Hi, all.
First off, I apologize for not spending much time in this space over the past couple of months.
If you’ve followed my blog activities (and inactivity!), you know that on October 22, I accepted a position as marketing and media director at one of the Assemblies of God’s 100 largest churches. I was thrilled not only to have a job but to be in a position that required top-notch creativity and performance from many areas of my skill site — and many areas I was eager to acquire new skills in.
As marketing and media director I designed several promotional and in-house printed pieces, I wrote press releases, I worked with vendors, I approved and gave guidance for the video and broadcast editing (though not much of that because my staff was not only skilled but very professional and surpassed my knowledge in many ways). My team struggled with print deadlines, malfunctioning and aging equipment, and volatile tempers. I raised the visibility of my overworked team’s plight (loads of stress and too much work), and asked a lot of questions. I didn’t always like the answers, but my job wasn’t to change the church, but to understand it first.
Unfortunately, I failed to understand many things quickly enough and I now find myself looking for work once again after the single shortest tenure at any job I’ve ever held in my short, if rotund, life.
But, fortunately, my hasty departure from the church is not due to any sort of illegal, unethical, or moral wrongdoing. Instead, I chalk it up to a severe failure to communicate on my part. Which is ironic, really, since communication was my … err … job. (Big failure on my part.) As the pastor noted when he released me, my personality was not a good fit for the church.
Upon tearful reflection, we are agreed.
So, once more into the breach. My family and I will covet your prayers yet once more. We are packing up to move to Michigan where we will live with family while we wait for our Chicago home to sell and try to find gainful employment again.
Regards,
[tags]BlogRodent, career, church, church marketing, church staff, designer, employment, freelance, hire me, imag, image magnification, job, job hunt, jobs, marketing, media, media relations, photographer, photography, press, social networking, talent, talented, video, video editor, web 2.0, writer[/tags]
In a mad dash of creative craziness, a few more things have popped up on the PneumaBlogs tool-set. So, for your blog-reading enjoyment, here’s a quick summary of everything not covered in my previous post (“
Since we’re a year older here at the BlogRodent’s bolt-hole on the Web (I use the royal “We,” of course, any blame accruing from this blog is entirely mine–my wife happily observes), I thought it’d be a good time to effect a complete redesign. My WordPress install has gone from something pre-1.5 to something post 2.0 while my blog template has remained steadily prehistoric, and the maker of the old theme had dropped off the Web. It’s long been time for an upgrade just on technical reasons, alone. Visually, I was due for an upgrade not long after launching. :: sigh ::
For some reason, my weblog became the target of hundreds of referrer spam hits from pornographic websites over the last week or so. I keep an eye on my referrer logs (a record of URLs that generated traffic to my site), and lately a bunch of URLs showed up which had no business being there. Some URLs are obviously pornographic, but there were one or two that looked innocent enough that when I clicked through to see who had linked to me, I got an eyeful. I really, really, don’t need that.
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