Culture 101 (#12)

Are Our Children Learning Enough About Whales?

Youth Mission Trip. The TTUMC youth leave on their mission trip to West Virginia this morning. Pray that God will bless them in every way.

Platform for Church Video. YouTube is now allowing its video player to be customized. This includes the color scheme, layout, and title. And, as Bobby Gruenewald writes, you can even “choose your own playlist of videos to be displayed in the custom player.” This could make it very easy for a church web site to make sermon message series viewable in a controlled and professional way–as long as you don’t mind uploading your sermon video to YouTube.

Video is Important! Speaking of video, Joshua Cody relays that “75% of Internet users watched online video in May 2007, averaging 158 minutes per viewer. Nearly 8.4 billion videos were streamed online in the month of May” (ComScore). Cody suggests doing video podcasts of messages, video highlights of events, and video interviews with church members. “People want to be able to see what goes on at your church without actually entering the doors,” Cody writes. “[H]ow are you going to help them?”

Facing Facebook. The topic of Facebook, a social networking site, is getting a lot of play on popular pastor’s blogs, including Swerve and LeadingSmart. Bobby Gruenewald, a pastor of LifeChurch.tv, blogs, “[I]f you aren’t paying attention to the online phenomenon of Facebook, you should be.” He writes that to fully understand why, you have to join Facebook and experience it. So I joined. But that’s about it for now. If you want to join and become my “friend,” please do. Maybe then I’ll start to grok what it’s all about.

Counting Weekend Attendance. How does a church with 2500 in each service count attendance? Surprisingly, it’s not that different: mostly, the ushers do it. Only sometimes the ushers find it easier to count the empty seats rather than the filled ones. (That method won’t work with pews, though.)

How to Find Mr./Ms. Right. According to blogger and Christian apologist Joe Carter, here’s the best way to find the right person to marry:

How do you know when you’ve met Mr./Ms. Right? How do you determine who, among the available range of candidates in your life, is the person you should marry? The best way to increase the chances that you’ve made the right decision is to follow this simple sampling strategy:

You will maximize your probability of finding the best spouse if you date about 37 percent of the available candidates in your life and then choose to stay with the next candidate who is better than all the previous ones.

Suppose that during your single years you will date 100 candidates for marriage. If you marry the first one that comes along then your chance of finding the best of the lot is only 1/100. The same probability is applicable if you date 99 of them and marry the last one. The chance that the last candidate is the best choice is only 1 in 100. Following the formula allows you to sample the options and increases the likelihood that you will choose the best of the available choices. (Note: This strategy also works for similar choices, such as buying a house.)

My wife is not too impressed by this advice. To say the least.