From time to time here at Mars Hill Church we receive emails with questions about the work that we do, who does it, what we use to do it and how the magic happens. This time we’ll start off with one of our more common ones…

Q. I was wondering if you would mind sharing who designed/engineered marshillchurch.org?

A. The short answer is “some great Jesus loving volunteers”.

Over the years, like any good site, the main Mars Hill website has gone though several iterations, as many hands have been put to work for the gospel. A core value of the work we do around Mars Hill and in technology is that it’s all worship, and that has lead to a great team of volunteers who see the design and development of our web properties to be a time of service and worship. The current marshillchurch.org was lead and organized by a few on staff while the execution and implementation was carried out by some very talented individuals who have given countless hours over the years to provide great looking sites that host and deliver our content worldwide.

So that said, we do not currently use outside vendors for the development and design of the site, we do have some more dedicated staff now, but the site for the most part resides in the hands of the faithful; both volunteers and staff.

Have you ever used the site and thought I could do that better, why don’t they do things like this? Then its time to come help out and get connected. Every Thursday is Tech Night at the Ballard Campus and we are always in need of designers, flash developers and whatever code you know, we have a project that can use your skills. So email zack(at)marshillchurch.org or just stop by on Thursday nights.

A few months ago, I (Zack) was away on a personal retreat for prayer and Scripture reading. It was a surprisingly clear day down by the water, and the quietness of being away from the city was quite cathartic. Just me, my bible, and a laptop for note taking…the day was wide open for anything to happen.

But this wasn’t a retreat for relaxation, rest, or anything like that. I urgently wanted to hear from the Lord about the greater purpose of Technology at Mars Hill. Especially pressing on my heart had been the idea of community at Mars Hill…what does it really look like and how does Technology fit into the picture? Does community need Technology, after all, don’t alot of people believe that the golden years of “real” community was in the era before Modernism? Hasn’t Technology just separated us from one another?

I don’t think so. Anyone that comes to our Thursday night Technology meet-up at Mars Hill knows that I believe that Technology is an agent of change just like Writing, Music, or many other creative activities: it can be redeemed and used in the service of the Gospel, and that God calls those whom He gifts with technical minds to serve in their gifting.

Anyway, I was talking about the retreat, so I’ll have to set that aside for a bit.

Later that day, as I was reading passage after passage on community, the pieces started coming together. The City was founded.

Explaining the idea is always difficult at first, but let me try this progression to get you thinking along the right lines:

1. MySpace - first massively successful social network (I know about the others, but that’s just an aside), but MySpace was focused on the individual. Customization was highly emphasized in the context of the individuals page, with the individual’s tastes, etc.
2. Facebook - this took it the next step by generating social graphs around large physical communities (colleges, at first). This was actually a very productive step in the sense of the Gospel in that the emphasis subtly shifted to the physical and away from the virtual community.
3. The City - Radically physical social network of intentional and missional small communities (think Community Groups and Service Groups) within a large community (the campus, then the church, then a network of churches). There’s alot to unpack in that statement, so I’ll have to spend some time doing so, just not this episode…

I’m happy to announce that we have made Re:Greek an Open Source Initiative!

What is Re:Greek?

It’s a website I (Zack) created a couple of years ago to assist fellow Greek students like myself to better interact with the Scriptures in their original languages (although getting the Hebrew text has been a bit tough). Over the years its feature set and audience grew as I chipped away at the possibilities in 15 minutes/week intervals. Eventually the code became so horrible, that I just knew I had to start over if I wanted to open it up for other developers to get involved. Re:Greek was born.

Possibilities

In one afternoon I rewrote www.zhubert.com into www.regreek.com, from 20k lines of code down to 811. It went from PHP to Ruby on Rails (two development frameworks). I was incredibly pleased with the new framework, as I knew it would get the code to the place it needed to be for others to jump in and build a Bible Software platform far more interesting than I could alone. So if we can get to where we are today with such a small investment of time, can you imagine what will be possible when developers from all over get involved?

Interest

There’s been some good interest so far, being covered in Challies, The Resurgence (naturally), and a few others. Including one I couldn’t read without the help of Google, hopefully it says nice things. There’s also been 14 developers that have jumped into the Google Group to assist in the collaboration of the site. If you’re interested, jump in!

This week is a bit of a different week for the Technology ministry at Mars Hill. Rather than being cloistered with our computers and hacking away at Cisco, CSS, and Ruby, we’re hacking away at rotted floors and framing out office spaces.

Into the project’s second week, we’re seeing alot of progress in clearing out the 70’s style carpet, the parallel port network (I use that term loosely, it’s more like what would happen if you daisy-chained a daisy-chain ad infinitum), and all sorts of fabulous construction materials damaged by moisture. We’re clearing out, cleaning up, and starting corners of construction to take this massive pile of office works into workable offices for Technology and Production.

If you’re interested in getting your hands dirty and happen to have some Carhartt’s to wear, drop on by anytime this week, ask for Jeff VanderGiessen, and work along side of us. We’d love the chance to get to know you and for you to be a part of this work. It’s quite fun, actually.

By Mark Blair

In our last episode, I had just completed a new version of the Mars Hill Church members site which consisted of some static HTML pages, and some dynamic PHP pages that was a Directory of Members. This was an interesting coding experience for me, a first time volunteering the skills God gave me for a Church based ministry, and I actually kind of thought I was done with it. You know, did my time, contributed what I could, and now going back to my regularly scheduled life. What I soon learned was that this WAS my regularly scheduled life, even if I was not the one doing the scheduling.

I also learned that the needs never stop, ever. I should have figured this, being in the software development biz as long as I had already. There are always new features, no real useful product is ever really done. If it is, it dies and nobody will be using it for very much longer.

So what happened? Well, the church always had a good public facing site that tended to draw a lot of attention. Shortly after completing my previous work on the members site, it really started to draw a lot of attention due to a feature called………Midrash. All the Mars Hill old timers are like, yeah, I remember that. Midrash was really nothing more then an open forum that any anonymous user could sign up for and post whatever they wanted using any identity they choose to make up. I guess we figured since it was on a Church url, that the discussion would be proper, polite, and appropriate for the Church. As it turns out, the Internet in general is not really that at all, so in retrospect it is no surprise that the things got way out of control on the Midrash. Things really started drawing attention when a Mel Gibson impersonator showed up and declared war on the English. You can read about in a book if you want (something about confessions and a Reverend).

When this all came to a head, I was asked if we could recreate the forums on the members site and remove the anonymity that had caused so much havoc. This was to be a closed forum for members only, so some random nitwit from some random place couldn’t give official church statements to the public like on the Midrash if he wanted. So, I snapped out of the delusion that my work was done, and began doing what so many people talk about these days, I re-factored the code.

I didn’t write my own forum software, that would have been way over kill, I incorporated some forum software called phpbb into our existing system. This including modifying the existing phpbb code to recognize people who had log onto the site using the previously incorporated system. People would log onto the site using HTTP Basic authentication and the phpbb code was modified (hacked) to use that login as a registered user. No anonymous users were allowed. User information was stored in the mysql database, and the apache web server used a module called mod_auth_mysql to authenticate users. Users were added using a user/group tool I created on another website, that was only accessible by staff.

So now on our members site we had some static pages, a members directory, and members forums. All this work took a great deal of time, as most software projects tend to do. I’m not saying this to brag, I’m just saying that I learned that God demands our time and not JUST our thoughts or money. I also learned that I enjoyed the work, and really felt that this was a worthwhile effort, even if it was really bad code I was writing.

I did finally learn to write decent code eventually…….but I think I’ll talk about that next time.