Regional Days

I leave Monday for a week with the rest of the eastern area staff, for what we call "Regional Days". We debrief how the term is going and plan for the upcoming months.

This weekend I prepared a portable server with a network file share, and a wiki. As an ops team member, I hope this will help our staff be that much more productive during this week, so that they can then be more effective in communicating the gospel.

Water is Life

One of my goals with this blog is to show what our parent organization Power to Change Ministries is doing. Power to Change Ministries has over 11 different ministries. Today I'd like to focus on one project that the Global Aid Network is doing.

Global Aid Network (GAiN) exists to demonstrate the love of God, in word and deed, to hurting and needy people around the world, through relief and development projects. http://www.globalaid.net/

What I really appreciate about GAiN is the very real, practical, tangible demonstration of the gospel that goes along with the words.

At staff conference this year, I learned about a project GAiN is doing to provide clean drinking water to areas in Africa: The "Water for Life" initiative. GAiN reminds us that "water-related diseases kill a child every 20 seconds, and are responsible for 80% of all illnesses and deaths in the developing world". GAiN goes in with a team and builds a well that taps in to clean water 80 meters below the surface. By providing clean drinking water, people in the village are 1) healthy, and 2) able to focus on tasks that produce income, rather than fetching water.

I have also heard that these wells provide an avenue to minister to the spiritual needs of the community as well as the physical needs. It's great to be a part of a ministry that is creatively addressing physical and spiritual thirsts.

Some say helping is when you've walked a mile in someone else's shoes. We believe it takes about 80 meters.

summit weekend

Last weekend I went to "Summit", our fall student conference. There were 9 summits across Canada. The one I went to had over 320 students!

The purpose of summit is to kick off the fall term of ministry by training and challenging the students. There were a number of training seminars including "How to share your faith without freaking out". The main speaker spoke on the danger of idols like money and approval in our lives.

I went to both help out and represent the operations team. The setup team appreciated having another person to help out. I moved a lot of speakers and mic stands! As a member of the operations team it was beneficial to be present so people to ask me questions or feedback about our web sites. I have some ideas now about how to be more effective in this regard next year.

pulse on the ground

I just had a pretty cool experience. I gave a short demo on the pulse at the new discipleship group (roughly, Bible studies that do ministry together -- we call them DG's for short) training at McMaster. There were maybe 50 students and 3 staff there.

What was neat is seeing how the pulse is being used "on the ground". I fielded a number of questions that gave me some insight in to what's confusing people and how they're using the pulse.

I overheard one student saying how he was able to go to the directory, where it lists all people in your campus, and start straight up calling and contacting people who weren't in a DG group already. Since we've imported all conference registration accounts, there's a few thousand people in the pulse already. That proactive student was able to start connecting people, just because the information was there to do so.

One of the staff was also telling me how it's provided some accountability for leaders. Before, they would say "hey, make sure to pick a time for your DG!" and hope that it would happen. Now, their time is right there on the web site. If they haven't chosen a time, it says "TBA", and if they have, it's updated as soon as they enter it. Now staff can make sure times are chosen by a certain date.

Then some of the staff gave me some feedback and feature ideas, and I showed them how to do various things that they weren't clear on or just didn't know you could do. Overall the demo was good but just being there was the really valuable part. It was really neat to see the pulse in action.

Ops Huddle

Last week I traveled to London, Ontario to join the rest of the operations team. We had people fly in from BC and out west and from the Maritimes. There were about 8 of us. Starting Tuesday and going till Thursday, we heard from international and national presenters remotely, and discussed what we as an operations team will be doing in the next year. As my boss blogged about, we weren't retreating -- instead we called it the "Ops Huddle".

We decided that our goal for this year is to position the pulse to be our premium app. That will entail making sure we really support our staff as they use the pulse, being quick on bug fixes and having a high standard for new feature releases. On a technical end, this also means making the pulse the center of our infrastructure, using libraries and web services to communicate with our other apps.

Overall I really appreciated the focus and clarity that emerged from our time there. It was great to meet some of the team in person and hang out, especially for those in other parts of the country (and we definitely have distributed team). We even found time for some starcraft gaming!

The Pulse is Online!

I'm excited to announce that we have released the movement tracker for the Canadian staff! We're calling it "the pulse", alluding that this tool will help gauge the ministry's status, and will become a critical piece of infrastructure.

Already we have well over 50 groups created, across 14 campuses! To each of you supporting me in some way, know that you were a part of making this happen. It's really exciting to see this come together.


I'm thankful for the additional of Josh and Deb, staff based out of the Maritimes, who are joining our ops team. Josh has already provided personalized support, which has really enhanced our user experience. Deb has provided graphics and an artistic eye for the colours and branding of the pulse (and will do so for other web sites).

As mentioned in the last post, we trimmed down the movement tracker substantially from the international version (being developed jointly with the United States, Canada and Australia). We removed all features we weren't sure were up to par, were unclear on how to use in our ministry, or that we simply didn't want. As a result, we have a highly supported and documented piece of software that does much less -- namely, compare timetable, update personal information, and manage groups -- but it does it well. In the coming months we plan to add more features.

The Pulse

On Monday we will release the Canadian version of the Movement Tracker -- which we're calling "The Pulse". The idea is that you "check the pulse" for information about how you're movement is going, that is, who's involved, to what degree, and in what structure. I think it's a pretty catchy name that one of our other ops people came up with.

For this release, we're focusing on the profile editor and the bible study scheduler. We actually disabled a number of other features from the international version of the movement tracker, in order to make what we do release really solid. I think that's a smart move. Over the two weeks we've really been testing it out and polishing the site up, and I'm happy to say we're ready to release on time!

I'm actually going for a week of vacation this coming week. I'm going to be doing youth camp counseling at Ryerson Camp. I'm not sure how restful that will be but I love counseling and camp so at least it should prove as something different! No computers or internet for a week!

Oh, I'm also tracking my development from a technical perspective on this blog.

More pictures from Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado. We
were rounding a bend and startled to see several elk only meters
off the side of the road. A sizable crowd - and a park ranger waving
drivers on - had already gathered.

Near the top we stopped and took a short hike. We came across
a few marmots like this one.

This gives a good indication of the road. Notice there are no side
railings at all and the steepness of the mountain.

A nice view of the mountain and valley.

more IBS reflection

One of the big concepts they instilled in Bible Study methods is something they called "fallen condition focus" (FCF) and "redemption solution" (RS). These seem to be based off "God's Big Picture" and "Christ-centered preaching".

fallen-condition focus: experiental aspect [of Scripture] that answers the question, 'What aspect of the fallen condition of mankind does this passage address?'.

redemptive solution: shows how Jesus is presented in that text as the remedy for our experience of sin, immaturity, suffering, or brokenness

This is something I can think of when reading any passage or listening to any sermon or talk. Definitely one of the things I'll remember from IBS.

back to Canada

On Sunday morning we took a shuttle early to the Denver airport. After going through security and taking a short train to the gate (overall a long process -- Denver airport is definitely not the best laid out or run, of the airports I've been to), Silas and I arrived in Vancouver. We spent some time with a friend from high school who's doing his masters at UBC, then headed to another staff member's house in Abbotsford. While the owners were in meetings, we were delighted to consume immense amounts of lasagna, salad and pie that was left over from their previous group dinner and then relaxed in their hot tub.

The next phase of our summer travels is Campus Days here at Columbia Bible College (CBC) in Abbotsford. For Campus Days all staff in the Campus Ministry come for about a week before the general staff conference. There's some training and reenforcement of our vision and purpose.

Today we slept in and headed over to CBC for registration at 2pm. I'm excited particularly to (1) not have to do homework, and (2) have someone cook for me. :)

Rocky Mountain National Park

Here are some pictures from our hike last week in the Rocky Mountain National Park.

At the "Alluvial Fan" deposited when a dam broke several decades ago. This is at the base of the mountain.

Bridge at the alluvial fan.

We took a detour path up to a waterfall.

Just chillin'.

We made it! This is about the highest point we got to.

IBS weeks 1 and 2

Last Friday was the last day of classes for the first two courses I'm taking at IBS. Intro to Christian Theology and Bible Study Methods are now complete. I took the final for the theology course earlier today.

One thing I really appreciated about the theology course is how different beliefs among Christians were laid out. When Dr. Alan Scholes gave his opinion, he made that very clear. Another helpful distinction was the idea of levels of beliefs: conviction, persuasion, and opinion. Conviction level beliefs are those crucial to salvation. Persuasion level beliefs are those you are personally convinced of but are not crucial to salvation. Opinion levels are those you acknowledge you are unsure about.

Through these different levels, I feel I have a much better understanding of what different Christians believe on different issues. I also appreciate that Dr. Scholes examined some difficult issues, such as homosexuality and whether the Bible is truly accurate in all areas (the "innerancy debate"), such as science, and not just morality (which is a current debate in Christianity).

Throughout the course, Alan Scholes also injected quotes from the Campus Crusade for Christ statement of faith. It was interesting to see the different levels of conviction addressed in the statement of faith (conviction, persuasion, opinion) -- it seems to have various statements at all three levels. On some issues it's very specific (such as inerrancy of Scripture), on others (such as Calvinism vs Arminian) it's intentionally silent -- evidently someone higher-up decided that taking a stand on certain issues wasn't important enough to offset the cost of possibly divisions.

Some of the highlights for me:

• learning about the different views on the "inerrancy" debate. This is one of the more current issues in Christianity and Crusade right now. Campus Crusade has specifically stated that it believes the Bible is fully inerrant in all areas, not just in morality and faith issues.
  


• learning about the various heresies that have surfaced in church history, especially relating to the trinity. One heresy called "Modalism" states that there is one God who puts on three different fronts, which, by the way, is where most of our analogies about the trinity will degrade to if taken too far (ice/water/steam, for example).
  


• learning about the Biblical view of humanity -- not that we are at core evil, but that we were created fully good (in God's image) but are corrupted because of the fall. I did know this but hadn't realized the subtle difference in how most non-Christians think the Christian view is "evil at core" and the true Christian view (good but corrupted).
  


• learning about the idea of an "antinome". Dr. Scholes presented an antinome as something that seems contradictory, yet is true -- we really just don't understand how it works. In Christianity, for example, "There is one God, in three persons, who are fully God". Scholes points out there are antinomes in other disciplines, citing the heisenberg uncertainty principles in physics.
  

I'm also feeling much better. The first weekend I slept a lot and drank a lot of water. I figure I averaged about 11 hours of sleep per day that weekend. Last week I had the sense that IBS assignments got easier as they went along, which I suspect was more likely me getting my energy back.

This weekend I went to Rocky Mountain National Park. It was incredible! We drove up a one-way narrow road that wound up the side of the mountain. There were several spots where you were mere feet from the edge, with no guard rail. We got to see a bunch of marmots and elk who were close to the road. I'll try to get some pictures up soon.

On the Friday Waterloo project finished, fellow staff member Silas and I headed to Hamilton, spent the night here, then to his place for Saturday night. It was a nice relaxing weekend. On Sunday we flew out here to Colorado. We arranged it so that we had the same flights, definitely nicer than traveling alone.

On Monday we started classes. I'm taking two classes for these first two weeks: Introduction to Christian Theology, and Bible Study Methods.

Intro to Theology covers the major theological issues from a high-level vantage point -- things like the Trinity, inerrancy of the Bible, etc. The lecturer also happens to be the author of the textbooks (Alan Scholes -- What Christianity is All About).

Bible Study Methods is teaching us techniques for how to study the Bible. All of the assignments revolve around Ephesians. Unlike the Theology course, there's less lecturing but instead we have small groups where we focus on assignments.

It's a unique environment of academia and faith. In between the two lectures, one time this week they actually did some praise and worship songs. In our small groups, we discuss one chapter of Seeing and Savoring Christ before doing anything else.

Unfortunately, I've been hit by either dehydration and/or altitude sickness and/or heat-stroke and/or jet-lag type symptoms, which has made it hard to do much other than try to keep up on the assignments and readings as best I can. Overall though, I'm enjoying the content of the assignments quite a lot, and hopefully things will continue to improve on the health side of things.

We compiled a video presentation about what was working on at Waterloo project. I got one of our more outgoing students to interview everyone, and some of the results are quite humorous.

[July 6, 2009 - I removed the embedded video since it was loading each page view, which results in excessive bandwidth usage. Instead, watch the screencast using this link.]

Yesterday was our last day of working in our work teams. Today we started debrief, and that lasts for a few days.

A few weeks ago we had to make a tough decision. It looked like what we wanted to do with the measurements component of the movement tracker was more complicated and difficult to meet all the requirements we came up with. After some consulting with my higher-ups, we decided to solve the same problem with a combination of spreadsheets, an existing web application, and some much simpler statistics from the movement tracker. I think it's a testament to the leadership that we were able to recognize that and be agile enough to switch. We were then able to put those resources in to other areas.

I'm realizing that leadership is as much deciding what you won't do as it is deciding what you will do. And it takes effort to really stick to that when lots of voices are saying you should go in other directions. Often they're well-intentioned voices, and even are right in many ways, yet you have a plan that will get you there, and if you keep switching to every which way that sounds good you'll just go around in circles. Of course, you need to open minded and willing to switch if it really is appropriate too.

Without going in to too much detail, there's been a lot of discussion about the vision and purpose of Waterloo project, and even Campus for Christ and Power to Change as a ministry. Sometimes the product can seem at odds with developing our students. Much of this discussion has actually stemmed from the IT team leadership (my boss and I) finding the project not conducive to producing products number of reasons. I don't mean to say what we're doing is not worthwhile, or that we haven't accomplished anything. But I think we need to really have a clear purpose that lets us decide between two worthwhile things, so that we can do what we choose to do well. You can pray that we find a way to balance all this and come out in a way that honours God's call on our ministry.

Some pictures:

Having fun in the halls.

Walking along University.














Last weekend we went camping. Some of the students explored the lake that was close by.

We had a staff member from the Western team come and speak about Biblical work/rest. Overall I found it an enjoyable weekend away from computers. The fact that there was consistently ample food and free time probably had a large part in that. :)










Our Friday evening fun - playing networked computer games. :)

Everyone now has their jobs, and have been working on them for about a week.

We have two people working mainly on web sites. The web sites being developed are updates to http://mycravings.ca, http://campusforchrist.org and conference promotion sites (which is basically a subset of campusforchrist.org).

The rest are working on the Campus Movement Tracker (CMT) in various forms. We have a QA team of two guys who work in the same room, one who mostly finds issues, and the other who mostly fixes them. We put one guy on the functionality for joining and creating Bible studies, since that's a major deliverable. The others are working on a number of other subsystems.

Work is coming along slowly but surely. We're halfway through project but only now really learning the CMT code we were given, and learning the technology in a way that is simply not possible with learning projects. Overall though, that's actually quite a good timeframe all things considered, and I'm quite happy with the skill level of the guys. I wish I had them for another few months and we could really get going! I think they're all honing their programming skills and will be able to apply what they're learning in their courses.

Some project highlights so far for me include a large soccer game involving everyone, of which I scored the lone goal for my team (I happened to be in the right spot at the right time, and tapped in a shot that got past the goalie). Last Thursday we went bowling. It's fun spending so much time in one community.

Earlier today we had one of our leaders from BC come by. He's one of the most forward-thinking and idea generating people I know, so I got him to brainstorm with the IT guys about how we can use technology and evangelism. I thought there were some really great things that came out of that. Some ideas included mobile/iPhone app short videos or booklets with spiritual content that could be pulled up from anywhere, making a guide for our staff and students on how to make the most out of youtube (turns out some of our highest hit web sites are actually youtube channels!), and making use of twitter and mobile devices during an event. We took some notes which I put here.

It's interesting to see how the core hours is working out. Every week I give them a numerical goal for # of hours I expect, and with time tracking software, you can be fairly accurate in tracking. Probably 2 or 3 of them start earlier, around 9, and 3 or 4 start later, around 10:30. It's not unusual to see them working during the weekends because they need to work hours up, which is good in that it's similar to a real workplace with flex hours.

Today was a unique day for the IT team. We all agreed to start at 9am, and start diving in to the Campus Movement Tracker. It took about an hour and a half to get everyone set up to the point that they had the CMT running on their local computer -- that's actually fairly good to get all the database and dependencies set up for 7 developers.

Our next task was simple yet very open-ended: learn as much about the CMT as we could. I bought a few whiteboards and got people to look at different aspects: database relations, page layout, permissions and roles, groups, scheduler.

In the afternoon I needed to do some staff work, so left two in charge and let the group go at it. Tomorrow we debrief what we found. Should be interesting.

I think the guys are enjoying getting in to things that will actually reach our staff and students. They've been faithfully learning our technologies, a necessary step, but there's something motivating about working on production projects.

Tomorrow we have "project fun" time in the evening and we're going bowling!

Oh, I'm also getting them to rank a number of jobs by preference. If you're curious, you can see that list of jobs here.

Technical Goals

I want to give some details the technical end of things. The IT team will be especially involved with two aspects of Waterloo project:

1. Movement Tracker
2. Technical back-ends of various web sites

Each of these goals can be broken down into sub-goals.

First, let me explain what the movement tracker is. Over the years in campus ministry I've heard of several software solutions built for tracking the ministry -- things like who's involved in your ministry, their addresses and contact info, responsibilities, Bible study/small groups, tracking other groups, etc. In many ways it's like a "holy grail" of ministry development. At its core many of these features can and have been tracked using a spreadsheet. Unfortunately such solutions don't scale well past a few years of a few hundred participants.

In fact, the idea of a movement tracker is so universal that several countries have started on their own solutions. During January 2008 my boss Russ Martin went to Australia to see what they've been developing as a solution to this problem. Between 2008 and 2009 development was started on a collaborate effort between the US and Australia (done mostly by a US developer in Chicago, the same guy who gave me a code base for the Project Application Tool), and we've joined in with that.

Specifically, we're working the ruby on rails implementation of the Campus Movement Tracker (CMT) stored here on github. It's actually released under the Affero GNU Public License v3. It's actually being used right now on a beta test trial with some campuses in the states.

If you'd like to play around with the CMT, you can do so on a demo install here. Use the username 'test.user@example.com' and password 'testuser'.

One goal for Waterloo project is to get the movement tracker working for our ministry. That will involve making it work with our database schema, finding and fixing any major bugs, and some documentation. One specific deliverable we've identified is making sure our staff and students can use the Bible study scheduler feature, where everyone inputs their schedule and it finds times to meet. (Actually, we've had a tool like that for several years but it needs some work and the CMT version of it is much nicer.)

Another sub-goal with the CMT is to build a stats module. We already have a stats module as well, but it's in php and has some design limitations. We've decided that it makes the most sense in the long term to have our stats system done inside the CMT. The means it will be in rails and in the same spot as the movement tracker features which means one web site to deal with instead of two different ones. The stats module will be a significant deliverable on the international scene where we as Canada can bless the rest of the groups using the CMT with this stats module.

Shifting to the other major goal of web sites, the IT team will be involved in some of the web site design and redesigns. Campusforchrist.org is probably the biggest one here. I'm not as involved in the direction and vision of campusforchrist.org -- but other staff here do have big ideas for that site. It's being hammered out in various meeting groups as to what the goal of campusforchrist.org is, who the audience is, and what should be on there. Once that's ironed out, it will be passed on to the IT and graphics team to make it happen. It will probably look like a lot of research and installation of various blogging/content management system (CMS) tools, for the IT team. We will make the technical side happen.

Other web sites in the works include a soul cravings web site and conference promotion sites. Soul cravings is a book by author Erwin McManis used on many of our campuse ministries. Again, as an IT team our job will be to set up the technical side of these web sites.

So, to put these sub-goals in with the high-level ones:

• Movement Tracker
  
  
  
  • Make it work with our database
  
  
  • Fix any major bugs / security issues
  
  
  • Make sure the Bible study scheduler is usable by students
  
  
  • Build a stats module


• Web Sites - Technical end of ..


• campusforchrist.org


• soulcravings promo site


• winter and fall conferences promo sites

Hopefully that gives you a good idea of what we're aiming for here. I feel like these are specific and focused enough that they're quite achievable, although it will take some work to break down these tasks even further into measurable goals.

Welcome

I've decided to start a blog. If there's one thing I remember from my high school English courses, it's that you should know your audience and write for them. In this case, I will be gearing my writing towards my supporters. My goals are:

• To provide more frequent updates about my ministry
• To provide stories from the Campus ministry and other ministries, to show what Campus for Christ -- and Power to Change as a whole -- is doing

My intent is not to replace my newsletter updates with this blog, but to complement them with more frequent updates. In some cases they may be shorter, but I suspect this blog will also be an outlet where I can write in more detail to give a better picture of the day to day operations.

With that said, let me tell you about Waterloo project.

About two weeks ago the staff met to discuss various aspects of the project, from high-level goals to details like our daily schedule. One moment I really remember was when we were all in a conference room editing a shared google spreadsheet with our schedule in it. We simultaneously tried different schedules out, summed up work hours, answered questions in the chat (so as not to disturb the main discussion) and made it look pretty with colors. One person's change would just show up on the other people's spreadsheets (assuming the internet in that conference room worked for you). It was a striking example of how collaboration increases efficiency.

Two Sundays ago I moved in to this residence by Laurier University. The students moved in on Monday. The first three days were student orientation, mostly done at a local church. It was particularly interesting to see the leadership games done Tuesday morning. One team had to move an apple using only strings attached to a ring, while the other team worked on untangling themselves from a circular rope with their eyes shut. You could see who the natural leaders were, yet how important the followers were in completing the team.

On Thursday we finally met as an IT team. I gave a presentation about the technology landscape at Power to Change, what our goals are for Waterloo project, and what my expectations were for them. I've decided to implement a "core hours" idea, where I require them to work from 10:30 to 4:00, and require a total # of hours worked per week (we keep track using a project management tool called ClockingIT. The idea here is to give the students real workplace experience, and most programming companies (at least the ones I would want c4c operations to emulate) give you flexibility to work start mid-morning, provided you get the work done and work your hours.

Of the 17 students on project, the IT team consists of 7 students and one splitting his time between campus and IT. I'm expecting them to work 32 hours a week on IT, not including lunch. That leaves time for evangelism and other project activities. The skill level of the IT guys is quite high. Two have already worked for C4C in the past, and all are quick learners and have programming experience of some form. It's the first time I'm leading such a large group, so I'm both excited and nervous.

That's all for now; stay tuned for more.