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We’re enjoying a few days of visiting from Micah Bales and Faith Kelley. They’re two of the organizers of this May’s YAF conference in Wichita. Hopefully I can get a video interview out of them before they leave!

Great piece:

How come the rest of the church is taken up with missional or emerging church as if it were something new? We are only doing what the apostles did two thousand years ago, and what the regular old Christian in the street did – helped the neighbour, fed the poor, nursed the sick, visited the imprisoned, clothed the naked…

I’ve been reading John P. Bowen’s book Evangelism for “Normal” People, (Augsburg Fortress 2002). What is “normal” evangelism? Not approaching strangers with “Are you saved?” or handing out leaflets on street corners! It’s living peacefully, helping our neighbours, reaching out to those in need, and generally following Christian principles. It’s taking some risks when people question us about faith. It’s being bold in witness, but in witnessing with love.

It was a contrast to Stillwater, where the demographic skews much older and where a sense of sacred quietness prevails. My first thought : East Richland seems more “alive,”more a-crackle with energy,…

A local client from Tabernacle NJ came to me with an interesting project. He’s owned a commercial cleaning company for a number of years and has heard his share of horror stories about the cleaning services clients hired before finding him! This experience led him to write a PDF book about how to hire the right cleaning service. What a great idea and a what a useful book this is for small business owners.

The site’s on a bit of a budget so it’s a simple design, with colors and general look-and-feel borrowed from a site the client likes. Simple editing comes via CushyCMS. When customers click to buy, they are sent to Paypal for the actual transaction and then forwarded to E-Junkie, which provides the automated and integrated PDF download.

Visit the site: Office Manager’s Guide to Hiring the Best Cleaning Service

Visits with Friends along the way in Indiana, the Gathering itself (and the tragic death there) and her and it’s plans for 2010.

An 88-year-old white supremacist with a rifle walked into the Holocaust Museum, one of the capital’s most-visited sites, on Wednesday afternoon and began shooting, fatally wounding a security guard and sending tourists scrambling before he himself was shot, the authorities said.

She’s prepping for the release of her book, The Wisdom to Know the Difference, out this September.

“Ants aren’t smart,” Gordon says. “Ant colonies are.” A colony can solve problems unthinkable for individual ants, such as finding the shortest path to the best food source, allocating workers to different tasks, or defending a territory from neighbors. As individuals, ants might be tiny dummies, but as colonies they respond quickly and effectively to their environment. They do it with something called swarm intelligence.

Philadelphia Yearly Meeting’s Cookie Caldwell told me about this in his visit early today. Definitely looks interesting. He has some grand ideas that Friends organizations might look at this model—idealistic, I’d say, but maybe post-organizational Quaker networks might run with it.

Adam Ostrow looks at the successful Facebook campaign by the makers of Vitamin Water.

Although there are a few risks of building a campaign that directs users to a social media site versus your own property, the benefits are likely to far outweigh them if you can successfully get people engaged. Not to mention – what’s the last memorable corporate website you visited? Vitamin Water’s site – though impressive graphically and informative if you’re looking for details about their sports drinks – has absolutely no compelling reason to come back to it.

On the other hand, users will keep logging into Facebook for the foreseeable future, and in turn, seeing updates from the brand on their homepage. Vitamin Water’s approach makes sense, and turns what would otherwise be a difficult-to-measure branded advertisement into an interactive one with tangible results.

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See also: my recent O’Reilly Media piece, Will Facebook (all but) Replace Corporate Websites?