Hertzler’s Outpost

European EveryStudent.com Leaders

A meeting room with people, not very exciting except for what we accomplished.

[Later I realized this post was completely out of context. Dan (standing) and I organized this meeting in Paris to get our European EveryStudent.com leaders further ahead in how to get students to their language version of EveryStudent.com in their countries. We gave them a general overview of why to use the Internet to communicate with students (as apposed to spending your time on a university campus trying to meet students in person) and how to use online advertising venues like Google to get students to these sites. And other things. Everyone left with a renewed motivation, a better understanding, new relationships, and good examples to make EveryStudent.com a priority in their campus ministry plans.]

Westminster Christian Academy

Today I am speaking at the Westminster Christian Academy chapel service. It would be fun to tell stories on my friends who are now teachers there, but I won’t. I’ve been back to my high school before, but going back to speak in chapel is a little different. It reminds me of the chapel services I sat through, some incredibly boring, and some that I remember to this day.

Here are some places I intend to mention:

Meant4More.com - a place to find out more about a relationship with God.
EveryStudent.com - the site I help produce
EveryStudent.com promo video - this is a variation of what I played in chapel.

Google’s Gifts

Really. Not only did they send me a greeting card, they also sent me two gifts. Receiving them reminded me that my Campus Crusade Visa card directed quite a bit of advertising dollars their way this last year, but even at that I see the incredible value they provided in directing spiritually interested students to EveryStudent.com.

One gift is a 2Gb USB drive. The unique thing about it is that it came in the form factor of a credit card.

The other gift was a gift card - of sorts. It’s actually an opportunity for me to direct a donation from Google to any public school classroom project of my choice.

I am quite pleasantly surprised. Well done, Google. Thank you.

Giving The Presentation Today

If I was in control of life’s situations, I would have given my presentation two years ago to the audience who heard it today. Our campus ministry directors from Eastern Europe meet regularly, but it wasn’t until this year’s meeting that I was able to get on their agenda. God’s timing I suppose.

It is great to be back in Budapest for the second time in two months, and better still to be here with Cathy. Like me on my first trip back two months ago, Cathy feels totally comfortable and at home here. After dinner at the Adler tonight we had to catch ourselves and remember that we can no longer simply walk home!

And I did enjoy ‘the Jerry’ dessert tonight, having been offered it by that name by my friend, Tomas, the waiter. It was as good as ever, too.

Keleti Train Station in Budapest

After my stop in Budapest in October I discovered an opportunity to further the EveryStudent.com agenda in Eastern Europe by going to the conference where all our national campus directors meet to discuss strategy. This will be an opportunity to explain to them again how students search for spiritual truth on the Internet and how we need to have a presence on the Internet in the local languages that students use to search.

This trip Cathy gets to go, too! Frequent flyer miles from my two Asian trips earlier in the year put us in range for an international ticket. She is very excited and can’t wait to see our friends there again. We hope to get to the Christmas market and freeze our toes off again like we did every December when we lived there. And eat at the Adler. And ride public transportation again. And take a look at our old home again.

Most churches don’t have Internet marketing experts in their group, but all churches could benefit from some expert advice on how to make their church website more effective.

Here’s an online assessment you can use to evaluate your church’s website.

Really, this is just one person’s opinion of what makes a good church website, but it covers many aspects that no one would disagree with.

This survey assumes the purpose of your church’s website is to both tell others about Jesus and tell Christians about your church, but my experience tells me that a church needs three separate websites to serve three different purposes, not just one. You need a website that explains how to know God, a website brochure for your church, and a website that facilitates communication within the church.

Mixing these three purposes into a single website reduces the effectiveness of accomplishing any of the three.

Want to help your high school student transition to college well? LiveAbove.com has the resources and information you need to help them get started in the right direction. This is a cooperative venture between most of the campus ministries in the U.S.

Rich and me with our new hats

Four days in Central Asia went very well. We hope to launch www.StudentStan.com this fall based on the plans we made. Rich, my traveling colleague and friend, did a great job leading the group in planning. For most of this trip I was busy configuring and reconfiguring some spiffy USB flash drives. These drives run a secure communication system for our website volunteers to use when they respond to visitors on this site. I also trained everyone how to use this new communication system.

Our new friends gave us these gifts on the last day.

This weekend I’m enjoying Budapest. Had dinner at the Adler last night and a day of good meetings yesterday.

Last week a trip I had abandoned became a reality again, and I’m really happy about it. Since January coworker, Rich, and I have been planning a trip to Central Asia to help our ministry leaders there get a version of EveryStudent.com going. About two months ago I concluded Rich could do the trip by himself and that I needed to focus the majority of my attention on fund raising. But last week I realized that I really did need to go and that my technical background will be necessary to navigate some of the issues related to what we are trying to do there.

Best of all, I was able to schedule a detour to Budapest over the weekend after our meetings! Woo hoo! The only bad part of this is that I can’t take Cathy and the kids. They’re green with envy.

So later this month I’ll be in Muslim, Russian speaking Central Asia for the first time.

One of the cooler things we plan to do is give our staff members and volunteers USB flash drives with computer programs pre-loaded that will allow them to respond to website visitors securely, without compromising their identity or location.

Soularium Site

One of the most unique and interesting things I’ve seen Campus Crusade produce lately has been Soularium. It’s a great way to connect with another person in a whole new way.

An interviewer takes a group of 50 photos and asks the interviewee which represents their life, which reflects their view of God, which expresses what they would like their life to be like, and so forth.

You can see results of surveys done so far at MySoularium.com.

You can order your own set of Soularium photos here.

CSU Dorm

When I walked into the dorm building at Colorado State University (CSU) to register for our Campus Crusade staff conference, the smell inside took me back to 1989 when Cathy and I first came to CSU for our new staff member training. The dorm buildings still smell the same as they did back then. They are good memories, and they remind us of what we were thinking back then and why we joined Campus Crusade.

The messages we are hearing now also remind us why we joined Campus Crusade. Dying to ourselves and our desires in life and surrendering to the work of the gospel still speaks to us. We still believe the eternal value of letting God use our work to advance his kingdom is greater than pursuing our own agenda. This commitment might not always have us at Campus Crusade, but for now we think this is where God wants us.

So anyway, living in a dorm again is nice. The cafeteria is downstairs, and the only challenge is getting there when it’s open and not eating too much. Still, I have not managed to reduce my daily number of chocolate ice cream cones to less than two.

I’m back home now and happy to be so. I loved being in Korea and eating Korean food, but I’m ready to return to my normal diet again. I have lots of photos, several new friends, and many good memories.

As far as EveryStudent.com goes, the trip was a home run success. It provided the opportunity to build relationships with many of the leaders of CCCI in Asia who now plan to begin using a translation of our site to reach students in their country. This made the trip worth it alone, not to mention the thousands of other students who now know how they can personally use our site. CCCI’s president, Steve Douglass, helped boost interest as well when he mentioned EveryStudent.com in his address to the students. The trip was a lot of work but well worth the effort.

Lunch at CM2007

Lunch and dinner at the CM2007 Conference is amazing. They get about 16,000 people fed in less than two hours. Twice we have had McDonald’s Big Macs for lunch. That many Big Macs ready at the same time and same location strikes me as quite an accomplishment. I had to miss both those lunches, but I didn’t mind, as my seaweed, fish, and rice breakfasts have been carrying me through until dinner.

July 12 Update: Originally I had written that there were 20,000 attendees at this conference, but today I learned the official number was 15,994. 10,800 of those were Koreans, and the rest were from 121 different countries.

EveryStudent.com Seminar at CM2007

The day began with a breakfast meeting and ended at 9:30 when we shut down the booth at CM2007 (”Campus Mission 2007″). Our two seminars about using EveryStudent.com to reach university campuses with the gospel went well, and people are excited about what they are hearing about EveryStudent.com.

We sat Korean style for the seminars; no chairs. I stole a bench from one of the convention center restaurants just so I could operate the powerpoints and video projector without stooping over our table for four hours.

And we discovered that writing our hotel address didn’t help our taxi driver get us home. He only reads Korean characters. Duh.

Students at CM2007

As we stepped out of our hotel today on the way to the opening meeting of CM2007 (”Campus Mission 2007″) we got an idea how big it really is. We are a five minute walk and three stops on the subway from the convention center, yet there were conference volunteers directing people just outside our hotel! We traveled in a pack to the convention hall.

One of the really fun things has been seeing so many friends here. Two of my neighbors are here (from next door and across the street) as well as many others from Orlando. But at the subway stop I ran into a bunch of friends from Budapest that I had not seen since we left there a year ago. That was a breath of fresh air. And then tonight my brother arrived. So this should be a fun few days for that reason alone.

Busan, South Korea

For breakfast this morning I had fish soup and kimshi, along with rice, barbecued dried fish and something else that was pickled green, looked like asparagus and tasted sweet and tangy. My waiter said it was “ooga” and didn’t know the English word for it.

Last night we rode on a bus to our hotel with a bunch of American students who are also here for this conference. The conference organizers expect 20,000 students to attend, most of them Korean, so I am sure I’ll be meeting many more.

Today our tasks are figuring out how to get to the convention center by metro and then setting up a booth for EveryStudent.com. And adjust to this time zone. (I’m already adjusted. 24 hours traveling with ~3 hours sleep leaves me quite ready to sleep on any schedule.)

Decisions - click to watch

If you have any interest or involvement in what we do with Campus Crusade for Christ, this video probably explains why better than anything else.

If you read this blog regularly you might be wondering what Campus Crusade for Christ did in response to the recent shootings at Virginia Tech.

First, we grieved. Three of the students killed were involved in Campus Crusade (”Cru”) at Virginia Tech. Several of the witnesses were students in our group, too.

Here is a Time magazine article describing how Molly, one of the students in Cru at VA Tech, discovered the bodies of her slain dormates that early morning.

It would be impossible to catalogue everything other Campus Crusade groups did in response to the shootings, but one of the things we did was run ads pointing to our website gobbletalk.com. (This is a localized version of EveryStudent.com).

In the days following the shootings (until the time of this post), over 10,000 people visited this site and 59 indicated a decision to trust Jesus as a result.

During its first full month of publication, March, our Romanian EveryStudent.com site (EveryStudent.ro) saw 791 visitors indicate a decision to put their faith in Jesus while reading the site. That is eight times the rate most of our other EveryStudent.com sites experience! God is doing something amazing right now in Romania.

One source of visitors to our site was a Romanian Satanic site which has linked to us. We always like more traffic, and we wrote the articles on EveryStudent.ro to answer questions for those who are on a spiritual journey, but this situation has a unique twist.

Many of the visitors from this site are sending our volunteers obscene emails filled with Satanic curses. It feels quite like a concerted attack against what we are doing.

So we are trusting (and praying) the power of God will prevail in this conflict!

Tom, Florin, Beni, and Jerry

Beni broke his leg, and a whole bunch of Romanians responded in faith to Jesus.

Since he couldn’t get out on campus last fall after breaking his leg quite badly, he decided to produce a Romanian translation of EveryStudent.com, EveryStudent.ro.

Two weeks ago the Google ads went live for this site, and since then over 100 people have indicated a decision to trust Jesus while reading the site!

The last time I was in Asia was 1999 when I went to our offices in Baguio and Singapore to work on computer networks. I just booked my second Asian trip for this spring and summer; first to Bangkok, Thailand then to Pusan, South Korea. Both are conferences where the EveryStudent.com team will be helping other parts of Campus Crusade learn how to use the Internet to tell people about Jesus Christ and what it might be like to know him.

Asia doesn’t interest me much (other than the food), so I haven’t been too excited about these trips. But going through the process of getting oriented, I see they will be fun. On the back end of the South Korean trip it looks like I will have the chance to stay a couple days at a youth hostel outside the city, and upon arriving in Seoul, I will take a three hour train ride across the country to the conference city, Pusan. I’m getting more enthusiastic about this trip! My only regret now is that Cathy can’t join me.

EveryStudent.ro

EveryStudent.ro and KazdyStudent.pl are our two newest members of the EveryStudent.com family.

KazdyStudent.pl (still under construction) will be a Polish translation of the site, and it will be led by my friend, Bartek. I am really excited about this one, as I think we will see great response from visitors. Bartek produces a student site, podprad.pl, which has seen as many as 500,000 visits during some months.

EveryStudent.ro is a Romanian translation produced by Beni, my friend in Bucharest. He set the record for fastest translation and production of a new site; 4 months. He also produces a student site, Fitzuica.ro.

An interesting side note: As of today, Google does not show EveryStudent.ro in its results pages when you search for it, even after we purchased a Google online advertising campaign for it. Maybe this blog post will help.

Finally, a Macedonian language site is almost ready to launch, SekojStudent.com. Scott leads this ministry effort and is excited about using it to help reach every student in Macedonia with the opportunity to know who God is and what it might be like to know him.

Beyond The Ultimate website

This Sunday, sports fans around the world will watch the ultimate game in professional football as Tony Dungy’s Indianapolis Colts face Lovie Smith’s Chicago Bears.

Athletes in Action, the sports ministry of Campus Crusade for Christ, has teamed up with both head coaches and several players to create an opportunity for them to use this historic stage to talk about their common faith in Jesus Christ.

Beyond the Ultimate is a new website featuring articles and streaming video from players and coaches who share their stories and talk about their faith in Jesus Christ. There will be a full page ad in USA Today on Friday for this site, and we have begun Google advertising for the site as well.

This also gave me a new project. Our follow up site, startingwithGod.com, will be the destination to which we point all the visitors who indicate a decision to trust Christ on BeyondtheUltimate.org. We added a new response form and have made an attempt at sending college students who have questions to our volunteer team that specializes in responding to students while sending other visitors to a more general group of email volunteers.

I had fun making these minor changes. It reminded me of the fun I had setting up this site, Hertzlers.com, a couple years ago.

Anita, Leader of Agape.pl

Today and tomorrow a bunch of us Campus Crusade types are talking about how we can do a better job helping people grow spiritually via the Internet. God has blessed our efforts at bringing people to a site that explains who Jesus is, and many thousands have responded to Jesus in this way. We have email volunteers that answer visitors’ questions and help these people get connected with a church, but we haven’t done a great job staying connected with them and helping them grow.

Well, some of us in Campus Crusade have done well at this; our ministries in Canada and Poland.

My friend, Anita, leads a Bible correspondence course in Poland, Agape.pl. Every day they get one or two new students, 30% of whom finish a four-lesson course that covers the basics of a relationship with God through Jesus Christ. Students get new lessons after they complete and discuss the first ones, and all students have their own personal teacher assigned to them. All the correspondence is done by email.

Both our Canadian and Polish ministries use some of the same elements; personal attention from spiritual coaches and opportunities for leadership as you grow spiritually. After a student completes the entire Agape.pl Bible course, quite a challenge actually, they can be teachers themselves. Currently there are about 50 teachers and 500 students enrolled. Our Canadian ministry has many more staff members and volunteers working with it, but they use the same idea.

The challenge we have now with EveryStudent.com will be finding ways we can help our campus staff members keep students engaged in a process of spiritual growth when they can’t meet with them personally. StartingWithGod.com is a site we currently direct new believers to, but we don’t have a solid means of staying connected with someone as they work through the site. We’re praying for a creative solution.

This just in from our internal communications department:

The CBS film crew just finished shooting at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. The focus of the story is the increased spiritual interest of college students and their involvement with Christian groups.

CBS shot the entire UW weekly meeting with fantastic footage of a classic Crusade gathering with students streaming in and hanging from the rafters. They also filmed an entire freshmen girls dorm Bible study. Two students were interviewed sharing how they left the party scene when their lives were changed by Jesus. Now they are leading Bible studies.

The feature is tentatively scheduled to run on Wednesday, November 1, on the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric. That is subject to change.

Tune in tonight to see our work in action!

[Update 9 November 2006 from CCCI’s staff website]
“With the election returns and now Donald Rumsfield’s resignation, CBS postponed the feature until next week.

It will likely air on Thursday, November 16 and will run as the first in a two-part series. The second part on Friday will focus on how youth ministries - mostly high school church based - are addressing changing technology and styles.

If/when CBS starts advertising the series around next Tuesday, we’ll have high confidence the feature will actually run on the November 16.”

[Update 19 December 2006]
CBS News called the series Wired for Faith. It aired Thursday, December 14 at 6:30 p.m. EST.

The two-minute segment was titled “Praying Not Partying.” Watch the video on the right side of the screen or read the transcript in the main column.