model(4/0)
The church must learn new forms
The American Church is not growing. The new people in the pews are almost exclusively either transplants from another church or people returning after a period of separation. When churches close their doors in your neighborhood, it’s too late. Closures are the inevitable result of our failure to add any unchurched people to our community for many years, not just the past one or two. As with business, danger signals are outside customer base.…
Evangelism models
Healing Prayer Many people’s first introduction to Jesus was news about the people who were healed by him. The leper who approaches Jesus saying that, if he is willing, Jesus can make him clean is a classic example (Mark 1:40-44). When I see a person in distress because of an illness, I remember that Jesus heals and wonder if he might heal this person. But uncertainty usually takes hold of me.…
Encompass complex thought with diagrams
The software project I’ve been building has grown to the point that it’s no longer simple enough that I can reason about it without the assistance of a diagramming tool. To my surprise, there are a proliferation of such tools, but few open source versions I could spin up today. Then I discovered PlantUML! I was a little turned off by the simplistic website, but once I began to use the tool I was thoroughly impressed.…
Models make complex ideas sharable
Business models encapsulate complex ideas into simple and sharable patterns. In software design there is a concept called design patterns. Design patterns are commonly defined as “a general reusable solution to a commonly occurring problem within a given context” (Wikipedia). Software developers who apply these patterns in their appropriate circumstances benefit from proven solutions to problems others have experienced in the software space. This also gives developers a common vocabulary to explore designs for large systems without the precise details of implementation.…