Author: Glen

Cour­tesy of the cool Ein­stein dynam­ic chalk­board gen­er­a­tor.

Our staff team is going to begin a read­ing pro­gram togeth­er. We’re pick­ing our books now, and I thought some of you might be inter­est­ed in the guide­lines we’re using. I sort of made these up and mod­i­fied them based on the feed­back I received.

Fre­quen­cy
Let’s start off with a book every two months. This will give us plen­ty of time to pur­sue our own read­ing with­out short­chang­ing our staff reads. We can always adjust the time lat­er if we need to.

Selec­tion
We make our list up two full cycles in advance (one whole year). We each get to pro­pose 4 books, and then we each rank the result­ing list of 12. We tal­ly the votes using an inter­net script (Con­dorcet method for any vot­ing geeks out there). The top six books win. We’ll decide the order in which the win­ners will be read infor­mal­ly, try­ing to alter­nate old­er books with new­er books.

Guide­lines

1. We have to pro­pose books that we have not read yet. Don’t pick some­thing you loved and think it will be good for every­one else. The point of this exer­cise is per­son­al growth.
2. Hav­ing said that, it’s okay if some­one else pro­pos­es a book that you have already read and the team selects it. In that case, you don’t have to reread it–skimming will do.
3. Don’t try to impress any­one. No need to pick aca­d­e­m­ic phi­los­o­phy or any­thing like that–unless you real­ly want to read it.
4. Let’s try to alter­nate between new books and books old­er than we are. This isn’t a rigid rule, but an aspi­ra­tion.
5. Fresh­ness is good when we’re talk­ing about some­thing based on research, and age is good when we’re talk­ing about some­thing based on reflec­tion. If you want us to think about sci­ence or cul­ture get a new book. If you want us to think about God or life get an old­er book. Unless you real­ly don’t want to–these are guide­lines and not rules. 😉
6. The books can be about any­thing, but let’s keep fic­tion to a min­i­mum.
7. Noth­ing over 500 pages with­out first clear­ing it with every­one else.
8. Noth­ing over $30 with­out clear­ing it first with every­one else.
9. If you want, you can pro­pose mul­ti­ple short books as a sin­gle rec­om­men­da­tion (less than 200 pages total).

After Read­ing
Fol­low­ing the read­ing of the book, by a spec­i­fied dead­line, the choos­er will com­pose a few (3–5) ques­tions for group dis­cus­sion either in per­son, over the phone or online.

Any­way, it’s not too ele­gant but it looks as though it will serve us well. We’ve each made our sug­ges­tions and here’s the list we’re going to be vot­ing on:

• The Nico­machean Ethics by Aris­to­tle
• Prayer by George But­trick
• Good to Great and the Social Sec­tors: A Mono­graph to Accom­pa­ny Good to Great by Jim Collins
• Col­lege of the Over­whelmed: The Cam­pus Men­tal Health Cri­sis and What to Do About It by Richard D. Kadi­son and There­sa Foy DiGeron­i­mo
• The Five Dys­func­tions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni
• Cre­ative Min­istry by Hen­ri Nouwen
• In the Name of Jesus by Hen­ri Nouwen
• Pensees by Blaise Pas­cal
• Eat This Book: A Con­ver­sa­tion in the Art of Spir­i­tu­al Read­ing by Eugene Peter­son
• Spur­geon’s Lec­tures to My Stu­dents by Charles Spur­geon
• The Oth­er Six Days: Voca­tion, Work, and Min­istry in Bib­li­cal Per­spec­tive by R. Paul Stevens
• Mar­gin by Richard Swen­son

Once we have the results I’ll let you know what we wind up read­ing.

We’re putting togeth­er a text-mes­sag­ing reminder ser­vice for our meet­ings. Every Wednes­day night at 7pm our web­site will send out a SMS mes­sage to the cell phones of every­one who signs up remind­ing them to get ready for Chi Alpha’s week­ly wor­ship meet­ing. It’s a sim­ple mes­sage to help out those stu­dents who always mean to come but get busy doing some­thing else and for­get until the meet­ing is part­way over:

Chi Alpha at 8:00 tonight in 300–300.

I’ve just test­ed the sys­tem and it works pret­ty smooth­ly. It’s the mod­ern-day equiv­a­lent of ring­ing the church bells!

The script was real­ly sim­ple to write. If you use a unix-based sys­tem with PHP & PEAR installed you could eas­i­ly adapt it for your min­istry:

#!/usr/bin/php
 ?php
//sends SMS announcments to each person in Chi Alpha who wants them

require_once('Mail.php');
$parameters['sendmail_args']='';
$mailer=&Mail::factory('sendmail',$parameters);

$cells['Ferdinand Frosh']='5555555555';
$cells['Suzie Sophomore']='5555555555';
$cells['Jing Junior']='5555555555';
$cells['Sheila Senior']='5555555555';

$headers['From']='you@example.com';
$headers['Reply-To']='you@example.com';
$headers['Subject']='XA @ 8pm';
$body='Chi Alpha at 8:00 tonight in 300-300';

foreach ($cells as $cell) {
        if (empty($cell)) continue;
        $email=$cell.'@teleflip.com';
        //echo $email;
        $mailer->send($email,$headers,$body);
}
?>

All you have to do is cus­tomize the script (add cell phone num­bers and the right “From” and “Reply-To” emails) and then add it to your crontab file with an entry like so:

0 19 * * 4 /path/to/announce.php


(Hint: type crontab ‑e to edit your crontab file).

By the way, it should go with­out say­ing that you nev­er add some­one to an SMS announce­ment sys­tem with­out their express per­mis­sion! If you think email spam hacks peo­ple off, then just wait until some­one has to pay a text-mes­sag­ing fee for some­thing they’re not inter­est­ed in. The depths of their rage would aston­ish the Hulk.

Geek­s­peak: the rea­son I used the PEAR::Mail library was to make sure that the reply-to address was the one I want­ed. I just could­n’t make it hap­pen using the PHP mail() func­tion alone. Every­thing was from “root@my web­serv­er.” Very annoy­ing.