I’m running a half-hour seminar tomorrow at a training day for people who are funding and facilitating school scripture. Most of the groups that fund scripture in schools don’t have websites — and of the few that do, they appear sometimes as an ‘afterthought’ not really of any particular use to anyone (though there are exceptions).

We’re going to look over the basics of publishing a website, as well as looking at some reasons why this might be a worthwhile thing to do. The focus will be more on functionality than on technical excellence, which is a bit of a shame, though necessary due to time (& the audience).

I had a great — albeit brief — chat with Angus Courtney from Sydney Uni’s Evangelical Union yesterday about Christian marketing & design, which was encouraging. We both got along to FEVA’s Promoting the Word through Image and Text conference last year (highly recommended, by the way).

However, for the purposes of tomorrow, it’s more about convincing people that the web doesn’t have to be scary and does have a legitimate place & purpose in ministry beyond some token page that declares you exist that costs twenty bucks a month to leave up there for no reason at all. Pointless, indeed.

Accordingly, once we’ve gone over potential things that websites are useful for, we’re going to setup a secure way to accept credit card donations up to $2,350 Australian dollars in under fifteen minutes.

The aim, of course, is to demonstrate that even what is traditionally the most terrifying part of web publishing (e-commerce) is entirely within the reach of scripture boards across the country.

I believe there are pastoral and community-building advantages to web publishing, too, and we’ll be looking over that briefly.

I’ll also be taking advantage of this opportunity to promote CYIADA — of course! — as well as making everyone aware we’re still looking for a programmer! We’ve had a couple of great applicants come through and will be trying to arrange interviews over the next week or two, but if you can think of anyone/you are that person we’re looking for, it’s in absolutely no way too late to get in touch!

I cooked these up for our church, where I lead on the kids ministry team, to ask parents to support their kids during a few weeks of “mission” at our sunday school.

We’re really fortunate to have taken stacks of good photos of our kids that we can use for things like this, and, in part, fortunate to have geeks like myself with some design skills around.

That’s not everyone’s church. We’re not better Christians because we can design some funky cards to ask parents to support us, but our communication is probably more effective for it.

The thing is, churches aren’t operating in isolation — we shouldn’t be constrained by our normal (often geographical) context. Local churches are fantastic things, but they don’t need to be the only places we can serve. Church communication is a pretty universal need, though the exact application will vary depending on numerical size and the range and depth of ministry any given church is involved in.

So when I say we have lots of good photos that enables good design, I’m not just boasting about the things we do (though there is probably some of that), but remarking on the potential resources we’ve been given and the need that exists beyond our own ministry context.

CYIADA has potential to help here. Initially, we were only considering it a product for teenaged ministry, but God is making it increasingly obvious that the potential applications of a community that shares documents of all kinds (yes, including artwork and graphics! This has always been a part of what we are trying to achieve!) extend beyond that, and particularly into children’s ministry.

Kids learn in various ways that span all of the senses, and leaders of our children need to be aware of this. This isn’t just something for those with kids with learning disabilities to be aware of (our sunday school has had one child with autism), but a necessity for all leaders due to the different learning styles of children. A resource for sharing all manner of resources could aid in the development of sunday school curriculums that are clearer to more children.

Not that anyone would ever be underprepared in youth ministry, but, if they just so happened to have their lovingly crafted bible study notes swallowed by a crocodile that attacked them as they stepped out of the bus on the way to youth group, it’d be nice to know there was an alternative quickly to hand.

CYIADA ♥ electronic publishing (and dead trees, too, but they’re hard to make come out of a computer screen) and doing this sort of thing has been on our radar since early days. It’s one big way the website is going to be sustainable — publishing resources that Youthworks has already created, and making them more accessible and leader-friendly by sticking them in one easy-to-reach place.

It’s great to see Matthias Media pushing electronic publishing closer to the mainstream!

All that it has in common with us now (aside from theology, denomination, and other such important things) is general locale — it’s a plant that is geographically close enough for a message to everyone in our congregation to be a useful thing for them in terms of gathering volunteers.

Wouldn’t it be great to be able to send that kind of message to a whole bunch of networked churches in your area?

We need to balance that kind of functionality with the potential to seriously annoy people by inundating them with emails, but if there was an opt-in system (”Yes! I would consider serving in other local childrens ministry”) or volume limitations (max geographical distance restriction combined with some cost to send out a message, so that people value the service and don’t abuse it), or even moderation — via a church administrator as occurred in this case — with the added benefit of a more targeted group of people.

For example, restricted to those who have existing Child Protection training & have signed Prohibited Employment Declaration forms, and those who are already serving in Children’s and Youth ministry in some capacity. CYIADA could also exclude full-time workers (including only people who are students & part-time/casual) so that the message only goes out to those people who are likely to be able to take an hour or three off on a weekday morning.

The real heroes are the people giving up their time to minister to kids, but CYIADA can at least help locate them.

Now, I’ve not had much to do with Flex. I saw a video last year about how it made developing things ridiculously quick, à la Ruby on Rails’ blog in fifteen minutes video — to which I say fooey (though I was for a time impressed, before I put the old brain into gear), because even I have been known to cook up similarly boring database interface-y things in under an hour without any framework using PHP — albeit in more than 60 lines of code. So I may have ignored its impact somewhat, but it does look like a cool platform.

It just looks so ridiculously fast — but I can’t help feeling dirty using it. Flash is traditionally bad, inaccessible, designer-ish nonsense with 8 pixel fonts and low contrast text and things that whiz and make users feel nauseous (or just turn off their speakers, or just leave your site). It’s not anymore, but it’s still not pure HTML. It still wouldn’t work on a mobile device in the way that you can use mobile stylesheets to make HTML work differently on a mobile device.

Still, it seems stupid to ignore because it looks like it would speed up development so much. I’m just struggling to justify certain usage scenarios because it feels irresponsible to not build a HTML version to which the site may degrade.

One thing I’d like to be able to make it do (though don’t know if is possible/impossible yet) is function as a front-end for a Flash application that works as a PDF document viewer, perhaps after the style of this sample application published by Adobe. This way people can quickly and easily preview PDF documents without loading the (oh-so-slightly-bloated, especially next to Flash player) Acrobat viewer. Ideally, they’d even be able to print from inside it without saving anything onto their computer. This is naturally better than relying on PDF’s inbuilt security features otherwise, though probably not possible yet.

That’s hardly what Flex is on about, though. That’s just me trying to use it to tie in to other Adobe products — they’re doing incredibly useful things as a software business spread across nearly every domain of multimedia practice, so you’ll have to excuse me on that point.

Please pray for wise use of technology and time, in a way that wouldn’t damage the end product or curtail its usefulness too severely.

A few more hoops to jump through, no doubt, but it’s the first real sign of progress seen on this front, which is pretty good. Praise God!

I briefly addressed the idea of “losing control” over the way branding is done without losing the brand itself in the context of Myspace websites and external services used by bands in particular — is this the same when we’re talking about the front page of a website that’s attracting thousands of hits a day?

He made an interesting observation about the place we engage and discuss ideas that I thought worth sharing, and especially interesting in light of the CYIADA concept.

Paul goes to the Areopagus, where people spend their time doing nothing except telling, and hearing, something new. Let me ask you today, right now, where is it that the people of this world meet, and do nothing — they sit on their backsides, and all they do is they talk about what is new? Where does that happen right now, today?

I would have said perhaps in my generation, five years ago, television. But that’s old. It’s no longer TV. What’s happening with the Internet? You probably spend hours on the Internet! Everyone put up their hands, everyone’s got email. Where is God on the Internet? Think about that. And how can we as Christians engage with our world better? See, your parents — they’ve got no idea what’s going on there. You, sitting here, you know what’s going on there. They… they’re clueless. When they have problems they probably come and ask you about the computer and the Internet. How can we engage with that world?

Now, I don’t consider the primary role of CYIADA to be that of a contemporary Areopagus. That might be a part of it, but there are already places where people thrash out arguments for and against “foreign divinities” (Acts 17:18 — though our foreign divinities are not necessarily physical objects) online — yes, we need more people participating in those places (be that an obscure discussion forum or in the comments of a blog on the Sydney Morning Herald website), but there are not more of those places required. The danger in creating a website like this is that you encourage rabbit warrens of Christians, never reaching beyond their own sphere.

To deal with this, we need to be creative about how we approach external communities, and strategic about losing control over a brand. Myspace is, of course, the most prominent example of this for the teenage demographic we are trying to serve. Bands will place their Myspace URL in as prominent position as the URL of their “official” website on posters. Musicians will no longer just have a small selection of songs available on their own website for sampling, but place them on someone else’s website and use that as a promotion channel as the “social networking” concept takes hold.

Hundreds of operators already offer Myspace services, like images, profile editors, music… what can we offer? What should we offer? For youth groups, there’s the possibility of integrating their upcoming events timetable (in CYIADA) with their group’s Myspace page. But, with that is the danger that youth won’t bother signing up for CYIADA and enjoy the benefits of Christian community beyond their immediate church/school context.

Please be praying that we might find answers to this in the coming weeks.

Having said that, it’s pretty clear it’s not a very good name in terms of mnemonic utility! Jim Ramsay wrote a slightly tongue-in-cheek article on SydneyAnglicans.net, entitled “What I should have got for Christmas”, a list in which the first item reads as follows:

A copy of the latest book called ‘NAFF’ (No Acronym Fosters Fellowship). This will help get rid of the alienating acronym epidemic that is sweeping through our churches. Not only does a newcomer or outsider have no idea who or what “Nostrils” or “AWOL” is but the eyes of regular members glaze over when the terms are used. Acronyms are naff!

Indeed.

CYIADA — as a name — stemmed mostly from a lack of creative naming ability and the pre-existing (but prohibitively wordy) working title “Christian Youth in a Digital Age”. I’m not particularly attached to it. I don’t think anyone else is particularly attached to it.

Accordingly, brilliant suggestions (or even slightly-better suggestions) are ridiculously welcome!