On this page I want to answer a few questions about this blog and about me that are likely to arise often. While you will undoubtedly get to know me better from the blog posts themselves, it would take a lot of blog posts to give you some of this information.
I’ll start this page with a quick introduction and then expand on some of the topics. I’ll introduce each major topic with a boldfaced title. I’ll underline subtitles.
Introduction
Quick Bio.: I am an Electrical engineer, but in techie crowds I’d be better described as a Systems engineer. I worked in the Space Program for a little over 40 very exciting years, mostly as a manager. Since then I have consulted with a wide variety of organizations, seeing how what I learned over those 40 years applied in other contexts.
I am also a lifelong lay leader in church and parachurch settings. It has been fascinating to observe how what I have learned and am still learning applies to church as well as business settings. My book, Tell Me a Story: Creating Life-Changing Ministries from Stories, is one result of these observations.
This Blog: Let’s be honest. An important motivation for this blog is to bring attention to Tell Me a Story. But I have fonder hopes for the blog. They are to gather a community of people who are interested in ways to create and improve vital Christian ministries (#ministrydesign). I am hoping that, together, we in this community can sharpen the tools available to the Church and, thereby, launch ministries that hasten our collective goal of bringing each one to completeness in Christ (Col. 1:28, 29)
My Biography
I am the product of a loving, intact, Christian family. I went to public schools from kindergarten through high school, first in Chicago, where I was born, then in the San Francisco bay area, and then in the Pasadena, CA area. College was back to the Bay area and I finished in Southern California, long after I was married.
Because I enrolled in ROTC, I served two years in the Army.
I worked for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, operated by the California Institute of Technology for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration for over forty years, all but a few in management positions. Roughly speaking, for the first half of those years I managed work to prepare spacecraft data for scientific analysis. The most significant of this was to manage the team that pioneered the field of digital image processing. For the second half of those years I managed efforts to apply space technology outside of the civilian space program. Much of this was for the Department of Defense. I must say work for JPL in the space program was a dream job for a young (and even mature) engineer, and in the process I felt like I never stopped my education.
The continuing education stimulated me to “retire” early from JPL. (Though I don’t believe in the “R” word). I wanted to see how the things I had learned would work in the “real” world of business, industry, and non-profits, so I turned to consulting and to writing about what I had learned. My consulting career has been fascinating. I found applications of my systems engineering principles applicable the fashion, television, insurance, and finance industries, as well as in church settings. Although Tell Me as Story is my first book to be published, it exists because I set aside my broader, secular book on general design principles. In fact, I have had to set the broader book, a novel, aside several times to concentrate on consulting “gigs.”
I am a life-long Christian. Nothing is more important to me than loving and following the Lord Jesus Christ and serving His Kingdom.
I have been called to leadership positions in both my church, Lake Avenue Church of Pasadena, CA; in parachurch ministries, particularly the Fuller Evangelistic Association, known for the Old Fashioned Revival Hour; in my local public school board; and as a director of a Savings and loan. At Lake Avenue Church I have served in numerous capacities, including as leader of Missions and Evangelism, as leader of Adult Ministries, and as Chair of the congregation. These church roles were capped by twenty-four years of mentoring and teaching a large class of energetic young marrieds.
I hold bachelor, masters and Ph.D. degrees, all in Electrical Engineering.
I have been married to Deanne for almost three quarters of our lives. We have three wonderful daughters and six fabulous grandchildren. We live in Arcadia, California. Besides Christian service, consulting and writing, I like to spend time with tons of friends, read (but never have time), go out to eat (for which I make time and include friends), watch football (college first, then pro.), and watch baseball (if only DirecTV would broadcast the Dodgers).
My Blog
This blog is focused on design in the context of Christian ministry. I treat ministry in broad terms. At its core are the things a church or parachurch organization does to help people grow in faith. These are things like planning and conducting worship, developing and delivering Bible-based learning materials, organizing programs of Christian service, and building Christian community. But ministry also includes organizational and business issues, such as caring for and counseling hurting people, building and equipping facilities, and providing for and training skills needed for all of these. In particular, we need to train people such as musicians, technical equipment operators, security personnel, teachers, babysitters, etc.
All of these ministries require design; that is, they need to be thought through before we jump into exposing them to the people we want to help. Design to my mind, at least in Christian contexts, is a Spirit-guided creative activity that guides people to decide what they should do, how they should “deliver their goods.” It leads to prescriptions of how worship will be planned and conducted, how curriculum will be developed, how service programs will be conducted, how Christian communities will be formed and what they will do, and, to me most importantly, how a typical parishioner might progress toward completeness in Christ (Col. 1:28,29).
My professional experience tells me that there are common elements in virtually all design activity and that it applies in some way or another in virtually all design situations. Sometimes these common elements are done well, and sometimes they are not. This blog is in some sense a share-the-lore forum to help us all select the better approaches to design and set aside those that are less effective.
My Goal: So, my goal here, then, is for us, me and you, my readers, to interact with each other to create relevant content that we can put to work in our churches and parachurch organizations, to find those common approaches to ministry design that work.
My Blogging Practices: Because I am writing this About page as I am just beginning to blog, I can only give my intentions and not actual practices. My intention is to write two or three times a week. To make sure you don’t miss the newest posts, I plan to let you register to receive Twitter and/or e-mail notices of new blog posts. My Twitter account is @ministrydesign1. Please follow me. If you’d like an email, write me at bill@ministrydesign.blog.
While I won’t start with it, I may later decide to accept a limited amount of advertising to help defray the cost of this blog.
My Contact Information
I’d love to hear from you. Here’s how:
- Respond to this blog. Your response will go to everyone who reads the blog, but that’s its purpose in the first place.
- E-mail me at bill@ministrydesign.blog
- Follow me on Twitter at @ministrydesign1
- Follow me on Facebook at TellMeAStory
Colophon
Some people get a kick out of this kind of information, so I include it. Webster defines colophon as an inscription at the end of a book or manuscript usually with facts about its production. So here is mine:
My blog is built on WordPress Personal (self-hosted). My theme is the Twenty Sixteen, a WordPress standard theme.
The text font for the whole blog is Source Sans Pro. Titles use Lobster Two.
Caroline Sommers took all my personal photos. The header photo is from WordPress. I’ll take the blame for the Logo. All other photos are from Dreamstime (www.dreamstime.com).
My site is hosted by WordPress.
Ministry Design 