Christmas Gift Card Flier

After getting feedback about the Gift Card Ministry (formerly Scrip), we decided it would be beneficial to highlight this ministry for Christmas. Here’s what it looks like:

Some thoughts on the design:

I went simple on the design, using the motif of a Christmas tree. The explanatory text continues the image of the tree, making [...]

Scrip Improvements, Take 2

Thanks for all the feedback on the Scrip program over the past couple days! Here’s a summary of what I heard, both online and off, from this group of readers and research in other programs:

Increased visibility of point-of-sale. It’s hard to find it and when you do, it’s really crowded. A sign would be helpful. [...]

Billboard Top Hits: Blame It by Jamie Foxx

Continuing our series, we’re doing Blame It by Jamie Foxx.  Sort of.
The song actually crosses the line for what I’m comfortable playing at Sunday School, so we’re going to look at the key topics Jamie Foxx brings up through a different song: Maybe it’s Maybelline by Relient K.  Here’s the song, courtesy of Grooveshark:

We’ll primarily [...]

Billboard Top Hits: Dead and Gone by T. I.

We’re doing a series in High School Sunday School called Billboard Top Hits.  Youth are able to vote one week for one of six songs, all at the top of a different Billboard Music Chart.  In addition to looking at themes brought out by the music, we’re trying to teach our youth to be discerning [...]

Town Hall For Hope

I’ve enjoyed Dave Ramsey ever since we saw him at the Catalyst conference.  After taking the Good Sense budgeting course with Susan Whited, I’ve taken a much more proactive approach to finances, and Dave has been a great companion for that.
If you’re like the typical person, this economy may be freaking you out.  First Trinity [...]

Technology In Our Life

George Barna release some interesting statistics today about the use of technology among age groups.  Here’s a summary of some of the things I found interesting:
Mainstream Technologies (Used by more than 50% of all computer users)

Boomers and Elders

Email
Search

Busters (25-41, I think)

Email
Search
Text Messaging
Hosting a personal website

Mosaics (18-24)

Email
Search
Text Messaging
Instant Messaging
Posting comments on other blogs
Watching videos online
Downloading music [...]

Technology and Ministry Article

I mentioned a while back that I got an offer to write for thESource again.  My article is now up over there.  Just in case anyone cares. 

Personal Spiritual Assessment Tool

I’m involved in an interesting discussion on a DCE email discussion group I participate in.  The discussion started around the question, “How do we measure effectiveness in ministry if not by numbers of people coming?”  Numbers are easy to measure: they are either up or down. 
It’s not a perfect measurement, however.  There could be [...]

Greasemonkey Script: Feedburner Text Resizer

The size of the text in the “My Feeds” section of Feedburner drives me nuts.  Why would anyone want it that large?  I figured someone else would have had this problem and written a Greasemonkey script to fix it.  (For my regular readers, who probably don’t know what in the world I’m talking about, Greasemonkey [...]

Windows Live Writer Wish List

Microsoft released a new version of Live Writer.  It’s a tool to make blogging easier.  it comes with a host of great new features (check out Digital Inspiration’s take on it), but there are a few that are missing that I’d like to see:

Sync drafts to the “cloud” for editing on another computer with Live [...]