Hertzler Outpost

Internet access during my trip to Kenya last week did not allow me upload videos about the trip as it happened. Now that I am home, I thought I’d share this story about how God brought things together during my time there.

Ever wondered why most churches ignore the potential of reaching their community on the Internet? If this fact bothers you, Internet Evangelism Day may be just the right opportunity for you to do something about it!

“The last 15 years have changed our world forever,” claims Tony Whittaker, coordinator of Internet Evangelism Day. “Digital media are transforming the way we communicate, behave and even think. If Facebook was a country, it would have the fourth largest population in the world.”

Internet Evangelism Day is a strategic resource to help the worldwide church understand these issues and use the Web to share the good news. It is both a year-round online guide and an annual focus day – to be held this year on Sunday 25 April.

Churches are encouraged to use Internet Evangelism Day resources to create a presentation for their members on or near that Sunday (or at any other time they choose). The IE Day site offers free downloads: PowerPoint, video clips, handouts, drama scripts, music and posters. These enable any church (or homegroup, college, or conference) to build a customized program, lasting from five minutes to fifty.

2010’s focus day will be the sixth to be used by churches around the world since the initiative’s launch in 2005. Over this period, digital media have developed dramatically, with the advent of YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, and the growing use of mobile phones to access online services. The outreach opportunities have multiplied too.

IE Day’s website is also a one-stop resource covering many subjects, including how to build a church website that is ‘outsider friendly’, using Twitter in evangelism, and blogging. Perhaps surprisingly, you do not need to be technical to share your faith online. And you can volunteer to be an email mentor to inquirers with several large online outreach ministries.

Internet Evangelism Day is an initiative of the Internet Evangelism Coalition, based at the Billy Graham Center, Wheaton. It is supported by a wide range of leaders and groups. “I am glad to commend Internet Evangelism Day,” says John Stott.

For more help, visit the website:
InternetEvangelismDay.com

“How do I know God isn’t just something people invented? Hasn’t Science proved that God doesn’t exist?”

“How can you know what Jesus really said?”

These are the type of questions people ask when they are searching for God, and the Internet is often where they go to find the answers. Campus Crusade for Christ publishes many websites that answer questions like these, but visitors still want to talk with someone personally about their questions.

This is where you can help. By simply sharing your own spiritual experience with visitors to some of these sites, you can help someone find a relationship with God through Jesus Christ. You can do this by becoming an online mentor and answering email messages that visitors submit from our various websites.

This is where you can find out more and begin the application process.

Spiritually searching people are waiting for you!

T-Mobile MyTouch phone

Google recently release a cool new phone based on its Android phone operating system. This operating system is what our mobile phone project is using, so I borrowed an Android-based phone to get up to speed with it. I’m hoping I can keep this phone long enough to take it with my on the project’s planning trip to Nairobi next month. It has been a long time since my work required me to learn a new gadget, so this has been fun.

In another post I introduced a project I’m working on, a mobile phone initiative for Africa. In addition to the cool seminary training this project will provide, it also brings another benefit; a way for Campus Crusade’s staff members in Africa to focus on their ministry more efficiently.

Right now our staff members in Africa visit each person on their ministry team every time one of their ministry partners wants to donate to their ministry. For ministry partners who pledge a regular, monthly gift, this means the staff member visits their house monthly to collect this gift. The amount of time this requires puts a very significant strain on the time and ability of the staff member to do their primary ministry!

It isn’t possible for the ministry partner to make an electronic bank transfer to the staff member, in most cases, because retail banking services are not available . The continent’s retail banking industry is quite small.

In the last five years, with the advent of pre-paid mobile phone accounts, the phone companies have become de facto retail banks. They hold an enormous amount of cash on pre-paid cell phone accounts, and most have a system where individuals can transfer minutes from their account to the account of someone else. It is also possible to withdraw some of the balance on a pre-paid account in cash.

Putting this together with the advent of mobile phones in Africa means that virtually every person who has the ability to give to the ministry of Campus Crusade for Christ also has a pre-paid mobile phone account from which they can transfer some of their balance to a staff member’s account. This amount can then be treated as a gift and withdrawn as cash to help meet the financial needs of the CCC staff member.

The project I’m working on will develop software to make this type of transfer work smoothly for both the donor and the ministry staff member. It will provide reminders and receipts for the donor and provide an easy way for the recipient of the gift to thank the giver.

Best of all, it will allow our staff members to spend more time winning people to Christ, building them in their faith, and sending them out to reach others!

And if this project works in Africa, I will work to make it available in South Asia and anywhere else in the world where  it can help our staff members be more effective.

T-Mobile G1 smartphone
- seminary textbook?

One of the things I have been excited about lately is a project I recently started on; a mobile phone-based system for theology training and banking.

To set the context, on the continent of Africa in the last few years, there has been rapid growth in the church. An estimated 20,000 new churches started, most running now without a trained pastor. On the continent of Africa there are about 26 seminaries or centers for theology education, the largest of graduating 50 students a year. Doing the math, you can see there is an enormous need for theology training for pastors in Africa!

Even if you added enough seminaries to equip 20,000 churches with a trained pastor (you’d need 40 new seminaries that can graduate 100 students to equip these churches in the next 5 years!), you would still have the problem of getting these pastors to leave their families for a year, leave their jobs, and travel a long way. Money, time, and family considerations make this simply impossible.

But in the last five years almost half of all Africans acquired a mobile phone. Each of these phones can do two things: send text messages and interact with their account at the phone company.

If you add to this picture a smartphone, like the HTC Hero, you now have a platform for delivering seminary training to the pastor at the location of his church! Add to this a micro-finance loan and you have a way for almost any pastor in Africa to acquire a smartphone. Put it all together and this is a way to train 20,000 pastors in the next five years!

This excites me.

Right we are partnering with a university-based team of programmers developing software to do just this. The software is now in the testing phase, and we hope to deploy it in a test setting this summer. I hope to visit the Campus Crusade for Christ seminary in Nairobi, Kenya in the next couple months and be involved in launching this test.

If all goes well in Kenya, I will start looking for ways we can use the same technology in India or East Asia.

And there’s more….. I’ll write another post about it.

Here are two on-the-spot videos from people who attended MinistryNet telling about their experience at the conference and some of the ideas they intend to try once they return home.

[Note: There is a bit of Campus Crusade lingo used here. VLM = 'virtually-led movements', a term we use internally to describe how we use the Internet to help build spiritual movements online. And there are others...]

MinistryNet Ideas from Dennis Strellman on Vimeo.

MinistryNet and ‘VLM’ Integration from Dennis Strellman on Vimeo.

Knowledge Cafe at MinistryNet
- photo by Mick Haupt

Here’s what one veteran participant had to say about the MinistryNet Conference last week.

International gatherings are inevitably complicated and expectations are hard to meet, given different cultures and languages. I’ve been in my share of so-so conferences like this over the past four decades. But the buzz here in Antalya is palpable. A fellow from Romania said he was so excited he could hardly sleep. A British colleague has people queuing up to discuss how he could help with transforming their corporate websites into a platform for transformational ministry based on his boundary-busting prototype.

Reports like this convince me that God answered the prayers of many people and made last week’s conference a big step forward for our organization’s ability to integrate the use of the Internet with how we work to tell people about the hope of the gospel.

My boss, Keith, wrote the following summary of the MinistryNet Conference.

I’ve been watching the 166 MinistryNet participants leave today. 37 countries on 5 continents are receiving back some highly motivated people with written strategic plans to implement specific steps to leverage internet communication tools in our win-build-send mission. My prayer is that the world will never be the same. That the kingdom will be impacted for eternity because of our days together.

This conference was a special time for me. God reminded me that when I was asked to step into the Chief Technology Officer role in 2001, I asked God what he would have me work towards. I wrote down 4 things. One was “Identifying emerging leaders with a pioneering/entrepreneurial spirit who are willing to claim a part of the internet world for Christ.” This conference was part of God’s gift to me to see it happening.

Summer Tech Team

For most of the summer I have fielded computer questions and resolved laptop problems. This is the team that works with me, all extremely capable. It has been over ten years since I’ve done computer help desk work, but I am enjoying the reprise. We have resurrected nearly-dead laptops, fine tuned slow ones, worked out encoding issues on the Internet broadcast of our conference, and published an online purchasing system to sell off the 70 laptops we used to run the conference and summer programs. They have been a fun team to work with.

Cathy working another registration

Today and tomorrow the rest of CCC’s US Staff members arrive and register for our biennial staff conference. Cathy will be helping people register all day. I scrambled all morning setting up, but now things have slowed down a bit.

Audrey in the Coffee House

Helping students stay awake as they study, keeping fresh coffee available, and cleaning up are some of the things Audrey is doing as part of her job in the Coffee House this summer. The brilliant neon yellow uniform t-shirts didn’t make her terribly excited, but she likes the job otherwise. Earlier she was doing a lot of babysitting during the day for staff member parents on the conference team, and I think she likes this job better.

Andrew, Computer Lab Monitor

Helping students log in to the computer lab computers, setting up printers on other laptops, and refilling paper in the printers are a few of the things Andrew is doing as part of his summer job as Computer Lab Monitor. Another high schooler had the morning shift (during classes) when the lab was virtually empty. Andrew got the busy shift today, but I think he’s enjoying it.

Cathy is a Registration Helper

Today about 800 600 staff members of Campus Crusade for Christ will go through registration for the Institute of Biblical Studies, CCC’s biennial summer Bible school. Cathy is a registration helper, and I have already done most of my work for the day on the Tech Team. We set up the ad hoc computer networks in two rooms and scrambled at the last minute to resolve a problem that kept the Finance team from working. Stuff like that. But things are running smoothly now, so I have a few minutes to post this.

Compared to the relative calm of the last three weeks, I think it will be a lot busier here for the rest of the summer.

The line of people waiting to register
goes around the building

Update: Why not 800? It turns out that about 200 people incorrectly indicated their arrival on this date! They must have clicked on “21″ thinking it was July 21, the time when most people will arrive for the main conference. Instead they were actually clicking on June 21.

CCC’s Conference Team getting
instructions – photo by David Nagy

This is the first time Cathy and I have joined CCC’s U.S. Staff Conference Team, but it’s about 30th year Campus Crusade has held our biennial U.S. Staff Conference here in Fort Collins, CO. But on Thursday we all did something for the first time, even the other long-time veterans of this staff conference team. We did a community service project.

The work was weeding and mulching in the Fort Collins City Park. You can see in the picture that our group is fairly large, so we managed to make a significant difference in the park’s landscape.

And compared to working with people and computers, working outside on landscaping is a downright pleasure!

Setting Up

It’s been ten years since I setup computer network cabling, but I ran enough in the last few days to make up for it. Andrew and I arrived in Fort Collins, Colorado on the Campus Crusade U.S. Staff Conference Advanced Team earlier this week to help unload trailers and build an operations office. The work is a nice diversion from my normal job.

I’ve always said, “When you work with computers, nothing is ever easy. When you work with people, computers are easy.” So I’m back to working with computers, and they’re easy.

This conversation, from a visitor on EveryStudent.com, ended well. It seems this visitor, like most atheists who are willing to respond on the website, was raised in a Christian home but rejected his family’s faith. Rather than argue with him, I told him about my experience knowing God. And I told him I didn’t want to change his mind unless he was looking for a different way to see things.

This was his response:
“Well thanks for the conversation Jerry. Sorry for having a rude tone with you, its just i’ve been yelled at and called mean mean mean names so many times for being atheist. Thank you for not trying to change my mind.”

This article was the start of the following email to me from a visitor on the EveryStudent.com site: “If god is perfect and creates imperfect beings deliberately, then why does he punish them for their imperfections.” And thus another conversation with an atheist begins…

Always Something Going On

My time in India went well. I gained a better understanding of how university students there think and how they use the Internet, and I had a good planning time in Bangalore.

Finally on my last day in country I began feeling comfortable, but I left with more questions about the culture than I came with. For example, Mumbai is home to 4 of the 6 richest people in the world, but it also is home to Asia’s largest slum. Why do the ultra rich live there? How can huge slums exist in the middle of a city where real estate prices are high?

My first reaction on seeing some of the slums was pity. But from two different sources I heard this story: As land owners develop a piece of land, they are required by law to build free housing for any slum dwellers their development displaces. In the past when this has been done, the displaced slum dwellers take their new apartment and rent it out to someone else while they move their slum to another location and continue living in it! Whether this is true or not, I don’t know, but either way it highlighted how far from my own culture I had traveled and how long it would take me before I had a good understanding of the mysteries of India.

Brain Masala

Fried brain masala with naan bread was today’s lunch. Hmm good. It had the consistency of tofu (the brains, that is), but the masala spices overpowered any flavor the brain itself had. It was a challenge getting my mind to eat brain. I can now check this off the list of things to do before I die. It wasn’t really on the list actually….

Today we got blocked from entering two campuses, so we didn’t get to talk to any students there. And on a third campus where we were welcomed by the administration, we were not able to talk to any students. So we didn’t connect with any students today, but we learned a lot about the difficulties of connecting with them in general. I think it illustrates the need to find other ways, like the Internet, to connect with students other than visiting a campus.

This beats all.

I generally try to avoid McDonalds in other countries. Why eat the worst of American culture somewhere else? But this one was too hard to resist, and my Indian friends wanted to eat there. A Chicken Maharaja Mac. Just sounds funny.

Over lunch I learned why cows are sacred but not chickens, how students pay for university, how the caste system works and where foreigners fit into it.

Before and after lunch I learned how students use the Internet in India, but there were no surprises there. Google, Facebook, and lots of time online were consistent among the thirty or so students I talked with.

Bangalore Street

After arriving in Bangalore at 12:30 am today I was surprised at how functional I was the rest of the day – until 4:30 when my brain decided it really wanted to sleep. After a 15 minute nap I headed out for a walk on the street near where I’m staying. It was quite a contrast to the quiet office I worked in all day!

Everyone that I stopped to photograph was really friendly. They all smiled back at me, and two guys even asked me to take their picture. I feel much more comfortable here now than I did 12 years ago.

Breakfast and lunch today were curry, as I’m sure dinner will be as well. It is being served now, so it’s time for me to eat.

I’m sitting here with my friend, Sam, showing him how to use a WordPress blog.

Jerry and Friends, Bangalore, India

My upcoming trip to South Asia got me digging out some old photos of my last (and only) visit there back in 1997. It was my first trip outside Western culture, and it was quite a memorable experience. I returned with far more questions than I had left with.

At the time, Bangalore was a developing tech center for the world, and the U.S. was outsourcing a lot of work there. But nothing I saw resembled any high tech center I had seen before. It was all quite unfamiliar.

This was also where I had my first mango. I was hooked after the first one. My friends sent me back home with a whole bag of big, tree-ripened mangoes, but the U.S. customs agent in Atlanta confiscated them and wouldn’t even let me eat one before he tossed them in the trash. Now the best I can usually do is find dried mango at the grocery store; the fresh ones just aren’t the same.

I’m hoping my next trip there will leave me with a better understanding of how this part of the world thinks and lots of opportunities to eat their delicious food!

I posted a few more of my photos from 1997 over on Flickr.

One of the things I’m working on this year is an effort to help our ministry in South Asia make better use of Internet media to reach spiritually interested people there with the message of Christ. The project includes other aspects of helping them apply technology to accelerate their ministry, but this one aspect looks the most interesting at the start.

In talking with our U.S. staff members who are already involved in that part of the world I learned that there are others who are making an effort to reach one of the key cities in this area. This is a combination of U.S.-based ministries and South Asia-based ministries, and they are meeting in Indianapolis next month to talk together.

So this looks like a good place for me to jump in and see what we can do to use our Internet sites to help connect with students in this area. EveryStudent.com/india and StartingwithGod.com/india are two of the sites out there, but it’s really too early in the process to say for sure.