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Interview – Shaun Groves

October 21st, 2009     0 Comments

At BestChristianDesign.com we are always trying to bring your relevant interviews and insight from exciting people in the Christian internet community. In this edition we are delighted to have Shaun Groves with us.

Shaun is an internationally known Christian songwriter and recording artist hailing from Tyler, Texas. In recent years Shaun has played a huge role in the Compassion International movement, particularity in their online development.

Visit shaungrove.com today to check out his latest album One Night In Knoxville or read read his challenging and humorous blog.

When did you become interested in music and what lead to you traveling the world playing your songs?
I grew up in Texas where, around age 12, kids have to choose an elective in school like homemaking, woodworking, Spanish, or band. A homemaking class in which I was the only boy probably would have improved my love life tremendously but I chose band instead. We had a saxophone stored away in the back of the attic so that’s what I played. I moved on to piano a when I was 17 and then on to guitar in college. I never dreamed of (or planned on) being a professional musician. I wanted to write songs for someone else to sing, but in 2000 I rear-ended a record deal and I’ve been traveling and singing ever since.

The newly designed shaungroves.com looks fantastic, which aspect of the site are you most pleased with?
About half my blog audience, I’m guessing, doesn’t care about my music. The other half cares a great deal. The challenge for us was to create a site that gave fans of my music easy access to what they needed without shoving my music down the throat of anyone who doesn’t care. To make matters hairier, I also speak quite a bit, and head up Compassion International’s blog initiative known as Compassion Bloggers (CompassionBloggersa.com). We had to somehow make room for all the things I love and do without making a site that was too cluttered and schizophrenic. We did this chiefly by hacking Wordpress so that every page of the site has unique content in its sidebar. If you’re shopping on the site, you don’t want to see tour dates or videos in the sidebar. If you’re checking out the tour page you don’t want to see recent comments form the blog. We made sure you don’t have to.

You describe yourself as a singer, songwriter, speaker, blogger… how has your life journey taken you down so many road?
In 2004 I went to El Salvador with Compassion International and saw for myself the poverty millions live in around the world and what Compassion is doing about it through local third-world churches. That changed everything. I only sing to draw a crowd so I can mobilize Christians to do God’s will on earth as it’s done in heaven by sponsoring a child through Compassion International, serving a neighbor, teaching someone to read, forgiving an enemy, adopting, etc. I got to a point where realized there were other ways I could draw a crowd and mobilize it to serve Christ by serving others. So I started doing more speaking at churches, and started CompassionBloggers.com so that other people with an on-line crowd could see the poverty and hope I saw in El Salvador, write about it, and mobilize even more people to love the least.

You are clearly very active online, do you see the internet as a ‘new mission field’?
Mission happens anywhere a Christian goes. On-line too. So, yes, if there are CHristians on Twitter, Facebook, Vimeo, and Wordpress, then those places become transformed into tools for expanding the borders of God’s empire. Through the internet we can love, inspire, correct, teach, serve and even sing together.

Which artist or album is currently getting a lot of airtime on your Ipod?
I don’t listen to much music, oddly. ut I recently discovered The Avett Brothers. Ballad of Love And Hate is a favorite right now.

What are your five favorite or most visited websites apart from BestChristianDesign?
My favorite bloggers are my friends. Anne Jackson over at flowerdust.net, Brant Hansen at branthansen.typepad.com, Sophie at BooMama.net and Brad Ruggles at BradRuggles.com. They routinely make me laugh and think. Then there are the people I don’t know but wish I did. Guys like Seth Godin at Sethogodin.typepad.com – an incredible marketer whose posts have implications for life outside of marketing too – and Skye Jethani at Skyejethani.com – who wrote the best book I read this year: Divine Commodity.

Interview – Mark Taylor

September 14th, 2009     12 Comments

Mark Taylor is one of the co-founders of the fantastic website Inspiks.com.  The website is made up of a group of christian digital artists dedicated to using their talents to bring praise to God and inspire others. Their mission  is to reach as many people as possible with the Word of God, namely, The Gospel.

How did you become a Christian and what impact has God had on your life?
I started going to church at an early age. Attending Church regularly is part of the culture of living in Jamaica. Sundays were peaceful, 99% of businesses were closed, the roads were empty, it was a day of rest and worship. Although I knew God was real and felt the pull of the Holy Spirit on my heart during my junior school years, I never gave my heart to the Lord, I was afraid of missing out and losing friends, I basically wanted to follow the crowd and do my own thing.

I attended a summer crusade when I was 16 and listened to a sermon entitled, “Heart of Stone”. The message of the sermon reiterated the fact that, if we keep quenching the call of the Holy Spirit on our lives, soon our hearts will become hardened against God and we will have a heart of stone. I knew that was what I was doing and I imagined my heart turning into a stone, hardened towards God, that concerned me a lot. When the alter call was given, I did not go up to surrender my life, but that night I went home and thought about it more and I knelt down on my knees and asked God to come into my heart. The next day, I went back to the final night of the crusade, I could not wait for the pastor to finish preaching. I can’t tell you what he preached about that night, but as soon as he was finished, I went up to give a public confession of what had taken place in my heart.

You told me that Art, God and Design are your passion, how did this come about?
God has blessed me with a great gift, I have no doubt about that. I have been drawing since I knew how to hold a pencil. When I was about 6 years old I drew a space scenery on my summer vacation and I brought it to school to show my friends and none of them believed that I drew it freehand. My friends thought I had traced it, that concerned me a bit, because I was not getting the feedback I thought I would get. Incidents like that would happen, time and time again, but I soon learned to embrace it as a compliment. My love for art grew after high school, when I left Jamaica to pursue a new life in the US. I was introduced to Graphic Design by my twin brother Michael. Michael encouraged me to learn Graphic Design, so I learned everything I could from him and picked up other tricks along the way by doing projects for my church. I later attended The Arts Institute of Fort Lauderdale. The ability to interpret scripture with art is done with great passion, because I know that the ideas are given by God and it is a great way for me to spread the message of the Gospel.

How important do you think Graphic/Web Design should be to the church?
I think Graphics and Web design is playing a more integral part in the ministering of the gospel today. Churches are realizing the importance of Church marketing and branding and translating that to the web. The web can be looked at now as a tool, rather than just a showcase of the churches ministries. I love what some churches did in Mexico after the outbreak of the swine flu, churches were podcasting services to the sick and shut-ins and services did not miss a beat. Many churches are now sharing their ministry on twitter and other social net work services. If we take a look at the ministry of Jesus we see that he always meet people were they were, whether it be the woman at the well or the blind man by the wayside. The church must endeavor to meet people where they are hanging out and in today’s society, the web is one of those places.

How do you think Christians can use the internet to spread the gospel?
I think there are various ways that Christians can use the Internet to spread the Gospel. I think there are some great examples out there right now, for example blogging, the use of Twitter and Flickr, It is just a matter of being lead by the spirit, finding your passion and a target audience. Christians have the greatest target audience,..the world! With the ease of setting up a blog, many christians now have the opportunity to tell their story and thoughts on the web. Micro blogging can be very useful too, even if it is just sharing a scripture verse a day, which can be very powerful and can reach a large audience. I have used Flickr to spread the gospel by placing a scripture verse beneath my graphics or photos and I am always surprised at how many people write and thank me for doing that. The great thing about all the social network tools that are available is that, they are all free and we can reach people so easily, by just a click of the mouse.

What do you want people to know about your website inspiks.com
Inspiks is a great example of how the web can be used to spread the gospel. The idea for inspiks started out by my brother Michael, who started to send emails to his friends with images combined with scripture verses. His friends liked them so much that they were asking for more. In 1998 he had the idea of placing the archive of images on a website and that is how the ministry was born. Our first image gallery had images created by Michael, Christopher my younger brother and I. The images were hosted on a free server. We later started to create wallpapers, because beautiful christian wallpapers were so hard to find. The ministry then spread into supplying e-cards and now we have a blogging element to the site where we share insights into biblical truths and various design news. The main focus of the website is to bring people into the saving knowledge of Christ and to engage with the Christian community through art.

Interview – Tim Challies

September 7th, 2009     1 Comment

Best Christian Design has had the privelege to interview Tim Challies – the blogger, author and designer.  Challies.com is one of the most widely used Christian blogs on the internet. But I will let Tim do the rest of the talking…

How did you become a Christian and what impact has God had on your life?
I had the privilege of being raised in a Christian home. My parents are really among the best theologians I know so from a very young age I was taught the truth about who God is, who I am in relation to God, and what God demands of me. Still, it was not until my teen years that I became a believer, surrendering my life to the Lord. Since then I don’t think there is an area of my life that has not been impacted and perhaps even transformed by God’s presence. And still I pray that God continues to mold me into the image of his Son and that he enables me to give over all of my life.

You are currently a blogger and web designer, How did you get involved in this line of work?
I am, indeed, both a blogger and a web designer. Both really came about by accident, I suppose. In April of 2002 I was bored. Not just a little bored either, but mind-numbingly, depressingly, discouragingly bored. Having recently been laid off from a job I had held for several years, I was now working at a new job where I was system administrator at a small company in downtown Oakville. Though the pay was good and the office’s location was great, the job itself was terribly drab. It was repetitive and boring. I found myself in the unenviable position of knowing that I was expendable to the company. I did not have enough to do, but knew that if I went to my boss and told him this, I would effectively be writing my own pink slip. I tried to keep busy but with little success. So I sat in my windowless basement office, dealing with terrible headaches from the noise of the forty computers I shared an office with, and waited for the day to end. And always I felt just a little bit guilty for not putting in, and not being able to put in, an honest day’s work. One day I went for a walk at lunch time and as I walked I prayed that God would somehow reveal to me whether or not I should quit my job and go out on my own in some kind of computer-related business. I guess I was hoping for a lightning bolt or a voice from the sky or something. As it turns out, that was not far from the truth. I walked back to the office at the end of my lunch break and got called to my boss’s office. He told me that I was going to be laid off effective immediately. They gave me some severance pay, had me clear out my desk, and off I went. And just like that, my company was born. I taught myself web design over the course of a couple of weeks, found a few clients, and off I went.

That fall I started a little web site. My family had just moved to the United States and I wanted a forum where I could show them pictures of my family (I had one child already with another on the way). One day I got it in my head to write an article and post it there so my folks could read it. They enjoyed it so I wrote another. Then the search engines did their magic and other people began to read them as well. Soon ten people a day were visiting, then twenty or thirty. Soon I decided to get rid of the pictures of my kids and keep up the writing. And things just kind of escalated from there.

How do you think Christians can use the internet to reach a lost world and ultimately to glorify God?
I think that question is one that in many ways remains to be answered. Certainly we can use blogs and web sites and forums and any other means of communication to glorify God and to help people see and treasure him. But the internet is still in its infancy so we are still just learning how to communicate in this strange new medium. As time goes on and as online community develops, I think we will find exciting new ways of sharing the gospel online. Always we want to take advantage of new ways of communicating the gospel, but always we need to be aware of our tendency to be pragmatic and to let the message be lost in the medium. So to this point I’ve been perhaps a little underwhelmed at online evangelistic efforts, but I do think a better day is coming.

Your blog www.challies.com has become one of the most popular christian blogs online. If someone was to ask you what the purpose behind your blog was, what would you say?
The purpose of my blog is really to give me a forum to think in (hopefully) a distinctly Christian way and then give my readers a means of (hopefully) thinking in a distinctly Christian way. So I do that through articles and quotes and reading classic books of the faith and through book reviews and just about any other way I can think of.

There is a lot of talk these days about church and social networking, do you have any views on twittering in church etc?
Social media is all the rage. Like most things it has great benefits and great potential drawbacks. We can feel a strange and irrational pressure to join in the fun–to begin a Facebook account or to begin to Twitter, and so on. But those who join usually quickly learn that these things do not change their lives. So yes, social media has some great uses, but I think for the vast majority of us it is a black hole that sucks into it nearly endless amounts of time and energy. I don’t know that any of us would lose much if Facebook and Twitter one day just disappeared.

Finally, apart from your own, what are your top 5 favorite blogs?
I read about 100 blogs or so. That is to say I skim 100 or so and read what looks interesting on them on any given day. My tastes run from news and book reviews to blogs dealing with the Toronto Blue Jays and blogs dealing with commercial aircraft. I don’t know that I could pick five of them as favorites. Really, how many blogs produce consistent quality day after day after day?

Interview – Abraham Piper

August 26th, 2009     0 Comments

Found a short interview with Abraham Piper at www.news.sbts.edu. I Thought the question below was particular intreresting.

How should local churches view the Internet as they think about ministry?

I think that churches should think of the Internet as a neighborhood, not mainly a tool. There are many things you can use the Internet for, but it is increasingly a place where people simply spend time.

When there is a concentration of need near a church or when many of a church’s members live in a particular area, the church will often have a neighborhood pastor, or at least an emphasis on serving that neighborhood.

Well, near every church there are people online in need. And most churches’ members live at least some of their lives online. Therefore, rather than seeing the Internet as merely a convenient place to advertise for things, see it as a place to meet and serve others.

Most practically, this means (in my non-church-leader opinion) that we ought to see churches hiring ‘Internet pastors.’ Web departments (and if your church is big enough to have ‘departments’ at all, then it should have a web department!) should not be primarily about technical upkeep, but about frontline ministry, just like the departments that focus on children, music or small groups, etc.

View the rest of the interview here.

Interview – Jonathan Longnecker

August 20th, 2009     3 Comments

Jonathan Longnecker is one of the partners along side Nate Croft at the fantastic design company FortySeven Media. He  kindly agreed to answer some questions for us here at Best Christian Design.  Hopefully you will enjoy reading what he has to say about God and design.  Its a brilliant read, and feel free to comment below on anything he says. (:

How did you become a Christian and what impact has God had on your life?
My family has deep religious roots, so I was aware of  the need to accept Jesus pretty early on. I was in 1st grade, I believe (7 yrs old), and my teacher led those of that were ready in the prayer. And yes, I was in a Christian school . However, when everyone in your family are Christians, you ride on their coattails by default and there comes a time when you have to find your own relationship with God. That happened in High School for me. In the last 6 years, I’ve gotten married and will have my 3rd child in October, and those things have drastically changed my understanding of love, grace and responsibility. It’s amazing how fresh the Bible stays for different stages of your life. I know God has been involved in so many aspects of my life and the directions it has taken that there’s not room here. Suffice to say I ask Him everyday to keep me going the right way, and I know He hears me.

How did you get started in web design and graphic design?
This will be a great example of the above, actually. It’s amazing how God takes even the small paths and decisions you make to bring them together. My partner (Nate Croft) and I met in High School. He played guitar like a madman and while I used to play, it had been a while. He inspired me to pick it back up and start writing. That’s when I fell in love with music again. We started writing and playing together, culminating in a band that played shows, wrote our own music, and led worship for our Youth Group every week (Check out heroesorghosts.com to listen). We naturally needed posters, t-shirts, CD cover designs, and a website so Nate and I dug in and figured out how to do it. By the time we got to college, we decided Graphic Design wasn’t a bad backup gig if the music didn’t work out. We got our degrees, paid our dues in low paying, great experience shops and started building our business. While we did some Flash sites back in the day, we just recently got into web design of the semantic nature (HTML/CSS) a few years ago. We’ve never taken a class for web design; everything is self-taught.

What are the biggest challenges that you face in web/graphic design currently?
Our biggest challenges of late have been working through our strengths and weaknesses as individuals and finding out how to become more profitable and keep enjoying what we do. This has translated into a lot of soul searching and goal planning (we had no goals!) to give us a clearer roadmap and large things to be excited about and work towards. As a result of this (and the total grace of God) our workload has kind of exploded so now we’re dealing with how and when to grow. And really just how to get all this work done

How do you think Christians can use the internet to spread the gospel?
I think the internet is a great vehicle for sharing the Gospel. Blogs, social networks, twitter, podcasts, videos are all infinitely easier to produce and get in front of people than ever before. Not only is it great for sharing the Gospel, but also for connecting Christians in more ways. I read an article on Collide not too long ago that brought up the idea of churches becoming smaller and sort of franchise based in the future. When you have a smaller group and Facebook and Twitter, do we really need a 5,000 seat auditorium? You could subscribe to a video podcast of a great preacher and use that instead of hiring someone on staff. Plus this whole idea of people having their salaries paid for by the church wasn’t really even in the Bible, was it? I’m definitely not claiming that any of this is right or wrong, but the next 10 years should be very interesting to watch.

What do you want people to know about your company?
As part of our aforementioned  goal planning, Nate and I distilled FortySeven Media into two main passions: Create Things and Do Good. We’re obviously creating design and websites, but we still have a passion for music and video and art and whatever else we can think of. We’d like to see some of those become part of our revenue stream in the future, too. Also, with initiatives like DesignHope, our blog and doing keynote talks we’re finding new ways to give back to the community everyday. As we have more capital, expect to see much more of the Doing Good come into play. We’re just two guys who really love what we do and won’t rest till it’s done right. We try to keep it simple.