Leaders are often inspirers. And so bright shiny toys get leaders excited. The promise of what a new piece of software, a new webtool, a new gadget can do! O, the possibilities!

And so Facebook Groups and Google Drives and Dropboxes and Evernotes and intranets and Task Management software get used in the hope that we will be able to better plan our services, streamline our committees, better manage our conference, better collaborate in REAL TIME. Remember Google Wave?

But collaborative software is mostly useless for collaboration.

Why?

1. Any effective collaboration still needs a clear leader/facilitator. Collaborative tools often blind us to this need, so we either have aimless projects that run out of steam, or really one person is doing most of the work, it just happens to be online.
2. There will always be a significant percentage of people who won't log into the tool. They won't read the notifications. They won't comment in the shared google doc. So it hasn't actually made collaboration easy for the whole group. That will required either extra time, enforcing and training. Or multiple methods of communication.
3. These tools, although seeming intituitive, always have frustrating quirks. I remember years ago deleting the entire DropBox content of Redeemer City To City's incubator, when I was just trying to remove my local copy. User-friendly is never entirely user friendly to every user, even if the software uses colloquial turns of phrase and has lots of white space in its UI.
4. Although shared drives in theory avoid the duplication of documents, in practice they end up with duplicated because the drive folders still need curating and tidying and merging. Before you know it you'll have 'Timetable Sunday Franks Notes_DRAFT' and 'Sunday Timetable Frank V2' and 'timetable FINAL notes'.
5. Collaboration can promote pointless iteration - everyone adds, changes, edits, shitfts, suggests, emails, cuts, pastes. Sometimes one 'point man' who requests and collates data is just cleaner and quicker.
6. Live shared docs still get accessed at certain times and only rarely get used while still live. They tend to get downloaded or printed. This requires clarity on cut off dates for additions and edits.

Look, this stuff has its place. But largely to enhance good disciplines of project management and collaboration. Without those disciplines in place it is all just a fast, high-tech version of sticky notes.

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As churches and ministries grow older in age, and especially when they grow out in size, changes need to be made to the way they do things.

Some of these things are practical necessities, they just get forced upon you and you have to do it.

But some of them are strategic necessities: you can get away without doing them, but if you do, it's possible that this will reduce the depth, and quality and impact of your ministry. And it's also possible that it might therefore stifle your ability to welcome, engage, edify and train more people. 

So I thought I'd do a little series on a few.

Not Teams But Rosters

There's a good place for rosters. They are efficient and simple and obvious. They engage everyone in doing a little bit so that a lot gets done.

But rosters can be lazy: They stop us from building teams, recruiting people to the vision of that team.

And so rosters can be limiting: They mean we never build groups of specialists who really own their area of ministry and develop it.

Rosters can also simply be wasteful: is it the best use of all these people's time and energy to do all these jobs? Are there a smaller group of people who do it better, quicker and more joyfully? Or are there people who could be paid to do it for us, freeing everyone up to do different things?

So part of growing your church up might be developing an aversion to the 'simple' roster-solution. 'Let's just all muck in and do the job', shifts to 'Who's the best person to get this done?'

It might even be helpful to start thinking of rostering as a 'last resort', to force the discipline and creativity to think of other solutions.

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1. The Atlantic writes on the rise of women in the workforce, the apparent strength of female workers in the new economy, the struggle of blue collar workers to retrain for the 'pink collar' sector, and the reality that there are now several tiers of the female workforce - women doing childcare and housework to free up professional women. 

2. Andrew Heard interviewed on local radio about Same Sex Marriage.

3. A blog that gives everyday examples of how to be more emotionally mature.

4. The economic cost of hipster gentrification.

5. What makes a woman? The intriguing cultural clash between feminists and transgeder activists.

6. An excellent lecture by Sandy Grant on Same Sex Marriage, with Q&A. I have a lot of time for Sandy - he is intelligent, careful, humble and sympathetic.

7. Steve Kryger is convinced that pop-up web advertising works. But he removed it from his site because he became convicted that it was not in line with a gospel ethic. 

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I preached at a church a few weeks ago and a friend, who was also a preacher, happened to be in the congregation. He kindly offered to give me feedback, which I was eager to receive.

All his comments were good, and got me thinking and reflecting on which ones to take on board and how.

One bit of feedback particularly got me thinking - he suggested an inadequacy in my sermon and proceeded to suggest how I could have remedied that inadequacy: 

'The sermon is addressing the problem of fear. WHY are people afraid? How does this passage address that fear?...'

He proceeded to sketch out a very admirable 3 point sermon along these lines. It would have been great to listen to as a full sermon.

Afterwards I reflected on this feedback - would I now preach my sermon differently? Ultimately I concluded, this particular point was really suggesting an entirely different, and equally legitimate sermon. So while I might adjust my existing sermon a little to include a bit more of this angle, to really do it justice would be to write and preach a different sermon. And in so doing, many of the benefits of my existing sermon would be lost!

There are many different sermons that can be preached from one passage. Slightly different angles, emphases, applications:

• Spiritual psychology - getting under the skin of why we fear, or how we repent, or what worship looks like.
• Stirring the imagination - rich illustrations, stories and appeals, which awaken our imagination to interact with the teaching of Scripture.
• Learning and memory - an emphasis on 'big ideas', catchy headings and neat summaries to ensure our listeners can repeat what the 'sermon was about' straight afterwards.
• Extensive application - lots of time and focus on spelling out application and calling for those actions.
• Doctrinal depth - dealing with all the doctrinal points the passage touches on, and unpacking them at length.
• Exegetical commentary - big focus on context, structure, argument flow and points of difficulty related to translation/grammar/logic.

Each of us have preferences for some of these particular angles. 

But we need to realise no one is always superior to the others. And perhaps we need to branch into some of the others to better round out our ministry.

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We have a student executive committee meeting for the Uni Fellowship of Christians once a quarter. The student president's report covers topics like 'Summary of Activities', 'Relationship with students, staff, leaders, TUU, UTAS'.

But there is also a section: 'observations about uni culture'. This meeting, our student president gave quite a detailed list, which is both funny, and also really helpful:

Blog News

• James Wheller started a blog - http://ift.tt/1HPKxWK
• Alice Wanders recently posted on being human - http://ift.tt/1LBEoCc
• Mikey recently wrote on the length of blog posts - http://ift.tt/1HPKxWM
• The Three Views On podcast is still going strong - http://ift.tt/1LBEoCe

UTAS News

• First indigenous exchange students have arrived from Northern Arizona
• Seth Sentry – Strange New Past at the Uni Bar on August 8
• Inter College Cocktail this Saturday – please be praying for safety
• Scav Hunt happening now and into early august
• Fossil Free Uni – Divestment Day August 14

Top 5 Songs This Week 

Like I'm Gonna Lose You, Meghan Trainor Feat. John Legend 

Main themes: Love and The concept of limited time

Can't Feel My Face, The Weeknd 

Main themes: Bad addictive relationships?? Very repetitive, dance type track (I wouldn’t recommend)

Are You With Me (Original Mix), Lost Frequencies

Main themes: Not Sure, again very repetitive, but a much nicer sound

Headlights, Robin Schulz Feat. Ilsey

Main themes: Not getting distracted by pretty, but pointless things. Definitely Christian blog potential

Peanut Butter Jelly, Galantis

Main themes: Not sure (Maybe sex), Most repetitive of the bunch, cool “rewind” sounds

In Fashion

70’s style is back, along with a real push for layering over the winter months. So expect flared jeans, 

repurposed civil war jackets, fringing, and mustard and burgundy tones. Also, I appears that double denim is 

now acceptable again. Despite strong efforts on my part, ugg boots as casual outwear hasn’t taken off yet.

Design News

Amy Rolfe recently posted on twitter that Adobe Calson Pro was a nice font. I agree, but think it’s more of a 

printed book font than a poster font. This whole paragraph is in the font for your convenience.

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I think Nathan Campbell's blog posts are too long. It annoys me. But I know he doesn't mind. Of course I normally preach sermons that other people think are too long. That annoys them. But I don't mind.

Here he explains WHY he writes long blog posts. (I'm still not convinced he should write such long posts.)

Reason number 1 is a helpful one:

"Editing would significantly, significantly, change and lengthen the time I invest here that I need to invest elsewhere....

"I don’t edit because I don’t have time. I have a wife. I have two young kids, with another one due in the next two weeks. I have a pet dog. I have a church family. I have a job. Writing takes me away from these things some times. To be honest, I spend too much time here for too little tangible return in the relationships that matter most."

I can relate to that. Not on length, but on spelling. I type quickly and recklessly into the Geneva Push Expression Engine admin portal, which doesn't have an auto-spellchecker. And I normally update spelling when someone tweets me to say that I really should get my spelling right if I want people to take me seriously.

So I apologise and fix up the spelling. But I carry on as before. There's probably typos in this post. 

Nathan should write shorter posts. I should get my spelling fixed up before posting. But we've got pet dogs to look after. And we have persevered in writing blogs for about a decade, when many other Australian Reformed evangelical blogs have died by the side of the road. So go easy ;-)

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