Online Journal - Page 24 of 45

Starting a New Chapter #Missions #Church

Unlike other jobs, I give notice to Solid Rock Christian Fellowship after almost 11 years with a heart heavy with so many emotions. I know that where I am going is where God wants me to be in the interim before I launch as a Social Media person with WorldVenture. Other doors closed this week, too. Not that I can go into any detail, but an old life is fading and a new life is beginning.

Change is something a person can count on. It’s a constant. I’ve experienced so much change the last couple of years. It leaves me breathless. Even as I watch winter fade into spring, I am excited for the future. When I sing songs in church, I hear them differently now. It begs the question: Are you really living on faith? I mean, really?

Do you give until it hurts?
Do you step through open doors in your life not knowing why, but doing it anyway because God opened that door? You risk awkward silences and disaster stepping through; OR you risk blessing yourself and others in the process.
Do you go without to make something God wants happen? Or are you only willing to serve within your comfort zone?

Lastly, are you really impassioned about sharing your faith? I mean, really? I ask this because when I mention the online world and how people can funnel that passion through this tool to share the Gospel, I get one common response: “I don’t like change.” This usually follows after, “I hate Facebook.”

“I hate change,” is a barrier I come up against time and time again. It’s not just a barrier to what I do, but it is a barrier that keeps people from learning how to use the online world as a tool to build relationships and share their faith. Social media is simply a conversation. It’s like meeting someone in the hallway and asking, “How are you?” And instead of walking away after a short answer, staying to listen.

The church isn’t dying. The church has a communication problem. This problem is keeping the church in a building and causing people who are online to sound like angry Americans because the church isn’t learning how to train their people how to use the online world in appropriate ways or teaching how to contextualize responses to another person’s culture.

I would love to hear how your church is training your congregation to serve online. If you aren’t training them, why not?

Coffee With Nikki – Next Episode

The next episode will be Saturday, March 25. Coffee With Nikki episodes are aimed at the technologically disabled or the Senior Adult Christian to encourage them to get online and serve.

To see these consistently every week, please consider how you can partner with me on a monthly basis. I serve online before and after a full time job. My aim is to go into this full time. Without you, I cannot do it. I need people willing to commit to $25, $35, or more per month in a tax deductible donation. You can view my profile on WorldVenture here or press the give link at the top of the page.

With ministry meetings most of the day on Friday, I was not able to get one done. Your donation will contribute towards freeing up my time to mobilize the church and serve online myself.

SRCF Missions Festival

Solid Rock Christian Fellowship Missions Festival

Thursday, March 30 (6:30 pm)

Fellowship Group Dessert Night – If you are in a Fellowship Group with SRCF, learn about the missionaries attending as guests and stop by my booth to hear more about what God is doing with technology.

Saturday, April 1 (11:30 a.m.)

Women’s Luncheon (Tickets available at 928-778-9790)

A booth will be set up here. You can learn about what God is doing with technology and how you can use it to grow your church. I’ll be there early and stay late for questions.

Sunday, April 2 (10:30 a.m. service and All Church Luncheon)

After the 10:30 a.m. service here, I will be joining my church partner for their all church luncheon. Consider sitting with me at lunch.

4 Myths About #SocialMedia

Every month I send emails out to gather support. Not everyone will see the vision I have and embrace it as eagerly as my current partners and friends. It’s an art to write authentic emails that wrap my vision around the vision God has placed on a church I am contacting. Social media affects every church and ministry and every person whether they want it to or not. With 3.2 billion people on the internet out of the 7 billion worldwide, the church should jump at the thought of using a tool that is free for online evangelism, missions, and discipleship. This is not always the case for whatever reason.

Let me go over four myths:

Only Church Leadership Should Do Marketing Ministry: A medium church has a staff of 5 people. Your church has 350 attendants. Typically, unless you are a mega-church, your administrator or pastor doubles as social media marketer. How many people in your congregation make up the 1.57 billion people on Facebook? Why aren’t you training them? What do you train them on? How do you create a team of missions/evangelism-focused individuals who can be mentored by experienced past or present pastors or missionaries? Merely posting announcements is not good enough. You must engage the people on your page. You must use social media to talk to people and teach your congregation to talk to people.
“I Only Support (Insert Your Favorite Denomination Here).” While I do not agree with denominational prejudice, you should look for someone in the field of social media and technology to support or consider pioneering the use of technology and social media who is in your denomination whom you can support. Consider your neighborhood? Does your church have a strong presence in it? Or is it dwarfed by other belief systems? Implement a social media strategy. Consider this part of planting churches, running ministry, and doing church.
“I Hate Smart Phones. No One Has Conversations Anymore.” The church is great at publishing stories that scare people away from using social media. We are experts at why we shouldn’t use social media, but most who talk against it are barely using it (if at all). The conversations are happening. They don’t look like the conversations you have; different isn’t necessarily evil. Granted, balance does need to come back into the online and face-to-face world. Who will show an example of that balance if you are not going where the conversations are happening?
“I Don’t Need a Missions Course; I’m Not Going Overseas.” Social Media is global. Unfortunately, some of the missions courses aren’t packaging their courses to be applied domestically and internationally. Americans can offend another culture online and be blocked if they don’t learn about that culture first like missionaries do. Who are the people groups in your area? Have you searched that information online, taken a long drive or a walk in your community, or taken a course at a university or college to understand how many of the students come from other countries?

Support is secondary as to why I want to talk to your church. Your church’s hopes, dreams, and vision are mine, too. What I do is as important to you as it is to what God has me doing. Let me talk to you even if support is not available. Church isn’t about self-service. It isn’t about your programs. It isn’t about the music. Our passion for those things should be less than the passion to reach the lost with the truth and love of the Gospel.

The creative possibilities are endless with how a church can use social media to put into practice the vision that God has placed there. What are the barriers and how can they be overcome? What is stopping you from being more strategic online?

VOM Conference – May 6

On May 6, I will be at the VOM Conference. If you would like to join me or meet for dinner after to talk about what I am doing with WorldVenture, let me know. I do encourage you to attend the VOM Conference itself. This is a free event, but you must register.

It’s good to learn what God is doing in other parts of the world.

A New Living Room Session

Living Room Session

A Living Room Session is about 30-45 minutes online via Facebook. To join, you can email me your Facebook email address and I will add you to the “secret” group. On March 18 at 9 AM MST, sign on to Facebook and go to the group. Click on the “Live Video” feed and participate in the discussion about technology, Social Media, and what God has me doing with WorldVenture. Many people have questions. Bring your best mug of coffee and join me for a live video chat. The video is not on your end. Just on my end.

So bad hair days, curlers, and no make up is allowed.

A Blessing

On President’s Day, we took a long drive up highway 260 in Arizona. As a social media mentor and consultant, it’s almost a crime not to post on social media when you see beauty reflected in creation. The pine trees are almost black against the white snow. Where the snow had melted, small ponds have formed. The best view was the sudden discovery of Elk just outside Payson, Arizona.

We think they were bulls who had shed their antlers. My husband stopped in the middle of a highway in his excitement, but I directed him farther up the road where we found a pull out to park. We walked quietly back to the herd and took this video:

Use Different Words About The Online World

When I read devotions, it’s always talking about using different words; find a new narrative in your head; because using different words will change how you think and feel. People, especially older adults, think of the online world as self-serving instead of serving.

If the narrative in your head is “self-serving,” you will spend less time on it, not use it strategically, and make that face you make when someone mentions social media. It’s not about becoming relevant as a church, but getting involved in people’s lives. You can keep your involvement simple or learn marketing to cast a broader net. I’ve found that God will direct you to certain social media apps if your heart is willing to serve.

What does serving online look like?

When someone posts a status that you feel the need to pray for, your timely comment, email, text, or private message is meaningful rather than just lurking. Your acknowledgment of love to that person will encourage them.
If someone needs help financially or with a food box, you can personally connect them with a Christian ministry in their area. Send them a private message, email, or text and start that conversation. Be their online friend while that Christian ministry becomes their face-to-face friend, walking with them in their struggles.
If someone becomes a believer, you can connect them with a pastor, deacon, or elder who can disciple and baptize them and ensure the “ball isn’t dropped.”
Encourage someone online in their goals.
Be an accountability partner with someone.
Be louder than the voice in their own heads so their identity can be aligned with Christ rather than whatever label the world pastes on them.

Communication is a big problem. People under use the tool or spend all their time marketing. Any tool can be negative, but it’s up to the church to use this tool to bring the people online into a fellowship of faith. If you don’t use this tool, someone else will.

Book Review: No More Faking Fine @EstherFleece

Two kinds of crowds exist in the Christian world: the peace makers who believe that forgiveness means reconciliation no matter what the situation or the danger, and people like me who understand that forgiveness is more important and reconciliation is not always possible. Esther Fleece wrote, No More Faking Fine, and it is a clarion call to the church to understand and learn how to lament.

“A lament saves us from staying stuck in grief and rescues us from a faith based on falsehoods. It was a false belief that led me to believe I was the reason for my parent’s divorce. It was a false belief that told me I would never find my way out of despair. These false beliefs, combined with my inability to lament, caused a deep wedge between me and God. God was not angry with me about this. He understands the complexity of human emotions. But I had to be willing to communicate with Him to see what I needed and what He was doing and to uncover the fake beliefs prohibiting my intimacy with Him. (pg. 38)”

Unlike other memoirs, No More Faking Fine honors her parents and the situation by focusing on the events and what God did through those events and her own psyche. It’s rife with Scripture, pointing her suffering and her recovery back towards an intimacy with God. The book became more than just a review for a publicist company; it became an act of worship, re-visitation of the past, and a lament. People who come from our similar, but varied backgrounds, can relate to this emotion-filled book. It is not written from hurt or revenge, but from a heart in healing and lament. In my experience, lament is not practiced in church because we are busy looking like we have everything together.

Even our Facebook pages are filled with happy, wish-you-were-me posts and pictures of happy families, healthy relationships, and people who, because they are busy, have no time to listen to someone else’s lament. No More Faking Fine goes into talking about how coping mechanisms fail and how pain has a purpose if it leads us back to God. She weaves her own story thinly throughout the book, but mostly gives us a theological look at her emotional and spiritual journey as she worked at coping with coming from an abusive and traumatic past.

What stood out to me was the fearlessness she learned as her faith grew in the Lord. I recall how I was trying to share with someone how a person can go to church all their life and not know Christ or have a relationship with Him in spite of hearing the same verses every week. It is through the relationships of the people that come around us during our time of lament that help us understand intimacy with God. Fellowship is tricky for some of us.

“Some of us need to be told that good people are still out there–and they are. But even when Jason and Tamy showed me in numerous ways that they were there for me, my heart still anticipated their abandonment. I didn’t want to keep them at a distance, but my self-sufficiency had turned against me, and I had no idea how to reverse it. (pg. 176; emphasis mine)”

I resonated with everything written in, No More Faking Fine. We even share some of the same struggles as I am sure some of you whom read it will identify with, too. People I minister to or meet that come from similar but different situations or backgrounds and are damaged have discovered that we share the same emotional struggles. Grief has many stages and that grief needs to be heard in safe places. While I love most of the books that I read on the subjects of grief and forgiveness, I can say with absolute confidence, No More Faking Fine needs to be read by others who struggle with lamenting. Isolation is our worst enemy.

We need the fellowship of non-judgmental believers to come around us with, “hugs and tissues,” instead of Job-like friends who only sit with us for a time until they try to “solve” or blame us for our problems. We need a fellowship of faith so we can recover, and mentors or loving families willing to come around us for gentle and timely correction or encouragement. Like Esther, we need to move forward in obedience to Christ in spite of our fears, real or imagined.

In quoting her namesake,

For if you remain silent at this time, relief and deliverance for the Jews will arise from another place, but you and your father’s family will perish. And who knows but that you have come to your royal position for such a time as this?” Esther 4:14

You’re doing a great job, Esther.

Keep speaking to those of us who need to understand how to lament and draw closer to Jesus.

Help us become fearless by pointing us to Scripture.

READ ESTHER FLEECE’s WEBSITE