Author: Nathan Campbell

Nathan runs St Eutychus. He loves Jesus. His wife. His daughter. His son. His other daughter. His dog. Coffee. And the Internet. He is the pastor of City South Presbyterian Church, a church in Brisbane, a graduate of Queensland Theological College (M. Div) and the Queensland University of Technology (B. Journ). He spent a significant portion of his pre-ministry-as-a-full-time-job life working in Public Relations, and now loves promoting Jesus in Brisbane and online. He can't believe how great it is that people pay him to talk and think about Jesus. If you'd like to support his writing financially you can do that by giving to his church.

To 4S or not to 4S…

I’m an Apple fanboy. I don’t know how it happened, but it did. I like iThings. But I’m a little underwhelmed about the new iPhone. Both Robyn and I are off contract, and lugging around a semi-bricked iPhone 3G, and a semi-bricked iPhone 3GS. We’ve been holding off on upgrading to the iPhone 4 believing the hype about an iPhone 5. But where is it?

So now the question – given that our phones barely receive or make calls anymore, and given that we actually do need phones (we don’t have a landline, and the phone provides internet when we’re on the road) – should we stump up the extra for a 4GS? And what provider should we use – we’ve been with Vodathree for ages, and while their customer service is adequate their network is not very good…

I’m not going to go to android – so shut your yaps you insidious open source google nerds… I like iTunes. I like my phone, iPad, and MacBook being essentially tied to the same mothership. But a flashy camera and a slightly faster processor? Seriously Apple. No wonder your share price dipped this morning… What do you reckon?

The times, they are a-chaining…

You can buy this clock, which is a pretty cool fixture if you want to make a hipster friendly cafe, or just be awesome.

Have your mind blown by shades of grey…

Check this out. It’s pretty clear the bottom box is lighter. Right.

Now cover the joint in the middle of the shape with your finger. Do it. On the screen. Amazing.

Via tywkiwdbi

Roboblogging…

Jason Kottke runs one of the finest examples of the curated link blog out there. He manages to find and post some of the most interesting stuff online before just about any body else. Now, somebody built a robot version of Kottke… it’s an interesting experiment.

I don’t think of St. Eutychus as a link blog. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it’s a content blog. Sometimes it’s a soapbox. But my inclination towards link blogging waxes and wanes. It’s a great way to keep content flowing without investing significant time into posting, but you also get to a point where your curatorial or editorial senses are dulled. There are things on the Internet that don’t excite me as much as they used to. Everybody’s sharing stuff. Some people are sharing everything (I’m looking at you 22 Words)… Kottke describes this malaise beautifully in a piece about the robot version of himself…

“Some days, you just don’t want to do it,” Kottke says. “You look at so much stuff everyday and it all becomes kind of the same—all equally interesting or uninteresting. It’s hard to maintain that sense of discovery, that little hit that you get when you find something that you haven’t seen before. I’ve posted 15,000, maybe 20,000 links since I started. I’ve been whittling down the discovery space of things that are going to be new and interesting.”

Here’s Robottke – the machine version of the link blogger…

Sticky fun: Draw a Stick Man

This is the most fun I’ve had on the Internet since, well, since the last time I found a cool link. You draw a stick man. He comes to life. He fights a dragon. Good times. ‘Twould be cool to draw Trogdor and have a dragon fighting a dragon… Here’s my viking style stick man with an elongated chin.

You get prompted to give your stick figure a sword, so don’t feel like you need to include one in the beginning.

Victory…

Cop that Laurie Daley.

How to use Facebook for Jesus

I gave a talk last night that was semi-evangelistic/semi-practical advice type talk, with some tips for using Facebook as Christians. It was an interesting exercise for me to think through the professional stuff I’ve done with Facebook and how it applies to being a Christian individual (rather than a Christian organisation – I’ve posted a social media strategy for promoting Christian stuff over at Venn Theology).

I promised I’d post the tips online – I don’t know if anybody actually wants them, but I’m a man of my word…

The first point I made, speaking to a group of slightly younger than me tech-savvy types – is that digital natives, the people growing up alongside the Internet, increasingly get all their news, and the information that shapes everything they think about the world, via the Internet. Which has implications for us as Christians – because we need to get the gospel into their news feeds.

There’s all sorts of research out there about digital natives and media consumption, you can google it, or you can take my word for it…

To set the scene for these tips – I used Philippians 2 to show that becoming a follower of Jesus restores the way we relate to each other, because our inter-human relationships were damaged by the fall…

Using Facebook to Encourage one another
We can use Facebook to encourage each other. I’ve got five tips here for how we can encourage each other using Facebook.

1. Set aside some deliberate time to send somebody an encouraging message to their inbox. One where you’ve thought about what you want to say, don’t just tell somebody they looked nice tonight, tell them that something they did or said was helpful to you, or that you appreciated something they did, something they might have felt like nobody noticed.

2. Post encouraging comments on people’s walls, tag them so that their friends can see, and tell them that they helped you love Jesus more by whatever it was they did. That way not only does the person you’re thanking know, but their friends know that person is serious about loving Jesus, and your friends know that you are serious about loving Jesus, and other people who experienced the same benefit from that person’s work can join in. Now, we run in to problems if we start doing stuff expecting to be thanked on Facebook – that’s not why we serve, but it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t encourage each other in our service.

3. Share real moments from your life where you’ve struggled with something and God has helped, or where you’ve really appreciated something – and thank God for it. It’s important that these moments are real – or both your Christian friends and your non-Christian friends are going to know you’re faking, and that’s actually discouraging.

4. Share the occasional Bible verse. I love the Bible. I’m sure most people in this room love the Bible. And it’s great to excite each other with the gold that is to be found in the Bible – but you don’t have to make every update on your wall a Bible verse. Let me tell you something interesting about Facebook, about how it works – Facebook has this thing called Edgerank, Edgerank determines how often your statuses appear in your friend’s newsfeeds – basically edgerank calculates how much people like your statuses by how many interactions you get on each one – and Bible verses operate on what’s called a law of diminishing returns – the first time you post a Bible verse, everyone’s going to notice, some people are probably going to comment – heaps of people will like it, especially if it’s a positive verse about love… but if you post a Bible verse every day, pretty soon even your Christian friends are going to ignore you, the same way people would if you just randomly approached them in the street and quoted Scripture at them. It’s a sad reality. But if we want to use Facebook to genuinely encourage each other we need to be thoughtful in the way we use it, and the way we engage in relationships. I think, as a general principle, it’s just as important online as it is offline to win the right to tell people about Jesus, not just to assume that we have something really important to say so the person we’re talking to has to listen.

5. Respond when people indicate they’re having a tough time – don’t just “like” their comment, and don’t give trite advice – but reach out to them and show that you care, offer to chat, chat on Facebook, do something in the real world – that might be a little controversial, but send them flowers, drop in, cook them something – do something to show that this person isn’t by themselves, show them that you love them, that you’re compassionate – show them that you’re a Phillipians two type of person… the word that our bibles translates as encourage means get along side, it means showing people that we’re in life together, we should be using Facebook to do that. One of the other great things about Facebook is that whether we mean it or not – other people will see that we love each other. Now again – we’re not loving each other just so other people will see us – but Jesus says in John 13 verse 35 – he says that people will know that we belong to Jesus because of the love we show for each other.

Then I shared a story about my friend Scotty, who I reckon is the best Facebook encourager going around. And I said avoid doing the reverse of encouraging when you’re online. Philippians 2 says arguing and grumbling isn’t a great look for Christians… and arguing and grumbling on Facebook is in a public and semi-permanent forum.

We can use Facebook to pray for each other.
This was my second point. Here’s the stuff I said in the talk…

One of the things I like to do is each time I log in to Facebook, I’ll go to my profile, and I’ll pray for the people Facebook pops up on the left hand side of the screen – those random friends that Facebook serves up for you each log in, but you could also pray for people when it’s their birthday, or pray for people when you see from their status that they’re having a tough time with something – Facebook gives us little snippet views into people’s lives, and view is enough for us to pray for the person – because God is in control of their lives too.

I haven’t done this, but I wonder how people would respond if you told them, in an inbox message, that you’d prayed for them – I think people, even if they aren’t Christians, still like to be prayed for… but like I said, I haven’t gone down that path.

Sometimes we forget just how powerful prayer is, pray for your Christian friends, pray that your non-Christian friends will meet Jesus – but at the same time use Facebook as a tool to encourage your brothers and sisters, and to reach out to your non-Christian friends.

You can use Facebook for Evangelism
I opened this point by talking a bit about digital natives, and a bit about the powerful testimony our relationships with one another is to non Christians, and how it’s important, giving how public Facebook is making our lives, to live lives that match what we say. And to not be holier-than-though, but to be people who openly admit our sinfulness and our dependence on God.

Here were some of my quick tips for how you can use Facebook to reach your non-Christian friends.

1. Check in at Church, or at youth group – let people know that being a Christian is something you’re serious about. Then, go back and comment on your check in and say what you enjoyed about church. If your friends from church do this – comment on their check ins. Make it clear that you enjoy being part of God’s family. If your friends think you go to church stuff because you have to, not because you want to, it’s going to make it harder to get them along.
2. Be real. Don’t make your Facebook a fakebook. Make it clear that you’re somebody who is living for Jesus, but let people know that that is really hard.
3. Invite people to church events on Facebook – most youth groups put their stuff online as a Facebook event. Invite your friends along, send them a link, and then send them a message telling them you’ve invited them – or better yet, ring them, text them, send them something outside the world of Facebook to let them know that you think this event is important.
4. Have meaningful discussions – it’s easy to turn Facebook into the home of trivial discussions. Don’t limit it to that. Talk about serious issues from the perspective of someone who loves Jesus. Comment on news stories, share links… get people talking, get people thinking – remember that most of your friends are getting all their news online and help them find important news by being a reporter for them. If you find a story you think one of your friends might think is really interesting – tag them, and ask their opinion – people love sharing their opinions.

Being Elmo: a documentary…

This looks like fun. A documentary on the puppeteer behind Elmo. He’s a big dude. Totally not what I pictured as the guy who does that high pitched voice…

Via Kottke.

Where in the world do people care about Zombies?

The answer – pretty much where Hollywood movies are common fodder… based on the location of google searches anyway… big circles indicate lots of searches.

From the University of Oxford’s Data Visualisation page. Via Gizmodo.

A lull in blogworld…

All the people based blogs I read (except Al’s, Findo’s, Gav’s, and Gary’s, and to a lesser extent Arthur and Tamie, and Sophie, at the Fountainside, who tend to post on a more disciplined substantive regime anyway) appear to be going through the motions of blogging, or not at all,* at the moment. Come on people. Harden up. Drop us a bone. Especially those of us who use the internet to procrastinate.

The current state of affairs makes me sad.

Come on Ben. Simone. Izaac. Scott. Post something. Anything. GIVE ME CONTENT…

I’ll start taking note of all those articles that say blogging is dying otherwise.

* I realise and acknowledge the irony that I am a contributor to this general state of affairs…

Back, to the future…

Ahh. Melbourne. Coffee. Home. Essays. Sermons. That’s the story of my life this week. We left Melbourne yesterday, and that was the last real holiday I think we’ll have before our family gets a new addition.

So, in the next few days blogging will be a little sporadic. I’ve got three sermons to write before this weekend. One on Psalm 122 for my trials for license (complete with a 3,500 word exegesis paper), one on social networking and what it teaches us about the human desire for relationship (for another church’s youth group on Saturday), and one on Paul’s method of connecting the gospel to culture (based on Acts 17) for church on Sunday.

Plus, I’ve got a tutorial presentation paper and essay on the Psalms to prepare for the first week back from holidays (next week). So that’s an ouch.

Anyway. Here’s some photos from Melbourne to tide you over.

This dessert was the best thing I’ve ever eaten.

And this was the best pork belly ever… both were from Axil Coffee.

Reviews of our caffeinated long weekend in Melbourne are up on thebeanstalker.com (I’ve got a couple more to go)

An ode to Laurie Daley’s extraordinarily bad tipping abilities

Some people make hating Manly into an art form, some people have turned on field success into career longevity in the form of punditry and off field roles. Few have done both the way Laurie Daley has.

Laurie Daley is an idiot. Here is his season prediction for Manly this year: 13th. They’re now in the Grand Final.

He was a selector for the NSW State of Origin team for five years, and while I don’t condone filling wikipedia with biased misinformation the blurb has it about right:

“He was the first person from the disgraced and shamed New South Wales administration to quit after five consecutive series defeats”

Mr Daley tipped the Roosters, the Raiders, and the Titans to make the top six this year, they came 11th, 15th, and 16th. His pre-season predictions were abysmal – the teams that finished the regular season in positions 1 and 2 were tipped to come 11th and 13th respectively.

He spent last week death-riding Manly, suggesting the Broncos were specials to knock off Manly.

The man is an idiot.

Manly should take out next Sunday’s Grand Final, which will be sensational…

Taxidermy Gone Wild: Chuck Testa, Taxidermist

Continuing with my fascination with all things taxidermy comes this advert for totally realistic taxidermy. Chuck Testa is the best taxidermist out there. Period.

The ad is real. Sort of. Well, no, it is – but it was put together by Rhett and Link as part of their previously featured campaign to make regional TV ads more compelling, here’s a news story about Chuck Testa, taxidermist and viral phenom.

Here’s Chuck Testa’s Ojai Taxidermy website.

Via DeYoung, Restless and Reformed

Possibly a little bit too honest “worship” leading…

Ahh. This one has been doing the rounds – it’s been an open tab for far too long in my browser. So here you go.

I think the “I’ve sung this song for years…” line is perhaps the one I feel the most convicted by.

Via Jesus Needs New PR, but Tim also posted it in the interim, so he can have a link too.

Reversed vegetable bowls make eating salad fun

I like these “reversed volume” bowls.

Here’s a fennel bowl incongruously placed next to an apple.

And some more bowls…

Possibly the apple is for scaling issues…

Sadly the coffee bowl appears to no longer be for sale.

Created by Mischer Traxler, sold by designmarketo.