I’m pleased to announce the public availability of the Ekklesion Meal Planner,¹ a web-based application that allows volunteers to easily sign-up to deliver a meal to friends in need. Granted, it’s a strange little application that most people won’t find terribly useful. However, if you are part of a church or organization that cooks meals for members who are sick, shut-in, or have a baby, then you may find Ekklesion to be a lifesaver. At Princeton we live in seminary campus housing and our neighbors are having babies constantly (seriously, six babies in ten days during the first part of December) and it’s tradition to provide meals for the happy family during the first month. However, overwhelming email communication was needed to coordinate this. When everyone wants to deliver a meal on the same date, or when someone wants to know who else is bringing chicken, the emails really start piling up.

So two years ago I created a simple web application that allowed people to signup for an evening, list the time and meal they’ll bring, and then receive an automatic email reminder the day before the meal is due. This was a hit, but it required that I setup a page every time someone had a baby. Not good. And after two years, an upgrade was needed.

So I outsourced the project via Rentacoder to some programmers in Islamabad, Pakistan. Yes, Pakistan. And they whipped up a very fine system that allows anybody to easily create a meal plan for someone else. Everything is fully automatic. And I like that.

Ekklesion works like a charm and makes coordinating meals a snap. Take it for a whirl; it’s free to use for anyone that finds it useful. You can even login using “example” for both the username and password in order to test the backend. I’ve already heard from two churches in the Princeton area that are starting to use the system, and I have plans to refine and expand the system this spring when I’ll sell it for a nominal charge to churches and organizations that might desire an internal planner of this sort.

If you have upgrade suggestions, comments, or find Ekklesion helpful, I’d love to hear from you.

1. Ekklesion is Greek for “of the churches.” It derives from Ekklesia. Those of you who are Greek nerds will want to know that its morphology is feminine plural genitive. [↩]

Techno backlash: Cool kids are leading a technology revolt and unplugging gadgets in order to reconnect with one another, says major British newspaper The Independent. This has been predicted for sometime.¹ But the thing that is important for youth ministry, the thing I want to highlight, is something that The Independent article glosses. What’s happening here is NOT a backlash against the disconnection produced by things that plugin; this is a backlash against the disconnection that our society fosters whether plugged in or unplugged. The 20th century was largely about assuming that technology is the answer to societal woes. It’s not, but neither is disconnecting from technology. The technology isn’t the issue.

The church gets caught up in this frenzy as well: Should we include or exclude technology from ministry and worship? Even Emergent churches get caught in this trap. Unfortunately, inclusion and exclusion discussions aren’t the heart of the matter because they’re responses to the wrong issue. The real issue is a matter of disconnection from self, others and the divine. The real issue is much deeper than technology; it’s one that the church in its true missional fullness is called to respond to by offering communion with God and others — something which technology or the exclusion of technology can’t fix. Unfortunately, we’re often too busy arguing about Powerpoint backgrounds and whether there should be a projection screen in the sanctuary to take notice of the deeper longing of the human soul that the church has been divinely equipped to respond to.

Sunday School for Atheists: Just when Christians were all but ready to give up on Sunday school (actually I gave up long ago), atheists are jumping on the bandwagon offering children lessons in humanist thought and apologetics. Read the Time magazine article.

Emerging Adulthood: Books and Culture has an interesting essay by sociologist Chris Smith on Jeffrey Arnett’s proposal of a developmental phase between adolescence and full adulthood called emerging adulthood. The concept is a few years old, but it really appears to be taking off. Emerging adulthood appears to be the new de facto way of referring to 18 to 25 year olds in recent articles I’ve read in the Journal of Adolescence and elsewhere.

1. The last time I heard a prediction like this was by Zach Suchin, CEO of College Tonight during The Millenials conference in NYC. Also, keep in mind that this involves a minor subset of youth and is a trend that’s not likely to go mainstream. One of the things I know well from my days in journalism is that the status quo doesn’t sell newspapers, so as journalists we have to cover the new and novel regardless of how minor the movement may be. [↩]

At the behest of the Pennsylvania State Pastor’s Convention I’ve been toying recently with the question, “How does online social networking affect adolescent understandings of belonging and membership?” I think it’s an interesting question, one that I ultimately broadened to include issues of both belonging and identity as they relate to a variety of technologies, not just social networking like MySpace and Facebook. Text messaging, blogging, MMORPG’s, and virtual worlds all contribute to how youth understand community and personal identity. These were the issues I tackled during a plenary session at the convention in Harrisburg earlier this month. I don’t have a recording of the PA event, but you can see my first stab at the issues in a lecture (video) I gave November 1 at Princeton Seminary. It’s rough, but gives a good glimpse at some of the thoughts I’ve been exploring lately. Luckily, I was able to refine the lecture for the pastor’s convention, and I figure that after I present this material another 8 to 10 times I might actually like what I have to say.

Delinquent Virgins? This one will likely create some hot discussion in the weeks to come. “A new study by University of Virginia clinical psychologists has found that teens who have sex at an early age may be less inclined to exhibit delinquent behavior in early adulthood than their peers who waited until they were older to have sex. The study also suggests that early sex may play a role in helping these teens develop better social relationships in early adulthood” (from a UVa press release). The UVa site carries an audio interview with lead researcher K. Paige Harden. A Washington Post article on the study is here. Newsweek has also carried a (meandering) opinion piece related to the study.

Facebook Drops “is”: The word is out that Facebook is dropping the mandatory verb from the status field. (And there was much rejoicing.)

Games as Religion: Mother Jones includes a photo essay of teenage boys in poses that bear striking resemblance to religious imagery. Saints in the making? No, teenagers playing video games (props to YSMarko).

Intimacy and IM: New survey results from AP and AOL show that 43% of teens have used IM to say something they would not say in person (props to Ypulse).