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Today in 2017, there are a thousand and one different ways to build a website. As always there’s good old fashioned Wordpress, and of course there’s drag-n-drop website builders like Wix. One thing these have in common is that they need a traditional hosting environment, and for that you gotta pay. If you can manage it, the cheapest way to host a website nowadays is to create a static HTML site. But don’t hand-craft HTML, that’s hard and boring. Use a static site generator, for fun and profit! ...

We love momentum March 13-17 was a big week for us. We invited a group from Louisville, TX To join us for a week-long momentum building project. This group had an amazing impact, we drew in well over 100 people for the seminar, and our social time was a big success as well. We got a lot of new contacts and, as was our goal, we will be following up with them over the coming weeks. ...

So I took a look at my blog recently to make sure everything is working, and got a big fat “Your connection is not secure” message. Uh oh! Fortunately I just need to request a new certificate from Let’s Encrypt and install it. I’ve done this before, it’s a 10 minute job. Buuuuuttt… what if I could automate it? If I spend all afternoon on this I’ll save myself 15 minutes of work every 3 months! That math totally works out right? What does the XKCD guy have to say about it? ...

What a great weekend! This past weekend we went to Cyprus for a conference about reaching leaders and influencers for Christ. The group was about 28 people, including 10 professionals, 4 teachers, two businesswomen and a government worker. It was a great time of learning and inspiring our partners to reach their peers for Christ. One speaker was a bible teacher who took us through the book of Mark, highlighting the disciples’ stories and their leadership journeys. Another speaker was a professional business consultant who focuses on leadership training. Alba in particular got a lot out of that speaker, because she leads a team at her work. The third speaker was the vice president of Leader Impact worldwide, he introduced to us the concept and mission of TraNet. We also had various smaller seminars throughout, on interesting topics such as the Sabbath rest as applies to business, and integrating faith and work from a former communist perspective. ...

Lots of stuff has happened this past month! Last I posted I was in the middle of a 2-week break in Dallas. That was a great and relaxing time for me, helped me to prepare mentally and spiritually for these next 7 months in Albania. I saw friends and family and enjoyed plenty of tacos. When I got back it was right back into the swing of things with a seminar the next day. It was a video seminar, we showed Patrick Lencioni’s talk from the 2016 Global Leadership Summit. It had already been subtitled in Albanian. The talk was great, but when we asked our partners afterwards for their feedback they said it would be better to have a live speaker in the future. So, as much as possible, we’ll try to do that. ...

Merry Christmas to everybody! I love Christmas time, spending time with family, listening to the Advent messages at church, and especially the Christmas hymns. My favorite is ‘O Holy Night’. It’s my favorite because it speaks of the hope that came into the world when Jesus Christ was born. Hope is an elusive thing. Lots of people lose hope when what they desire becomes impossible, or even worse, when they get exactly what they wanted. ...

We’ve been working on follow up since Momentum Europe. We’ve had some good meetings with people, and had some good conversations. Of course our goal is to help our partners to do that more and more - to have the conversations that lead to Gospel presentations, to encourage them to share with and invite more people, and to build their confidence. To that end we organized a training conference this past weekend. We invited about 20 young professionals out to Durres for 2 days of working through the “Bursting Your Bubble” curriculum. It was a great success! They enjoyed the time together and came away with a stronger desire to serve and share with their peers. ...

September and October have been pretty slow months, as we plan and gear up for our first big event, Momentum Europe. I’ve been busying myself with a lot of administrative work, but we’ve also had opportunity to begin training our committed believers. Bursting your Bubble In my opinion, our greatest success last year was finding 8 believers who have decided to commit to being part of our ministry. One of the things we asked of them is to commit to be trained in evangelism by our staff. We started that training this month with the series “Bursting Your Bubble”. ...

One of my projects during my vacation has been to take back control of my data. The question of online privacy is a difficult one, because while there’s some things you can do to improve your privacy, to really own your data takes a lot of effort and learning. For most people, hosting their own services is more headache than it’s worth. There’s a lot of good privacy-conscious services out there if you’re willing to pay, but most people are not willing to pay. The convenience trumps the privacy concerns, and for me it has been that way for a long time as well. ...

Well, it’s been a crazy couple months! When I last posted we were about to start Ice and Spice, CRU Albania’s summer camp for high school students. As part of my role on the LLM team, I was also helping out with an International School Project conference for teachers and principals. So I was already a little worn out when Ice and Spice started! But I got energized when my friends arrived from Texas. It was a great week, filled with a lot of good conversations with high school students. And as the Albanian team followed up with the students after my friends left, we heard several times about students who received christ! ...