It's been a month since the The Elephant Room Round 2 event, and since I haven't really posted my reflections and thoughts from the second round, I thought now would be a good time to do that.
Background - About The Elephant Room
This was the second round, hosted by James MacDonald, and the idea behind The Elephant Room is to get pastors together in one room and talk about various issues that the Church is facing as a whole, or talk about issues that pastors are facing in leading the Church. There are a total of 7 conversations/topics and 7 pastors (including James MacDonald). For each conversation, there are two pastors in the hot seat and moderated by a third pastor (typically James or Mark Driscoll). More information can be found at http://www.theelephantroom.com/.
To summarize, below are each of the conversations and a quote or two that I took away from each conversation. Note: The quotes below are rough quotes and may not be exact, but the concept should be the same nonetheless.
A Little Help - The Future Of Denominations & World Missions (Jack Graham | Mark Driscoll)
This conversation discussed denominations and their role today. Are denominations still relevant? What is the difference between denominations and networked churches? Harvest Bible Chapel would be a network of churches in that each church is its own entity, and while they all follow a same/similar format, each one operates individually and not a top-down approach. All pastors would agree that whether your church is part of a denomination or not, the importance is sharing the Gospel. James MacDonald said, "Less control, more empowerment to get the Gospel out." Denominations are just as relevant as independent churches, as long as the Gospel is being preached.
The Gospel - What's Essential For The Gospel & Presenting It (Crawford Lorritts | Steven Furtick)
Basically the point here is what must be included when sharing the Gospel (ie. what teachings or beliefs make up the Gospel). Each pastor also believes that we need to do less watering down of the Gospel and present it as is. "The message of Jesus is offensive (double meaning): it offends and it is on the offensive, moving forward", Steven Furtick. Christians, including some pastors, try to soften or water the Gospel with fear that presenting it as is would offend people. Christianity isn't about making everybody feel good about themselves and softening the reality of Hell. Hell exists, Hell is real, and we need to stick to what the Bible says, not create a feel good, everybody wins doctrine. "When you're drowning in Lake Michigan, don't describe the color and features of the rescue boat. Point them to Jesus and don't cloud the cross. It is simple and beautiful as it is," Crawford Lorritts. My favorite quote from this section was by Mark Driscoll, "It's easier to be a critic than a pastor."
A Hard Day's Night - Burn Out & The Pressures Of Ministry (Wayne Cordeiro | James MacDonald)
Ministry burn out is no secret, and some say it is the inevitable. For this conversations, the pastor's talk about warning signs and how to prevent burn out before it happens. There were a lot of quotes that I liked in the section, but here are a few: "50% of leadership is self management," Wayne Cordeiro. "We don't forget we're pastors, we forget we're human," Wayne Cordeiro.
Ticket to Ride - "Majors" Of Christianity, Sound Doctrine (T.D. Jakes | Mark Driscoll)
This conversation talked about the use of labels and the doctrines or theology that we believe. "We believe different things...Everything we believe doesn't fully describe God and all that He is," said T.D. Jakes, "When we get to know people by their labels, then comes all of the baggage that defines those labels,." Despite some differences that T. D. Jakes has from the other pastors that were in the room, there was a relief in the room when T. D. Jakes professed the core doctrines of theology. My favorite quote here is from James MacDonald, "I am leery of people who try to erase mystery and replace it with certainty, all in the name of sound doctrine."
Come Together - Racial Doctrine in Church (Jack Graham | T. D. Jakes)
It is obvious in our Church today that there is a lack of cultural diversity, and this conversation seeks to bring more diversity to the Church. "There was more cultural diversity in the 50s and 60s than there is now," Crawford Lorritts. "The thing that God hates most, if He could ever get a voice in church, is Pride," T.D. Jakes said, "God uses the most culturally diverse people in the Bible," (speaking of people like Moses and Paul).
Help - What To Do When Staff Morally Fails (Wayne Cordeiro | Crawford Lorritts)
Not only do many people burn out in ministry, some fall to sin while serving, and this conversation talks about dealing with those who fall morally, including pastors and other staff members. In dealing with those who are in ministry and fall morally, Crawford Lorritts said "If they are negotiating, they have not repented. If they are concerned about their image/reputation, they have not repented." Wayne Cordeiro said, "It is better to confess than it is to admit."
We Can Work This Out - Christian Relationships, Associates, & Contexts (Steven Furtick | James MacDonald)
One of the James' biggest points and goals of the Elephant Room is to get to know other pastors and people before getting to know them by their label or what others say, and something that I have come to practice myself when I hear things about various pastors or people (though I am not perfect in this area). "I'm gonn start getting in a room with people and get to know them before I draw conclusions about them," James MacDonald said. Instead of starting with Googling people and drawing conclusions, we should get to know them a little first. Sounds clips taken out of context can mean something different than in context. And as said previously, it is easier to be a critic than a pastor.
There was a lot to take away from the Elephant Room. I always enjoy it when pastors can get together, differences aside, and have a civil conversation. While others wanted more of a debate or argument, James MacDonald has said that his goal with the Elephant Room is to simply bring unity among pastors and the Church.
Saturday, February 25, 2012
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
Internet Blackout: Just a Day or the Future?
If you experience problems on the web tomorrow, Wednesday January 18, 2012, it may not be your computer or connection. Some companies, such as Wikipedia and Mozilla, have announced that their sites are going dark in opposition to the SOPA bill (H. R. 3261), which will be discussed by the House Judiciary Committee in February.
So, what is SOPA? SOPA, or Stop Online Piracy Act (also known as Protect IP Act, PIPA, in the Senate), is an attempt by the media industry to stop online piracy. Sounds good right? Wrong. The content in this bill are vague enough that it could cripple the internet as we know it. Ever shared a song or music video on Facebook? Under this bill, Facebook would be responsible for the content shared by its users. If a user shares a song or video on Facebook, this will would allow the media industry to shutdown Facebook. Same goes for any other site. We could say good by to user-generated content, including blogs (which will probably be the first to go).
Do you use Dropbox or online storage sites? Since those sites could potentially be used for piracy, they too could be shut down.
The title of the bill sounds good, but in the end, it will(!) cripple the internet. We need to make sure this bill does not go through. Here's a video to help explain SOPA:
PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.
For more information about this bill, go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Online_Piracy_Act (although you may not be able to on Wednesday, annoying and another reason to stop SOPA).
Also, you can sign a petition at http://fightforthefuture.org/pipa
Or, the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation), which will be participating in Blackout Day, also has detailed information about the bill and a place to send a message to your local representative(s): http://blacklist.eff.org - just enter your zip code and street address to send message (on the left of the page).
Happy Blackout Day and may the internet live on while SOPA does not!
- Other Sources:
Reuters - Internet Blackout Against U.S. Law Fails To Enlist Big Sites
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/01/18/us-internet-protest-idUSTRE80H01U20120118
CBS News - Wikipedia, MoveOn, Reddit, Mozilla Shuts Down to Protest SOPA/PIPA, How to Prepare
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-501465_162-57360174-501465/wikipedia-moveon-reddit-mozilla-shuts-down-to-protest-sopa-pipa-how-to-prepare/
 |
| Photo by: Samuel Anderson (Gravity) |
Do you use Dropbox or online storage sites? Since those sites could potentially be used for piracy, they too could be shut down.
The title of the bill sounds good, but in the end, it will(!) cripple the internet. We need to make sure this bill does not go through. Here's a video to help explain SOPA:
PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.
For more information about this bill, go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Online_Piracy_Act (although you may not be able to on Wednesday, annoying and another reason to stop SOPA).
Also, you can sign a petition at http://fightforthefuture.org/pipa
Or, the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation), which will be participating in Blackout Day, also has detailed information about the bill and a place to send a message to your local representative(s): http://blacklist.eff.org - just enter your zip code and street address to send message (on the left of the page).
Happy Blackout Day and may the internet live on while SOPA does not!
- Other Sources:
Reuters - Internet Blackout Against U.S. Law Fails To Enlist Big Sites
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/01/18/us-internet-protest-idUSTRE80H01U20120118
CBS News - Wikipedia, MoveOn, Reddit, Mozilla Shuts Down to Protest SOPA/PIPA, How to Prepare
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-501465_162-57360174-501465/wikipedia-moveon-reddit-mozilla-shuts-down-to-protest-sopa-pipa-how-to-prepare/
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
Moved Content From Xanga
It wasn't an easy task, but I have done it. I have moved all of my posts from Xanga (a blog that I abandoned years ago) and have brought them into Blogger. This post will explain my process, some hurdles I have had to overcome, and the end result.
For starters, why move away from Xanga? I don't remember why I ever started with Xanga; maybe because all of my friends had a Xanga account, maybe I just didn't care about data liberation then, I don't know. What I do know is that none of my friends are using Xanga any more (the last post from my group of friends was April or May of 2007). I also know that Xanga, without paying for a Premium account, will not allow you to download an archive of your content. I am the one who wrote those posts, why shouldn't I be allowed to archive what I have written! Here on out, I will not use a blogging platform if I cannot retrieve my own archives. Since everything is extracted, I will be shutting down my Xanga account, probably wait 90 days or so before I do to make sure any Xanga user's who know me can see that I have moved. I don't like having accounts open all over the web that I know longer use. Just a pet peeve of mine I guess.
That said, a few years ago I was looking for a platform to start blogging again and since I already had a Google account with GMail, Android, and now Google+, Blogger seemed like a natural selection for me to use as a blogging platform. Also, Google has made it very public, via the Data Liberation Front, that the user should own the data, not the platform, visit http://www.dataliberation.org/ to read more about their efforts. So, how did I get Xanga content onto Blogger, and without spending a cent?
Tim Wylie has written a nice little tool called XWord/Xanga.r. The program is written in rebol (being a developer of sorts myself, I haven't heard of rebol, but the tool works, so eh, what can I say), so you will need to download and install (extract) rebol on your machine. I used a Windows machine for this and was pretty simple to do. There is a binary executable for Windows and Linux/Mac, but those versions are outdated and I couldn't get it to work, so I think you are left with the rebol script version.
To download the xword program, go to www.timwylie.com/xword.html. The software to run rebol can be downloaded from www.rebol.com. Xanga.r is a command line tool, while Xword is a graphical interface for xanga.r. Wil Fry has a post regarding his experience with xanga.r at http://wilcfry.com/blogs/verily/?p=292. I came across his blog while researching how to export Xanga to Blogger.
Once the download is complete, simply type the url for your xanga blog and export the data. Here comes the real tricky part. The generated file is a RSS file for WordPress, but it cannot be imported into a WordPress.com blog; it must first be imported into a WordPress.org blog, since it requires an RSS Import.
If you visit Wordpress.org, you can download the CMS system that powers WordPress.com, but to run and "install" WordPress.org, you also need to have a web server. I use Xampp all the time for web development stuff, which can be downloaded from http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html. Here you can also find tutorials on how to set up Xampp. You will also need to create a MySQL database for use with WordPress.org. Extract the WordPress.org download to htdocs in your Xampp installation directory, and if Xampp is running, you can go to localhost/wordpressdir (where wordpressdir is the WordPress directory in htdocs) in your web browser and install WordPress. After the install, you will find it is much like WordPress.com, except with a few more features, such as the ability to install modules (which is what we will need to do next).
Go to the Plugins section and search for the RSS Import plugin and install it (all from your WordPress.org admin dashboard). Once the plugin is installed, you can now import an RSS to WordPress.org by selecting the option under the import tab and then choose your Xanga .xml file created with xanga.r. After the import is complete, you can now export the WordPress.org posts to a WordPress XML file for imported to WordPress.com or any other blogging platform that will recognize this format.
Another option is to use these tools at http://code.google.com/p/google-blog-converters-appengine/. This project on Google AppEngine allows you to convert your blog to/from different types. I used this to convert my WordPress XML file to a Blogger file (http://wordpress2blogger.appspot.com/), then imported the generated file into Blogger.
I have a non-active blog (on Blogger) that I have imported my posts to, simply to keep them separate from my posts on Blogger and as an archive of its own. I have left those posts unpublished, so if anybody finds that blog, they won't find anything other than an empty blog (again, I did this for keeping a separate archive for now and may delete it in the future, just something I set up to make sure the import was going to work the way I expected it to). After a verified the format of most of the posts, I then exported them, and imported them into this blog where I have published the imported entries and are now part of my current blog.
The nice thing about going through all of this work is that all of my content is now on one site, and if I move later, I can export everything and import later (such as to WordPress.com with their Blogger Format import tool). A few things to note:
- If you have posts with listening/reading/watching, you may need to correct these posts. For each of my posts that had a listening to or reading header, the post content was missing and just the header was imported.
- Comments are extracted from Xanga with the xanga.r script, but they were not imported to WordPress. This required me manually importing the comments by creating a Spreadsheet in LibreOffice that matched the table columns, then saved the file as a csv. I found using | to break columns and ^ to enclose all text worked better since some of my text contained quotation marks. I also included column names in the first row and upon imported, simply skipped the first row. Once the comments were imported into WordPress.org through phpmyadmin, I was able to export them and import them to other platforms just fine.
I have noticed a few minor formatting issues with importing, but that is to be expected and shouldn't be too hard to clean up. I know this isn't a complete step-by-step tutorial on how to get your data, setting up Xampp, etc., so please feel free to comment or contact me if you are having problems getting your data out of Xanga.
---
My last post from Xanga is http://kgunnit.blogspot.com/2007/04/morning-mourningpraying.html.
My first post on Blogger is http://kgunnit.blogspot.com/2010/12/blog-information-and-goal.html.
You can also see all of my Xanga posts by searching for the Xanga Import label.
For starters, why move away from Xanga? I don't remember why I ever started with Xanga; maybe because all of my friends had a Xanga account, maybe I just didn't care about data liberation then, I don't know. What I do know is that none of my friends are using Xanga any more (the last post from my group of friends was April or May of 2007). I also know that Xanga, without paying for a Premium account, will not allow you to download an archive of your content. I am the one who wrote those posts, why shouldn't I be allowed to archive what I have written! Here on out, I will not use a blogging platform if I cannot retrieve my own archives. Since everything is extracted, I will be shutting down my Xanga account, probably wait 90 days or so before I do to make sure any Xanga user's who know me can see that I have moved. I don't like having accounts open all over the web that I know longer use. Just a pet peeve of mine I guess.
That said, a few years ago I was looking for a platform to start blogging again and since I already had a Google account with GMail, Android, and now Google+, Blogger seemed like a natural selection for me to use as a blogging platform. Also, Google has made it very public, via the Data Liberation Front, that the user should own the data, not the platform, visit http://www.dataliberation.org/ to read more about their efforts. So, how did I get Xanga content onto Blogger, and without spending a cent?
Tim Wylie has written a nice little tool called XWord/Xanga.r. The program is written in rebol (being a developer of sorts myself, I haven't heard of rebol, but the tool works, so eh, what can I say), so you will need to download and install (extract) rebol on your machine. I used a Windows machine for this and was pretty simple to do. There is a binary executable for Windows and Linux/Mac, but those versions are outdated and I couldn't get it to work, so I think you are left with the rebol script version.
To download the xword program, go to www.timwylie.com/xword.html. The software to run rebol can be downloaded from www.rebol.com. Xanga.r is a command line tool, while Xword is a graphical interface for xanga.r. Wil Fry has a post regarding his experience with xanga.r at http://wilcfry.com/blogs/verily/?p=292. I came across his blog while researching how to export Xanga to Blogger.
Once the download is complete, simply type the url for your xanga blog and export the data. Here comes the real tricky part. The generated file is a RSS file for WordPress, but it cannot be imported into a WordPress.com blog; it must first be imported into a WordPress.org blog, since it requires an RSS Import.
If you visit Wordpress.org, you can download the CMS system that powers WordPress.com, but to run and "install" WordPress.org, you also need to have a web server. I use Xampp all the time for web development stuff, which can be downloaded from http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html. Here you can also find tutorials on how to set up Xampp. You will also need to create a MySQL database for use with WordPress.org. Extract the WordPress.org download to htdocs in your Xampp installation directory, and if Xampp is running, you can go to localhost/wordpressdir (where wordpressdir is the WordPress directory in htdocs) in your web browser and install WordPress. After the install, you will find it is much like WordPress.com, except with a few more features, such as the ability to install modules (which is what we will need to do next).
Go to the Plugins section and search for the RSS Import plugin and install it (all from your WordPress.org admin dashboard). Once the plugin is installed, you can now import an RSS to WordPress.org by selecting the option under the import tab and then choose your Xanga .xml file created with xanga.r. After the import is complete, you can now export the WordPress.org posts to a WordPress XML file for imported to WordPress.com or any other blogging platform that will recognize this format.
Another option is to use these tools at http://code.google.com/p/google-blog-converters-appengine/. This project on Google AppEngine allows you to convert your blog to/from different types. I used this to convert my WordPress XML file to a Blogger file (http://wordpress2blogger.appspot.com/), then imported the generated file into Blogger.
I have a non-active blog (on Blogger) that I have imported my posts to, simply to keep them separate from my posts on Blogger and as an archive of its own. I have left those posts unpublished, so if anybody finds that blog, they won't find anything other than an empty blog (again, I did this for keeping a separate archive for now and may delete it in the future, just something I set up to make sure the import was going to work the way I expected it to). After a verified the format of most of the posts, I then exported them, and imported them into this blog where I have published the imported entries and are now part of my current blog.
The nice thing about going through all of this work is that all of my content is now on one site, and if I move later, I can export everything and import later (such as to WordPress.com with their Blogger Format import tool). A few things to note:
- If you have posts with listening/reading/watching, you may need to correct these posts. For each of my posts that had a listening to or reading header, the post content was missing and just the header was imported.
- Comments are extracted from Xanga with the xanga.r script, but they were not imported to WordPress. This required me manually importing the comments by creating a Spreadsheet in LibreOffice that matched the table columns, then saved the file as a csv. I found using | to break columns and ^ to enclose all text worked better since some of my text contained quotation marks. I also included column names in the first row and upon imported, simply skipped the first row. Once the comments were imported into WordPress.org through phpmyadmin, I was able to export them and import them to other platforms just fine.
I have noticed a few minor formatting issues with importing, but that is to be expected and shouldn't be too hard to clean up. I know this isn't a complete step-by-step tutorial on how to get your data, setting up Xampp, etc., so please feel free to comment or contact me if you are having problems getting your data out of Xanga.
---
My last post from Xanga is http://kgunnit.blogspot.com/2007/04/morning-mourningpraying.html.
My first post on Blogger is http://kgunnit.blogspot.com/2010/12/blog-information-and-goal.html.
You can also see all of my Xanga posts by searching for the Xanga Import label.
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