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. :)