I was bothered by this admission for a couple of days for a number of reasons.  I tried to process where the concern was rooted.  Am I jealous?  Nope, ruled that one out.  Am I concerned he’s going to go all the way with her? Nope, not that either.  So, what is it?  I finally decided that it was simply that she has become his god, that he would rather do pretty much anything than work at pursuing and developing his relationship with Jesus.

Last week we talked about this for quite some time.  I asked a few more questions and then told him plainly that what he is doing with her is sinful.  I assured him that I was not being the sin police, that we all mess up, but that my prayer for him (and for me) is that we run to the light, rather than seeing how close we can be to the darkness.

The next day, he came to me and said that he and another 16-year-old boy talked and decided that it isn’t sinful to be on top of a girl, in her bed, in a state of arousal, with tongues down each other’s throats.  Wow.  I was blown away.  This wasn’t even an option for me in my teenaged years.  I always considered it sinful.

So now, today, I am bothered again.  This time, not by the act.  Rather, I’m bothered that my “brother” would, in my opinion, rewrite the Bible to allow him to do whatever he wants without guilt.

My question to you, loyal reader: am I overreacting?

1. LifeChurch.tv released BabelWith.me today.  It simply lets you communicate with anyone, anywhere in up to 45 languages, automatically translating your conversation as you type. It’s built on Google App Engine and uses Google Translate, making it possible to enjoy real-time conversations with people around the globe, no matter what language they speak.
2. ACS released Check Point themes today.  This is great for churches with limited graphic design expertise.  You can install a simple program from ACS that allows you to change the theme of Check Point to any of the available options in their theme gallery.  It’s pretty cool – just beware… it overwrites your default.  So, if you’ve got a kick awesome design right now, be sure you have that graphic saved elsewhere.

Click for full-size screenshot

Apparantly cell phones don’t work perfectly in 19-story buildings in the middle of rain storms.  For future podcasts, I’ll make sure to use a land line.

During the call, we talked with Keith Thompson, a Senior Software Developer with ACS.  He outlined the upcoming integration with AccessACS and Facebook via an application that ACS is developing and will host on their servers.  They will allow churches to create their own semi-customized copy of this application.  They are releasing this as a free, value-added service to all clients who have purchased AccessACS.

Click for full-size screenshot

Some of the things this application will allow church members to do:

• View and update contact information with the church.  Changes will still go through the change request process
• Mark attendance for small groups
• View groups and rosters of all the groups they are involved with at church
• View upcoming events and activities
• View a church or group directory

This is exciting stuff, and you heard it first on the ACS Users Podcast!

Our featured guests will include members of the ACS Research and Development team.

This will launch our monthly podcast, where you can call in and talk to others who are in the same boat as you.

To join the call, coming to you live from the annual ACS convention, simply dial in:
(724) 444-7444
Call ID: 19965
Enter 1# as your PIN

Or, connect via the Internet.

I was really excited about this class because it offered users a view of implementation from a fellow user’s perspective.  I shared our successes, our failures, our wants, our needs, our love for the product, and our love for the company.

I heard a lot of really positive feedback.  I’m glad that ACS allowed a little vulnerability in releasing their stage to me and creating a venue for real people to hear from other real people who use this stuff everyday.

If you’d like a copy of my class handouts, you can grab one here.

They have now taken that integration even further.  You can embed individual calendars (ie: ministry area calendars) to your Web site via a link in AccessACS.  See our live example.

To accomplish this, you will first need to load Facility Scheduler.  Click the Admin tab, then Calendars.  You’ll need to go into each calendar you’d like to create embeddable links for and change the Published flag to be checked.

Once you have done this, the links will be created in AccessACS.  (Note: you will have to log-out and back in if you were logged into AccessACS while you made the changes in Facility Scheduler)  Go to Admin > Options and click on the Web Links tab and then the Calendar sub-tab.  You’ll see all the

Two interesting tidbits…

First, my roommate Kevin went to a conference in Jacksonville this month, in the exact same hotel.  No one else seems to think that is as weird as I do.  Of all the hotels in the United States…  Well, he was in room 1103.  If I get that room, I will be trippin’ out.

Second, I’m teaching one of the convention classes.  I’m excited about this, and I’m hoping to use the convention as a time to launch the ACS Users Podcast.  It’s time we get that thing up and running!

Through a series of events, I was convinced that not only do we need to change but also that now is the right time to change.  I’m showing that logo to you (above), asking for your comments.  What do you think?

We’ve submitted both of the designs to the Church Marketing Lab on Flickr.  This is a GREAT creative resource, provided by our friends at Church Marketing Sucks.  See both of them in the lab: logo and stationary set.

Andy Stanley started the conference talking about “Gaining and Sustaining Momentum,” a tremendously timely topic for us.  Stanley defines momentum as “forward motion fueled by a series of wins.”  He made the following claims that really resonated with us:

• Anything new, by definition, generates some kind of momentum
• Organizational momentum is often triggered by new leadership, a new direction, or a new product or program
• Momentum is never triggered by tweaking something old

As we are in the process of launching a number of new programs and heading in a new direction, this stuff really hit us.  He continued in his talk about how we maintain that momentum, by ensuring that the “new” things are a real improvement over the old and that we continuously improve upon them through systematic evaluation and unfiltered evaluation.

Bravo Stanley!  Bravo Catalyst!

Today, I had this wild idea that it was time to join the 21st century and add a flash image rotator to our front page. Why? Several reasons:

1. (Probably the most realistic) because I like change
2. because I like being able to have a fluid number of features
3. because transitions are cool

So, I asked my friend Jason Morgan (who does not have a blog) to create a MySQL statement to pull what I needed in order to create an XML playlist on the fly. He, being the amazing guy that he is, made the most ridiculous SQL statement that I have ever seen.

SELECT wp_postmeta.meta_id, wp_postmeta.post_id, wp_postmeta.meta_key, wp_postmeta.meta_value, wp_term_relationships.term_taxonomy_id, wp_posts.post_title, wp_posts.post_name

FROM wp_term_relationships INNER JOIN wp_posts ON wp_term_relationships.object_id = wp_posts.ID INNER JOIN wp_postmeta ON wp_term_relationships.object_id = wp_postmeta.post_id

WHERE (wp_term_relationships.term_taxonomy_id = 100) AND (wp_postmeta.meta_key = ‘large_photo’)

ORDER BY wp_postmeta.post_id DESC

There are two keys to making this work. First, you need to create a “Featured” category and then use phpMyAdmin to browse the wp_term_taxonomy table to find out what that category’s term_taxonomy_id is. (This is easiest if your category has description text entered).Ours was conveniently 100.  Every post that you want linked in your rotator will need to be in this category.  You could modify slightly to accomplish this with a tag also.

Second, you need to add a custom field of large_photo to every post in that category. You can obviously call it whatever you like, but you’ll need to edit the MySQL statement accordingly.  In my large_photo field, I include the full URL to the image.

I then used the sample PHP at Longtail Video to get that MySQL statement to do some work for me in generating a suitable playlist for their AMAZING Image Rotator.

In any case, you can see the results here. I haven’t implemented on the main page yet as I need to reduce some of my HTTP calls before I add more bloat to the page.