JC Reigns - a fantastic contemporary Christian band in Northern Virginia - brought their great lyrics and warm personalities to Pender United Methodist Church, Fairfax, Va this past weekend. "What if?" is their first CD release and each song has a story.

But the big story? The band is giving their CD to churches to use as a fundraiser for "whatever." As band leader, Kevin Havens, says, "This CD had been given to us as a gift, and we wondered what it would be like to do this CD in other churches as a 'parable of the talents' gift?"

I've been experimenting with several template overrides. You'll need to work on a template override to have your Joomla template lean, mean and fast as a table-less template. Say what??

Well, here's the deal. You can work up that perfect template with only html (no tables) and a slick css. But the Joomla! system itself (read "modules") generates tables!

One easy way to do away with all of those tables is to:

1.) create your template and upload your template package into your joomla install;

 Did you know you have a news room? And, why would you care if you did?

Why? Because you want people to know about your church and you want your church to invite people into their ministries.

What is a newsroom? Any place where "news" or "information" about your church comes out is your news room. It may be your office or it may be volunteers. Why not get some education on how to use your news room for maximum exposure outside of your church? It's called Public Relations and what I learned from the webinar: "Writing for the Web 2010 - New Search Strategies" offered by Lee Odden of TopRank Online Marketing is pretty cool stuff. Listen in as I describe some strategies that will help you.

Where's my newsroom? Every church has a newsroom, and it's potentially powerful! It's everything you put out there for public consumption. Do you produce audio tapes of your services? Do you write booklets with descriptions of your church and her programs? Do you produce a bulletin for worship? Do you have a website? Do you ever think about creating press releases for upcoming events or important news about your church? (You should, by the way.) That's your news room.

Why not coordinate your volunteers and office staff to produce effective wording from the newsroom to the public? Why not be effective with what you are already doing?

Lee's main point: choose about 12-15 keywords that describe who you are, and then use those words "church-wide" in everything you produce. Those keywords need to be thought out carefully and then used effectively.

You've heard the terrible stories coming out of Haiti. 7.0 for this earthquake on the richter scale brought buildings down killing thousands or tens of thousands. And people are asking, "How can I help?"

But WOW! Technology, cloud computing, and viral campaigns are new to this disaster relief effort! This is truly life-altering for people in the disaster recovery business. It is nothing other than miraculous. $3 Million has been raised by a simple texting campaign alone - in 3 days. There's some fine print however. It will take 90 days for that $3 million to be released to aid efforst.

Imagine ... improvements we can make and how this viral social technology can be well worth the effort - if we only counted the disaster of Haiti into the equation. The world can be mobilized for good.

mgiving . . . 

"The Red Cross, whose campaign is being publicized by the White House and the U.S. State Department, is accepting $10 donations via texting “Haiti” to 90999 in a program powered by Mobile Accord’s mGive. As of this morning, that campaign alone had raised $3 million (see the map image below for a distribution of donations). The State Department had actually been responsible for initiating the Red Cross campaign with a call to Mobile Accord chairman James Eberhard (who had met Secretary Clinton at a dinner earlier this month, but got the call while traveling in Pakistan this week). It was activated at 9 p.m. ET on Tuesday and had raised $800,000 by 3 p.m. Wednesday." ------- http://gigaom.com/

 online conference giving . . .

CloudCamp Haiti is a virtual unconference held as a public webinar. CloudCamp-in-the-Cloud builds upon the popular CloudCamp format by providing a free and open place for the introduction and advancement of cloud computing. For this event, we are raising funds to donate to the aid effort in Haiti. -----http://www.cloudcamp.org/haiti

online missing persons registry . . .

 Within 24 hours, this website was up for people to check for their loved ones - or to register someone missing. Amazing. --- http://www.haitianquake.com

 social networks . . . 

 There's a Facebook application for giving to your favorite charity. You add it to your page and people can click on it to give. ----- http://apps.facebook.com/mgiving/

geo tools . . .

Google earth has a plug-in already where you can see the before and after.  ----- kml plugin download here

the United Methodist Committee on Relief online . . . 

The United Methodist Church lands on ground 0 in disaster zones within 24 hours -- all year long, and they have an online way to give to disasters, including this new one in Haiti. ---- http://secure.gbgm-umc.org/

 Give with your heart and your head. Make sure it's not a hoax by giving to reputable agencies, who also work together. See one way to check out that group through Charity Navigator.

David Seah always has good ideas. He blatantly admits that his life is a mess, and he's trying to get hold of doing the things that need to get done, and let the rest fall off the face of the earth.

How about you? Do you get done in a week what's reasonable and should get done? If you're like me, my time seems to slip away - sometimes in good ways (unexpected interruptions from people) and sometimes in a bad way (mind frolicking everywhere!).

That's why I'm trying out a New Year's resolution this year: Try to live more balanced.

And I've decided to use David Seah's tool - a Day Grid Balance sheet. I tweaked it for my purposes, mostly to add a weekly scripture focus. You can download my tweaks or download the original. It's all licensed under Creative Common license.

Explanation on how to use this effectively has been all written out here. I would add these experimental comments: 

•  It's not a waste of time! Living a reflective life is part of living a good life with God. ("Consider now, for the LORD has chosen you to build a temple as a sanctuary. Be strong and do the work." 1 Chronicles 28:10, NIV)

• Use a focus Scripture for the week and consider each event throughout the week in light of the lesson from scripture. What if each week were a God-honoring week?