Mobile Ministry Magazine

Most people get on me because I am so focused on mobile. And they do have a point, I do and push things that in a lot of cases just don't seem feasible to most folks. But then again, it is. Check out a snippet from this story and think about it:

...The story goes something like this: Vic was out for dinner with family and friends. The adults were on one side of the table, the kids on the other. The adults were debating some issue, and Vic said, in response to a question from one of his friends, "I don't know."

His four-year old daughter Samantha, whom everyone knows as "Tiger," piped up from the other side of the table: "Daddy, where's your phone?"

"What do you mean, where's my phone?" She explained that she'd overheard the question. Why wasn't he just looking up the answer on his phone...

There's a lot that people are doing on a PC that would be a lot better served on a mobile, and by interacting with one another. As the Body of techies, how are we teaching and enabling this simple observation from a child, to change how we approach tech and ministry?

Labels: education, innovation, mobile, mobility, teaching

Sometimes, we need to do more than just think outside the box, we need to think beyond it:

...Last summer, Chipchase sat through a monsoon-season downpour inside the one-room home of a shoe salesman and his family, who live in the sprawling Dharavi slum of Mumbai. Using an interpreter who spoke Tamil, he quizzed them about the food they ate, the money they had, where they got their water and their power and whom they kept in touch with and why. He was particularly interested in the fact that the family owned a cellphone, purchased several months earlier so that the father, who made the equivalent of $88 a month, could run errands more efficiently for his boss at the shoe shop. The father also occasionally called his wife, ringing her at a pay phone that sat 15 yards from their house. Chipchase noted that not only did the father carry his phone inside a plastic bag to keep it safe in the pummeling seasonal rains but that they also had to hang their belongings on the wall in part because of a lack of floor space and to protect them from the monsoon water and raw sewage that sometimes got tracked inside. He took some 800 photographs of the salesman and his family over about eight hours and later, back at his hotel, dumped them all onto a hard drive for use back inside the corporate mother ship. Maybe the family’s next cellphone, he mused, should have some sort of hook as an accessory so it, like everything else in the home, could be suspended above the floor...

Read this entire article in its context at the NY Times.

Can we really say that we are using the Internet and its associated technologies to the benefit of others and to the glory of God in light of examples like this?

Labels: community, innovation, Internet, mobility, poverty, wealth

This weekend I had the opportunity to attend two of three concerts which are part of a show called MixxMaster's Studio Lounge. Both nights saw a ton of youth and mobile action, and the picture in this post is just one of the really neat scenes from the night.

This scene was probably the most awesome of the night as young and old, people from various races and areas of the US, all came together to just put Jesus in the front of all that was going on that night. Lecrae in particular leading this was an impressive act of humbliness and maturity. A Christian hiphop artist who has recently broken the secular Billboard Top 10 with his latest release, he pointed folks to Jesus. This moment captured in a picture, a moment of utter agreement by all in the room (400+ people), was just awesome.

At the same time, that venue also added to my fustrations with the Body and mobile technology. Let me preface in saying that I am very clear on issues of artists, images, video, and rights. What I want to point out is the missed opportunity to involve youth with a media company, and the ability to literally change how concerts are done - with just a simple mobile phone.

On the third night of Mixx Master's, it was asked of all those in the audience with cameras and camera phones to only take stills and not video of the night. Now understand, most of those with a mobile in the audience were youth. And that video was going to go right to their MySpace (or other) pages before they left the building. But due to legalities, the security in the audience constantly told people throughout the night that moving pics could not be taken.

For me, for this mobilists who started MMM with the idea that the Body should be innovators of mobile tech and its use, I was fustrated.

Its Sunday night when I am writing this, and I am still fustrated. This was an opportunity to do the best of mashups, and include mobile and youth in the telling of a story about an artist that many of them identified with. It didn't happen - again.

A ton of youth with a mobile phone, a free SMS/MMM shortcode to upload videos, utilzie the abiltiies of the audio/video team to mashup the content, publish the viewpoints of those in the audience beside the professional footage = end up with a story that cannot be repeated, but can be shared and told over and over. For all those hands that were raised, especially the one teen girl who gave her life to Christ, this was a story that was missed. An opportunity to do a concert and TV show in a way that had not been done before. It was missed.

For my part, I've got a problem in seeing these opportunities and then putting Jesus in front of them. Its really an issue of knowing that the Body has the best story to tell, but will not take advantage of it with what is available either because of ignorance or refusal. I really don't know what I'll do at this point except to point this post to a few there, and hope that people can start to use their means to see all points of our lives as vantage points where Christ's story can be told so that others come to see Him just as Lecrae presented - the man who wasn't afraid to be a rebel to show us how much the Father loved us. Because to me, people getting together to exhalt the Lord is fun, but when we keep our own slience, the fustration just weighs on me.

Labels: community, innovation, mobility, music, teens. youth

Change is a weird thing. Its one part exciting and another part very uncomfortable. Jesus's life was marked by these challenges to general conventions and perceptions that were sometimes received with gladness (for example, forgiving the sins of the lame man then healing him) and other times mocked and scorned (the Pharasees, council, and Pilate questioning Jesus' divinity).

These challenges to change mark our very lives though. Whether we are the agent of change, or being subjected to it, at some point, we have to accept that the way we think, do, percieve, etc. must adapt, or we die.

I'd like to believe that Body has done an impressive job of eventually adapting to whatever the world has done around it. When there was a need for educators, the church stepped up. When there was a need for doctors in war-torn areas, people in the Body formed organizations to address those needs. It would see that the Body always has had the right, if not late, reaction to change.

However, I've not see us as proactive (instead of reactive) to change. If you will, pulling a card from Jesus' life and being an agent of change, even in respect to the fact that people won't get it until we're gone to glory. It seems to me that we've lost that edge a bit, and that edge is something that could have mitigated several items that we react and fight against even today.

I've just finished reading an article titled Of Cell Phones, Maps and Mental Models: Why Doing What Was Right Is Sometimes Wrong. This article is aimed at those who analyze the trends and their impacts; those in the technology field who get blinded by their light of what looks good and successful now, but they miss the little thing that signals the change that will overturn things sooner rather than later. Here's one of many quotes from that piece that stood out:

..Thus, the first and critical point about why we fail to see the need for change stems from the fact that we stand blinded by the light of successful past mental maps. The longer these maps have worked, the more it makes sense to hold on to them and the more difficult it is to see beyond them to recognize the need for changing them. This applies not only to companies and macro issues like strategies or technology, but also to individuals and issues as small as how to communicate or provide feedback to someone.

Placing this in the context of the Body, church, and technology, it would seem that we'd be wise not to rest on our laurels, or even fight against the change that is happening right under our noses. We'd be better learning how we can be apart of what's changing, and then be like Jesus and prepare those who will be taking the mantle to the ends of the earth with the tools and Gift needed to do so.

Labels: commentary, community, innovation, tech

This year, one of my biggest struggles with just about everything has been to remember that there's a good bit of relevance that must be undertaken with everything. And especially in the field of mobile technology where things just move faster than people want to even write about, its important to remember something I've been told often, technology is only relevant when it is personal. Some recent thinkings have put me in a position though where I realize that I have to do a lot more evangelism than just using this stuff in order to make this point clear.

I can start with the example of my use of Nokia's Mobile Web Server. Frankly speaking, this is probably one of the most far out things that I use and one of those things that people go "ooh" about, but just don't understand. Without repeating the entire post that I wrote up on my personal website, I will say it like this: using a web server on your mobile phone, or even just the idea of having a web server in your home gives YOU control of the information that you put on the net. Not Google, not Nokia, not anyone. You administer it, and you say how it gets anywhere, if it goes out at all.

The mobile device that's that and adds the ability to associate that personal information with the context of your environment. Its not just an IP address, its an IP address that's attached to a photo of a place or a contact person or a a mesh of all of those and more. That's not the web virtual, that's a literal web. And its already something in your hands. Imagine knitting the Body together with that kinda stuff.

Or about about mobile devices in general? Most would say that while they are enabling, that they offer no real benefit over other computing situations. That might be right, until you consider the cost of powering devices. The wastefulness that we display as a computing culture is crazy. Slimming down to the bare essentials should allow us the time to develop more accessible and renewable solutions, while making all of those previously stated connections all the more fruitful.

Connecting: I want to be the kind of parent who has the "key" for allowing his household to be online. If you will, I'd like my mobile device to be the gateway for my family. This way I can see and interact with what my kids are doing, and my wife has an accessible and open means to keep me accountable. Far reaching? Nope. Using something like this soon to come software and a solid smartphone this is not just possible, but probably advisable.

Look. I am not saying that we have to do this. I am saying that the technology is relevant if we look at it as being so. I still think that a partnership between churches and developing nations could do more for increasing technical competencies for both sides than just doing nothing. I still feel that solutions like Earthcomber should be used by more urban missionaries to share and live the Gospel. I still see the need for people to put these devices down and interact with one another being an important part of using these devices. I just have a problem with just letting it sit here. I'm made in God's image. I'd like to believe that somewhere in me beats the ability to be relevant with whatever is in my hands and life.

For me, it just happens to be mobile tech and its various applications, intersecting with my faith, in a way that just happens to push the green light out a bit longer.

Labels: accessiblity, Bible, children, church, community, computer, environment, innovation, Internet, Mobile Web Server, mobility, networking, OLPC, smartphone, software

I was reading about the next OLPC laptop, the XO-2, and its new form factor and it caused me to reflect a bit on the purpose of technology to empower and enable people to reach beyond the glass ceiling that social or economics presents before us.

As the Body enabled with mobile tech in its various forms, I think about a project like the OLPC Project and wonder where and if we are being as effective in terms of looking for innovative and needed (debatable term I know) solutions for empowering communities.

Another thing that the OLPC Project brings to mind is the fact that we can sometimes have an effect in a place where we originally didn't want to. The OLPC has spawned devices such as the MacBook Air and Asus Eee PC as capable laptop solutions that fit into lives instead of forcing you to fit into theirs (mostly).

I've been exposed to some very blessed people in the Body, and some wealthy ones. I wonder on both accounts if we are doing what we can to effect change for the greater good given our abilities with resource. Not to say that we all have to be a Bill and Melinda Gates, but how are we using what we have to bring Christ into a place that He hasn't been. And moreso to improve the quality of life of those around us so that preaching Christ is easier to be heard since basic needs are met.

It's just me thinking aloud. But I wanted to share this because its something that hits me pretty often. Is there really any innovation left in the Body, or are we just riding the coattails of whatever happens until Jesus returns?

Related Articles at MMM:

• The OLPC Give 1 Get 1 Challenge As A Mobile Opportunity
• Becoming More Tech Savvy Is A Necessity

Labels: Asus Eee, community, innovation, MacBook Air, mobile, OLPC, tech