Chapter 9 covered by Graham Brenna as part of our Group Blogging Project discussing the book Flickering Pixels by Shane Hipps. If you need a quick overview to what Flickering Pixels is about, please go here.

The shared experience… what a great representation of community!

We share our experiences with others by talking with them face to face or on a cell phone, sure. But we also have the ability to share our experiences with many people at once via facebook, YouTube, blogging and many other online tools. Those of us in the blogging group that are reading this book are reading it by ourselves on our own time, but we’re sharing our experiences with each other and many others through ChurchCrunch! We are connected to a much larger shared experience… blogging FTW!

If you are a regular reader of ChurchCrunch, you are part of a tribe… a ChurchCrunch tribe! We are sharing this experience with each other. I have made what I call “twiends” (twitter friends) with a few people that belong to this tribe and have met not even a handful of you in person!

However, according to Feedburner, there are now over 1,600 of you that are potentially reading this! We are sharing the same experience and we don’t even know each other! Whoa… total mind blow! Or maybe not a total mind blow… as we have all become accustomed to sharing experiences with each other even though we don’t know each other.

I would venture to guess that many of you ChurchCrunch tribe members are also part of another tribe, the late-nite NBC tribe, and are aware of the late-night game of musical chairs that has taken place on NBC this year with Leno, Conan and Fallon. For many of us, that is a shared experience, even though we don’t know each other.

Cell phones are great tools for connecting people, there is no doubt about that. For the last two years one of my best friends, Dan, has been living in El Salvador and working as a missionary while I have stayed at home in Naperville, IL. He moved home today and popped his head in my office, just minutes before I sat down to write this blog post! Over the last two years I have only seen him twice when he briefly came home for Christmas or something.

Other than that… our relationship had shifted from hanging out all the time to a cell phone relationship. It was hard at first but we made an effort to talk with each other at least once a month… and usually it was more frequently than that. But our cell phones kept our relationship going.

Now that he is home, we won’t rely on our cell phones as much to keep our friendship strong. If we were to not hang out now, even though he is less than 15 minutes away, and were to keep our friendship a “cell phone friendship” things would be different. We would likely not be good friends after awhile.

Yes, cell phones, facebook, and blogs are great… but they should never completely replace spending physical time with the people you love!

What are your thoughts about “shared experience” in light of Shane’s writings?

This is the 2nd Part of a 2 Part Series by Guest Poster Graham Brenna.

As I mentioned in part one, my wheelbarrow is patience. This is the type of call to action that gives me no patience

We have the will of God, the power of the Holy Spirit, the best news anyone could ever receive and all the social technology imaginable to build powerful community everywhere that creates disciples of Jesus. So let’s do it!

- Nick Charalambous

The last line there… “So let’s do it!” is seriously the best call to action ever.

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This is the first part of a 2 part series by Graham Brenna. He can be found blogging at GBrenna.com.

That’s right! There is no patience on the internet.

The internet is one large call to action. You won’t find a link online that says, “it’s okay if you don’t click this link” except for this one, (okay be honest… you clicked it didn’t you?). Think about it though for a minute. Everything you see online is telling you to ACT NOW! Not tomorrow… not the next day… NOW!

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Today is the 15th week of the Weekly Tech Blog Topic Series.

If you’re confused about what exactly this is, go here to read the first post ever and the guidelines…

Today’s “tech topic” is:

How often do you get bored with your cell phone and get a new one just for the sake of something new?