I am speaking twice in Los Angeles - an informal retelling of a bible story at a church and a boring lecture at a mission organization. Come along and say hi if you get the chance.
1. At the Tribe of LA community on Sunday [Jan 9] I am telling the story of the Samaritan woman in John 4 and discussing the fine art of life-streaming in today's world. Should be pretty casual.
2. At the US Center for World Mission [Jan 11] I am giving a talk on social media and the great commission in what I have called the "1024 Window".
"We are familiar with the idea of the 10/40 window as a geographical grid to view the world's population and their access to the gospel. The 1024 window is a way to understand accessibly to the gospel through new media and the internet. 1024 pixels represents one line of pixels on most of the world's computer displays (1280x1024, for example) as well as digital camera footage (divisible by 1024 pixels), phone displays (1024x480) and even the new iPad (1024x768)
With 2 billion people now online, and another billion coming soon, it is a common experience for many people to have their first interaction with the gospel through a computer screen or phone. And for many others around the globe, the screen has become the primary means for communication with other Christians as well as accessing, storing and retrieving and passing on information.
We have seen the birth of the cyber-church, online communities, evangelistic web events based on synchronized aggregations of Christian content, and millions of people clicking a widget to indicate a decision for Christ. This is just the beginning."
This talk will deal with the potential for social media to impact the 2 billion online people through storytelling and online publishing, as well as look back at some historical precedents to get some bearing on where we are now. The USCWM is well remembered for mapping out unreached people groups but there are other ways to map out the world also, as the image below suggests.
