From the last disciplemen.com Insiders Update E-mail:

September 4, 2007

The new disciplemen.com is primed and ready for its official launch. All we need is you and the NCMM members to list their resources for leader’s in the men’s discipleship movement! Help meet the needs of these leaders by participating in the 3-Step launch process:

1) REGISTER if you haven’t done so yet
2) JOIN the Leadership Directory and let the other users of the site know you are committed to discipling men.
3) CONTRIBUTE your favorite resource to the Best Practices & Resources section. Have you used a great book in a small group or mentoring relationship? Found a great Bible Study curriculum or web site? Created a useful tool for the men in your church? See if it’s listed in the BP&R, and if not, post the resource yourself – you can even attach documents, power point slides or pictures to your posting to equip other leaders to use it more effectively. We are hoping to have 750 resources listed the in the Best Practices and Resources center as soon as possible.Join one of our upcoming disciplemen.com launch conference calls & we’ll walk through the launch process outlined above.

The schedule for these calls will be:
Friday, September 7th – 11 a.m. EST
Thursday, September 13th – 1 p.m. EST
Wednesday, September 19th – 2 p.m. EST
Tuesday, September 25th – 4 p.m. EST

The conference calls will last approximately 1 hour with half of this being a demonstration time and half being for Q & A.If you would like the telephone number and conference call code to be included in one of these sessions, please email us at resources@disciplemen.com and we’ll be happy to provide further details.Here are a few of the things users of disciplemen.com can look forward to with this release:

• User submitted resources to the Best Practices & Resources section
• New entries into the Leadership Directory
• More information about members of the Leadership Directory
• New search functions throughout the site
• An entirely new 5-Star Ratings system for all resources
• A revised comments/reviews ability, tied to Ratings
• A new design for the How-To’s section
• Ratings now added to the How-To’s section
• Ability to earn more user points
• Forums to communicate with the community and the developers.

We are excited to see how God uses disciplemen.com to help connect discipleship leaders all over the world.

Thanks, and God Bless!

The disciplemen.com team
 

disciplemen.com was launched at the NCMM meeting last month in Kansas City. During the conference, the beta release of the site, available at new.discplemen.com, was demo’d in the opening plenary session. All four sections of the site - What’s happening?, How To’s, Leadership Directory and Best Practices & Resources - were up and running. The 48 hours leading up to the event were hectic, as you can imagine, but the guys at Modomo Technologies, our developer, pulled a rabbit out of their hats and had the site ready to go, with only a few of the usual bugs - I mean ‘features’ — you might expect in a beta release.

Over 100 men’s ministry leaders registered on the site as users, and most of those joined the Leadership Directory as well. Plus, more than 60 new resources were added to the Best Practices & Resources Center.

It was a great week with leaders from around the country.

On April 12-14, a few hundred leaders in the men’s discipleship movement will gather at the National Coalition of Men’s Ministries annual conference, entitled Momentum. We’re excited to be launching the next phase of disciplemen.com at this conference!

In the disciplemen.com Internet Cafe, attendees will be able to access the brand new Leadership Directory, where they can list themselves along with their interests and expertise for others to contact them. In addition, the Best Practices and Resource Center will be rolled out, allowing leaders to post materials that they have used - books, curriculum, events, speakers, etc. - and share them with other leaders from around the world.

It’s not too late to register for this conference. In addition to the disciplemen.com Phase Two debut, there will be representatives from 50+ ministries dedicated to helping leaders disciple men in the local church.

Promise Keepers announced a new approach to their conference season this year, with 7 of their traditional arena events, and a new set of small conferences called CityCenter events and PK Selects. They are also going to make much of their past content available online via webcasting (for an example, see Man in the Mirror’s extensive webcasting site).

This could have an interesting impact on the way many leaders disciple their men this year. With less PK events, church leaders may look elsewhere for the big “catalytic event.” Some might make a renewed effort to have a men’s retreat in their church. Other ministries may step into the gap left and offer alternatives. Maybe the seven events will be even more well-attended because there will be fewer offered this year. Or maybe the era of the “big event” is just on its way out.

What do you think?

As our friends from Modomo work on bending the Drupal Totally Cool Open Source Content Management System (see the previous post) to their will, one of the main components is the Best Practices & Resources Center, or as we like to call it, the BP&R. The idea is to gather the best ideas, resources and materials in one place so leaders can find it.

This is where you come in…

We will populate the BP&R with materials that you - the leaders that use disciplemen.com - provide us. Have you used a great book in your small group? (Like Twelve Ordinary Men, or Point Man?)We want to know about it. Have you organized a really cool event at your church that helped move men into discipleship? (Like a men’s retreat or an adventure dinner?) How did you do it? Have you worked with a parachurch ministry that really gave your ministry to men a boost? (Like Men’s Fraternity or Man in the Mirror?) Share it with the community.

We want to connect leaders who are successfully discipling men with those that want to, and facilitate you sharing your “best practices” and “resources” with each other - thus, the name.

To submit a resource or idea send an email to resources@disciplemen.com. In your e-mail include the following:

• Name of the resource
• Brief description
• What is it (a book, event, speaker, web site, Bible study, ministry, etc.)?
• How did you use it?
• Do you have any materials you made or used to implement it in your church? (like graphics, flyers, your own discussion questions, an itinerary, etc.) If so, please attach them to your e-mail
• Your contact info, including your name, e-mail address and a daytime phone

We’ll look over what you send and then contact you to fill in any details we might still need. So think about what you have done or used in your ministry to men, and please, SEND US YOUR BEST STUFF!!!

Got any ideas for the next poll? Post a comment and give us your input.

The R-rated movie poll garned over 400 responses, with about an even split between guys saying to never recommend one - 200 votes - versus guys who said OK with an exception for sex, violence and/or if it had a great message. Go to www.disiplemen.com and click on News & Notes to see the actual numbers.

Really, it’s the only halfway decent reason I could think of for the length of time since I last posted. Of course, aliens didn’t actually snatch me (or invite me, for that matter). Life just got, well, like life gets, I guess. But we’re back, and stuff is happenin’!

First up, while I was off-planet, 325 people have already signed on as users on disciplemen.com. In the words of one of the apostles, “Wow!” (It’s in the original greek.)

Second, if you’ve been to disciplemen.com lately, you’ve seen the “How to’s.” These are cool mini-trainings delivered via e-mail right to your desktop. Already, 212 of you have signed up for a course, and the feedback has been awesome.

But wait, there’s more! We have contracted with an awesome company called Modomo Technologies, run by our new best friend, Lyndon Modomo, and his merry band of techno-gurus. They are working feverishly (seriously, they’re burnin’ up) on the next two phases of disciplemen.com, a Leadership Directory and Best Practices & Resource Center. First phases of those will be up in April, if all goes according to plan.

So that’s the techno-update for now. I’ll be posting more frequently now. Really, I will. But as Dale Carnegie said and Pat Morley likes to quote. “The older I get, the less I listen to what people say and the more I just watch what they do.”

Watch the blog. Let’s see what happens.

Wow! The ‘R Rated’ Poll really struck a nerve. Of the 500 or so people we told about the poll, over 250 people voted. We’ll post the final vote tally once a new poll is up.

Speaking of a new poll, what should it be? Use the comment function to suggest questions you would like to see leaders committed to discipling men answer or vote on. Keep in mind that for right now the poll has to be multiple choice.

Oh, and stay tuned for a big announcement about the ‘real’ disciplemen.com site going active in the next few days. Those of you on the disciplemen.com Insiders Update will be notified via e-mail. If you’d like to get the update, go to Man in the Mirror’s e-mail subscription page, enter your e-mail address, and select the disciplemen.com Insiders Update from the list on the left side of the page.

CAUTION: Major Kingdom-Building Ahead!

So what do you think? Should you recommend R-rated movies to your brothers? There’s some that have gotten quite a bit of notice in men’s circles. Movies like Braveheart, Gladiator, We Were Soldiers, etc.

If you haven’t voted yet, go to www.disciplemen.com to cast your vote. (If you’re reading this post after October 9, it’s probably a different poll by now…so go vote on that one!)

Post your comments. We want to know what you think! Please, keep it civil, but keep it honest.

Whatever it means, it is the totally cool Open Source Content Management System - or, as we call it, the TCOSCMS - we have chosen for disciplemen.com. Drupal gives us a ready-made way to handle things like User Login, adding stuff to the site, navigation, etc.

Michael Maine, Internet Services Director, and Kevin Fittro (M&M and K-Fit to their friends) prepared the attached document to give you a better idea of what drupal is.

Wanna really see what drupal can do? Here are some other sites built using this TCOSCMS!

• http://www.destinationbride.com/

• http://www.scrippsnews.com/ 

• http://www.sudden-thoughts.com/ 

IBM even wrote an article about why they used drupal for a big project they did. Pretty cool! (I mean, “totally cool.”) Click here for more drupal-based sites, a link to the IBM article and more of M&M and K-Fit’s Technical Mumbo Jumbo… Drupal Technical Info