What Google, Facebook, and Your Church are Hiding from You

With a title like this, you might think: “Nate’s gone off his rocker. All this rapture talk has turned him into a conspiracy theorist.” Judge for yourself, but I think you will find a compelling case below that we as the church, like the internet, are in danger of over-personalizing our user experience to the extent that we lose sight of both the gospel and the missio dei.

What is Active Membership, Really? (and Other Difficult Ministry Questions)

I am amazed at the depth and breadth of ministry discussion that happens among Christian leaders online. A recent discussion was initiated by a friend with the status “How does your church define active membership?”* If you’re in a hurry to see what I mean, click this link to the see the entire transcript of the 64 responses on Google Docs. A little discussion of my thoughts on the opening question and some of the other conundrums follows in the rest of this post.

Unexpected Power

I was a little surprised yesterday when I received a Facebook message titled “Thank You!!!” from a “shirt-string friend”, someone I knew only through her membership in a local Bible literacy initiative I had been webmaster for.

I was more than a little humbled when I opened it and read that because of a paper I posted online, her life had changed and she was now training to become a pastor.