Who's Running This Site?

I'm Steve Dennie, owner of Random Pokes. I'm a writer and graphic designer, and I've spent my whole career serving local churches.

Every week I put together the pre-service PowerPoint announcements at my church here in Fort Wayne, Ind. That would be Anchor Community Church, an eight-year-old "restart" in a working class neighborhood just west of the downtown. I also play the keyboard in our dynamite worship band, and do a bunch of other things.

I really love my church, and I think it's a blast putting together the PowerPoint announcements. The worship team meets up front before services. I enjoy looking out and seeing people--usually about half of them--with their eyes glued to the looping slides. It's a bonus when someone chuckles in response to a funny slide.

For the past 27 years, I've been Communications Director for my denomination, the Church of the United Brethren in Christ. That's my day job. So I'm constantly working with churches and pastors.

My work has given me quite a range of experience.

• Designing and managing our denominational website. (I do my church's website, too.)
• Producing scores of publications--brochures, booklets, reports, letterhead, flyers. You name it, I've designed it.
• Editing and designing the official denominational publications--a magazine for 12 years, two newsletters for the past 12 years.
• Editing a weekly Sunday school take-home paper, and writing and editing some adult curriculum.
• Traveling to Honduras, Nicaragua, Thailand, Hong Kong, Macau--plus a couple places in the States--to film videos of our mission work.
• Writing a couple books for the church, including a history of our work in Honduras.

Along the way, I've gained plenty of insight into the communications needs of local churches.

I've also done freelance writing for about 40 different Christian publications, and wrote three humor books with InterVarsity Press (Murphy Goes to Church, Murphy's Laws of Parenting, Murphy's Laws of Marriage). Robb Suggs provided the cartoons for those books. I've done seminars at a few writer's conferences. And along the way, I picked up a Masters in Public Relations. I've got a personal website at SteveDennie.com.

So that's me. I'm the guy producing all of these slides.

For 15 years, I wrote a column in our denominational magazine. It was actually an editorial, but people read it because of the humor. The column was called Random Pokes. I decided to keep the name alive.