Category: Resources & Reviews

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.