In September, Pam and I head for Oklahoma City to attend MinistryCOM, a national conference for church communications professionals. I attended this conference the past two years (in Phoenix and Nashville), and have found it exactly what I've been thirsting for--a gathering of my peers in Christian communications.

I've worked pretty much alone for 30 years. At MinistryCOM, I discovered lots of fellow professionals who do the same stuff I do--writing, graphics, video, web--and they do it in the context of the local church. Mostly megachurches. I work from the perch of a denomination's national office, but still in the service of local churches.

This year I'm doing a workshop, and I'm jazzed about it. The title is "Writing: Different Media, Different Techniques." The idea is, you don't write something for the church newsletter, then throw the same text, unchanged, onto the website and into an email and the Sunday bulletin. Different techniques and principles apply to different communications vehicles. You need to edit your well-crafted copy to fit the needs of that particular medium.

At heart, I'm a writer. I've been doing publication layout for 30 years, computer graphic design for 20 years, web design for 10 years. Today, I spend more time in Dreamweaver and Photoshop than I do in Word. I've developed some strong competencies in graphics and web design. But when you scrape everything away, you find a writer. I miss the opportunities I once had, in editing a magazine, to write lengthy feature articles (something which, in what is now ancient history, won me a couple awards from the Evangelical Press Association).

So it'll be nice talking about writing, with a focus on how the new media affect your wordsmithing.

If you're a communications professional in the Christian world, I encourage you to consider attending MinistryCOM. And if you register by July 31, you're eligible to win a free iPod Nano!