Wired Parish Blog

Life Church Secrets

Got a heads up to check out the redesigned MySecret.tv by Life Church here in Edmond. As I clicked around the site, a couple of positive things stood out:

1. Great graphic design.

2. Craig's video on the site is extremely good. Everything I've ever heard from Craig and about Craig leads me to believe firmly that he is a class act and that he loves God and people deeply.

But CLEARLY several 'what are you thinking????' things stood out as well:

1. You can now browse secrets through a tag cloud of sin. 'Sex,' as you might imagine, is the leading tag. With other sex-related tags like 'pornography' and 'affair' running close behind. Is this a good idea?? And yes, the link actually says 'Browse Secrets.' Not 'prayerfully read secrets' (see below), but 'browse.' Like 'browse through Barnes and Noble 'til you find something that catches your interest.'

2. Craig says in the video not to browse the secrets just to pry into other people's lives, but . . . come on . . . do you really think people are coming to the site to prayerfully read these anonymously confessed secrets? Really?

I would LOVE to know what percentage of people come to the site to prayerfully read the secrets.

Putting fairly lurid details in front of people and asking them not to be voyeurs is a bit like putting chocolate in front of my 2 year old and telling him not to eat it while I leave the room for 30 minutes. He may understand that he shouldn't eat, but he's gonna eat it! Way too tempting not to.

3. The best: You can actually subscribe to an RSS feed for each secret, and the link above each feed says--and I am not making this up--'Don't miss a comment.' So if you find a secret you're particularly fond of (or perhaps that you prayerfully read. That's certainly possible.), you can plug it into your RSS reader so you'll be the first to know when someone else comments on it.

4. Weird: If you click on 'Prayer,' you can submit a name and email if you are praying for the people who are confessing on the site, but there is no way to submit a prayer request or directly ask for help.

The only way I could find to actually contact someone through the site if you need help is to click on 'community,' then 'find a life group,' then click on the button that indicates you need help finding a life group.

A little bit of commentary:

1. I very much appreciate Life Church's desire to push the envelope and do crazy stuff. I'm a fan of crazy, but the downside (to which my life is a living testament) is that sometimes you get too crazy. I can't possibly understand how this is anything other than that.

2. If Life Church is really serious about not treating this as a voyeuristic site, but one in which people making these confessions are actually prayed for, they should plaster that sort of language all over the site instead of using language like 'browse secrets' and 'don't miss a comment.'

If you don't watch the video, there's really nothing else on the site that indicates the whole 'prayerfully read these' vibe. Maybe we should intuitively know that, but it's DEFINITELY not a central focus of the site. Just a single mention at the first of the video.

3. I would absolutely love it if someone could give me some arguments as to why doing a site like MySecret.tv is a good idea in spite of the fact that the default way most people will use the site is either to anonymously confess to a computer screen or to read the confessions in a voyeuristic way. Any takers on that?

4. Maybe my commentary says more about me than it does about the site. I certainly hold that out as a possibility. I don't think so, but I could be wrong.

Greg Horton and My Flooded Email Inbox

I'm listening to the final minutes of Greg Horton's podcast this week on Wired Parish. It'll be available for download later tonight.

Just wanted to ask you, our dear listeners, to carbon copy me on any emails you send him after listening. I can't imagine how . . . what's the word . . . INTERESTING they'll be! I'm not going to respond to any of them. I just want to see the fireworks.

Just so you'll know, I share most of Greg's concerns that he raises in the cast, but I probably would have put them . . . um . . . a little differently. While I share his concerns, I don't think of them in quite as black and white terms as he does. And yes, I'm being intentionally vague about what he talked about. You'll have to listen for yourself!

I love Greg for many reasons, but two of the more obvious are that he makes me think and he makes me laugh. Sometimes at the same time. He did both this week.

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Scot McKnight on Fear

Scot has a wonderful post a JesusCreed.org on the greatest fears of Liberal, Evangelical, and Emerging churches. Most definitely worth a read.

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Top 10 Podcasting Mistakes (Part 5)

5. Inferior Equipment

One huge plus for podcasting is that you can do it with little more than Garage Band and your laptop's internal mic.

One huge negative for podcasting is that you can do it with little more than Garage Band and your laptop's internal mic.

The very first podcast I ever did was in January of 2005 with writer JJ Sullivan. GREAT content. UNBELIEVABLY bad quality. As I attempted to do the edits, I was so mortified by the sound quality that I just stopped. So it's somewhere deep in the recesses of my laptop's audio files, never to be retrieved.

I ruined a wonderful conversation because I made the mistake of using a combined total of $50 worth of recording equipment. Horrible move.

You don't have to have thousands of dollars of mics, headphones, and software, but investing a couple of hundred bucks in a solid mic, popscreen and set of headphones will take the sound quality of your recordings up several orders of magnitude.

Oh, and pleeeease make sure you're in as dead a room as possible. Think: Closet not kitchen.

Note: Although you don't HAVE to have high end headphones, listening to the new Amos Lee on a set of our studio headphones while blogging late at night is a SPECTACULAR experience. Feel free to be jealous.

Also See:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

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Podcast Co-Hosts

Quick Note: We're looking for a couple of co-hosts for new podcasts that we are launching. If you are in the Oklahoma City area and would be interested in 'sitting across the table' with one of our hosts on a regular basis, email me. I'll give you the details on what we're looking for.

The short version is that if you have speaking or interview experience and you're effective in asking questions and dialoguing, then we may have some opportunities for you.

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Kicking It with Jesus

Here's a picture of Jesus and me. We met at a convention a few weeks back.

Theology note: His hands and feed had bloody nail marks in them. Now, not to be flippant, but shouldn't he have nail scars but no blood?

Conspiracy Theories

This is going to sound crazy, I know, but in the last 2 weeks, I've gotten the following:

1. 6 emails suggesting we hold a Brian McLaren Look-Alike Contest.

2. 8--yes EIGHT--emails calling for a Wired Parish Best Looking Host Contest . . . AND I KID YOU NOT . . . 7 of them nominated Anthony Smith. The 8th nominated Kyle Johnson, but that email actually was from Kyle Johnson.

Clearly, there are conspiracies afoot that I know nothing about . . .

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Life Church: Brilliant Marketing

While I refuse to refer to Life Church as LifeChurch.tv, I am ridiculously fond of their new marketing campaign. SatanHatesLife.com is BRILLIANT.

I nearly drove off the road when I saw one of the billboards today near the Wired Parish secret bunker. I didn't actually see that 'Life Church is killing me' was signed by Satan; so my immediate thought was, 'OH MY GOODNESS! SOMEONE HAS DECIDED TO MOUNT AN OFFENSE AGAINST LIFE CHURCH!'

Instead it's one of the most creative church marketing campaigns I've ever seen--maybe the most creative.

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Easter Resources

Worship House Media has a) cool stuff for Easter programming and b) cool videos promoing the cool stuff. The dude in the brown shirt in the promo videos is--let's face it--dead sexy.

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A Reason to Subscribe

Tim Bednar over at Turtle Interactive taught me a cool trick using FeedBurner.

I connected my blog feed to del.icio.us; so when I bookmark something in del.icio.us it splices the link and my comments into my blog feed.

What that means is that once a day, blog subscribers get a list of links I've bookmarked for that day.

That generally includes interesting articles on technology, leadership, and ministry; cool apps; new music that you can't live without; etc.

So if you want to look over my shoulder, subscribe to the blog feed, and I'll keep you on the cutting edge of cool. :)

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