2012 - Alan Rudnick

A pastor learns from Google at smAlbany

A minister, an IT consultant, and a small business owner walk into an auditorium…

No, no. It’s not the start of a joke, but what really what happened at the 6th annual smAlbany expo for Capital Area Small businesses. Every year hundreds of business minded folks gather to hear speakers, pick up tips, check out vendors, and connect with new businesses. So you might be wondering, does a pastor have any business being a business expo?

The answer is a resounding, yes!

This year the key-note speaker was Google’s Joe DeMike. Joe is a great presenter and has a really interesting background as a West Point grad and tech guy with Google. I have always known of Google’s importance since it’s inception in 1998, but yesterday I really saw the impact that Google has on business. If you want to move your product, business, or idea forward you need to be using Google. The tools, tricks, SEO, social media and apps really do rule the way we search for things. Check out the Times Union social media panel reflection on Twitter.

A few weeks ago, I was sitting and eating lunch at Chicago O’Hare Airport, when a very polite gentlemen asked if he could sit next to me. I said, “Sure.” and we starting talking. I discovered he worked for Google, in some sort of sales. I started to tell him my woes of my church‘s Google search engine results and mapping. He quickly helped me correct a few problems.

Google’s motto is “Don’t be evil.” It makes sense. Since Google is so powerful, they don’t want to end up as a big-bad tech company. Their employees live by that motto and it shows. Google wants to help you.

According to DeMike, 97% of people search online for a product or service online before buying it. And, most use Google to find what they are looking for. Hearing all the facts about how Google is used in business made me a believer in how much churches and faith communities are missing out on the power of Google.

Here’s what I learned from Google’s presentation that churches need to implement now: Continue Reading…

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Going to #smAlbany

Today I’m attending smAlbany, which is Albany small business, social media, tech, and (fill in the blank trendy industry). This year the gathering is sponsored by Google. I hope to pick up on some trends for social media, tips, and info for promoting churches on social media. Look for updates on twitter: .

social media, Tom Cruise Katie Holmes divorce

What Tom Cruise and Katie Homes’ divorce taught us

If it is anything Americans love it is watching a good dramatic celebrity break up. Although, if you are a DirectTV customer, it’s lights out for you if you want to watch all the drama of the Tom Cruise and Katie Homes divorce saga. It is really sad that more Americans tune into or log on to TMZ than reading the daily newspaper.

It is never a happy thing when a marriage fails, but if the reports are true it was wise of Katie Homes to get out of crazy Cruiseville. There is a lot of speculation swirling around why Katie Homes called it quits on Tom Cruise. Apparently, it totally took Maverick off guard as Katie used a disposable cell phone to plan the divorce while Tom was in Iceland (of all places) filming a movie.

No matter what the rumors say about why the marriage failed, we can learn three things from TomKat‘s divorce that give us a glimpse into some revealing trends and realities in our culture:

Leadership, mainline church

Sometimes, churches need to ‘die’

church-death

A 100 year-old plus-mainline-congregation closes its doors. The church dies. What’s left? An empty shell of a building and a disbanded group of church members. Many have predicted the death of mainline churches for the last 20 years. People have “headed to the hills” or more accurately, to less connectional churches or no churches at all.

I keep a pulse on my denomination, the American Baptist Churches USA, as it appears in the news. One “dead” congregation caught my attention. It is a New England American Baptist congregational and it died. After 163 years, the Massachusetts church closed its doors. Usually, that would be the end of the story, but it was not. The MetroWest Daily News tells the story: Continue Reading…

The Blind Side

Christian publisher boots ‘The Blind Side’

Let me tell you a great story: A husband and wife adopt an impoverish teen who grows up to become a college football player and goes on to the NFL. Except, if you walk into a store of one of the largest Christian publishers, you will not be able buy the movie.

“The Blind Side“, a movie based on a book by the same name, stars Sandra Bullock and Tim McGraw and apparently is deemed too dangerous with its PG-13 rating (because of a racial slur and a few minor curse words) by LifeWay Christian Resources, affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention.

A Southern Baptist pastor successfully fought to have the movie dropped from LifeWay. Rodney Baker, pastor of Hopeful Baptist Church in Lake City, submitted a resolution to the SBC Resolution Committee. According to the Associated Baptist Press, Baker was able to push for a similar resolution to pass in the Florida Baptist Convention.

I asked Ed Stezter, President of LifeWay Research, for a response: Continue Reading…

John Edwards

John Edwards’ sins: can you forgive?

Which of these news stories is unbelievable: A cannibal zombie high on bath salts killed a man in Miami, Mayor Bloomberg wants to ban large sugary drinks, and a politician admitted to his ‘sins’? If you said politician admitting to ‘sins’, you are correct!

On Thursday, former Senator John Edwards was acquitted on one federal charge and a mistrial was declared. Edwards has been through a tabloid scandal of cheating on his wife while she had cancer, fathered a child with his mistress, and proved to be an all around creep of a guy. Upon the mistrial, the former vice-presidential candidate declared:

I did an awful, awful lot that was wrong, and there is no one else responsible for my sins. None of the people who came to court and testified are responsible. Nobody working for the government is responsible. I am responsible, and if I want to find the person who should be held accountable for my sins, honestly, I don’t have to go any further than the mirror.

The trial proved everything we know about Edwards. He did some horrible things and unfortunately, based on legal scholars, he did not break any federal election laws. However, he did break some major moral laws. He committed an affair and lied to the world about his affair. He tried to cover it all up with money and the truth came out.

In his speech to the public after his mistrial he said, “I don’t think God is through with me…” That sounded disingenuous. If you watch his speech he starts to confess and seem contrite, and as his parents look on with an exhausted look on their faces, Edwards turns his confession into a public relations campaign to prove he is a good guy. Yuck.

Based on his “confession” can you forgive Edwards? Continue Reading…

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Two blogs, two different reactions on Dan Savage

It’s amazing how audience dictates the comment section of a blog and how each handle discourse. I posted my Dan Savage blog post on this blog and on my Times Union blog. Interestingly, I posted my blog post on Facebook. On Facebook, the conversation was civil, exchanged differing views, offer opposing ideas, and generally mild. On this blog, there were no comments about the post.

On my Times Union blog, it was a different story with over 55 comments. Most of the posts were critical of the fact that I spoke out against Dan Savage. Most of the commenters thinking revolved around the fact that Savage represented a community who has been unfairly oppressed by religious conservatives. Thus, my critique of Savage’s comments about the Bible being ‘bullshit’ and how he misunderstood slavery in the Bible were not apropos. Despite the fact that I deplored gay-bashing and Bible beating any group, it seems that many commenters believed Savage’s comments were just and called for. Many of the blog comments were attacks against Christianity in general, how religion is narrow-minded, and even some personally attacked me.

Rabbi Brad Hirschfield (author, radio and TV talk show host), led a Q&A for the Washington Post, commented on Dan Savage. The Rabbi wrote “You Don’t Have To Be Wrong For Me To Be Right: Finding Faith Without Fanaticism” and offers some important insight when he commented on a reader’s question/statement on the Dan Savage story:

bullying

Anti-bullying advocate: ‘Ignore the bullsh*t in the Bible’

Anti-bullying advocate Dan Savage recently told a gathering of 1,800 high school students to “ignore the bullshit in the Bible”. Savage is a columnist and a speaker for the gay community. Savage’s comments came at a conference for students and his forum was about responding to cyber-bullying.

His speech in context was as follows:

People often point out that they can’t help it. They can’t help with the anti-gay bullying, because it says right there in Leviticus, it says right there in Timothy, it says right there in Romans, that being gay is wrong. We can learn to ignore the bullshit about gay people in the Bible the same way we have learned to ignore the bullshit in the Bible about shellfish, about slavery, about dinner, about farming, about menstruation, about virginity, about masturbation. We ignore bullshit in the Bible about all sorts of things. The Bible is a radically pro-slavery document. Slave owners waived Bibles over their heads during the civil war and justified it.

As you see in the video, students who are presumably Christian, walk out in protest of Dan Savage’s comments.

Savage continued:

If the Bible got the easiest moral question that humanity has ever faced wrong, slavery, what are the odds that the Bible got something as complicated as human sexuality wrong? 100 percent.

After his rant, Dan Savage welcomed the departed students to come back:

Millennials

Millennials losing faith in record numbers

This should not surprise us, but it should alarm us. Millennials, 18-24 year olds, are not only leaving churches in record numbers, but they are also losing their faith too. The Public Religion Research Institute and Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace & World Affairs, just released a shocking study on these young people.

Many Christians think young people are leaving churches for other religions and that is just not true. Young people are leaving their faith behind and quickly becoming the generation of “unaffiliated”.

Daniel Cox, the Public Religion Research Institute’s research director said,

“These younger unaffiliated adults are very nonreligious. “They demonstrate much lower levels of religiosity than we see in the general population,” including participation in religious rituals or worship services.

The hard numbers:

1 in 4 young adults choose “unaffiliated” when asked about their religion
25% say religion is unimportant
1 in 4 Millennials said that they attend religious services at least once a week
Among Catholics, whites were twice as likely as Hispanics to say they are no longer affiliated with the church
37% say that they never pray
Fewer than half (40%) say that religion is either very important or most important thing in their life
45% who attend or attended a religiously affiliated college reported attending worship services once a week compared with just 13% attending or attended a private college
6-in-10 (62%) Millennials also believe that present-day Christianity is “judgmental.”

The crucial bit of information within this data is that within the “unaffiliated group”, 55% identified with a religious group when they were younger. Meaning, we are seeing a growing segment of younger people not only leaving their church, but also losing their affiliation with their faith.

The study also found that Catholics are losing the highest number of childhood believers, with about 8%. White mainline Protestant adherents lost 5%. For those who reported a change in their childhood and young adulthood religious affiliation was the unaffiliated, which moved from 11% to 25%.

Compared with other generations, Millennials do not have a bright future ahead for religious faith and worship attendance. Denominations and churches must act quickly, but decisively to change their strategies. Instead of pumping money into dying churches, denominations must support growing churches.

Pastors and churches must understand that Millennials are a values based generation. That means, they will affiliate with causes that embody their conviction for ethical causes. They care about the oppression of peoples, injustice of poverty, and have compassion for the lowly. Churches must see their outreach as a missional outreach to their community. By embodying the Gospel message, churches must share the salvation of Christ and Jesus’ mission to uplift the oppressed. If 62% of Millennials believe that Christianity is judgmental, then we churches and believers have a lot of work to do to change.

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The voice of the empty tomb

Today, many of us will connect with family and friends joining in the Easter celebration. Many traditions exist abound. Growing up in Maryland, our church always had an Easter egg hunt, as many churches do. Kids running around trying to gather as many eggs as possible. Parents watching as they wear their new Easter outfits.

Easter in the northeast can be hit or miss for Easter egg hunt. I learned that first hand last year. My wife organized an Easter egg hunt for the church and guess what happened? It snowed! Snow on Easter!?! We almost canceled the event but we did not want to disappoint the kids waiting and wanting that classic Easter celebration. So, we had it inside, not exactly a spring type activity, but a reality in the Northeast.

You may have heard of an Easter egg hunt that was canceled recent. Because of weather? Low turn out? No. This year, the Associate Press reported that an annual egg hunt in Macon, GA – traditionally one of the largest Easter events in central Georgia – had to be canceled because of aggressive parents. Reports from Georgia tell of parents injuring kids and other adults. Children were trampled on. Parents were too aggressive to make sure their kid wasn’t holding an empty egg.

Nobody wants to get an empty egg for Easter. After all, an empty egg is just about as good as being given an empty gift box at Christmas: just a big disappointment.

What’s so great about something empty? Continue Reading…

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