Welcome to the second issue of Mobile Ministry Magazine (MMM) simply titled Envisioning. There was a decent response from the year’s first issue and so we are going to continue down the same path with this package of observations and insights from the mobile ministry (#mobmin) space.
Discover
One of the questions that MMM has gotten since its inception has been “why is there not just one single place where folks can find out everything about mobile ministry?” Part of that reason is because there’s not really been all that many places. Thankfully, times have changed since that question started and now sites and conversations are popping up all over to add some depth to the discussion about this space called mobile ministry.
MMM’s contribution towards trimming the fat has come through a mobile-portal page called MobMin.Info. MobMin.Info is simply a single, mobile-first webpage highlighting some of the content areas and opportunities which have arisen within mobile ministry. Using some standard web frameworks, MobMin.Info is also able to live on many mobile devices as an offline-web app, making it easy for you to at least identify areas of mobile ministry opportunity, or key web contacts when you are in personal, ministry, or project conversations.
MobMin.Info has been designed to support the efforts started by the Mobile Ministry Forum (disclosure: MMM is a founding member of the MMF) and therefore, some of the content that’s not present is not deliberate. If there’s some kind of #mobmin content you’d like to see linked there (or something’s old and needs to be removed), let us know so that we can get that page updated for those folks who’d appreciate that resource.
The photo leading this issue shows MobMin.Info on a smartphone to give you an idea of what it looks like.
Observe
There are three items which have stuck out since the last issue. The first is an item on trends within digital cultures, and the other two are our monthly videocasts:
February Videocast: Snow and Mobile
March Videocast: #mobmin Perspectives for Leaders
Relate
As with the previous issue, our Relate section pulls from a piece published first at Medium. In Passing Digital Heirlooms, Antoine asks about the behavior of passing down items within our digital frame of reference, and what is gained/lost if we lose that sense of passing down worn items.
Recently, my 1st generation iPad was gifted to my 2 year old niece as a birthday gift. Likewise, in faith communities, its not just fatih that’s passed on, but heirlooms and sacramentals too. Is there space in digital faith expressions for the same kind of bequeathing we see in the offline world?
Read the rest of Passing Digital Heirlooms at Medium (click Recommend at the end if you’d like for others to see it)
Release
This issue, there are two items worth bringing to your attention: All Books and iPrayer.
iPrayer is a social/mobile app and service designed to create and manage prayer communities. Having seen a number of applications and services, this is one that impressed due to the quality of the application, and the ease at which it was being administered. However, the developer is no longer able to keep iPrayer going and is looking for a ministry, organization, or company who’d like to purchase the assets but retain the developer for support. If this is something that’s attractive to you or your ministry, get in touch with iPrayer and make something great happen. I’d hate to see this product go to the #mobmin graveyard.
All Books is user interface (UI) experiment we started back in 2011 or so with the expressed desire to challenge some of the interface conventions used in Bible apps, and to also create a front-end where those who might have HTML-formatted bibles, have something a bit easier to deal with than the frames/iframes that many (free, low-maintenance) Bible distributions had seen. While it has largely been a personal project, it has been shared via Github and is in need of some additional hands. If this is a project you’d like to get involved with, jump on in at Github and we can talk about some directions that are on deck. I can reveal that some time ago, there was some thought about adding an ability to put a web service at the front of this, and such a thought might have an ability to solve a very sticky Bible licensing issue. If you want to know more, jump on in.
Do you have some items near release? Point it out to MMM and get it featured in an upcoming issue.
Intersection
At the intersection of faith and mobile technology, there are a number of ways to respond. Sometimes, we discover something we’d not considered before. Other times, we simply observe the traffic flowing around us, and wait for that moment to be released into it. In every case, we relate something in our lives towards it, and that allows for us to push forward in life and faith with something worth sharing for a few more generations.
We hope that Issue 2 has been a great read for you. Remember, you can read past issues, or even check out other presentations and experiments as they continue to happen.
If you are interested in commenting, please use any of the contact methods noted. If you’d like to contribute something which could be highlighted, or would like to lend financial support to MMM, please also utilize those contact methods. Consulting services and speaking engagements are available – as are some other limited-service engagements.
Thanks for taking a read into this issue. Stay tuned to social media and the conference circuit as MMM will be keeping the vision going there – with things cresting in another issue in about 4-5 weeks (or so). Or, get MMM via email or RSS so that you are notified when the new issue publishes immediately.