Globalisation: An Example

As many people know, I love to travel, and I guess sometimes I get a little geeky about it, too. This fall has been wonderful: A weekend in Riga, Latvia, in September; this last weekend in London; and now this Friday, a whole week once again in Riga.

But add to that a rather peculiar piece of trivia: As a family, my brother, my parents, and I travel a lot, separately and together. We’ve been far apart before, but at this very moment for the first time we are on four different continents.

My brother and his wife on holiday in Kenya, my Dad at meetings in the U.S., my Mum at home in Australia, and I at home in Denmark. When I leave for Latvia, none of us will be in our native country.

How’s that for small world?

Church Websites for Dummies

The top guys of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church are gathered at the headquarters in Washington, D.C., for their annual council. For the participants this must be very important, and so they do their best to produce something that looks like results. There might be some hits, but there’s also some misses.

To this last group belongs the news that the church has agreed on a set of ‘Web site Guidelines’. The news report states that “having a series of guidelines for Web sites is important to the Adventist church’s growth on the Internet.” Why is that, again?

Ray Dabrowski calls it a “very important development”. Well, if that’s the best you can do, I’m disappointed. Unfortunately, Dabrowski doesn’t seem more visionary at the GC than he did in the TED. A ‘set of guidelines’? Wow, how cool!

If we take a look at the document itself, not all is useless, of course. Nos. 1, 8, 11 make good sense for the church, while for most of the other points, however right they might be, you’d be better off checking out useit.com or other people who actually know what they’re doing. No. 4 is sweet, but is it really necessary?

This could easily be just brushed off as a small miss for the communication department – get back on it, guys – were it not for the fact that the entire annual council actually spent time on it. Why doesn’t the responsible department have the necessary responsibility to do this themselves? Why does the main body of the church have to be involved in what can only be described as a waste of time?

Fatigue

My head is slowly clogging. When the main courses of your life consist of thinking activity – in my case studying full-time, writing sermons, coming up with project strategies, etc. – there isn’t always much room left for perspective.

Hence the recent silence on my blog. I simply haven’t had any thoughts deemed worthwile enough to share with the world.

This highlights some interesting issues about blogging. Is it important to write with a certain frequency? With RSS, that shouldn’t matter too much. Is it important to actually have something to write about? Some bloggers don’t seem to mind.

When I blog, I like to aim for not wasting the time of my readers (if any). Except now, of course.