MitchRoss.com
Pastor's Husband, Geek Dad

Today I spotted another Pastor's Husband who's blogging.

This guy's even got a cool domain name:

http://ThePastorsHusband.org

Check it out. As always, let me know of any others you see.

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One of my duties as a Pastor's Husband is to provide late-night tech support for my wife. She'll be preping for a sermon and ask for something- say, a YouTube clip, and want it for the sermon.

Usually it's not a problem- and the biggest challenge is usually getting a full-screen player that multi-head aware. Even then, there's usually creative ways around that.

One issue does crop up almost every week. Fonts.

Man, I hate custom add-on fonts.

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Votes: 119 - Rating: 0.08

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Ah, yes. Cell phones. That thing we all have, and all hate. A very large percentage of people these days have them on their belt or purse everywhere they go. That's not so bad, but that includes movie theaters and church.

And then there are those who just refuse to turn their ringers off.

It's not unusual to hear a phone go off in the middle of a sermon. About half the time, there a quiet panic and digging through a purse. The other half, there's an apparent denial that their "way cool" ring tone is audible through the entire sanctuary.

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As a Pastor's Husband, I'm a computer guy. I look at stuff in the church with a viewpoint of the technical business world, while my wife has the viewpoint of the pastor. It makes for strange conversations at home.

Recently I discovered that our church's prayer chain has fault-tolerance built in, and closely resembles the Token Ring protocol (rest in peace, may it never return!).

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Jackson's Holiday Parade (aka Christmas Parade before Thanksgiving) is happening this Friday.

The parade route happens to run right past our church, right in the middle of town. So what do we do? Give out hot chocolate and hot dogs!

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Time for another character to be added to the PH galere.

For those keeping score at home, we've got:
-The Denier: People Who Don't Get It
-The Cling-on: Pastor Stalkers
-The Fruit Loop: Hi, I'm here to argue with the pastor
-People Who Suddenly Act Strange
-The Babbler

Today it's the Control Freak.

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Earlier this year our church had a blood drive. I've neglected to blog about it until now...

There were 2 goals for this: helping out by giving blood, and to get greater visibility in the community.

Our church is downtown in a very non-church looking building. I've lost count of the number of people who say they've walked past the building repeatedly and never knew a church was there!

From the donation point of view, the blood drive was a huge success. Around 25 people gave blood, and we even turned away at least 5 people. I dropped by over the lunch hour, and the wait was long enough that I had to bail.

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A recent Sunday, I was manning the sound booth. I had the laptop, and another guy had the sound board.

As we do every Sunday, we were running a countdown video right before the start of service. The countdown is just a large 5 minute timer with some upbeat contemporary music. The idea is to get people milling about to their seats, and to set the tone for the start of the worship service. We tend to get ours from SermonSpice, but there are a few other places.

We've been doing this countdown for about a year now. It's a regular part of the service. We've only ever had positive feedback- mostly when we first implemented it. It's also the fastest way to find my 4 year old. He'll run to me, sit in my lap and watch "countdown movie". He's learned how to cound backwards from 10 using that video. But I digress...

Back to this recent Sunday. The countdown is ticking down, and up strolls senior citizen. She's clearly a first time visitor- I've never seen her before. I don't think she had spoken to anyone else at the church yet, short of basic greetings.

She walks up to the sound booth, and her first words are "What the #@!! is this? Jungle music?!?"

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