Postkiwi Duncan Macleod

Media Communication and Christian Community

Duncan — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 03:51:12 +0000

Here’s the outline for the Media and Communication course I’m teaching at Trinity College, Brisbane, Monday July 6 to Thursday July 9. We have about 15 registered participants, most of whom are training for or are in ministry in the Uniting Church. Cost is $100 for auditing-only participants.

Monday July 6 - Media and the Gospel

Morning Session (9 - 12.30 am)

Opening worship experience exploring the death of John the Baptist using oral/aural expressions only, using music, story telling, silence, extempore prayer, call and response. Mark 6:14-29.

Introduction to Marshall McLuhan’s focus on Laws of Media, with reference to Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media. Read Shane Hipps on Laws of Media (Download excerpt).

Exploration of impact of print media on Christian faith, using Shane Hipps, The Hidden Power of Electronic Culture (download excerpt).

Afternoon Session (1.30 - 4 pm)

Exploration of electronic culture using Tex Sample, The Spectacle of Worship in a Wired World, Peter Horsfield, The Mediated Spirit. (Download Peter Horsfield, Theology, Church and Media)

Exploration of ambient approaches to learning, marketing and worship.

Tuesday July 7 - Communication and Community

Morning Session - Effective Communication ( 9 am - 12.30 pm)

Worship experience using printing, writing, speaking, exploring the metaphors of salvation in Ephesians 1:3-14.

Information Sharing, Semiotics, Cultural Texts, Community Building, Dialogue, Feedback loops.

Afternoon Session - Developing a Communication Plan (1.30 - 4 pm)

Mardi Lumsden, Communications Director, UCA Queensland Synod, on the Synod integrated communication plan, and on developing a local communication plan.

Wednesday July 8 - Local Media and Communication

Morning Session - Local Media (9 am - 12.30 pm)

Worship experience embedding visual media exploring Psalm 24.

Marketing and the Church - billboards, TV advertisements, Direct.

Phil Smith, ABC radio presenter, on hypothetical situations - relating to newspapers, magazines, radio and television. Proactive communication and crisis management.

Afternoon Session - Online Community (1.30 - 4 pm)

Online Church - using email, designing a web site, blogging, podcasting, videocasting, social networking.

Thursday July 9 - MultiSensory Worship & Ethics

Morning Session - Multi-sensory worship (9 am - 12.30 pm)

Multi-sensory worship experience, using 2 Samuel 6 (The return of the Ark of the Covenant to Jerusalem).

Visual Arts, Film and the Church (a retrospective)

Exploring the concept of curator in worship experience, using The Prodigal Project, Kathy Kirkpatrick, Mike Riddell and Mark Pierson (Download Excerpt)

Afternoon Session - Ethics, Media and Communication (1.30 pm - 4 pm)

Exploration of principles for virtuous reality, using Quentin Schultze, Communicating for Life, and Habits of the High-Tech Heart: Living Virtuously in the Information Age.

Evaluation

Useful Reading

Understanding Media, the Extensions of Man, Critical Edition, Marshall McLuhan, Gingko Press, 2003. (Original edition was 1964)
The Mediated Spirit (CD ROM) Peter Horsfield, 2002
Introducing Cultural and Media Studies, a Semiotic Approach, Tony Thwaites, Lloyd Davis and Warwick Mules, Revised Edition, Palgrave, 2002
The Media & Communications in Australia, edited by Stuart Cunningham & Graeme Turner, Allen & Unwin, 2006
Belief in Media, Cultural Perspectives on Media and Christianity, Edited by Peter Horsfield, Mary E. Hess and Adan M. Medrano, Ashgate, 2004
Flickering Pixels: How Technology Shapes Your Faith, Shane Hipps, Zondervan 2009
The Hidden Power of Electronic Culture: How Media Shapes Faith, The Gospel and Church, Zondervan, 2005
Entertainment Theology, New-Edge Spirituality in a Digital Democracy, Barry Taylor, Baker Academic, 2008
A Matrix of Meaning: Finding God in Popular Culture, Craig Detweiler and Barry Taylor, Baker Academic, 2003
Reel Spirituality, Theology and Film in Dialogue, Robert K. Johnston, Baker Academic, 2000
Engaging Technology in Theological Education: All That We Can’t Leave Behind, Mary E. Hess, Rowman & Littlefield, 2005
Between Sacred and Profane: Researching Religion and Popular Culture, edited by Gordon Lynch, I.B. Tauris, 2007
Understanding Theology and Popular Culture, Gordon Lynch, Blackwell, 2005
Digital Storytelling: The Art of Communicating the Gospel in Worship, Len Wilson & Jason Moore, Abingdon 2002
The Prodigal Project, Mike Riddell, Mark Pierson, Cathy Kirkpatrick, SPCK, 2000

Lead With Your Strengths

Duncan — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 04:25:48 +0000

I recently attended a couple of seminars on leadership led by Peter Kaldor, a consultant with New River. Peter’s known for his work with Australia’s National Church Life Survey, including a range of resources on community formation and leadership. His most recent resource, published by NCLS, is designed to engage with the main findings of NCLS leadership research, identify and develop each person’s leadership strengths, and identify personal foundations that will sustain leaders over time.

Peter worked with us using a range of exercises to identify twelve leadership strengths that are needed by any team. The point was that no one person holds within themselves all the competencies and capacities needed by the team.

The twelve leadership strengths are listening, connecting, envisioning, exploring, inspiring, empowering, structuring, communicating, optimism, acting, resolving and learning. The six personal foundations are spiritual foundations, clarity of purpose, sense of self, integrity, supportive relationships, balance and boundaries.

The resource includes a really helpful book, a workbook, and a booklet, each providing a new way to read about, workshop and reflect on the model.

Here’s the whiteboard list of leadership capacities we put together in the NCLS workshop at Ashgrove Baptist. Normally Peter looks for a bigger whiteboard - but this had to do!

Working with Muslims in the Workplace

Duncan — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 04:39:36 +0000

I spent this morning in a workshop led by Shaima Khan from Muslim Youth Services, in which she helped Gold Coast community care professionals get some understanding of their Muslim clients and colleagues.

I enjoyed learning some of the practical details of how Ramadan is practiced, organising prayer routines, physical contact between genders and alcohol abstinence. I wasn’t aware of the need to wash up before prayer, including hands, face and feet.

Here’s a humorous but to-the-point video on Muslims in the workplace, from Salam Cafe, a ten week series run on SBS in 2008, based on the Channel 31 title Ramadan TV.

Click on the image below to play the video in YouTube (HD)

Youth Dialogue Building Bridges in Carrara

Duncan — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 23:16:16 +0000

As a follow up to an earlier post I wrote on local opposition to a Muslim school in Carrara, on the Gold Coast, here’s an opportunity for building inter-faith bridges. I’m working with Muslim Youth Services, a team of youth workers in Brisbane, to host an series of conversations between youth and young adults from the Carrara area, building understanding and capacity for dialogue. The gatherings will provide a chance for young people to hear each others’ stories, to share common values and dreams, and test preconceived ideas about each other.

Watch this space…

How to Unpray

Duncan — Sat, 30 May 2009 06:09:00 +0000

I disovered the word “Unpray” today, in a Facebook Scrabble game with Conrad Parsons. The blighter scored 56 points with UNPRAY, JOWLY, LA and AR, a follow up to his previous move of PERUSERS worth 70 points.

So what’s involved with “Unpraying”? According to the dictionary it means to revoke or annul by prayer, as something previously prayed for. I guess it’s a bit like the “Recall This Message” feature in Microsoft Outlook.

An Unpray Story

Maxine was driving down the street in a sweat because she had an important meeting and couldn’t find a parking place. Looking up toward heaven, she said, ‘Lord, take pity on me. If you find me a parking place I will go to church every Sunday for the rest of my life and give up sex and wine.’

Miraculously, a parking place appeared.

She looked up again and said, ‘Never mind. I found one.’

Some classic Unpray messages

Oops.
Cancel that one God.
Hang on, I didn’t really mean that!

What would you add to the list?

McDonalds Questionaire Bogus

Duncan — Sat, 30 May 2009 00:12:03 +0000

I just received an email asking me to take part in a questionaire relating to McDonalds Australia. I’ve been on the McDonalds Australia site before and filled in in-store surveys so thought I’d take a look. Of course it didn’t take long to work out that this is a scam, designed to phish credit card details. The promise of a $50 gift for taking part in the survey is a cover for a fraud. The site is hosted on www.lidomar.ro in Romania.

Here’s the text of the email…

“We are planning big changes for 2009 at McDonalds AU chain of restaurants and because your opinion is very important to us, we invite you to take a short Customer Satisfaction Survey that will help us improve the quality of our food and services.

We know your time is valuable, so we will give you a $50 bonus just for taking our quick 7 question survey. The entire process will take no more than 5 minutes.”

Pentecostal Footnotes

Duncan — Thu, 28 May 2009 04:16:06 +0000

The editorial piece for Church of the Good Shepherd, (Ashmore Uniting), Sunday May 31.

Churches throughout the world are celebrating the festival of Pentecost, marking the day on which the Holy Spirit sparked the mission-focused church into action. The name Pentecost comes from the Greek phrase, pentekostē [hēmera], the fiftieth day. It’s seven weeks after Easter. The original context for Pentecost was the Jewish harvest festival of Shavuot or the day, fifty days after the Exodus, on which God gave the Ten Commandments at Mount Sinai.

In the second chapter of Acts of the Apostles we read the story of men and women gathered in an upper room, praying. The account tells us that these people experienced the arrival of the Holy Spirit, hovering above them like flames. They found themselves able to speak in various languages and took off out into the crowded streets to share the good news of the crucified and risen Jesus.

Pentecost is often associated with a Pentecostal style of worship and an understanding of the gifts of the Spirit, expressed in movements like Assemblies of God, Elim, Apostolic, Church of God in Christ, Church of the Four Square Gospel, and Christian Outreach Centre. But Pentecost doesn’t belong solely to the Pentecostal churches! The Holy Spirit teaches, encourages and empowers Christians everywhere, no matter what kind of brand of Christianity.

Pentecost is sometimes associated with speaking in tongues. The King James translation of the Acts 2 tells us that the disciples of Jesus were empowered by the Spirit to speak in “divers kinds of tongues”, which in today’s language means “many kinds of languages”. As we read Acts 2 we find that the Spirit was giving these people a gift of communication with people from many cultural backgrounds, finding language that helped people connect and engage with the gospel and one another. Maybe that’s what the Spirit is giving us today as well, helping us listen, learn and respond to people, finding ways to communicate good news that make sense and lead to changed lives.

Media and Communication Short Course Plans

Duncan — Tue, 26 May 2009 07:30:15 +0000

I’m preparing a short course on media and communication for Trinity College in Brisbane, designed mostly for people preparing for Christian ministry in the Uniting Church in Australia. The four day course will be run from Monday 6th to Thursday 9th July.

Here’s what I’m planning.

Day 1. Introduction to Media from a missional perspective. Looking at the ways we explore meaning using a range of media, from how we speak and use our bodies, through to print technology, electronic media (from phone to internet), and the ambient (experience-based communication).

Day 2. Introduction to Communication. Exploring the concepts of information sharing, community building and dialogue. Feedback loops. Web sites, blogs and social networking.

Day 3. Local media and marketing. How do we share our stories? Who shares them? Building partnerships with the local press, radio and television media outlets.

Day 4. Multi-sensory Worship. Using everything we know about media and communication to develop experiences of community, engaging in sight, sound, touch, taste and smell. Use of visual arts, including fine art and film. Use of music.

Each day needs to have something experiential - a chance to engage in and reflect with a communication medium.

The texts for the course have included:

1. Peter Horsfield: The Impact of electronic media on the culture we live in and some major implications for churches and Christian faith.
2. Jean-Nicolas Bazin and Jerome Cottin, How the Church assesses the Internet, from Virtual Christianity: Potential and Challenge for the Churches.

I’ll also be drawing on Mary Hess, Marshall McLuhan, Tex Sample, Quentin Schulze, Michael Bausch.

Any other suggestions?

Postrank Measuring Social Engagement

Duncan — Sun, 24 May 2009 02:46:47 +0000

I’ve just added a Postrank link in the sidebar for Postkiwi, similar to the link I’ve included on The Inspiration Room Daily.

I first became aware of Postrank when the AdAge Power 150 list of advertising/marketing related blogs started using the site in its ranking. The alarming news at first was that the Postrank site had allocated the feed for The Inspiration Room Daily to its predecessor, Duncan’s TV, meaning that my rank on the list had been dropped from 100 to 300. After a couple of weeks the Postrank team seem to have fixed things up. The good thing is that the AideRSS team behind the site have someone on staff providing a quick response to queries, using Twitter, a blog and bulletin board. I’ve been able to claim both The Inspiration Room Daily and Postkiwi by adding a blank html file to the root directories for each.

Postrank was developed in 2007 by Ilya Grigorik, Francis Lau, and Kevin Thomason to deal with daily information overload and our overflowing feed readers. It’s an RSS feed filtering service that measures “social engagement”, run by Canadian start-up company AideRSS . The Postrank algorithm monitors interaction with blog posts, putting together a score out of 10 for each post from the number of comments, incoming links, internet bookmarks (Digg, Twitter, Stumbleupon etc), clicks, and page views to find popular posts in a feed. PostRank filtering is built into a Google Reader Add-on, a Firefox Add-on and a Web widget, each designed to help users find the most significant posts in the blogosphere, arranged by topic.

Plurality 2.0 at Pomomusings

Duncan — Sat, 23 May 2009 08:44:33 +0000

Adam Cleveland, an Emerging Church kind of blogger in the USA (Pomo Musings), is hosting a series of guest posts on the theme of plurality. He thinks issues of pluralism, ecumenism, the exclusivity/inclusivity of Christ and everything else that could fall under the broad category of plurality are divisive issues that need to rethought. “For many, words like pluralism have very negative connotations – it’s something that only pansy, milquetoast Christians believe in. For others, pluralism is simply the air we breathe and we just need to accept it. But perhaps there are other different ways to (re)think issues like these.”

Read the rest of the post for the list of articles, including today’s post featuring Barack Obama…

Plurality 2.0 List

Here’s the impressive list of posts.

Yet To Come

May 25: Sarah Walker Cleaveland / Plurality 2.0 post
May 27: Landon Whitsitt / Plurality 2.0 post

May 28: Darleen Pryds / Plurality 2.0 post
May 29: Brian McLaren / Plurality 2.0 post

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