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worst powerpoint slides

infocus just posted the results from their “worst powerpoint slide” competition (these slides were actually used and not false creations). the slides are awesome.

i am constantly amazed at some of the presentations i see. sometimes these are in churches and other times they are in lectures (community and classroom). some of the presentations are horrendous. why should i listen to you when i can read your information off the screen faster than you can talk about it? why use presentation slides that actually distract from the message you are trying to convey.

TED talks and death by powerpoint changed the way i use presentation software. they both use presentation software amazingly well by keeping it very simple. if you watch a TED talk video you will normally find that their presentations slides are VERY SIMPLE. the speaker’s slides are usually just images or small phrases.

here are the simple design rules from “death by powerpoint” that i try to follow

  • one point per slide
  • few matching colors
  • very few fonts
  • photos (not clip art)

i generally use my slides for the small segments of scripture, single words, and LOTS of imagery. i believe most of the threads would tell you that they remember the points of the message better by the images i use than they do anything else.

the irony is that i have actually seen someone do an absolutely terrible presentation on how to use powerpoint effectively in sermons. it was an awful presentation that demonstrated the exact opposite of what the presenter was trying to convey.

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a millionaire and yet still i starve

zimbabwe-100-trillion-dollar-bill-obverse

the above image is of a zimbabwean 100 trillion dollar bill (worth around $1-$1.50). i just read a story about them being sold on ebay for around $5 as collector’s items. i may have to get one of these or convince my kids to buy me one for father’s day.

for 11 years i have been carrying around a 20,000 rubel and 50 cordoba note in my wallet. i’ve kept them there to remind me to pray for GOD’s work in belarus and nicaragua. they serve as a pretty good reminder for me. every time i buy something i see them and try to say a quick prayer.

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speed matters

as a part of my d.min project/dissertation i have been attempting to make contact with some rather large names within the CHRISTian ministerial world. i figure if i need to have other people involved in my work i might as well “shoot for the moon” with those i try to involve. right now i have plenty of time so there is no need for me to settle for adequate. i’ve been attempting to make contact with with several rather impressive experts within the field of homiletics and thus far i’ve run into two very different responses.

  • i wrote one pretty well know professor asking if he would consider being my faculty mentor. this is a rather large request. i knew i was asking a good bit of this guy. it would probably be too much and i was quite sure the answer would be “no.” still without asking i would never know for sure. so i emailed every email address i could find. these included his nobts email address, the church email address where he now pastors, several organizational email addresses for the organization he has started for spreading discipleship material, and even his old personal email address (at one time he did a few youth ministry things for me and thus i had what at least once was his personal email address). i emailed him a lot. in fact, i worried that i might be becoming a bit of a stalker – like my mom. 🙂 after 6 weeks i finally got my answer, which was the “no” that i thought i would probably receive. i just thought it would be faster than 6 weeks.

 

  • the opposite respond happened with dr. john stott’s organization. dr. stott’s writing, especially “between two worlds,” have had a strong influence on me and the way in which i preach. dr. stott is 90 years old and in pretty bad health so i was fairly sure that he wouldn’t be able to be a part of my project/dissertation but once again if you don’t ask you don’t know. so i email every organizational email address that i could find on his ministry’s website describing my project and specifically what i am asking dr. stott to consider. it took 25 minutes for the church relations director of john stott ministries to respond to my first email. unfortunately the answer was that due to his health dr. stott would not be able to participate in my d.min project. i wrote her back saying that i had assumed as much but i was still very grateful for their fast response. 24 minutes later the president of john stott ministries emailed me saying that my project topic sounds like something that fits the mission of the langham preaching program that john stott ministries encourages. he therefore recommended a colleague of dr. stott’s that might be of help. i was amazed. so i started to write this blog post to brag on them. while i was writing it i received another email from the president of john stott ministries with a connection to another individual that he thought might be of help. amazing.  true servants.

two very different responses. i hope i usually respond like those that dr. stott has around him. they are incredible.

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my preliminary proposal

life has been pretty busy recently. it has been good also … but busy. therefore, i have been more focused on the tasks at hand than i have been blogging. this makes me a little sad because every now and then i like blogging. the busyness will subside soon because i am about to be through with the seminar work for completing my d.min. woohoo!

of course, this means that i will now begin working on my project (since the d.min is a professional versus terminal doctorate it means that your dissertation MUST be practical in its nature, i.e. i have a project rather than a traditional dissertation). i finished my preliminary proposal last week (you can view it here) and we’ll see how that goes. i like the idea of it. it’s basically a study of how trinitarian and incarnational theology should effect the preparation of weekly sermons. in other words, should the fact that GOD is community in his very nature (i.e. the trinity) and the fact that GOD typically preforms HIS work through the agency of HIS people (i.e. incarnation) effect how many voices from HIS church are involved in the preparation of the weekly sermon and, if so, how can the church collaborate on the sermon?

this may not interest you but it does me. if you are thread then there is a chance that you might be asked to participate within my project. i’m going to do an A/B/A/B test to determine if sermons that involve collaboration within preparation have more impact than those that don’t.

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pam is a better writer than i am

if you would like to read a wonderful perspective on why i love easter with tapestry you should jump oper to my wonderful wife’s blog and read this post. she sums it up pretty well.

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how tapestry celebrates easter

IMG_1400 IMG_1433

i’m too tired to type much but i want to say that i love the way the threads of tapestry participate in holy week. each year we try to do an act of service during the week and then do a simple tenebrae gathering to remember CHRIST’s curcifixion. this year we fed at place of peace on thursday and then held our tenebrae gathering at the encore room in the uwsp university center. we had so many people at the place of peace that we had to take turns working because there wasn’t room in the kitchen for the 20-something people we had there. i love the fact that the church i am a part of gets super excited about serving people made in the image of GOD.

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i wish he was wrong

a couple of days ago my youngest son noah corrected me. i hate it when he does that, especially when he is right about it.

saturday the entire family was tired from the full day of traveling that we had gone through the day before. pam, noah, and i had spent the week with jim and jill, pam’s brother and sister-n-law, in orlando where the weather is warm and the manatees roam. they are great people to be around so the week was great. best of all like us they had no desire to go to anything disney related so we were able to avoid all things mouse-eared without family guilt. while we were avoid the rodent owner of central florida adam was on a band trip in new orleans and made it back home the day before we did. needless to say we were all a little frayed.

of course, traveling is always tiring, at least for me. so saturday at home was a recoup day. i thought it would be a great idea to recoup by eating lunch. it is something i like to do on days when i need energy – i.e. most days. since i was tired i wasn’t paying as much attention to my manners as i should have been and i was apparently eating the potatoes chips that were a part of my sandwich lunch with my mouth open. i only know that this was happening because noah asked politely if i would close my mouth when i ate my chips because the noise from my chewing was shaking his brain.

just so you know, i don’t normally eat things with my mouth open. i developed a deep fear of making noise when i eat because my dad hated the sound of celery being chomped. i know this because as a kid i loved eating celery while watching t.v. i often experienced the result of my dad’s irrational fear of celery (i think it involve some experience in vietnam, which doesn’t really answer anything because my dad was never in vietnam). whatever the reason the the noise of crunching celery caused him to have non-violent, though slightly loud flashbacks. i therefore trained my self to eat quietly.

so when noah pointed out my failure i wanted to blow up. i mean really! i think half the time when this kid eats he purposefully keeps his mouth open in hopes of leaving a dorito crumb trail along his path so that he can follow it home should he get lost. i can’t fathom how many times i have begged him to close his mouth. how dare he correct me.

of course, the problem was that he was right. i was chewing with my mouth wide open and it was noisy and disgusting. i was tired and not thinking about what i was doing.

the problem with him being right is that it completely destroyed my righteous anger. its not righteous when the smartalec punk turns out to be right instead of just being a pain. grrrh!

since i couldn’t be mad at him for being rude i just told him to go upstairs and clean his room. that made me feel a little better. 😉

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when was your bread baked?

i know i haven’t been blogging much lately. this probably doesn’t matter to many people but blogging is something i have been doing since 2003 and therefore it matters to me. i go through phases of extreme blogging and then non-blogging. apparently i am presently in a non-blogging phase. that will change eventually.

so here’s the info on bread.

i just read this over at neatorama. the color of the plastic tie tag designates when your bread was baked. i don’t really have any idea when this information would be useful for someone outside of the bread industry but i know that it enriches my life.

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google cloud connect

i have been a big fan of google docs for quite sometime. we at tapestry have used the collaborative nature of of google docs for many projects. we used it for the development of our church constitution and we are using it right now in a sermon preparation project. yesterday i found out about google cloud connect which is a plugin that allows you to work in microsoft office products over the google cloud. i’m going to be trying this over the next few weeks to see how it works.