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Judith Gotwald

New ways to measure “church”

2×2 records banner statistics as 2012 draws to a close

2×2 will soon enter its third year of online ministry. Very few churches are experimenting with content evangelism. This is new territory.

We have been forced into online ministry by the confiscation of our property and the abandonment of traditional leadership. Online numbers are the only thing we can measure. We don’t have property or a pastor to pay. We have few expenses outside of unending law suits.

This was an interesting week statistically. For the last five weeks or so we’ve been inching up to 400 readers per week. We got as high as 397 without breaking 400. We fluctuated a bit, week by week, with our monthly totals steadily climbing for the last six months. Our daily readership also climbed steadily during the latter part of 2012.

This week we broke the 400 mark—and the 500 mark—and the 600 mark. 604 readers visited 2×2 last week.

Keep in mind that Redeemer’s ability to fulfill its mission was the lame excuse offered to justify the Southeastern Pennsylvania Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America’s self-serving land grab. SEPA paraded false statistics before a Synod Assembly that was duped into taking foolish actions. Redeemer was allowed no say at the time (under questionable constitutionality)—by design.

Now we have independent statistics to prove our viability.

And a little church shall lead the way

2×2 is the focus of Redeemer’s mission. We pay daily attention to our blog’s statistics so we can do a better job. It’s not just a numbers game. We are forming real relationships with our readers all over the world. We are sharing freely what we are learning.

We look beyond the numbers to determine what the numbers represent. Online ministry is very measurable.

This week, an Ambassadors post early in the week attracted unusual attention, mostly on Monday but a little on Tuesday morning. By Tuesday afternoon, that interest had died. We expected the numbers to plummet to 20, 30 or 40 visits per day. They didn’t. By the end of the week, all the traffic was from the usual sources (people searching for ministry ideas), only at two or three times the previous week’s numbers.

Redeemer continues its dedication. We have numbers to back up our claims. Along with the statistics is evidence of Redeemer’s growing reach. We have readers all over the world. We may even lay claim to being one of the largest Lutheran churches within SEPA’s geographical area. But we are not limited by geography!

Imagine a different scenario than the one fostered by SEPA leadership

Imagine what we could be doing

  • if we had a place to meet for worship.
  • if we had a facility to hold workshops on the things we are learning.
  • if the pastor who had given us a five-year commitment hadn’t been chased off.
  • if our property were serving the community and earning income to satisfy existing debt and support even more outreach.
  • if we were free to monetize our site without interference.
  • if our members were not burdened or intimidated by lawsuits.
  • if we had a pastor to work with us and care about us.

And there’s the rub! It’s in that last bulleted item. The lay people of Redeemer now have more experience at this type of ministry than almost all ELCA pastors.

And so we are condemned and excluded. Not because we lack “missional” focus but because professional leaders, steeped in 19th and 20th century ministry models, don’t know how to work with us.

Who knows how long SEPA will keep Redemer’s doors locked until they feel they can totally control a ministry they never understood?

They have looked the other way as Grace, Roxborough, failed and their building and parsonage were sold to benefit SEPA. They allowed Epiphany, Upper Roxborough, to break its covenant with Redeemer and vote to close—assets going to SEPA. Only landlocked Bethany remains to serve several Philadelphia neighborhoods—East Falls, Wissahickon, Roxborough, and Manayunk.

A resurgence of ministry there without new focus is unlikely, but SEPA would rather watch traditional ministries struggle with an arrogant “we told you so” hanging in the air than help them to experiment beyond the experience of available leadership.

SEPA congregations and clergy look on with approval, touting the wisdom of its leaders, and protecting their own endangered territories.

Meanwhile, little, unrecognized Redeemer just keeps growing. Without property, without money, without professional leaders, Redeemer grows!

God is doing something new in East Falls.

When will SEPA  and the ELCA perceive it?

December 2 Stats

Screen shot of Redeemer’s statistics toward the end of the December 2, 2012. We actually closed the day with 604 site visits — two more visited before the Cinderella hour.


03 Dec 2012

Redeemer Ambassadors Learn More about St. John’s, Mayfair

On the first of the month, Redeemer always looks forward to holding our own worship service at the Old Academy Theater. The Ambassadors arrived still enthusiastic about our visit to St. John’s, Mayfair, last week. One of our Ambassadors enjoys the history and architecture of the churches we visit. She asked about the two cornerstones—one pre-Civil War and one from the mid-20th century. We discovered a connection we didn’t know we had. Our pastor, one of only a couple of SEPA/ELCA pastors not afraid to be seen in public with us, once served St. John’s back in the 1960s.  (Yes, we have a pastor, in fact we have two who worship with us regularly!) He told us a bit of its history, how it used to be downtown and how the new church had been designed to showcase its beautiful German windows. He talked about how the educational wing was once filled with Sunday School students and how it had a friendly competition with St. Paul’s in Olney. Its membership then was more than 2000. Latest Trend reports have them holding their own in the 600s, with a little fluctuation, most recently reported at 695, a third of them worshiping members.

02 Dec 2012

How Do You Join Twitter?

Someone asked. So here’s the answer.

Google Twitter. The Twitter site will come up first in Google results and you will see the sub-option SIGN UP. Click on that and follow the instructions.

You will need to supply your name and an email address. You can use your current email or open a free account dedicated to Twitter — it’s up to you. We did not have a dedicated 2×2 email address before. We opened a free G-mail account with Google.

You will have some options in creating a profile. Twitter will guide you through the start-up steps. Don’t be alarmed that you are asked to choose some people or organizations to follow right from the start. Twitter will present lists of celebrities who might appeal to your interests. You may have no interest in any of them. (We followed Lady Gaga, Steve Carrell and National Geographic. How’s that for eclectic!)

All of this is just to get you going. Twitter is all about following and being followed and they are trying to teach you good Twitter habits from the start. You can unfollow (stop following) any person or organization at any time. Stick with the ones that are fun. Click “unfollow” if they annoy you (there will be some that bombard you with self-promotion). By taking note of what annoys us, we will be able to figure out how we want to be perceived on Twitter.

01 Dec 2012

Our Twitter Report-December 1, 2012

We met our daily goal. We posted a blog about tweeting. We retweeted something we liked. We posted our Riddle Tweet and followed up with the answer an hour later (following the professional advice to not tweet more than once in an hour). In addition, we tweeted our worship plans for tomorrow.

Spent about a half hour writing today’s blog post and less than 10 minutes on Twitter.

Our post picked up one “Like” so far. (Thanks, Christian).

2×2 started with no followers yesterday. We have four followers today.

If you want to follow our month-long Twitter experiment, join Twitter and follow us at:

@2x2Foundation

01 Dec 2012

Getting Ready for Our First Tweet

Ready, Set, Go

So what should we tweet about? That IS the question.

We noticed that South Dakota Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America began their Advent season by tweeting the first verse of a popular Advent hymn:

Light one candle to watch for Messiah. Let the light banish darkness.

That’s a nice thought. We will retweet it. (More on retweeting later).

We could tweet a Bible verse. We listed a few dozen for our readers in a post a week or so ago.

But we are also remembering the advice from the pros: social media is about connecting with others. If we want followers, our tweets have to appeal to others or people will just gloss over them. So we are going to work on a mix of material to use in our tweets. We won’t avoid the message of the Gospel but we will talk about things that might appeal to an even broader audience. In addition we will write about things happening here in our neighborhood (roughly East Falls, Germantown, Wissahickon, Manayunk and Roxborough and the tail end of City Line Avenue in Philadelphia).

We are going to start with something just for fun. It’s a riddle. We’ll pose the question in the first tweet and an hour or so later, we will tweet the answer.

Remember, we are new at this, too. This is a process of discovery for all of us.

So today’s task won’t take more than 10 minutes and half of that will be first time jitters.

  1. Retweet the South Dakota Synod’s tweet.
  2. Tweet our own riddle.
  3. Tweet the answer to our riddle.

If you want to take part in the experiment. Start your Twitter account and start following us! We will follow you back! Let’s see if Twitter is as powerful as they say it is!

01 Dec 2012

Why Twitter for Churches?

Why Twitter, why not Facebook?

twiFacebook, the king and queen of social media, has some problems as a platform for churches.

  • To be used well, it is a lot of work.
  • It is unabashedly about monetization of cyberspace.
  • The rules change frequently.
  • It can easily become more intimidate than a congregation of unrelated people want to be part of. Facebook rules just changed recently to make posts more public than many users ever intended their Facebook pages to be. We’ll wait with everyone else for the fallout on that.

Facebook has been embraced by business and some nonprofits. They are more likely to have a top-down structure with monetary and hierarchical controls. In other words, Facebook will be part of somebody’s job. It might be their whole job. Few churches can afford that!

Twitter on the other hand comes with some control. You can create a following but you can direct your “tweets.”

The Twitter platform is stripped to the bone. You are limited to 140 characters (practically 120 characters). Who can’t write one sentence a day!?

Let’s look at Twitter. What is it, anyway?

Twitter is a social media platform first designed for people to answer the question, “What are you doing?”

People send simple, short messages. No pictures. No video. No fancy type.

The first reaction from the public, the echoes of which can still be heard, was “I don’t care what you are doing!”

But some people kept reporting their activities to the world anyway.

They soon learned the difference between “This sandwich is delicious.” and “Route 95 is backed up 20 miles. Stay away!”

Slowly with explosive bursts of potential, the world began to realize that there is power in caring about what someone else is doing and how we can influence what happens to them.

Does that not sound mission-oriented?

The power of Twitter is in making connections. Once those connections are made. It is really up to us what we do with them. Twitter is the spark.

There is a good explanation of this power in the book The Tao of Twitter, by Mark Schaefer. There are many good books explaining Twitter. Most of them are written from a marketing point of view. Marketers tend to love numbers and analytics, which if you can bear reading them, are impressive.

(We’ve provided a link to Amazon in our widget column for this inexpensive book.)

Most pastors and church people are not “numbers” people. If they were, they may have already fled the church scene. Church numbers are dismal at first glance and alarming with analysis.

Mark’s book dwells on Twitter’s power, beginning with person to person, one-on-one power. This is something every church needs. It is foundational to mission.

The current and traditional church mission focus is invitational. Build a building, open the doors on Sunday morning, and hope that people are curious enough during those few hours of the week to come to us. We sit in our big churches and wait. For decades we didn’t know how to do mission any other way. The tools to do a better job were out of reach, practically and economically. So we keep doing things the same way, rewarding the congregations that do this the best, despite the nagging realization that even the biggest churches are statistically ineffective.

To use Twitter, requires making an effort to unlearn and change this collective mindset.

How does Twitter differ from Facebook?

Twitter2Twitter is beautifully stripped down. You must tell your story in less than 140 characters. Church people can respond to this limitation in one of two ways.

  1. Protest! We can’t possibly tell our message in 140 characters.
  2. Cheer! How hard can it be to write one sentence a day!

Twitter will be manageable for any pastor or any lay leader. It is possible to put Twitter to work with as little as 15 or 20 minutes of effort per day. That’s good news!

01 Dec 2012

Spend Advent Reaching Your Community

Advent is a big season for Lutherans and several other denominations that follow the liturgical year.

Frankly, for a lot of Christians it can be a big letdown. For years, Advent has been playing second or third fiddle to the big “C” (Christmas).

Advent is important to us. Why isn’t it important to everyone? What’s with the celebration of Christmas for five weeks and the meltdown on December 26? Every church goer knows December 25 is the first of 12 days of Christmas! Why are the Christmas trees out in the trash on Day 2!

What can we do about this?

  1. We can wait every Sunday in Advent for the throngs to walk through our doors. We can be ready to welcome them and share our traditions. What are they again? Why do we light those four candles? Who is this Isaiah guy? And John the Baptist? Really!
  2. We can go to the world.
    Our Advent Tweet A Day is an attempt to share what is important to us with people beyond our membership. We’ll see together how that goes. But one thing we can guess. No one will follow us if all we do is talk about ourselves.

Meanwhile, here’s another idea. Instead of waiting for people to come to our congregations, what if we gathered our members and went to them. Try this! Get a group together and attend the local high school, middle school and elementary “winter” festivals. Maybe you have kids attending these schools. Maybe you don’t. That doesn’t matter.

The young people and their teachers worked hard on their music. These days many school groups are performing pretty professionally. Your group is likely to be noticed. You will have a chance to talk to others in the community.

Remember! It’s not about you. Just go and enjoy yourselves. Then write a blog article or two about it and start tweeting about your experience.

Make a habit of such community involvement. Check their web sites and subscribe if you can so that you know what’s happening.

You will start to notice more things about your community . . . and they might start to notice you, too.

Our community school concerts are next week. We can’t wait!

30 Nov 2012

Join Us in Our Advent Social Media Project

A Tweet a Day for Advent—Get Ready!

A week or so ago, we proposed a social media project for the four weeks of Advent.

2×2 started as a blog. It is time to spread our little wings to other realms of social media!

2×2 has been blogging seriously for about 18 months. We started in February 2011.  It took us a few months to get our bearings. Only one person visited our site that month! Our stats show that our readership didn’t break triple digits until July. From our many web visits to other church web sites we figure that’s about when most churches give up on social media. We kept at it!  Patience!

Our best month of 2011 was November with 623 new readers that month.

By this time we were able to see growth patterns and we predicted that we would have 12,000 new readers visiting our blog in 2012. We should exceed that benchmark with ease.

Looking ahead to 2013, we can anticipate doubling 2×2’s reach. We are nearing 1500 new visitors a month and the growth has been steady. 110 people subscribe and have our posts go to their email every day. So that’s an additional 770 views each week! Our reach is truly worldwide.

2×2 achieved this without using any other social media platforms to enhance our SEO numbers. We followed just one strategy: Offer content that will be helpful to our mission audience — seekers and lay leaders.

We continue to be surprised by the many and strong relationships we are forming with other mission-oriented church workers, many of them not Lutheran. These are rewarding and growing. We started to introduce our readers to one another and now they are referring people to us. We look forward to many new things in 2013.

Which brings us back to our Advent project.

Research shows that Twitter is the least understood social media platform with the greatest potential to reach new audiences. Better than Facebook. There are others, too. But let’s tackle one at a time!

The biggest barrier to using Twitter is understanding its potential. That’s why we have chosen December as our month to experiment. We’ll take it step by step and report our progress.

We hope you will follow our experiment and perhaps join us and share your results. We’ll try to make it easy.

How about it!?

Sharing the Gospel—140 characters at a time!

Watch for our official invitation to join the experiment which should be posted Saturday afternoon — just in time for Advent 1.

Step 1: We just opened our account:

@2x2Foundation

This required us to have an email account. We opened a free account with Google.

2x2church@gmail.com

This process took about 15 minutes.

You can do it! Get cracking! 

30 Nov 2012

Teach Us to Pray

Why do people go out of their way to ask preachers to pray for them?

Pastor Jon Swanson points to 1 Chronicles where David outlines the duties of the Levites. One of the duties is to stand every morning to thank and praise the Lord.

OK, it’s their job. But it is our job, too.

Each of us can pray. The littlest toddlers find comfort and empowerment in bowing their heads in pray. (Comfort and empowerment are answers to prayer.)

Over the rocky years of life, we tend to lose confidence in God and confidence in our ability to speak to God. The relationship is broken.

Easy way out: assign the duty to those we feel are especially trained to do this.

When you set aside one group of people to perform a function that each person is capable of doing, the result is predictable. The larger group is going to lose its skills.  Prayer is a pretty important skill—one we don’t want anyone to lose!

Another predictable result. The designated pray-ers will accept status and power. Over time, they will get lazy about their responsibilities and the prayers will become corporate in nature. Prayers will be written a year in advance, published, distributed to congregations, and read by the designated pray-ers, who no longer have to know the names and faces of the people they pray for. People will feel further lost and separated from God as their individual needs are grouped with the whole, undefined people of God.

The church must work at restoring people’s relationships — not so much with the Church but with God.

We all feel small before God and in our self-loathing we tend to think that clergy are somehow better. They are not. Clergy are servants just like every other child of God. They are capable of both good and bad. Putting them on a pedestal as the official representative of God results in scandals that grab secular headlines when things get really bad.

Clergy are charged with fostering spirituality. They are not surrogates. That kind of thinking led to the travesties that inspired Martin Luther to risk his life with his 95 Theses. Back then, people were encouraged to pay clergy to pray for them. The more money, the better the prayer. Maybe that’s what we have returned to today without using the word “indulgence.”

The disciples felt inadequate. They came to Jesus. “Teach us to pray.”

The church does not always do a good job of teaching us to pray. The laity is often OK with this. We want to know how to pray, but not if it means practicing. . . in public.

At this point we can learn from musicians. They know that no amount of practice behind closed doors can teach the skills that are easily honed playing in public.

One pastor we heard during our Ambassador visits exhorted her congregation to ration their prayers. Don’t bring your little concerns to God, she admonished. Save God for the big things.

Perhaps she meant to empower the congregation to solve their own problems, but it is definitely short-changing God. God is God. He’s not asking us to save Him time and trouble. God wants us to call upon Him. God can handle little things along with big! Nevertheless, I am sure God smiles with satisfaction when we get up from our knees and help!

There is only one way to change this. Put the responsibility for prayer into the hands of the people. Teach them to pray. Teach by example. Give lots of opportunity for practice.

Instead of glibly promising to pray for people who come to you in distress—as a way of dismissing their concerns—stop in your tracks, take their hands, and pray with them, asking them questions in the prayer so that their answers are a voice directed at God.

Then don’t wait for magic. Prayer provides comfort and empowerment! Roll up your sleeves. Lace up your boots. Put on your gloves. Go to work! Love your neighbor!

See if those prayers aren’t answered!

Teach us to pray.

photo credit: Lel4nd via photopin cc
29 Nov 2012

The Stewardship of Weekends

The concept of “weekend” is a fairly new in the history of the world. The term was first used in the late 1800s and was not commonly used until around 1935—only about 80 years!

The concept of Sabbath and one day of rest is much, much older. Thousands of years older.

Before the late 1800s almost everyone was vocationally tied to the earth. That created its own rhythm. Cows must be milked every day. Everyone worked close to or at home. The Sabbath was a gift!

The weekend came along with the shift to factory and office work.

Weekend, in its first usage, referred to Saturday noon to Monday morning. Today it spans to Friday afternoon to Monday morning and roughly once a month we add an extra day to that!

This helps our multicultural society. Islam has its Friday holy day. Judaism has it Saturday Sabbath and Christianity remembers Easter by worshiping on Sundays.

It’s great that all this time has been cleared from our schedule to relate to God. But now that most of us don’t have to milk the cows, what do we do with it?

We suspect there always has been a temptation to party away the Sabbath gift. God noticed!

Remember the Sabbath Day to keep it holy.

 
photo credit: kisocci via photopin cc
28 Nov 2012