Do Pastors Dream of Electric Sheep?

Open DNS Logo

A few months ago (back in December), Google rolled out Google Public DNS and it encouraged people to use it for a faster Internet experience. This was the first time for many that the term DNS became a household word. DNS stands for Domain Name System (click for Wikipedia Entry). DNS is sort of like a phone book for computers on the Internet. It looks up the web address that you type in and turns that into a number computers can use to locate the website. For instance, when you type “google.com” into your web browser address bar, DNS turns that into the number 72.14.213.147. If you enter that number in your web browser, you will go to Google’s home page. Without DNS, we would have to type in a series of numbers for every web page that we visited — sort of like looking up the name in a phone book and punching in the number on the phone.

So why would you want to use Google’s Public DNS or another service like OpenDNS?

The two basic answers to this question are speed up your Internet experience and improve security.

A third answer is available if you use a service like OpenDNS (http://www.opendns.com) – web filtering. This is a great option if you have children at home who have access to the Internet. Both of my kids have Nintendo DSi’s that can access the Internet. The Nintendo DSi has a web browser built by Opera on it. My nine year old son likes to search YouTube and Google for funny videos like boys making funny noises or things blowing up, etc. It isn’t too hard to imagine him typing in something “innocent” and receiving a picture or video that is completely inappropriate or downright nasty. Or he might hear something on the playground at school or on the bus and type it in … next you know, something you don’t want the kids exposed to is on the screen. While every parent should supervise their kids on the Internet, it isn’t possible to do it every moment — especially if your kids have a portable device that can access the Internet. OpenDNS solves that problem for our family. If the kids accidentally (or purposely) type in something inappropriate, the web page is automatically blocked based on criteria my wife and I set. All in all there are about 50 different categories that can be blocked ranging from academic fraud (paper mills) to gambling to lingerie to sexual themes. In addition to these sorts of categories, OpenDNS automatically blocks illegal activities and malware.

OpenDNS has two basic options that will interest the home user: the free account and the $9.95 per year (that’s right — per year) Deluxe account that gives you more customizable options. Besides the “custom” option, where you decide by selecting from 50 categories what to block, there are four basic pre-set options: High, Moderate, Low, and None. High level filtering: Protects against all adult-related sites, illegal activity, social networking sites, video sharing sites, and general time-wasters. Moderate filtering: Protects against all adult-related sites and illegal activity. Low filtering: Protects against pornography. None: Blocks nothing, but still offers the benefits of faster DNS service and malware protection, etc. With the Deluxe version you can add Whitelisted sites, etc. My house uses the “Moderate filtering” option with some minor customization.

One of the best things about OpenDNS (besides its price) is that it requires no special software, etc. Instead, you change the settings in your router to point to the OpenDNS servers. This provides protection to any computer, even guests’ computers, in your house. So you don’t have to worry about your children’s friends coming into your house with their computer or portable Internet device and downloading the latest album or movie leaving you to get in trouble with the RIAA or a large fine to pay for piracy.

The Internet offers many wonders but also many dangers for the family. It is great to have a tool like OpenDNS for the home to help keep your family safe from bad and dangerous things on the Internet. Another advantage is faster Internet surfing, protection from Malware and illegal activities. Considering you can use it for free, go give OpenDNS a try.

(originally posted here)

– Rev. Albert B. Collver, Ph.D.

Books for the spring quarter.

Pastors have lots of books. Despite the advent of more and more digital works, theology by in large remains in the print domain and our libraries continue to grow. The question before us is how do we manage our ever-growing libraries?

While some have their own organizational methods and can exist without using technology, many of us have to use digital tools to manage our libraries. These library managers will used to track your number of books, where they are located, who you have loaned them to, and how much you have spent on your books (don’t show your wife). Some of the software can also track your DVD and CD collections and some even can track your tool collection. Tracking your “stuff” can be helpful if you ever need to file an insurance claim. No more guessing, simply hand the adjuster your list of goods lost (stored off site of course as a backup).

Library Managers are easily found through a google search. Here is what you need to look for:

• Auto Searching. Most library management programs reach out to services such as Amazon.com to gather information based on your search parameters. More advanced programs also reach out to services like the Library of Congress to gather even more information. The most common search variables are titles and ISBN numbers.
• Auto fill. You want the software to accurately fill in data from the above web services.
• Available Fields. Some software offers more fields than others. A helpful program gives you plenty of options for importing information.
• Export Functionality. While you may love your software now, you may hate it in a year. However, if the software you used doesn’t allow for easy exporting you may be stuck with the software unless you want to manually reenter all of your books again.
• Print Services. It is best if you can both print out a list of your books and also print labels if you are so inclined.

Like I said, a quick google search can turn up many options for management. I’d like to highlight a few of these programs.

If you are interested cloud computing LibraryThing might be of interest to you. It allows you to catalog your books and make your library searchable and by others. It is free to catalog up to 200 books. Beyond that you can pay $10 a year or $25 for a lifetime membership. This is a growing service with one major downside. If you don’t have internet, you don’t have the service available. One cool feature is that you can buy a CueCat Scanner to quickly scan your books. You can also share your library and view the library of others.

Desktop Options (Mac focused):

Delicious Library is the most popular piece of software out there in this category. It has a slick interface and is very user-friendly. It uses the iSight camera available on most Macs to scan barcodes and import the information from Amazon.com. This program has a number of options including books, music, tools, and even clothes. I used this for my first three years of mac ownership, but switched after I had some library corruption issues that weren’t able to be fixed. Delicious Library currently retails for $40.

Another option is Bookpedia by Bruji. Bookpedia has a nice clean interface at the inexpensive price of $18. Bruji offers three companion applications to Bookpedia: CDpedia, DVDpedia, and Gamepedia. You are able to bundle applications together to lower cost which also allows you to get what you need (for example, I don’t catalog my CDs). Bruji’s website includes a number of user-created plugins that give access to more functionality beyond what most users will want/need.

My current choice of library management software is Booxter from Deep Prose Software. It doesn’t have the most eye popping interface but it is a powerhouse for managing my books. I now have over 1,000 books in the program and it doesn’t slow down at all. What I love about Booxter is the ability to do what I want with the software. It easily searches both the Library of Congress and Amazon.com to get information. I can quickly add in information about purchase price and retail price. One huge feature of this program is that it allows me to specify if a person is an author, editor, illustrator, or translator. Somehow, this feature is lacking in many other pieces of cataloging software. After I get all this information imported I can print labels or print lists. Unlike Delicious Library, Booxter does not catalog multiple media types in the same window. Instead you have multiple libraries. I have two now: one for books and the other for DVDs. Booxter retails for $49.99.

There is one last piece of software I think deserves mention: Librarian Pro from Koingo Software. I want to mention this because it seems to be a stable and feature rich program and also is cross-platform (both Windows and Mac). It comes at a great price: $19.95 for a single-user license and $7.95 for a single-user educational license.

Smart Phone Resources

For those of you with smartphones such as the iPhone there are some dedicated apps out there. However, the ability to integrate the above programs with an iPhone are somewhat limited. Amazon.com, who provides much of the data for these programs, limits what can be synced with a phone. Both Delicious Library and Bruji had iPhone apps which removed from the app store at the request of Amazon. You can export your library as a PDF and store it on your phone.

Summary

Like I said in my introduction, some of you can exist without this software. I cannot. If these programs interest you download them and take the demos for a spin. If you have any other program suggestions especially on the Windows side of things, leave a comment and we can add them to the article.

One think I dislike about being a pastor is having to track expenses.  I actually got out of the computer business to track people, not money.  But it is a necessary part of what we do for the sake of good order in the church.  The real problem, if I am can be so bold as to confess my sin, is that I’m just not very organized.  What I really need is a personal assistant to do all that tedious stuff for me so I can read, write, and visit with my Lord’s flock.  But that isn’t going to happen, so what does a busy pastor do the keep track of expenses like mileage, conference fees, meals he takes while out and about doing the work of the church.  I tried several different methods, including a self-made Excel spreadsheet, a shareware program, a commercial program, a palm pilot, and just plain old paper and pencil.  They all had advantages and disadvantages, but I usually didn’t stick with them very long.

Enter Xpenser.com.  Xpenser isn’t different because it does what none of the others does.  It’s different because it’s online, accessible, easy to use, works as advertised, and above all FREE.  (It is among those services that plan to introduce a ‘premium’ account but keep the ‘basic’ account free).  So far they’ve kept their promise.  As far as it goes, the ‘basic’ free package does everything I need it to do.

One of the best features of Xpenser is how accessable it is.  You can enter expenses in a wide variety of ways.  You can email them, tweet them, send them via IM, call them in by voice, and a host of other ways.  The format is simple here’s an example of submitting an expense via eMail.

All you do is send an email to e@xpenser.com (e for expense) with the subject line “lunch $35 with Jack client”. The format is simple “type amount notes” and it’s the same no matter what method you used to send them in.  Of course you can also go directly to the website log in and use the simple entry screen.

Great and useful features.

Xpenser saves your receipts.  You can scan them or send then as a picture from your cellphone.  If you’re at your favorite bookstore and buy a book you can quickly zap a picture of the receipt with your cell phone and email it to Xpenser.  The email address is all that changes.  You send the picture to r@Xpenser.com (‘r’ is for receipt).  The subject line would be “book $13.99 A Little Book of Joy, Harrison”

Xpenser tracks your mileage.  This is main reason I began using Xpenser.  In my previous congregation I spent lots of time behind the wheel.  Tracking mileage was a little chore that I couldn’t quite get the hang of.  Xpenser solved that for me.  When I finished my trip, all I had to do was text the mileage into Xpenser.  I didn’t even have to calculate out the amount.  All you do is put the word “mileage” (this is called a keyword) into the ‘notes’ position and Xpenser automatically convert the miles to dollars and drops the miles into the ‘notes’ field. (i.e. “mileage 132 miles hospital visit“)  It’s a simple set up to set the mileage rate on a setup screen.  There are other keywords that do magic things to expenses too, like currency conversion, time tracking, and filing expenses to a specific report.

Xpenser remembers.  Xpenser has all the great features you’d expect from a great online tool.  You can tag expenses to keep track of how much you are spending on books (Usually a dangerous thing to think about for me!).  Every report has a status, ‘submitted’, ‘paid’, ‘rejected’ etc. so you can keep track of what’s been paid and not paid.  And many more…

Overall this is a great online service.  Easy to use, feature rich (and growing) and above all accessible from anywhere you are.  Check it out at Xpenser.com.

Pr. Jonathan C. Watt

By Pastor Todd A. Peperkorn, STM

In my last post about using a computer for workflow, I mentioned that I do my actual sermon writing in a program called Scrivener.  Scrivener, by company Literature & Latte, is a writing tool.  It can be used by everyone from novelists, technical writers, journalists, non-fiction writing, and beyond.  It is an almost perfect solution in my opinion for working with sermons and sermon texts.

Here’s why.

My workflow for sermon writing is fairly consistent. Here is a screenshot of my workflow in Omnifocus:

So the first thing I do in my workflow is setup my electronic resources (Accordance and Logos). Part of what I don’t have in my formal workflow is the gathering & reviewing of previous sermons and other online resources (e.g. historiclectionary.com). Because I use the one year series, this allows me to gather a great deal of materials from various sources on these sermons. Sermons I have written. Sermons I’ve collected from others. Snippets from Luther, Gerhard, the church fathers, artwork, Pius Parsch, and the like. Depending on the week, the amount on any given week may vary. It’s great to have and find all of this stuff, but it’s frustrating if you can’t find that one quotation or insight that is holding you back in your process.

So this is what I do with all this stuff.

Scrivener is divided into two sections in the left binder: the draft section and the research section. Under research I create a folder for each Sunday. I make these Scrivener projects by season, so that I have everything for Epiphany (or whatever season) all in one place. In this case I’m looking at the Gesima/Pre-Lent season. In each of these research folders, I can keep all of my previous sermons, snippets, graphics, audio files, web sites (or at least addresses), and then have it all in one place. So a typical Scrivener sermon project for me is going to look something like this:

So you note in the example above that the DRAFT section above has the current year’s sermons in it. Then under research you see a folder for the season as a whole, then each of the Sundays in the season. I have it open to Sexagesima. In there you can see 7 sermons by date, a web page, an extended Luther quote, and then the notes I’ve gleaned from historiclectionary.com. Below the Notes section you’ll find some general sites. I just have one in there right now for Luther’s sermons online.

The advantage of this system is that it allows me to keep everything together, so that I don’t have to hunt around in folders or searching the web or anywhere else. Once I’ve found it, it’s in there. At the end of the season I just move the current year’s sermons into the research section for next year.

In the new post I’ll discuss the actual writing process. I am still fairly new to Scrivener, so I’m sure there are other features I haven’t found yet. But at this point, I can hardly imaging writing without it.

Pr. Todd Peperkorn

My computer is a nearly indispensable tool for me in writing my sermons on a weekly basis.  I don’t use it for absolutely everything, but I’m sure that 70% of my regular preparation and writing happens in from of my trusty computer.  While I intend to expand on this and unpack each step along the way, I thought it would be helpful to get a sense of the workflow on writing sermons on a weekly basis.  I use a Mac, but I expect that many of these steps would have equivalent versions in Windows or Linux.  Here goes:

1. Manage the sermon project in Omnifocus.  I am a huge Omnifocus fan.  It allows me to track multi-step projects, assign deadlines, make them repeatable, and generally helps to keep my sermon writing on track every week.  So I will have multiple steps and little tasks assigned for each day of the week.  This insures that my sermon writing doesn’t come down to “what am I going to talk about” on Saturday night.  We would like to avoid that as much as possible!

2. Keep all of my research and do my actual writing using Scrivener.  Scrivener is the ultimate writing tool.  I can hardly describe how much I love it!  It allows me to keep all of my sermons for a season in one project, as well as my  notes, links to web sites, snippets from various places that I’ve gathered, references, past sermons, and to manipulate all of this in a beautiful and simple interface.  It makes writing fun!  I’ll be writing a more thorough review of Scrivener later, but this is really the linchpin of my writing work.  I can hardly believe I worked without it until a few months ago.

3. Textual and Commentary work in Accordance and Logos.  Accordance (imo) is really outstanding for textual study, keeping notes on the fly, and working with the myriad of translations.  Logos has the most Lutheran resources from CPH & NPH & Augsburg/Fortress.  They overlap, but they are both great programs that are only improving as the years go by.  Logos, incidentally, also has an iPhone app so that many of your resources really can be had on the fly.

4. Greek/Latin New Testament audio.  This is the newest part of my sermon preparation regimen.  This amazing site has mp3 files of the entire New Testament read in both Greek & Latin.  It is amazing!  And free!  It is helping me to grasp the original texts in a whole new way.

5. Lutheran Service Builder.  I wouldn’t say that this is a part of my weekly workflow in terms of preparation, it is certainly worth mentioning.  Having all of the texts of the pericopes, introits, graduals, and hymn texts right at hand is really really useful for the liturgical types.  I find myself using it that way pretty often.

6. Apple Pages.  If I am making my sermon available in a printed form, I will format it in Apple Pages.  This is my “go to” word processor.  It’s elegant and beautiful, has a wonderfully intuitive interface, and is easy to use.  Unless you are doing lots of tables work where you are importing complex formulas from Excel or something, Pages is a great option.  Don’t get my started on Microsoft Word…

7. iTalk, GarageBand, iDisk, and WordPress.  I podcast my sermon over at Lutheran Logomaniac pretty much every week.  The way I do this is fairly simple: I record the sermon on my iPhone using iTalk.  I then edit the audio using GarageBand, export it to mp3 and save it in my public documents folder on iDisk (you could also do this easily with the free Dropbox), and then publish it in both text and audio with WordPress.  While that sounds like a complicated process, the whole thing actually takes about ten minutes or so.

That’s it on the first pass.  How do you use your computer for writing sermons?

by Rev. Charles R. Lehmann

I am the pastor of a very small rural church near Accident, Maryland.  Our weekly attendance varies between forty and sixty.  It is a lovely group of people who have been faithfully receiving the gifts of God for the past 146 years.  There are a number of challenges that a congregation like Saint John’s faces.  One of the most significant is visibility.

Our neighboring LCMS congregation is right on the main drag.  You cannot drive through Accident without seeing Zion.  It’s absolutely impossible.  We are a mile off of the main drag.  Unless you know we’re here, you’ll never just happen to drive past.  Visibility is an issue for us, and the Internet has been a great blessing in increasing our visibility.  In the less than a year since we’ve put up the website below we’ve had 6 visitors and 4 new members who came simply because of this website.  For a congregation our size, that’s an enormous blessing.

The challenge, however, is extreme.  How can a small struggling congregation have a decent web presence when they have practically no money available for such things?

Website of Saint John's Lutheran Church, LCMS, Accident, MD

In this post, I hope to help answer that question.

Continue reading

Rev. Jonathan C. Watt
Trinity Lutheran Church, Creston, IA

I’m not really a list keeper.  Well, at least I never was before.  But put a guy in a church with no secretary and you have to keep lists; prayer lists, visit lists, board agenda items, thank you notes to send, “to dos” for everything from newsletter article ideas to sermon illustrations to remember.  So, what’s a forgetful pastor to do?  I’ve tried them all.  Post-it notes are great but they don’t always stay where they are put.  And you can’t haul your computer monitor with you to a meeting.  The paper to-do note pad works but it’s either too large to carry everywhere or small enough to get lost, and a forgetful pastor like me often forgets where he put it.  Oh and don’t forget, you actually have to look at the paper list to remember what’s on it.  I’ve tried PDAs. They work well but good ones just cost too much.  And if you have a cell phone who wants to carry two devices?  It doesn’t take long to feel like Batman with a utility belt.  Now I must admit new cell phones look to be merging into very useful tools that will do a lot for the forgetful pastor.  But again the cost can be a factor.  Here’s one solution that I’ve found that is actually free (with internet access).   It doesn’t solve all the portability problems but there are some slick features that make it work well for me.  The answer http://RememberTheMilk.com

Remember The Milk is an online web service for managing your “to do” lists and more.  Here’s the description of the service from the provider:

Managing tasks is generally not a fun way to spend your time. We created Remember The Milk so that you no longer have to write your to-do lists on sticky notes, whiteboards, random scraps of paper, or the back of your hand. Remember The Milk makes managing tasks an enjoyable experience.

One of the strengths of RTM is that it is available wherever you have access to the internet.  (BTW that includes access from your cell phone browser at http://m.RemembertheMilk.Com).  But even more than that is the feature rich, easy to use interface.  Oh, did I mention that a basic account is free!  I’ve been using the service for years.  The basic free account does all that I need and more.

Here’s just a sample.  I use Remember The Milk to track my Sunday morning prayer list.  I make an entry for each prayer request using a label at the beginning (i.e. “Cancer: John Doe”).  That way all the requests for “cancer” are sorted together.  I set the due date for the Sunday the prayers will be done.  Now I can easily list the prayers for Sunday by searching by due date.  But even more than that, RTM has a very rich natural language way of setting how you items to repeat.  Usually I set prayers to repeat “every Sunday for 3 times” or “every Sunday until 1 Dec 09”.  After the Sunday list is printed I mark the prayers a completed and they repeat the next Sunday as I have specified.

Sunday morning announcements are done in a similar fashion.  For example I can remember to put an announcement in the bulletin that the Youth Group meets the third Wednesday of the month by having an announcement repeat “Every month on the 3^rd Sunday”.

Here is a list of a few other things I track with RTM.  Items I want to discuss at meetings.  Books I’ve let out.  People I need to contact.  Shutins I’ve visited with communion.

Here’s a short list of other features in Remember the Milk.  You can have an unlimited number of lists.  The user interface if very intuitive.  Items can “tagged” with keywords to make searching and sorting easier.  The system can remind you via eMail and SMS messages of due items.

There are many more features that make Remember The Milk a very useful program to use and one that I depend on every day.

Pastor Jonathan Watt.

Since this is the beginning of the Church Year, it seems appropriate to ask the question of how one keeps track of the liturgical cycle on your computer.  I am all in favor of keeping and planning these things in advance as much as possible.  There are numerous ways to do this.  We’ll start with the three year series, and then do the one year series.

First of all, the LCMS Commission on Worship has provided Word Documents for the three-year lectionary that include all of the dates and other information available.  You may find all of those available online by CLICKING HERE.

If you prefer to go “old school,” Concordia Publishing House has a really nice chart available for your use HERE.

CPH has also done a fantastic job of making the three-year lectionary available in both Google Calendar, Outlook & iCal.  Go HERE to find them.

Another wonderful resource is that Logos (makers of some of the finest bible software anywhere) has a free lectionary viewer that includes the  one year and three year lectionaries from LSB.  HERE IT IS.

Now on to the one year lectionary:

The LCMS Commission on Worship page has a number of great resources for the one-year lectionary as well.  You’ll find it HERE.

Pastor Mark Schlamann has edited the COW chart and included it with the calendar dates and put them into a nifty color coded Microsoft Excel file.  You can download it here: 09 10 one yr guide

Mr. Stan Lemon maintains a great website called Sanctus.org.  This site includes all of the one year lectionary in calendar format, plus in a Google Calendar that will work with iCal or Outlook or nearly any calendar program.  More than that, he has it setup so that it will link you to specific bible translations.  It is a great site that I highly recommend.  He also has it self so it works very well on an iPhone or any other smart phone with internet access.

Another great program that works with both the one year and three year lectionary is Leitourgia.  It is available in both Windows and Mac formats, and uses many different lectionaries.  You can download a trial copy and try it out to see if you like it.

There are numerous blogs and other sites that provide commentary and other info on the Church Year, but I think this is enough to get us started.  What do you use for the Church Year?

Navigation systems.  There are dozens of options out there, and from what I’ve heard almost all of them work (even paper maps–if you know how to fold and unfold them).  That’s not the issue.  The issue is, is a navigation device a useful tool in pastoral care?  In my experience, the answer is a resounding yes.

About a year ago, my wife and I were debating what to get ourselves with some of the money members of our congregation had given us for Christmas.

We’d batted around the idea of a GPS, and we eventually took advantage of a good deal on Amazon and got a TomTom One for less than a hundred dollars.  Being a man, I was soon using the GPS constantly.  It’s a gadget.  Playing with gizmos is what I do…  A few weeks after we got the TomTom, I needed to go to a funeral visitation in a town I’d never been to.  Obviously, I’d never been to the funeral home either.

The TomTom got me there very well.  While I was visiting with the bereaved and sharing the hope of the resurrection with them, I learned from one of my elders (who was also there) that one of my shut-ins had been rushed to the hospital earlier that day.  The word had not yet gotten to me, but would have shortly.

Without the TomTom, it would have been about a 2 1/2 hour drive from the funeral home to the hospital because I didn’t know the roads in that area well enough to know the best route.  With the TomTom, the trip was just over an hour, and that allowed me to bring the Lord’s Supper to my member in the hospital without being late for the bible study I was teaching at a member’s house that night.

Without the TomTom, I would have had to make a difficult decision:  Visit the member that day, or wait.  I could have gotten directions another way, but that would have taken time, may not have been reliable (or comprehensible to a “foreigner” like me), and the roads in the town (and county) where I was are not well marked.

The TomTom allowed me to care for both families that day and bring them the Word of the Gospel that they needed, and it allowed me to do so without there being any need to weigh one pastoral duty against another.

That is not the first time that a changing pastoral situation has made my TomTom a valuable tool in the past year.

Here are a few of the ways that I’ve been able to make my use of the TomTom even more effective.

1.  Use the “Favorites” feature:

I’ve added as favorites the locations of all of the following: my shut-ins’ homes, hospitals and nursing homes I frequently visit, churches in my circuit.  This is an important help for me because I never know where I will be when I learn about an urgent pastoral visit you need to make.  Since most of my circuit meetings are in Pittsburgh, it can make a significant difference in time and mileage whether I’m going from Pittsburgh to my neighborhood (Accident, MD); the Morgantown, WV area; Somerset, PA; or further east in Maryland.

2.  Carry a church directory in the car.

Since it’s not practical or necessary to program every member of the congregation into the TomTom, I bring a church phone/address directory in the car with me.  This gives me the data I need to make the TomTom do what I need it to do.

3.  Don’t panic.

Some avoid the use of TomToms and similar technologies because they occasionally don’t get you to the exact location you’re heading for.  Sometimes they take you down a route that you know is not the best.  In the first case, just look around and use common sense.  I’ve never been led so far astray that I couldn’t find what I was looking for from the place that the TomTom took me.  In the second case, go your way.  That’s a time when the TomTom isn’t an essential tool, but rather a convenience.

Now that I have had my navigation device for most of a year, I wish I’d purchased it when I first took the call to my current charge.  It has been very helpful in navigating the many unmarked roads in this area.  It has also been an excellent resource in learning routes that I would not have learned on my own until I’d lived here 5 or more years.

Being where your people are when they need you to be there is one of the most important and basic tasks of the pastoral ministry.  You can do that without a navigation device, but for a pastor in an unfamiliar (or geographically vast) area, this sort of tool can save you miles and time and allow you to get to more of your people in a given day.  That has made it a very worthwhile investment for me.

Pastor Charles Lehmann

Welcome to “Do Pastors Dream of Electric Sheep”.  I have started this blog along with a collection of my fellow pastor buddies as a way for pastors (and others) to reflect upon how technology is changing our world, and specifically, how it is changing the Ministry of the Gospel today.

The Holy Ministry has always embraced the tension of modernity.  St. Paul sailed on ships across the open waters.  And who can forget the great and scandalous discovery of St. Augustine?

When he read, his eyes scanned the page and his heart sought out the meaning, but his voice was silent and his tongue was still. Anyone could approach him freely and guests were not commonly announced, so that often, when we came to visit him, we found him reading like this in silence, for he never read aloud.
(The Confessions, c. 397-400)

Martin Luther, of course, was no stranger to change in the way of technology, either.  His use of the printing press revolutionized how the modern church hears and receives doctrine.  The Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod, of which I am a member, produced one of the very first radio “ministry” programs, called The Lutheran Hour.

Certainly there can be much benefit from recognizing and utilizing the changes in our culture and in communication.  But surely there are dangers as well.  When a church becomes too enamored of the modern, the new and the glitzy, it can allow something else to slip in under the guise of the Gospel.  One should never do a Star Wars Lent series, for example.  I’m just saying it.  Sue me.

There are a few ground rules that I would like to lay out at the start.  At some point I’ll make these into a page which can be referenced at will, but for now this will do:

1. This is not a place for doing battle over platforms.  There are plenty of Windows and Mac and Linux users out there, and I am quite certain that any of them (or others) can be used to serve the Gospel.  Comparisons are okay, but not cheap shots and absurdities.
2. We will have topics here that are technologically heavy and that are theologically heavy.  That’s okay.  Lots of room to talk around here.
3. There will be more of these that will adapt and change as the needs of the community changes.

One final note.  I have asked a few friends to join me on the editor/writer’s side of this fence.  If you are interested in becoming a writer for this blog and think of you have something to contribute, please contact me and we’ll talk.

So long, and thanks for all the fish!

Pastor Todd Peperkorn