Sam Cornwell

When 2 people tell a story of their past, none could compare to that of the moment Sam and Delia first met. Sam was working at Christian Life Assembly and Delia had just started her freshman year at Messiah College. Being new in the area Delia and her friends were looking for a church to get involved with and after a meeting with Pastor Jeff from CLA Delia and her friends decided to embark on a fall retreat 2 days later with the Youth Group. Meanwhile, Sam had recently begun helping with the Youth Group and on the day of the retreat was persuaded by a some of the kids to tag along. On Friday, November 2, 2007, Sam and Delia loaded into buses with about 60 youth ready to begin a great weekend. Sam and Delia spent the weekend helping plan events and watching the kids. The first time they spoke was when Sam came up to Delia and asked if she wanted Starbucks. Delia could never turn down Starbucks and gladly excepted the offer. Later that night they spent some time getting to know each other at the bonfire. The weekend ended as quickly as it began and Sam drove Delia and her friends back to Messiah. Sam gave an open invitation to Delia and her friends to come over and he would make them dinner. But Delia’s friends claimed to be too busy leaving Delia to except the invitation by herself. The following Friday Sam picked Delia up and made her dinner… and that is how they met.

For Delia the fourth of July weekend is like Christmas, perhaps it is her favorite holiday. Knowing this, Sam decided he would trek for the extended weekend and spend some time with her and the family. After a long weekend filled with fireworks, family BBQ’s, a parade, and lots of hot weather, Tuesday evening rolled around and Sam and Delia went out for Pizza. Sam brought his camera along and after pizza they went out to the park in Ridgewood to take some pictures. Since you can only take so many different posses they decided to walk down to Starbucks and get some drinks. Sitting outside enjoying the nice HOT weather they talked about how great the weekend had been and how sad they were that Sam was going home soon. Walking back toward the park, Delia asked if they could go to the train tracks and take some pictures. Sam said “Sure, but lets stop in the park for a couple more pictures there.”  Though the sun was setting, Delia decided a few more pictures in the park wouldn’t hurt. Setting up the tripod once again, Sam began to ask Delia when she thought he should propose. “Tomorrow!” she exclaimed. Sam gave her a look and asked what would happen if he waited till the end of the month. To this Delia showed her dismay and pouted at the camera as Sam snapped another shot. “But that is so far away and it will leave me no time to plan.” Delia continued to pout. “Well,” Sam said “what if I proposed right now?” Delia laughed and mocked him. As Sam got down on his knee Delia began to panic. Speechless she began to show her disbelief. Her eyes welled up with tears as Sam asked, “Delia… will you marry me?” Fumbling for the ring in his pocket Delia still doubted that this moment she had waited for was finally here. Placing the ring on her finger she stumbled over her words still trying to put together what was happening. After a moment to remove all doubt she confirmed to Sam, “Yes of course I’ll marry you.” They sat on the bench for a while longer talking and letting the moment set in. Delia was so surprised her face gleamed with excitement… and that is how he asked.

I’d intended to promote the re-release of Searching for God Knows What this week, but haven’t gotten around to it because I’ve been thinking a lot about church. And apparently so have you considering the number of comments on yesterdays blog. Essentially, I asked if modern churches were mostly educational communities, spiritual community colleges, seminars or schools, and whether there was room for churches to diversify the learning experience without leaning so heavily on the lecture model. Your responses were terrific, eye-opening for me and remarkably objective. I couldn’t just let the conversation hang. I’m wondering if we can dream for a bit. I think a number of pastors and leaders might get a great deal out of this conversation, if we could just take it one step further. So that step involves this question:

If a church decided to go a period of time without a sermon, a sunday school teaching or a seminar or “traditional” Bible teaching of any kind (sitting down to study the book in a classroom style) how would you teach people about God and how would you teach them right theology?

I have a couple suggestions that I’ll throw out as examples of the sort of thing I am talking about, but I am hoping you will add even more suggestions in the comments.

1. Your church could plant a vineyard and grow grapes. You could do a study of the farming metaphors in scripture, teaching people bits of Christ’s parables that relate to soil, growth, dependence on God, the fermentation process of making alcohol, the celebration of new wine and so forth. You could even have a Jewish wedding at the end marking the first miracle that Christ performed. All of this could be translated into actual life lessons people could apply each week. You could bring in an outside vineyard steward to help with the process, and even teach about soil and conditions for growing.

2. You could figure out the jobs of each of the apostles and characters that interacted with Christ, and send different groups from your church to different locations each sunday to learn about fishing, carpentry, baking, and even tax collecting, and each week the congregation would learn how a person from that profession might experience and understand the gospel.

3. You could transform part of your church into a different country and culture, and each week people in your church could visit a culture where the church is doing mission work and so better understand how the reach of your church is global and how the church itself cannot be contained by a building.

4. You could recruit hundreds of non-believers who would be willing to come to your church and sit down with your parishioners for conversations about how they see and understand Christians. You would allow your church members to ask questions, but challenge them not to try to convert anybody, but rather to listen to somebody else’s perspective.

5. You could set up a multi-week experiential “game” in which members of your church try to get themselves and their families out of slavery only using limited resources, helping people understand the plight of millions of people around the country.

6. You could send out a mass e-mail saying that the actual building of the church will be completely closed for one month, but that the church must go on, and let the church itself (not the staff) figure out how. The staff could be on call 24/7 to serve the church in any way it needed in order to keep going. At the end of a month, you could have a huge dinner and allow people to share their experiences and see what the church had collectively learned, and whether people felt lost or empowered.

And the list could go on and on. So, what are your thoughts? What could churches do to create experiential learning paths that make church feel less like a school or a seminar and more like the world in which people live? In other words, how could we better throw people into a life of faith, rather than help people simply think about faith?

Google just pushed out an update to the Dev channel of Chrome, integrating Flash with the browser by default and confirming rumors to that effect.

Google's reasons for the move:

We believe this initiative will help our users in the following ways:

• When users download Chrome, they will also receive the latest version of Adobe Flash Player. There will be no need to install Flash Player separately.
• Users will automatically receive updates related to Flash Player using Google Chrome's auto-update mechanism. This eliminates the need to manually download separate updates and reduces the security risk of using outdated versions.
• With Adobe's help, we plan to further protect users by extending Chrome's "sandbox" to web pages with Flash content.

For now you'll still need to use a command line switch to use the built-in Flash plug-in (add --enable-internal-flash to your command line or shortcut for starting Google Chrome), but in time expect all versions of Chrome to use the built-in Flash player by default. At a time when HTML5 is changing the web and taking over at popular sites, it's a pretty interesting move by Google.

A recent report published in CyberPsychology & Behavior finds that Facebook users that disclose their religious affiliation are also more likely to list themselves as being single. This is an interesting parallel and underscores the amount of interesting demographic data that can be obtained from the Facebook network.

The information was collected from 150 Facebook profiles and conducted by Sean Young, Debo Dutta and Gopal Dommety. The result of study can be misinterpreted, as the “people who reported religious affiliation were significantly more likely to report being single than were those who did not include this information.” This does not mean it’s a comparison to the ‘norm’ across the entire Facebook population, and does not factor in the idea that people who do not enter the information may have a higher proportion of single people.

There was a strong correlation, however, with users listing religious information being nearly 1.5 times as likely to report a single relationship status. The report goes on to make a conclusion, based on the report findings, that users that indicate their religious affiliation may be doing so to find a potential mate who is also religious. They explain: “people who identify with a religious background might be particularly interested in being contacted by potential romantic partners who have the same religious background.”

The study also found that women were more likely than men to list themselves as single. There is an important caveat about the study, though. The information obtained came from Facebook users in the San Francisco, Stanford University, or NASA network - making it difficult to generalize these findings to other populations.

This is a guest post by Jill Smokler. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.

Adding things to your newly created blog is pretty cool, right? But be careful, there are things that you’d better leave out. Below you’ll find 10 of them.

1. Auto-Music: Nobody, and I mean, nobody wants to hear it. I vow never to subject you to my love of Barry Gibbs and Barbara Streisand duets and implore you to extend the same courtesy to me. Please.

2. Animated Gifs: Sure, they were cool in the late 90s. Now? Not so impressive. Let’s leave them over at My Space where they belong.

3. Tiny Type: If I have to strain my eyes to read your post, I’m just not going to. No matter how good your blog is.

4. Comment Verification: Install a spam preventing plug-in. It will take care of the spam and save people the effort of typing out nonsense words, or even worse, solve math problems just to leave a comment. Even if you’re on Blogger and have to delete a spam comment or two every now and then, it’s a small sacrifice and courteous to your readers. And it will keep them coming back and commenting again.

5. Spelling & Grammar Errors: Proofread. And then proofread again. Preview your post before you publish it. Even have someone else glance at it. Of course, we all make mistakes, but do your best to publish a post free of obvious errors.

6. Badges of prizes and awards you won: Sure, they’re flattering when you start blogging, but if you’ve been around a while your sidebars will start looking like Boy Scout vests. Dedicate a separate page for them and clean up those sidebars. You’ll look no less popular, and the sidebar police will thank you.

7. Regurgitated Content: If you said something that bears repeating, link back to that original post. Your readers will know if you keep spitting out the same old content and Google frowns upon duplicate posts. It’s bad idea all around.

8. Flashy Backgrounds: Your blog is not the Vegas strip. Black backgrounds with flashing lights and neon colors are not only hideous and hard to read, but they also take away what people are really at your blog to see: Great content.

9. Lies: It may be tempting to make things up to gain more traffic, but don’t. You will be found out, and you will look like an idiot.

10. Plagiarism: The only worse thing than blatantly making stuff up? Stealing other people’s stuff. It’s pretty much the biggest no-no there is in blog-land. If you want to quote someone, go for it and link back to them. Otherwise, you’re history.

Jill Smokler blogs about parenting; the good, the bad and the scary at Scary Mommy. She can be found at on Twitter as @scarymommy.

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Sneaksy eco-friendly hobbitses. – Ms. Fix-It

Favorite Comment: Fixer slapchop says, “This is not the place for pornography. Please remove.”
And he is so right. However,Joe Hawtness has all your dirty minded needs covered over at Things That Are Doing It. Mildly NSFW. – Ms. Fix-It

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Social sharing is becoming a big contributor to traffic for many sites. While Facebook and Twitter drive more sharing than any other services, Google is trying to compete with Buzz, which is now part of Gmail but shares links to article and blog posts through Google Reader. Over the past month, according to AddThis, sharing through Google Reader is up 35 percent, with a big jump on February 9, the day Buzz launched.  This number only measures sharing through the AddThis button, which is on more than 600,000 Websites and gives you the option to share content through more than 200 services. So it is only a proxy for total sharing on Google Reader, but a decent one.

Google Reader still barely registers when compared to Twitter and Facebook, which account for 31 percent and 8 percent of all sharing via AddThis, respectively.  But Buzz is definitely giving it a boost.

You can now chart how different services do against each other on the sharing front via a new services directory on AddThis. For instance, Google Bookmarks does much better than Google Reader, with 5 percent of all AddThis activity.  It even beats Digg (which has 3 percent).  Google Bookmarks is probably used more for personal bookmarking than for social consumption, but it is smack in the middle of Twitter and Digg when it comes to activity via AddThis.

Another comparison is Tumblr versus Posterous, which suggests that Tumblr  is much more popular as a reposting tool, and is about neck-and-neck with WordPress.

Love it or hate it, everyone is talking about Google Buzz right now. And, judging from my account, a ton of people are actually using it too. The main use envisioned for Buzz was sharing, but the problem is that for content, you still need to copy a URL and then head over to Buzz to share it. Not anymore.

We’re all used to tweet buttons (like the one built by Tweetmeme), Facebook buttons, Digg buttons, and even Yahoo Buzz buttons on many posts around the web. These make it easy to share without having to leave the content. So we made a Google Buzz button.

When I say “we,” I actually mean one of our developers, Andy Brett, who hacked this together with amazing speed. He could do that because it’s actually a simple piece of code derived from a button you would use to share an item on Google Reader. And that’s an important thing to note: for this to work, your Google Reader shared account has to be hooked up to your Google Buzz account. The good news is that assuming you use Google Reader, Google did this link-up automatically for you.

So there you go, Buzz away.

What’s an administrative assistant doing on a leadership blog?

While my team is GREAT about telling me how important I am to them and how much they appreciate all I do, I still find myself questioning my worth because I’m almost 40 and I don’t have one of the “important” jobs.  I just do all the boring stuff so that “they” can do the real ministry.  True?  No, of course not.  Nine days out of ten I remember, but that one day…

I need to remember that God equipped ME to do these things, and do them well.  I remind myself of these things:

• Recognize the importance and need for support in ministry.  Leaders cannot do it all without being supported administratively and prayerfully.
• Never underestimate the necessity of the “menial” tasks.  Without administrative support, the paper would pile up, neglected; no one would answer the phone calls of people with questions or needs; ministry leaders would have tons of ideas that were never executed—in short, business would come to a screeching halt.
• Lead UP.  Higher level leadership has altitude…they see the big picture, but you can see things that they may never see.  Don’t be afraid to offer your perspective.

A few months back, we highlighted a few tips to take better nighttime pictures. Now photography weblog Digital Photography School is chiming in with six more ways to score better night shots, including how to breathe properly when snapping away.

Photo by John Krantz.

In low light situations, a steady hand can make all the difference between a crisp shot and a blurred mess. According to the post, it's best not to hold your breath during the shot. Instead:

Breathe normal and steady, don't hold your breath. I read some place that sharp shooters are trained to squeeze the trigger while exhaling as the body tends to relax during that portion of the breathing cycle. I've found this to be mostly true and it does help with longer shutter speeds.

It's also helpful to keep your finger on the shutter release when taking a shot, as attempting to remove it will "likely cause minor shakes." Browse the post for the other night photo tips. If, on the other hand, you're snapping away on your cellphone, take a look at our top 10 ways to get more from your cameraphone.

Update: Reader qldingo offers a bit more specific advice on the breathing techniques of sharpshooters:

The mantra for sharpshooting is "breathe, relax, aim, squeeze." In other words, breathe in, and as you relax your body and exhale bring your sights up on to target. You should come to your target just as your breath runs out, and slowly and steadily "squeeze the trigger" in this case I'd lightly depress the shutter release.

While checking out the website for Park Community Church in Chicago yesterday, Daniel noticed something interesting. On the site’s prominent “I’m New to Park” page, visitors find these words:

Looking for a church? We understand there’s not a “one size fits all” church for everyone. So here’s a list of other churches you should include in your search.

Wow. That’s the coolest thing I’ve seen on a church website — a local church providing new folks with a list of other local churches to consider. (I’m not saying Park is the first or only church to do this — that really doesn’t matter — I’ve just never seen it before.) By telling me about other churches in the area, Park actually tells me a lot about itself as an organization.

Park Community Church, we applaud you. For everyone else, we’re not mad at you for not posting a similar list on your site … but it’s something you should at least consider. In fact, I’d be interested to hear from you guys on this — Does your church’s site have a list like this? Why or why not?

So we’ve had our fun with Facebook over the years (Why We’re Suing Facebook For $25 Million In Statutory Damages, Republican PR Director Calls Facebook’s Randi Zuckerberg “totally full of sh*t”, Randi Threatens a Bar Bouncer). But in general these things are supposed to flow one way – we mess with them, they take it gracefully.

Today that changed. They punk’d us, and we fell for it. Hard.

Earlier today TechCrunch writer Jason Kincaid noticed something new on Facebook. When viewing any photo, it showed a “Fax This Photo” link on the bottom right of the screen. Ridiculous? Yes. But everyone in the TechCrunch network saw it. He fired off an email to Facebook at 5:05 pm. When they didn’t respond, he posted at 5:29: Facebook Now Lets You Fax Your Photos. I Have No Idea Why Anyone Would Want To Do This.

Things went downhill from there.

At 5:47 Facebook PR emailed and said “We already faxed you a statement on this??? Didn’t you get it?”

Then they emailed again at 5:51, saying:

Hey Jason,

We’ve been testing this product since 1992, and we are thinking that we will be launching this “innovative” feature at TechCrunch 50.

What do you think???

Uh oh. Our nose hairs started to twitch.

Then we asked a bunch of people outside of our network. Not a single other person said they saw the fax-a-photo feature.

Definitely not a good sign.

Jason then called Facebook PR. Jaime Schopflin took the call and, apparently, couldn’t stop laughing for five minutes. Between laughs while catching her breath she mentioned something about this being a joke, that nobody but us could see it, and that they were placing bets around the office on how long before we noticed it and posted. And something else about teaching us to contact them before posting.

So, bottom line, don’t expect to see this feature actually launch. Unless you come to work for TechCrunch, I guess. We still see it.

You won this round, Facebook. Enjoy your victory.

Oh, by the way, the feature works. Here’s what it looks like:

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

The early bird may get the worm, but there's something to be said about burning the midnight oil. In fact, according to a new study, staying up later and longer may increase alertness and productivity more than being an early riser.

Photo by myyorgda.

According to the study as reported by Scientific American:

An hour and a half after waking, early birds and night owls were equally alert and showed no difference in attention-related brain activity. But after being awake for 10 and a half hours, night owls had grown more alert, performing better on a reaction-time task requiring sustained attention and showing increased activity in brain areas linked to attention.

Of course we wouldn't be surprised if another study were to come along touting the opposite conclusion, so it's worth taking this news with a grain of salt, but the post is an interesting addition to the early bird versus night owl discussion. If you're looking to find your peak performance time, check out our previous post on the best times morning people and night owls should get work done.

If you've spent more than 5 minutes browsing around the web lately, you've no doubt dealt with greedy webmasters assaulting their readers with awful ads and more—but Firefox makes it easy to take back control.

Blocking Unnecessarily Obnoxious Ads

Without question, obnoxious ads are out of control on the web these days—you can barely move your mouse across a page without ads moving around, popping up, taking over the screen or pretending to be a dialog window indicating impending doom if you don't pay for a system scan NOW. These ads can be put in their place easily, using everybody's favorite Adblock Plus extension. Lifehacker is, of course, an advertising-supported site—so we'd be grateful if you'd keep us on the whitelist—but it'll do a charm for those flashing, pop-up-ing, overlaying, obtrusive ads all around the web.

Turn Off Auto-Playing Sounds

As annoying as advertisements and blinking text might be, nothing is more embarrassing than heading to a web page only to have everybody around you hear donkey noises emanating from your speakers at some ridiculous volume. Thankfully Firefox makes this problem easy to solve—though you probably should still think about headphones if you are in an office (even if they're not connected to anything). You can block most auto-playing music and/or sounds with the Flashblock extension, but since people can still embed media directly in the page, you'll want to take a look at the Stop Autoplay extension for a tool that can address both issues.

Prevent Sites from Resizing Windows and Disabling Menus

How many times have you clicked a link only to have your browser window resized and moved to the corner of the screen, or right-clicked on a page only to see a message saying that the clueless webmaster disabled the context menu on the page? Thankfully Firefox makes all of this easy to disable—just head into the Options panel and head for Content -> JavaScript -> Advanced and remove the checkboxes.

Disable the Blink Tag

One can only assume that the <blink> tag is the result of some practical joke by the nerds that created HTML in the first place, and Firefox makes it easy to disable. Just enter about:config into your address bar, filter for browser.blink_allowed, and double-click it to set the value to false. Once you've made the change you won't have to deal with annoying commenters that think they are funny, causing seizures across the web.

Disable Blinking Text in Firefox

Block Animated Favicons

This is one of the annoyances that isn't terribly prevalent (yet), but if you frequently need to use a site with an animated icon in the address bar, it can become irritating very quickly. Unfortunately there's no quick config setting to disable the animation, but you can use Adblock to disable the specific favicon or use the Favicon Picker extension to choose a new, friendlier icon for that site with the clueless webmaster.

How to Block Distracting Animated Favicons

Stop Pages From Auto-Refreshing

Whenever a web site wants to artificially increase their pageview numbers, all they need to do is set a meta tag in the page that makes your browser reload the page every x number of minutes. Sure, there are some legitimate reasons for automatic page refreshing, but if this one is driving you crazy you can simply head into about:config and set the accessibility.blockautorefresh value to true. You'll end up with a message in the page window saying that Firefox blocked the page from refreshing, but it's better than wasting your bandwidth.

Disable Automatic Web Page Refreshing

Click, Click, Clicking Through Multiple Pages

One of my personal pet peeves are those web sites that split up every article with a single paragraph on each ad-ridden page, and 437 Next links to click through before you can read the whole thing. The sad thing is that I'm only slightly exaggerating—it's a serious problem, but there's also a plethora of extensions that can help you deal with it. You can take your choice between AutoPager, Skipscreen, repagination, PageZipper, Unlinker, and even the Antipagination bookmarklet to load the next page inline without having to reload. Each of the extensions works a little differently, and none of them work as well as boycotting sites that are particularly hostile to their readers.

Greasemonkey and Stylish Can Handle the Rest

If you've got a specific pet peeve that isn't solved already, you can simply install the Greasemonkey or Stylish extensions and get to work customizing your favorite pages to work just the way you want them to. If you don't have the skills to create your own scripts, you can head to userscripts.org or userstyles.org for customizations created by the community—or take a look through our top 10 Greasemonkey scripts, 2009 edition.

It's here: The official invite for Apple's September 9 annual iPod event. It kicks off at 10AM Pacific—that's 1PM Eastern—and we'll be there bringing it to you live, as always.

What do you think we're gonna see next Wednesday at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts? iPods with cameras? MMS for iPhone in the US? A time machine that'll take us back to 2005, like this dancer? (Maybe they'll be dragging Mick Jagger and Keith Richards through it, judging by the caption. Does that mean no Beatles? Hmm.)

One thing it looks like we won't see, if the photo is any indication, is a coffin for the iPod classic. Update: Okay, since the headphone jack is on the bottom, indicating it's an iPod touch, maybe the classic will die after all.

Drop your predictions—and desires—right here.

Reposted from Andrew’s (VP of Marketing @ Tatango) blog.

In case you spend a lot of your time thumbing through books or drinking coffee in or around a Barnes & Noble bookstore, you'll be glad to know that B&N is now the proud distributor of free Wi-Fi through AT&T. They've offered Wi-Fi for quite some time, of course, but now you no longer have to pay for it. Photo by grilled cheese. [Macworld]

Here's the thing about the life of Walter Cronkite:

At every turn, he acted as if he had a responsibility to his audience. He didn't do the right thing because he thought it would help him get ahead and then one day he'd get his share. Instead, he always did the right thing because that's who he was. No sellouts, no political consulting, no false transparency.

That's the way it is.

Transparency works if it's authentic.

1. Multimedia messaging does not support sculpture, macrame, or interpretive dance.
2. Voice memo recordings totally don't sound like me. I don't sound like that, do I? Seriously?
3. Turned on adult content filter but everybody in my videos still has their clothes on.
4. Adding a task to calendar did not result in task getting done.
5. Clicked this blue "compass" icon but kept getting some stupid web browser.
6. Still no apps to cure the nagging feeling that I should've bought a Palm Pre.
7. The touchscreen is now on the back of the phone instead of the front.
8. Gone to the bathroom four times already today, and Remote Wipe hasn't worked once.
9. Spotlight search crashed with memory overload error trying to index my Harry Potter cosplay photo collection.
10. Tried out tethering, but I think I broke my finger smacking that phone around the pole.
11. Apple still hasn't fixed the no-hardware-keyboard bug.
12. "Cut" function does not apply to monthly AT&T bill.