I was sitting at the King’s Head last night when a message popped up on my handy Treo from Bill Kinnon to alert me that he’d posted a video on YouTube (see below) which provides a good introduction to Allelon. I watched it, and it does. He asked if I’d post it to help spread the word, and for reasons I’ll come to (and which have nothing to do with the Guinness he offered me), I’m happy to post it, thusly:

It’s a good overview, and there seems to be a fresh new effort on the part of Allelon to get their name out there and connect with people… could be I’ve just been talking with Bill, or it could be an inference from their new website. One can’t really say one has seen a website with as much content as theirs, not fully… but I’ve poked around some. The design of the new site is quite an improvement over the old one — warmer, more inviting. I first found Allelon online a couple of years ago, and while I was impressed at the amount of content, I was annoyed by having to register to get to it. At the time, I may have had a general unease at that time about one organization in the conversation wanting me to pay for friendship and another wanting me to join the (albeit free) club in order to see their wares. On the new site, I was able to click through to any number of articles I attempted without being challenged with a login page. Perhaps this change is not new (though someone else I asked cited the same complaint recently), but I confess I haven’t spent much time on the site since I first found it, for two reasons: (1) the login requirement; and (b) I always found it hard to read and to navigate. The new site design, while much more pleasing and inviting visually, isn’t really any more readable… a larger font (particularly on the articles) would do wonders. The navigation, if anything, is perhaps a bit worse… you always have the feeling you’re being bombarded with too much information and don’t know what to click next.

The Roxburgh Journal and Netcasts appear to be a nice new addition, and the article library does offer an index and search function, so there will be a lot of good information to be found by those who don’t mind a little digging… and in that respect, there’s an excellent repository close at hand.

My favorite thing about the new Allelon site though, is something I can’t let go uncommented upon. It’s the new tagline. The former “Living the story, embodying the kingdom” has been replaced with the much more intentional and less nebulous, “A movement of missional leaders.” Now there’s a tagline I can get behind… and I find myself wanting to spend a bit more time with the Allelon folks and learn even more about what they’re doing and how they’re going about it. Who knows, I might even put a blog banner on my site, once they post something that reflects the new site design. Overall, there’s a lot of work gone into the site and the stock of online resources it offers. Good on them, i say.

As one last aside, I noticed while clicking around to compose this post that there are a number of missional-tagged YouTube videos, and if you scroll down a bit, they’re not all Tim Keller ;^) Just what I need, more online video to watch.