So I’ve been a geek for a long time.  I don’t need to water it down.  If it walks like a duck & quacks like a duck, it’s a duck!  I walk like a geek and talk like a geek, so I must be a geek!!  I’ve been a freelance IT consultant for a number of years and used to work for a major Fortune 100 company until the corporate offices moved (and I didn’t).  Water’s wet, the sky is blue, I’m a geek.  You get it.

And if you know me, you know I’m a person of faith.  I’ve been part of The United Methodist Church (UMC) for a long time and have been working toward my Master of Divinity degree at Claremont School of Theology (CST).  I love to preach, I enjoy youth ministry and camping ministry, and I hope to become ordained in the UMC.

Who would’ve thought that these two seemingly different things could come together!  And yet they have.  This semester – and for the first time ever, as near as I can tell – a seminary is working to seek out tangible ways to communicate the gospel message on a massive scale and to teach those methods to new students.  Imagine ministry via Facebook.  Seen it?  How about via Twitter?  Seen that too?  YouTube?  Check.  Blogs?  Thousands.

How about all of the above and teaching and empowering new seminarians to use these tools?  That’s the part I think is new.  And if it’s not totally brand new, it’s at least new-ER.  It’s on the cutting ege.  It’s something the church doesn’t do enough of by far.  Social media has transformed the way humans relate to each other, and the church as a whole hasn’t kept up.  Will that change?  We’ll see how this class goes.

In the mean time, I’m excited!  Since a blog is required for the course – and since the instructors decided it was cool for me to use my own – I’ll be posting here some of my thoughts.  Part of the course will be a three-day conference held out here in Claremont.  For info on the conference, click here.

May we all be geeks, may we all be blessed, and may we all put weird (I mean that in the nicest possible way) stuff together like this!