Geek Theology

Most people who read my blog are geeks. My guess is that most of them are church geeks like myself who either volunteer or work full time doing IT work for their churches. I think we’re a pretty diverse group as far as denominations go, but I would guess that the largest contingent of church IT geeks who occasionally visit my blog come from some sort of evangelical protestant background. I do know that there is at least one representative from Orthodoxy (hi Andrew) and I recall communicating with at least one Roman Catholic IT geek. I myself belong to an evangelical quasi-Baptist church after having made an exodus from Seventh-day Adventism.

One thing I have noticed is that we as a group tend to talk mostly about geeky things even though we identify ourselves as Christian geeks. I’d like to change that. Geeks need other geeks to discuss theology with.

I have been thinking a great deal lately about tradition (see my food blog) and its tremendous value. I have thought much about what protestants threw out in the protestant reformation and why we did so. There seem to be three groups (Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and to a degree Anglican/Episcopal) that retain ties to the traditional heritage of the church. Most others seem to have discarded it without reservation.

The dividing line seems to be the protestant doctrine/teaching of Sola Scriptura. That is, that doctrine should be established purely from the written word of God and not from the traditions, oral or otherwise, of the church. That the written word of God is a tradition kept on paper rather than in our hearts, minds, practices and speech is often left unsaid. At this point I’m not even sure that such a doctrine can be supported scripturally (which would be a fatal flaw). It even seems that Sola Scriptura could be blamed for the creation of heresies like Seventh-day Adventism.

Now I am not saying that I think Catholicism or Orthodoxy are perfect and that we protestants should all jump ship. I believe the reformation was an important and necessary event. But however much benefit it has brought, it has caused at least as much damage. The church is in a multitude of fragments and there is not much that can be done to put the pieces back together. As Paul said in Romans 16:17, “I urge you, brothers, to watch out for those who cause divisions and put obstacles in your way that are contrary to the teaching you have learned. Keep away from them.”

My intention is not to cause division among us, but I would like to hear from like minded geeky individuals from other backgrounds on why Sola Scriptura does or does not make sense. My hope is that as geeky IT people, your thoughts will be logical and rational.

Thoughts?

OpenDNS vs ScrubIT

I’ve been using ScrubIT for some time now. A few weeks ago I decided to try out OpenDNS at home to see how they compare. One of the reasons for my dissatisfaction with Scrubit is that I have absolutely no control over what sites are blocked or open. Every so often some site that was perfectly clean and was something that needed to be viewed would be blocked and there was nothing I could do to fix it other than changing our DNS server temporarily. I signed up many moons ago for ScrubIT’s beta program for more fine-grained control, but I’ve never heard back from them. I decided I was tired of waiting and tried out OpenDNS.

The first and only problem I had was that within the first 4-5 hours of having registered, none of my blocked sites were actually blocked. After that initial delay I haven’t had a single problem. The fine grained control is excellent and reliability seems to be high. I will be switching the Crossroads office over to OpenDNS on my next trip to the office.

One minor tweak I made was to set my primary DNS server to OpenDNS and my secondary to ScrubIT. Both OpenDNS and ScrubIT offer secondary DNS servers, but my guess is that if one goes down, the other may too. Why not increase reliability by using a completely different provider for the secondary?

Now don’t take me wrong. I’m not knocking ScrubIT. ScrubIT has served us well for quite some time, is reliable, and does the job. In fact, I would still recommend ScrubIT for home users who don’t want the added complexity that comes with OpenDNS’s  flexibility.

Media Related Software

Pete Bishop has posted details on the media related software we use.

Freedom and Equality

Heard on this morning’s commute while listening to “The Lessons of History” by Will Durant.

Freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails, the other dies.

Low Budget IT

I’ve gotten out of the habit of posting about where Crossroads is headed with IT and Web infrastructure. I’d like to get back to it. Here’s a start.

The economic situation in Michigan has really hurt Crossroads’ finances. We used to be able to throw money at stuff to solve problems. Not so anymore. We’re on a budget. A couple of years ago I had visions of a full-time IT staff (we’re still volunteer run), a server room, and all the usual things a guy like myself would have visions of. None of that came to pass.

I have fretted about disaster recovery, dependence on our internet connection, collaboration, maintenance, support, and numerous other problems, but most of those problems seem to have been solved by our webification strategy (except our dependence on our internet connection). What that boils down to is that if we can use an online application to solve a problem, we do. The ball started rolling with Fellowship One and hasn’t stopped.

Here’s a list of the online applications we use so far.

• Fellowship One – church management, check-in (not really low-budget)
• Google Apps for Domains - document storage and collaboration, calendaring, chat, email
• ScrubIt – content filtration (I’m currently evaluating OpenDNS since it has more fine-grained control).
• Google Groups – Project management. We were using Basecamp, but realized we weren’t using the milestone and to-do list features and found that Google Groups fit our need for less money (i.e. free). To-do lists and such were being managed mostly by staff and they found that the next item on this list fit the need better.
• Vitalist – “Getting Things Done” style list management
• Planning Center – Worship service planning software
• Celtx – pre-production planning. This is a hybrid, not 100% online. There are clients for Windows, Mac, and Linux.
• GoDaddy – file sharing and domain hosting
• Jott – personal secretary. Jott in conjunction with Vitalist is pretty darn cool.

We do use a number of other applications that simply can’t be online – primarily media oriented applications. Pete Bishop will know more about those applications (e.g. Final Cut, Photoshop, MediaShout, Audacity, Gimp, etc.).

One other dirt cheap package we do use is F-Prot anti-virus. It’s not necessarily the most polished package, but it does the job for peanuts.