What is a mobile mininstry?
What is a mobile ministry? That’s a question I’ve been asking ever since I first found out about this web site. (One thing you’ll find out about me if you follow anything I’ve ever written is that I ask myself a lot of questions) I’ve thought about that in terms of a ministry to mobile, technical people. I’ve also thought about that in terms of a technical ministry, which is mobile. And I think in the instance of this web site, the answer is both of those, and a couple of more things put into the mix.
Mobility has been an interest of mine for some time. I think that the ability to move quickly allows one greater flexibility in how they serve God. In Genesis chapter 12 when God told Abram to go, he went, simple as that. He didn’t have to sell his house first and make arrangements to cover the difference in cost of living from one place to the other, or worry about family or anything else. God said go, and he went. I admire that tremendously and pray for that kind of faith. Abram is the best example of “mobile” that I can find in the Old Testament, but the examples don’t stop there. In the New Testament, in Matthew 8:20 and Luke 9:58, Jesus tells us that he himself had no place to lay his head. Probably He would have been considered mobile as well.
So when I consider these examples from Scripture of “mobile users” if I can say it like that without sounding disrespectful, the thing that impresses me is that there wasn’t anything that tied them to a particular home or location, or if the example were modern day, no piece of equipment tied them down either.
That’s kind of what I think about when I think about mobile ministry. I think about being able to be where God wants me, when He wants me there. Part of that includes keeping my life in my shirt pocket on an iPAQ and having a folding keyboard and a small Bible in my backpack. There are people I know, even some I work with, who couldn’t do their job without their specific desktop computer. Either the applications installed are so specific, or they’re so inflexible in their setup that working on another computer actually seems to hinder them. Or they require three or four computers stacked around them to do their assigned task.
I prefer to travel a little more lightly. I work off of two laptops, and one of them doesn’t even have a mouse. My configurations are so very vanilla and generic that it could seem to someone who casually looked at them, like they were “out of the box” configurations. Similarly, on PDA’s that I’ve used, I’ve forced myself to work for a period of weeks or months without any third party pieces of software so that in the event I need to do a hard reset and my stuff isn’t available for install, I’m not hobbled in my ability to use a device.
There are a couple of things I’ve seen recently which are most intriguing to me with regard to being portable and mobile, one is a Linux solution, the other is Windows, but they do very similar things. The Windows solution is from U3 and you can find out more at their website: http://www.u3.com/ but basically, your applications and a profile are build on a USB flash drive and you can carry it from one Windows computer to the next. Similarly, there’s a Linux solution called Mandrake Move, which is a distribution of Mandrake Linux on a bootable CD. When you start the machine Mandrake automatically mounts a USB flash drive (that’s one of the features of this distribution) and will load settings from a profile on that drive.
I haven’t worked extensively yet with these solutions, but I hope to be working with them in the near future. The idea of being able to carry my PC with me from place to place on a CD and a USB flash drive is really very attractive to me. But I’d like to hear from others about what their idea of a mobile ministry is and whether or not they’ve heard of or had any experience with things like I’ve talked about in this post. I’ll look forward to what others have to say.
Grace and peace,
A. Jay
Mobility has been an interest of mine for some time. I think that the ability to move quickly allows one greater flexibility in how they serve God. In Genesis chapter 12 when God told Abram to go, he went, simple as that. He didn’t have to sell his house first and make arrangements to cover the difference in cost of living from one place to the other, or worry about family or anything else. God said go, and he went. I admire that tremendously and pray for that kind of faith. Abram is the best example of “mobile” that I can find in the Old Testament, but the examples don’t stop there. In the New Testament, in Matthew 8:20 and Luke 9:58, Jesus tells us that he himself had no place to lay his head. Probably He would have been considered mobile as well.
So when I consider these examples from Scripture of “mobile users” if I can say it like that without sounding disrespectful, the thing that impresses me is that there wasn’t anything that tied them to a particular home or location, or if the example were modern day, no piece of equipment tied them down either.
That’s kind of what I think about when I think about mobile ministry. I think about being able to be where God wants me, when He wants me there. Part of that includes keeping my life in my shirt pocket on an iPAQ and having a folding keyboard and a small Bible in my backpack. There are people I know, even some I work with, who couldn’t do their job without their specific desktop computer. Either the applications installed are so specific, or they’re so inflexible in their setup that working on another computer actually seems to hinder them. Or they require three or four computers stacked around them to do their assigned task.
I prefer to travel a little more lightly. I work off of two laptops, and one of them doesn’t even have a mouse. My configurations are so very vanilla and generic that it could seem to someone who casually looked at them, like they were “out of the box” configurations. Similarly, on PDA’s that I’ve used, I’ve forced myself to work for a period of weeks or months without any third party pieces of software so that in the event I need to do a hard reset and my stuff isn’t available for install, I’m not hobbled in my ability to use a device.
There are a couple of things I’ve seen recently which are most intriguing to me with regard to being portable and mobile, one is a Linux solution, the other is Windows, but they do very similar things. The Windows solution is from U3 and you can find out more at their website: http://www.u3.com/ but basically, your applications and a profile are build on a USB flash drive and you can carry it from one Windows computer to the next. Similarly, there’s a Linux solution called Mandrake Move, which is a distribution of Mandrake Linux on a bootable CD. When you start the machine Mandrake automatically mounts a USB flash drive (that’s one of the features of this distribution) and will load settings from a profile on that drive.
I haven’t worked extensively yet with these solutions, but I hope to be working with them in the near future. The idea of being able to carry my PC with me from place to place on a CD and a USB flash drive is really very attractive to me. But I’d like to hear from others about what their idea of a mobile ministry is and whether or not they’ve heard of or had any experience with things like I’ve talked about in this post. I’ll look forward to what others have to say.
Grace and peace,
A. Jay
posted by A. Jay Sutton @ 2/23/2006 06:00:00 PM
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