Short and sweet this one.

I’ve been up all night – no not willingly as I’m at work and in 4hrs I’m attending a men’s breakfast. I’m going to try and get a decent enough seat so that I can stream the speaker live on ustream.

We have Mike Warnke over from the USA speaking – for those that don’t know Mike he was the number 1 christian comedian for a number of years. Anyway, he’s a good guy, funny and has a unique perspective on life.

Please feel free to stop by and watch my ustream – it’ll tweet when I go live but I’m not quite sure what the URL will be but you can try this one or just watch my twitter stream at about 10am UK time.

Here’s one I’ve managed to miss before – so many things, so little time …

Anyway, regular readers will know that I’m a fan of keeping my children safe online and by extension all children.

I’ve long been an advocate of everything and anything that helps to promote the safety of children and not just online. Anyway, it would appear that InSafe host an annual “Safer Internet Day” and this years theme is:

Think B4 U Post!

I agree.

So what is SID? In their own words:

Safer Internet Day is organised by Insafe each year in February to promote safer and more responsible use of online technology and mobile phones, especially amongst children and young people across the world. The topic for 2010 is “Think B4 U post!“.

To read more, simply click on the image above.

And by the way, it’s today!

And by media here I mean books, magazines, newspapers … in other words printed material.

I’ve long been a quiet evangelist for the green movement – not that I am an out and out recycling nutjob or constantly turning off lights, etc but I do try and remind folks where it’s blindingly obvious that we all can help to save our planet.

One of the ways I’ve been trying to drive the Church in this is by moving to what I’m terming as online publishing. Take last Sunday morning for example … I walked in and was greeted with a smile, a hug and no less than six individual bits of paper. Each had a valid reason for its existence but equally each could have been condensed down to a couple of lines and put on one piece. After the service I lost count of how many of these bundles of six were left languishing on their seats forgotten by their owners.

Is there an answer? I think so but the onus to drive it has to come from our leaders as they are the ones getting the designer(s) to generate this content.

First and foremost we need to look into exactly what is being handed out and why. Does it need to be printed out? If so, does it need to be handed out to every member or is it meant for external distribution? If for members (and I ought to clarify that I also mean attenders here as well) then do we need the huge glossy flyer for what essentially boils down to a date, time and type of service?

For regular content, such as a newsletter or magazine can we not get these (on the whole) delivered by electronic means? In our Church we are fortunate that most of the members are internet enabled and have personal email addresses. For those that don’t we can still run off the odd dozen copies or so.

I’m sure I don’t need to teach any whom read this to suck eggs but I’m raising this today to remind myself to address the issue with my church leaders and to challenge the tech community to suggest alternatives when the guaranteed “but what about’s” start coming at us.

So what do you do in your Church to reduce your carbon footprint?

Regular readers will know that my Church is creating an online presence.

The first aspect of this is our online bookshop – not some two bit addon to what we sell at the back of the coffee lunge on a Sunday morning, but a full blown professionally designed and built eCommerce site. Why? Simply because the Church has run a Christian book import / export business for over ten years now and this is the next natural stepping stone for us.

Due to my various involvements with the Church and my professional life I was put in charge of the web projects and although I’m involving the leadership every step of the way I have been given carte blanche to do “what I think best” and that “Stuart has the last say in anything web related”. Awesome responsibilities and an awesome challenge as well.

Part of the current challenge is in getting our developer to cough up the goods. Some of you will have already seen the “almost complete” eCommerce site. Unfortunately it hasn’t moved on from there as the developer has given every excuse under the sun to not do the work or to prevaricate over doing it. He has one task left – to ensure the payment gateway works, but rather than actually doing it all I appear to be getting is excuses. I’ve started praying for him / the project and have suggested the leadership do so as well.

As a part of all this frustration I’ve been thinking about the occasion when we do actually launch it. Thoughts like:

• what will be our daily / weekly / monthly tasks?
• how can I encourage the Church staff to keep this at the forefront of their thinking?
• how can we make the site look new / different without actually changing the template?
• how often should we change banners / special offers / etc?

Because I work outside of the Church in my professional life I won’t always be there to nudge, cajole and encourage and let’s be honest – eMail simply doesn’t hit the mark with everyone. So my first challenge is to get the leadership to have a monthly meeting (at least) that is solely dedicated to considering the online bookshop. Get them to discuss previous months sales – investigate any feedback – look at what stock to include / exclude – consider what promotional items to run – set challenges for the month ahead – involve the creative chap in designing the rotating banners and so on ….

Apart from these items is there anything else I should be considering?

After all, this is new to me as well.

This is a question I’ve been asking myself a lot lately.

I don’t have a complete answer and likely I never will, but none the less I keep pondering it. For now, I have an idea but I’d really like to get input from others.

Do you see media as a very narrow field such as TV or radio? Or do you see it as something all encompassing, taking in drama, art, IT, communication, internet, press … etc, etc. Or do you see it as something in between two extremes? I’d really like to know your opinions and would love to get a discussion going with any of you about it – either comment here or email me directly.

So whether you are in a media ministry or head one up or see it as a distraction I want to hear about it please.