantly, I’d like to know what boundaries you’re setting to become more healthy.

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Swerve (or any other blog) translated into any language

If you’d like to read swerve (or any blog) in any language, you can now easily do this with Google Reader.  If you are new to Google Reader, you can take their online tour to learn more.  Inside of Google Reader all you have to do to translate any of your blog subscriptions is to select “Translate into my language” from the Feed Settings dropdown.  Now you can share swerve with your friends who don’t speak/read english…we just hope Google gets the translation right!

Any foreign language blogs that you think I (or others) should start reading?

HT: Michael Arrington from TechCrunch.

Tags: Google, Google Reader, translation

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Featured on ReadWriteWeb

The folks over at ReadWriteWeb.com featured LifeChurch.tv and many of the various web initiatives that our team has worked on.  I don’t typically link to posts about our church…ReadWriteWeb is notable because it is one of the top 100 blogs (number 11) in the world and has over 233,000 daily readers.  We hope the article helps to introduce thousands of new people to the great things that God is doing, and also hope that it might help reshape the perception that The Church is out of touch or out-dated.  Thanks RWW.

Tags: ReadWriteWeb

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LifeShare

Earlier this week our Internet Campus launched LifeShare, a new 7-day challenge for the church to move together online with purpose. We’re partnering with the community at RagamuffinSoul.com to extend the love and compassion of Jesus to our friends, followers and online communities.

We’re doing this at a few different levels, ranging from simple steps like tweets and internet campus e-invites to more in-depth efforts like sharing online how God is working in your life and embedding video teaching on your blog. We’re connecting daily through a live video stream to talk about next steps and pray together. LifeShare is open to anyone, anywhere, so feel free to join us by signing up here.

As people increasingly live more of their lives online, we need to be intentional about equipping and challenging them to share Christ in those spaces as well. Have you found effective ways to help your church engage online? How?

Tags: LifeShare

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