What's Going On With NextDoorChristian.com?

Hello, friends. So I don't know if anyone out there is watching this space, but I wanted to post a little update.

NextDoorChristian.com (this web site) was partially built by myself plus the great help of my friend Stuart, but development effort stalled and ultimately stopped after some discouragement. Basically, initial development was incredibly fun and fulfilling, but the fun stopped, and it became a chore. I didn't realize this was the issue for the shutdown, I was just getting concerned that I was wasting time when I started fasting and asking God to clarify whether He wanted me to build the site or not. After a couple days, He finally spoke, "You're asking the the right question. The answer is, yes, I did want you to build it ... but I wanted you to enjoy building it. It was supposed to be fun." That's when I decided to put the whole thing on indefinite pause, because I wasn't having fun at all anymore. That was about three and a half years ago. Adding to the burden, I shared the site around to people I met, and few of them gave it much acknowledgement or affirmation of its usefulness or potential.

However, a couple years ago, someone suggested that I should integrate a for-profit marketplace into the site, e.g. like an auction site. The brainstorm think was that the social/community aspect of the site could drive the organic traffic and flow towards and within the marketplace. I haven't been able to fully appreciate and conceive of the idea yet, though.

Recently I got some prophetic words from someone that God was giving me a thumbs-up on a "church network web site, whether it's built yet or not" and that I should proceed to continue to support that effort. This to me means a confirmation to continue to develop this site, as well as to do some early pre-planning on a literal church network. For the latter, I've set up a placeholder domain bodylife.church. Feel free to sign up for updates over there, but the idea there will be to set up a registry of churches where true body life and Biblical discipleship are practiced regularly (minimum of weekly). True body life means that if you subtract the sanctuary service where people listen to a concert and a sermon and you subtract the nursery and children's services you still end up with a opportunity for any visitor or member to engage with other believers, to practice their spiritual gifts, to edify one another, and to play an active part in discipleship, including discipling other disciples. Likewise, discipleship means to make disciples, people who learn to do, and then do, the things Jesus taught, including all of the miraculous things he had his own disciples do.

I also got another prophetic word from someone else in the same time period along the lines of being a scribe for the Lord, that I should write down all the things I believe. This correlates with an interaction I had with an elderly woman I ran across half a year or so ago, someone whom I don't fully know but she is an elder's wife at a local Spirit-filled church, and she asked me up front, "Do you have a blog?" I don't know if the question came from her husband talking about me, or if she had a download in the moment. These sorts of things happen all the time, but either way I get the impression that God wants me to blog.

This web site will resume to be a place where I will continue to dump thoughts on faith. As well, I may link to various vlog posts I produce on my TikTok profile, Living Streams Daily.

Meanwhile, I have removed the ugly message I had put up for a couple months denying access to the site, since I added CAPTCHA as a starting point to address the spam/bot problem I've been having with site registrations, and I also updated the look and feel of blog pages. Hopefully you would agree that the blog pages look more appealing.

One of the reasons why NextDoorChristian development stalled was because the technology stack that was initially built has become a bit kludgy and slow to work with, and, it's also built on some really old tech; to my shame, it's built largely on jQuery. I was trying to prototype something quickly using skills I used to use over a decade ago. I accomplished what I sought out to do, but now I'm left with a prototype system I want to redo that actually looks good on all devices. Speaking of which, much of what I have been thinking about, resulting in analysis paralysis, is knowing there is need to rework NextDoorChristian for mobile devices. Given all this, I have seriously pondered starting completely over on NextDoorChristian and rebuilding it from the ground up as a mobile app. I'm still not sure what I will do yet, but for now the original web site partial/prototype implementation is still alive.

My friend assisted in prototyping a fellowship finder feature, but it was never merged in, because of the technology stack decisions. I decided I want to redo the feature either myself (so that I can know the updated tech myself) or else hold it off until a tech stack redo is done.

Another reason for the delay is the need to rethink the registration process so that it is really simple and easy to do, but without welcoming spam/scam bots. I've been pondering for months, years, on alternative approaches, and I don't see any way around the problem without forking out some money, and doing something like SMS validation with otherwise minimal initial registration input.

I've also been looking into integrating some kind of Zoom meeting or Teams meeting type of chat and video collaboration support, without just relying on Zoom or Teams. Until lately, few options have come up, but different resources cross my path regularly. This week I came across the Matrix protocol, which seems promising, but I've barely scratched the surface on research.

There are also opportunities to pepper in a bit of AI features right away, such as producing an Excerpt/Description in this blog editor (currently it just takes a truncation).

Meanwhile, I never did expand on good discipleship and outreach tools, and other areas of the site. Ultimately, when it all boils down to it, NextDoorChristian needs to become a proper, well-thought-out body life facilitator, with discipleship and outreach tools and social network features fully fleshed out. I welcome ideas and feedback at jon -at- nextdoorchristian.com (proper e-mail address masked for spam), but in the mean time thank you for reading my blog posts and I appreciate your patience.