I wanted to let you know about one of the dozens of front-lines ministries with the Campus Ministry that I have been involved in called Centerfield Productions. If you haven’t got a postcard about it, you will probably be getting one in the next day or so. The postcard highlights a website I built this summer spending many long nights working overtime to launch.

Centerfield Productions began a few years ago through Tim Henderson (the Campus Director at Penn State) and Rick James (the Editor of CruPress, our campus ministry publishing house similar to NavPress or IVPress). I got involved shortly after the inception lending my skills in web development and technology. The vision of Centerfield is to produce ministry tools for the field from the field. I love this concept, because the best stuff almost always comes when field staff interact with students. We’ve already produced a number of tools and strategies at Penn State that you can check out at this site.

Centerfield is a great thing that tries to create the best stuff possible for the field. But there are two major problems. 95% of staff are burned out because they have 15 jobs and don’t have time to produce the stuff they need to make their local ministry work well. The second major problem is a lack collaboration so stuff is not shared (because it’s too hard to do presently).

Collaboration and integration is a huge need among the campus ministry. The opposite effect of individualism and separatism is that our efforts are duplicated dozens of times. Here’s what this looks like. A student at Virginia Tech designs a web database application for managing new people who come to a Cru event so that they can be followed up quickly and efficiently. A staff member at George Mason University makes something very similar because the same need for tools to simplify ministy are needed. Meanwhile those at Cal Poly have no idea that this is even going on.

But imagine if campuses actively shared their ideas and strategies and tools…. What would it look like if the student at VT and the staff member at GMU collaborated to produce something that someone at Cal Poly could use? Can you imagine the possibilities?

My desire this past year was to stay at Penn State and help to bring this vision through Centerfield, because for collaboration to take place, we need to harness the power of emerging technologies that the internet offers. In my mind, Centerfield is the first step in the process of creating a global community of ministry collaboration for the benefit of staff members and students and laypeople everywhere. But as I looked in to making this happen from PSU, logistically it was impossible. Just as this door was closing another was opening, one that is gearing up to create a grass-roots movement of collaboration.

The Innovation Center for Technology is the cutting edge of the Campus Ministry. Although our work takes place in an office, thousands of students come to Christ every year through our ministry. We are the special forces, that elite group of soldiers that people don’t understand but can do things that ordinary infantry aren’t able to.

My greatest excitement of being a web-programmer/Technologist here is that I am devoting 100% of my time towards Research and Development. We are launching a number of sites this month and more in the months ahead. We are actively working on tools to create a community of collaboration and sharing. This is the internet of the future, being built today. This is the future (and present) of the front-lines of the campus ministry.

Until this has begun, check out the Centerfield website to see what we are producing. Already 1,100 student and staff members have subscribed to the site which was launched just a month ago.

Okay, so do you remember on the Charlie Brown cartoon where Snoopy dances on his back feet. Well, our Pippin, like the beagle, Snoopy, loves to dance too. We even took a video of her so that you can check it out. Here’s our four month old gettin’ her groove on, Snoopy style.

• The Pippin-Snoopy Video

Today I was watching Forest Gump on TV. I don’t have to go in to much detail about how popular this movie was and still is. First of all, Tom Hanks is probably one of the best, most-versatile actors today. He has been successful in many different roles, because it is so easy to empathize with him. I think it is because he incarnates the roles he plays and lets the emotion of the character come out. But, this is the topic of a different post.

As I watched Forest Gump I thought about what makes this movie so appealing. Is it the lovable characters? Is it the fun storyline? Is it the themes of hope amidst trials? While I don’t think there is one answer for the success of this movie, one thing stands out to me. Gump and Jenny traverse the decades of American history and culture through very different paths. All of us can relate to how either Gump or Jenny moved through a rapidly changing culture.

It is interesting how Gump is woven into US history. While a tide of cultural and political changes crash down, he simply stands tall and walks through it somewhat oblivious to what’s going on around him. Perhaps he is the symbol of modernism. His saving grace is that while those around him are swiftly changing, he just forges ahead with a head full of facts and simple truth. Gump is the conservative.

If Forest is modernism, Jenny is a symbol of postmodernism. She’s swept away by the emerging culture, so much so that she loses her identity amidst the crowd. She has no reference point to her life, because everything is relative to her. Jenny finds pleasure, but only with pain right beside it. Jenny is the liberal.

Forest loves Jenny, but doesn’t know how to win her to himself. Every time Forest tries to rescue her from the recklessness of her life, their relationship is put in turmoil and Jenny runs away from him and Forest walks away alone and disoriented. She can’t love a man who won’t let her live passionately. It’s not until Jenny is much older and the mother of young Forest that she realizes that she has messed her life up and loves him too, but not long after that she dies.

Forest and Jenny are opposites. Forest is the stable, factual thinker who doesn’t care about the future, only the past and present. Jenny is the progressive, emotional dreamer. All she cares about is what suits her future fancy. Forest is the left-brain conservative and Jenny is the right-brain liberal.

In the beginning of the story Forest falls in love with Jenny, because she is kind to him while everyone else dismisses him as different. In the end Jenny falls in love with Forest, because he is generous to her despite the mess she made of her life. The two need each other. Without Jenny he is empty, cold and alone. Without Forest, she is on the edge of danger and despair. This, I believe, is why people like this movie so much. It’s the story of two different people in a world in the midst of two vastly different ideologies.

The story of Forest Gump and Jenny. In our hearts we desperately want the two together. But is there hope for the modern and the post-modern to marry? The answer this movie gives is yes, but only through a generous, persevering love and pain and sorrow.