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?
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!
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!
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.
We need good people in all the standard artistic slots — music directors, choir members, wordsmiths. But there are so many more artistic skills needed.
Visual artists are underused and under-appreciated in today’s church. Painters and artisans used to be so important that their roles in the church were subsidized. That is why even small churches across Europe are filled with beautiful windows, murals and sculptures. This was also the age of great church musicians — the Bachs and Handels. But the love of art extended to things we consider mundane. The doors, furniture and fixtures of small churches built hundreds of years ago were created by artists. Art mattered!
This has been less true in the New World church. Where once we might have commissioned a great tapestry, we now buy from the catalog or fall back on homemade banners, etc. which are nice but would fail to qualify as artistically belonging to the ages.
And then there are the property artists, financial artists, leadership artists.
Many small churches are able to continue ministry because somewhere in their history, some member was an artist in caring for property, making investments or inspiring and rallying people.
In the days before the Church recognized the talents of half the population, small churches often prospered because of the people skills of a pastor’s wife or deaconess. They worked largely unrecognized and poorly compensated (if at all). They used their social gifts to see the potential within the community and instinctively knew how to nurture it. They never had any “power,” so protecting their power was never at issue. They are rarely mentioned in church histories.
Regardless, of the area of expertise, artists thrive on something the Church doesn’t really have much time for — chaos.
Artists are happiest when life is not predictable — when the rules don’t stand in the way of initiative and experimentation.
Many Church leaders have stifled creativity. It was probably not intentional. They may have had the congregation’s best interest (from their point of view) at heart. But church leaders tend to like structure, order, predictability, and comfort. They want their jobs to be easier. They surround themselves with people who complement these goals. They are rarely artists.
This sends creative people already in the Church packing. And those who are not in the Church will sense that they will never be of any use — so why bother.
While we say we are working for change and growth, we are actually judging members by their obedience. Choices will be made based on order, ease and comfort.
In reality, artists and non-artists need to exist together in amiable friction. That’s the spark of life. That’s what’s needed if congregations are ever going to live up to their lofty mission statements.
That’s why in spite of decades of talk about growth, the momentum in the Church is decidedly in the other direction.
That’s when we find out how well you make decisions.
When you don’t have the resources to do it the usual way, that’s when you show us how resourceful you are.
And when you don’t know if it’s going to work, that’s how we find out whether or not we need you on our team.
Every small church is in this position. Many are finding out that they don’t need to structure their “team” quite the way they have in the past.
The “dead wood” (a term one pastor used in a comment on this site in reference to small churches that the synod wanted to close) may not be the congregations. If you are going to assess interdependent ministries, look for dead wood in all the interdependent branches.
We suspect you’ll find some withering main branches.
Small churches are finding that not only do they not need them on their team but they have been playing without their support for years.
The Church, more than any other organization, save perhaps environmentalist groups, dwells on the concept of stewardship.
Sometimes we use the word interchangeably with offerings and donations, but we know it is more than that.
Stewardship is the conscious and wise use of resources. Too often we view only the property and financial assets in our thinking.
Measuring stewardship is a problem, especially when you don’t know what to measure.
Measuring stewardship leads to harsh judgments — often by people who are, themselves, stewardship-challenged. We are tempted to assume that we somehow have a right to judge who is the best determiner of when, where, and how resources are put to best use.
This can be tricky even for Christians without a horse in the race! Is the same $50,000 better used by a small congregation with 100 members or would it be better used to the Glory of God if a corporate church managed that money—or take the resources entirely out of the hands of the people who donated the resources. Let your regional body make the decisions.
Any organization of any size can use resources wisely or foolishly. Perhaps this is why the founders of the ELCA placed the determination of the use of resources in the hands of the congregations from whom the gifts were collected.
But let’s shift gears.
What if we stopped thinking of stewardship as the use of tangible resources?
What if we started thinking in terms of the intellectual property of the Church?
Let’s call it the Stewardship of Possibilities.
The concept is biblical. Jesus turned the attention of the disciples away from the pursuit of riches or status at every turn. Time after time, he directed them to possibilities. Unheard of possibilities. Away from “safe” investments. There is even a parable about it!
With the Stewardship of Possibilities, lame people could walk again. The blind could see. The hungry could be fed. Tax collectors could be honest. Fishermen could lead. People living in sin could turn their lives around. Children, women, foreigners mattered!
Instead of looking at our small churches with a message of impossibility, help them determine what is possible with the resources they have — all the resources—not just the endowment and offering plate.
Other things to consider:
The location of the property
The talents of the members
The creativity and ingenuity present in the congregation
Special skills in the congregation
The congregation’s spiritual life
The reputation of the congregation in the community. (Business calls it good will and puts a price on it!)
The relationships with civic and service organizations fostered over time
The stamina of the congregation (Can they weather a storm and work together?)
The potential
The faith and belief that all things are possible
These are things you can’t put in the bank. But you can bank on them.
The sign hangs close to the door of almost every church. ALL WELCOME.
A similar message of welcome will be on the church’s opening web page, usually accompanied by a photo of Christmas Eve worship—as if Christmas worship is representative of the whole church year.
We still expect our worship experience to be the entry point into community life within the Church. There may have been a day when this was true.
That day would have been when most people had some familiarity with religion and sought a new church community only when they relocated.
Today, however, a first-time visitor is often entering our doors totally unprepared for what they are about to experience.
Their first impression will be as if they were watching a foreign film with subtitles in a different foreign language.
Liturgies and hymns are laced with words from Latin and Greek and tunes from ancient choral traditions.
They will be asked to stand, sit and kneel with little explanation as to why. Obvious perhaps to church goers, but not to today’s visitors.
They will juggle bulletins with papers flying out and hymnals that have two numbering systems.
And then comes Communion, where they won’t be sure if they are among those welcome or not. They may be unsure of the local customs and have no clue what this eating and drinking of the body and blood of Christ is all about. (Many of those participating don’t know either.)
There is nothing wrong with any of this. Just realize that it doesn’t necessarily communicate to visitors. Although meant to be welcoming, it may be alienating or worse.
If a visitor is not welcome at communion, their first visit to church has been an experience of exclusion.
If communion is a weekly event, they will feel excluded weekly until they are made welcome through some form of initiation. If the Eucharist is a third of the worship service, the visitor has been excluded from a third of the worship service.
This is just something for the Church in a new age to think about as we practice our rituals.
I attended a convocation of churches this weekend. About 20 churches met to celebrate the Reformation, conduct some business and listen to some teachings offered by their bishop.
Today, as I waited for Hurricane Sandy, I went through the delegate list and visited every church website — at least those that had websites.
The websites were without exception static “brochure” web sites. A couple were very nicely designed, with full presentations of their ministry. Several others were minimal sites provided by directory services. A few had Facebook websites but they had done nothing with them except list service times. I was the ninth visitor to one of them, which indicates how effective they are.
Only one provided content that might attract traffic from outside their existing community and that was minimal.
As the Web matures we are starting to identify its evolutionary stages.
Web 1 describes the early days of the web from the early 90s, when organizations struggled with clumsy html code to produce static pages with no interactivity. Using the web well meant hiring some help. Help with technology is not on the approved list of church expenses. Organists and sextons are expenses church people understand. Web masters? Not in the budget. Pity! Web masters have real potential to influence the growth of a church! This has become easier.
News flash: You no longer have to know code to create attractive sites. Anyone can do it.
The move to interactivity began about 2004 and has been mushrooming. This is Web 2. Unfortunately many churches are locked in the frustrations they encountered in the infant days of Web 1. If fear of code and technical ability is stopping your church from using the web, relax. The web has become almost as easy to use for originators of content as it is for consumers of content. It is becoming more powerful every day — and that’s no exaggeration.
We can now become involved with the people who visit our sites. Isn’t Involvement why churches exist?
Web 1 influenced the world. Web 2 changed the world.
Most churches are barely embracing Web 1. This failure is creating a widening gap between them and their communities. Catch up is going to be a tougher and tougher hurdle. Still, there is a hesitance to believe that the web can be of value to church mission.
This is foolish.
The web can connect your congregation’s members.
The web can connect your congregation to your community.
The web can connect you to other churches with similar or complementary missions.
The web can connect you to the world.
It has never been easier to go out into all the world, yet the Church is late to the airport!
Congregations were never meant to live in isolation, yet we often do — barely aware of what the congregation a few blocks away might be doing. We view other churches as competition, not potential partners.
We are defying our mission.
Rabbi Herring discusses this in the essay we referenced in two previous posts (1 and 2). He suggests that organizations, including religious organizations are poised to enter a third era of Web capabilities— Web 3.
Having lived in the interactive era of Web 2.0 for not quite a decade, we have an understanding about the nature of online community, the need for a vital organizational web presence and the requirement of interactive and dynamic communication with constituents. While still in its early evolutionary stages,
I’d like to suggest that we are already in transition to a Web 3.0 environment. Web 2.0 meant that Jewish organizations needed to replicate their bricks and mortar presence online. Bricks and mortar and bytes and click ran parallel to one another.
Web 3.0 means that defining principles of online social media, like collaboration, co-creation, improvisation and empowerment must now be practiced in the physical world. In other words, the characteristics of the web that enable individuals to self-direct their lives must now flow back into all organizational spaces: in someone’s home, on the web or inside institutional walls. This is definitely another paradigm shift for organizations.
Rabbi Herring’s observations are astute. Those few congregations that have embraced the power of the media are about to take their interactive and collaborative experiences and transform what goes on within their brick and mortar churches. It will be the elusive formula for transformation.
We at 2×2 are starting to dip our toes into this water, cooperating with some of the churches that correspond with us. It’s exciting, It’s a little scary. But it is invigorating and promising.
Those that haven’t bothered to understand Web 1 and are oblivious to Web 2 will not reap the benefits of Web 3.
Someone said recently . . .
Bragging today about avoiding the internet is like bragging you can’t read!
Rabbi Herring suggests that there is a “club” aspect to religious life.
The rabbi and blogger discusses the way religious, civic and non-profits rotate leadership, sharing expertise. He recognizes that organizations benefit from working with a field of trusted leaders. But he points to a serious downside.
“In this model of involvement, there was a right way and a wrong way to get things done and one year’s program often served as the next year’s template. This pattern of involvement created predictability for organizations but, over time, unresponsiveness in addressing new community problems.…
“Yet, this informal rotation of leaders from one organization to the next created the appearance of a privileged club and also fostered a narrower sense of communal vision.”
This is often true within Christian leadership circles.
Just this week, I opened a newsletter from a local Lutheran Service Agency. I glanced at the Board of Directors. The names were familiar. Some of them had served on the same board off and on for decades. Other names I recognized from other Lutheran Agency and Synod boards, councils, and committees. Many of them, too, have been serving for decades.
A great pool of expertise . . . sure! But the same pool of leadership is likely to ensure that proposed initiatives will be cookie-cutter in nature. They aren’t settled in these leadership roles because they rocked the boat! They are appointed, elected, and re-elected because they are predictably safe in their leadership style.
Same people, similar thinking. At worst, the boards become rubber stamps for leadership. And all in all, there is an element of the “club.”
I recently read reports of the last Biennial Meeting of the ELCA. Wow! It was exciting. It was inspiring. It was moving. People had stories to tell. But I didn’t get a sense that anything happened, that problems were hashed out, that new directions were forged. It appears to have been a showcase for the leadership “club.”
Synod Assemblies, too, have a “feel good” (strike that) “feel great” ambiance. The voices of the Assembly are drowned out by the “show.” Participants must return to their churches pumped with stellar reports.
This was reflected in one of our Ambassador visits. One pastor introduced the lay representative to a Synod Assembly that had taken place just the week before. The young woman told of her thrill at being there, her awe in meeting the bishop, and the exciting worship expression. She added that she couldn’t remember much about the meeting part and didn’t understand a lot of it. But it was a great experience. She couldn’t wait to attend again.
If the Church is an organization charged with service in the world where service is most needed, you’d think there would be some sobering discussions leading to unsettling feelings, cries for solutions and service, and the introduction of new issues that might open a door for the interests of new leaders.
But church problems are pretty much glossed over in quickly read reports. Questions? You have 10 minutes. On to the next stirring worship service.
The Church can so easily become a club. If you are “in,” you work hard to stay “in.” If you venture to raise issues, you risk informal (or even formal) censure and you may never feel like a part of your church again.
Is it any wonder that people are not breaking down the door to get “in”?
Religion — at least the way it has been understood up until now — is facing a modern challenge. It has little to do with numbers. Numbers are just evidence of a major societal change.
It has to do with the way we are wired. Young minds — Generation Y and the Millenials — have known only an interconnected world. These connections were not organized for them by their parents or tradition. They were formed by each individual opting in and out of friendships, groups, and causes at will. More than that, these generations have been taught to use modern tools to initiate actions to address their sense of justice and righteousness.
The thought of joining a church, building trust, identifying a need, communicating the need, and then rallying volunteers and support to address the need is foreign to modern thinking. This is good! The old way is archaic and inefficient by modern capabilities.
Those of us still hanging on to the past may still value a well-run organization. We look for leaders who can work together to define goals and connect with people and resources to achieve goals. Our measure of successful participation is how well members obey and contribute.
Our children don’t care about “organizations.” They are not just avoiding organized religion. They are not joining Leagues and Service Clubs either. This is not a lack of empathy. They realize they don’t need to sign on as foot soldiers in a cause defined by someone else. They can create their own networks and contribute their passion their own way.
Independence from structure is just beginning to hit the Church, where structure is worshiped at the right hand of God. If the Church thinks we are going to come up with innovative programs to attract younger generations back into the pew to contribute to church community the way their parents or grandparents did, we are chasing a dream. An expensive, doomed to fail, dream.
Join Bishop Ruby Kinisa as she visits small churches "under cover" to learn what people would never share if they knew they were talking to their bishop.
Undercover Bishop will always be available in PDF form on 2x2virtualchurch.com for FREE.
Print or Kindle copies are available on Amazon.com.
For bulk copies, please contact 2x2: creation@dca.net.
MISSION INSPIRATION OFFER
A visual and biblical guide to help congregations define their missions.
Contact Info
You can reach
Judy Gotwald,
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at
creation@dca.net
or 215 605 8774
Redeemer’s Prayer
We were all once strangers, the weakest, the outcasts, until someone came to our defense, included us, empowered us, reconciled us (1 Cor. 2; Eph. 2).
Be calm. Wait. Wait. Commit your cause to God. He will make it succeed. Look for Him a little at a time. Wait. Wait. But since this waiting seems long to the flesh and appears like death, the flesh always wavers. But keep faith. Patience will overcome wickedness.
—Martin Luther
