Whenever you try something different in your personal or professional life you inevitably make yourself vulnerable to criticism. So as leaders we have to ask ourselves the question: is it really worth it?

If things go well you get the credit and if things go badly guess what happens….you get the blame. So as a leader it’s a fine line to walk. I recently tried something different in a church service by having a special “guest.” In some kinds of churches this wouldn’t be any kind of big deal at all and may not seem risky, but in other churches it could be considered to be quite controversial. Immediately after the church service, then, I give my first thoughts on video concerning the cost vs. benefits of trying something different and risky…oh…and I also reveal who the guest was.

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I’ve never really counted, but I imagine I have about 400 or so books and counting in my personal library. I outgrew several book shelves that I had, so two years ago I installed some wall shelving so I could fit even more books. After a while, keeping track of a decent number of books can be somewhat difficult. And if you ever let people borrow books, as I sometimes do, things can get even more confusing.

That’s why I was glad to learn about some apps out there that help you do just that. Here are 5 popular apps to help you keep track of your books.

1. Bookpedia

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Perhaps you’ve seen the iPodium from Littlemountain.tv.

In some of their advertising they refer to it also as the iPulpit. It looks really slick. They have several different models which you’ll see below, but they now have a competitor by the name of Churchium that is selling a similar product.

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How would you like to start a church or non-profit website for almost no money at all? Sounds too good to be true, right? But….it’s actually true. Some time ago I read this post on how, if you’re a non-profit, Dreamhost will actually give you free hosting. Completely free hosting. For most people, the hosting fees are one of their biggest expenses, so this is a pretty big deal.

Yup...it's true.

All you need is to have a 501 c(3) letter for your organization and you can send in the application to Dreamhost. I use Dreamhost for Modern Ekklesia and I’ve never had any issues, so I can safely recommend them.

Now let’s take this idea a little further.

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Do you ever find that it’s hard to get work done because of all the noise? Some people have responded by bringing in “white noise” machines into their work places to get try to get some work done.

Well there’s a neat website called Simply Noise that helps to solve this problem.

It actually gives you three different types of noise to choose from: white, pink, and brown. And it also gives you the option to oscillate the sound…much like the sounds of a fan going from side to side.

I’m personally not that into noise machines. When I really need to get work done what I need is a decent amount of silence. That being said, my favorite was actually the “brown” noise one. So I think I might actually pull this out if I have to work from Star Bucks or some other place that’s relatively noisy.

So what do you think? Do you use a noise machine? What “color” is your favorite?

[thanks to RyanJBell for the tip!]

Do you get spam on your organization’s email account? There might be a really simple reason for it: your email address printed fully on your website somewhere. The problem with that is that there are “email harvester” scripts out there that will search websites for those and add them to spam lists. That is bad.

So how can you prevent this?

1. Add a contact form to you site. Those are usually pretty easy to get going. On WordPress there’s a ton of those. Here’s a simple example of one. For a conventional website a simple Google search will reveal a bunch. Personally I’m not a huge fan of contact forms, though. When someone has one on their site it just seems very impersonal and off-putting. I suppose if you’re a huge company or celebrity you may not want people to send a direct email to you, but outside of that, they don’t make too much sense to me.

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NBC news just did a video report on house churches reporting that up to 9% of church-going Americans attend a house church. You can see it below:

I did a book review here on a book called “Pagan Christianity” (affiliate link) that attempts to show why any other form of doing church, other then house churches is unbiblical. As you can see by the review, I’m not a huge fan of their (Viola and Barna) analysis.

But I know some people are using them to good effect. What’s been your experience with house churches? What have you heard?

What do you think?