A few years ago, I accidentally started a nationwide debate. Well, a minor one, anyway. You see, I collect old coins—really old ones, mostly from the years 100 BCE to 100 CE. After winning on eBay what I believed to be a coin of Herod the Great (the King Herod who sends the “wise men” out to find the one born “King of the Jews”), I started to doubt I had correctly identified it. So, I posted a message to a biblical coins discussion forum online asking for help.

So, you've got that Amazon/Borders/eBay/B&N/independent bookseller gift certificate in your hand, and you're wondering what to spend it on. Here's a look back at ten of my favorite books of 2009, along with a list of the ten books I most wish I'd gotten around to reading, all especially selected with progressive Christian educators in mind. Hope you find some extra time in the coming days to curl up with a great book!

Two of the biggest challenges many Christian educators have are a) staying on top of the latest news and b) keeping on top of their To-Do lists. Tech-based solutions abound for both of them, but many people find the solutions overwhelming or too feature-packed for their needs. For example, RSS readers are a marvelous tool for following multiple blogs and getting the latest news, but they tend to work best for those who have a more serious need to follow lots of blogs for professional purposes. Applications and strategies abound for managing to-do lists and projects, ranging from the popular paper-based daily planners to various GTD (Getting Things Done) systems that take more time to figure out than they're worth for many people. 

So, here are two terrific tools (Alltop and TeuxDeux) that simplify both of those tasks. Perhaps they'll help you to get organized in the new year!

When the Christmas pageant is over and the Sunday school classes go on hiatus for a week or two, be sure to set aside a little time to review the past year. Since you've already (hopefully) been reviewing individual activities on an ongoing basis, now is the time to take a broad view and look especially at your publicity. Here are 6 key questions to ask yourself.

Chances are, in the next few weeks you are going to do some shopping. Even those of us who try to keep our Advent and Christmas seasons Christ-centered usually participate in gift-giving traditions. I do not like to shop, particularly at this time of year. So for me, one thing I do to keep the Advent season holy and meaningful rather than busy and stressed is to avoid shopping malls from Thanksgiving to January 2. For this reason, one of my favorite uses for technology is the ability to shop via the internet. In addition to the obvious advantage of not being a part of the crowd, internet shopping provides some advantages over shopping at the mall…

The web makes it very easy for people to do a bit of good each day. Sites like The Hunger Site have been encouraging people for years to just click on a button each day to donate a bit of rice to impoverished people. Some churches urge all of their members to use GoodSearch.com as their search engine, because doing so can generate revenue for the church or for another organization the church supports. Sites like these are proliferating rapidly as nonprofit organizations try to reach new audiences by blending a bit of education with a simple-to-do action and the power of social networks.

The latest of these sites to cross my path multiple times is Help From Home, which provides information about websites devoted to making a difference and ways to take action in as little as one minute. Frequently, the actions involve such low-effort tasks as digitally adding your signature to a petition, tweaking your email signature, or taking part in a project that uses your idle computer time to process data. In other words, these actions are gateway actions; they introduce people to issues of concern with the hope that people will gradually become more and more interested in the cause. A term has of course developed for this type of social action: slacktivism.

Every day, dozens or even hundreds of Twitter feeds, email newsletters, Facebook updates, and blog posts find their way into my computer. Many of these contain links to "must read" articles about denominational news, technology tips, resources that are coming out, and so on. I scan them quickly, looking for the gems I think are most likely to be useful to me (and to you!), and then I click on the links. But unless I'm going to take the time to read the articles right away, I have a problem: WAY too many tabs and windows get opened in my browser.

On the day when I hit 14 windows and 52 tabs open, I realized I needed to find a simple, elegant solution to my problem, then dedicate myself to using it regularly. Immediately my thoughts went to Evernote, a program I truly love and think everyone should install. Evernote has the ability to capture screenshots and other details through a simple button on my screen. Yet since I keep so many different types of information in Evernote (lists, To-Dos, voice recordings, photos, and more), storing links to articles I'd like to read just didn't seem like the elegant solution. I could just bookmark the pages in my browser, of course, but I prefer to keep my bookmarks focused on tools, not articles.

According to Netcraft, in April 2009 there were 231,510,169 websites. If you were to look at each website for 1 minute (we’re talking a quick perusal here) it would take you 440 years to view them all. Of course, this is also a moving target; there are more websites now than there were in April and it is impossible to predict the state of technology 440 years from now. Statistics like this make me grateful for search engines!

Considering the number of websites in existence, I am delighted when I discover a good progressive Christianity website. And when I do so, I am eager to share my find with our readers through The Daily Voice and the links pages on our website. I recently discovered such a site, the website of The Beatitudes Society.

A background slide is a type of PowerPoint (or Keynote, for Mac users) slide that works very well for both song lyrics and for presentation pages after the title slide. Essentially, it's a muted version of the theme slide, with the titles deleted. If you're not quite sure what I mean, you can see an example of variations on a theme slide for worship here.

Making a background slide is incredibly easy, yet many people who are not very familiar with computer graphics often don't realize just what a simple process it is. Here's a step-by-step tutorial, using a simple slide I created using a stock image and a terrific, free graphics program called IrfanView. You can do the same thing with virtually every graphics program—even in PowerPoint or your favorite worship software program if you wish—but IrfanView's worth downloading due to its huge feature set, tiny size, and super-stable performance. (IrfanView is a PC program. Mac users, you may wish to try Seashore.)

Think for a second about some of the ways your congregation members care for one another or for others in the community during a time of need. Perhaps you deliver meals to elderly members, families with a new baby, or individuals who have experienced a death in the family. Maybe you have had to help a family rebuild their lives after a fire, flood, or other disaster. Probably the pastor or others visit individuals who are in the hospital. Maybe you serve a meal once each month at a homeless shelter and need volunteer help. The list can go on and on.

Coordinating all of these tasks and volunteers can be a daunting task, but it's a super simple process when you sign up for (and use, of course!) a free Lotsa Helping Hands account. This incredible web-based service gives you the ability to add and track tasks, have volunteers sign up for slots, send reminders to volunteers, share information about an individual's situation, and much more. Lotsa Helping Hands requires no special technological skills or equipment...and again, it's FREE! Anyone with web access can utilize the Community you create. The only problem you might have is that sometimes the slots available can fill up so fast that not everyone who wants to offer help can do so! You'll also want to recruit one person from the church who will serve as the lead Coordinator. (This could be a staff person, but why not pass on that opportunity to a congregation member?)