Church camps are one of the Church’s greatest, relatively untapped resources.
Smart churches find a way to get as many members as possible to camp for at least a few days each summer. The Return On Investment is in the quality of lay participation and lay leadership. This goes a long way to creating a vibrant atmosphere in any congregation.
Camp is no longer just for kids. Many camps have multiple offerings throughout the summer for various age groups, including adults and families.
Church camps foster spirituality.
Camp is a place for reflection and introspection—but this activity takes place among a group of people who provide validation for spiritual exploration. Campers quickly lose the self-consciousness that might otherwise hold them back.
Church camps add new perspective and foster innovation.
Camps often use newer church music, so when your congregation turns to newer music, you’ll have a core group that either already knows or is mentally prepared to learn. The same applies to dance, drama and the visual arts, worship and teaching.
Church camp stretches your congregation’s talents.
People will try out new skills in their new (non-home) environment. Encouraged, they return to their churches ready to go to work.
Church camps help us break through centuries of stuffiness.
Silliness is always part of camp. Silliness helps us learn to not take ourselves and our preconceived notions too seriously.
Church camps create a network between participating congregations.
Campers develop friendships that span lifetimes. The Church needs to develop this resource. Congregations are always tempted to solve all problems independently.
Church camp is a reality check.
Today, more than ever, it is helpful to step away from the busy world and technological demands. At camp, we can find our roots and take a few days each summer to nurture and water them.
Although the focus of church camps is on the individual camper, those individual campers return to their congregations with renewed spirit and energy. In turn, it benefits the congregation.
Pity the church that doesn’t tap this great resource.
The Church often has a hard time looking outside its monastic walls for advice. In this case it may be necessary. There are models to follow; they may not be created by Church organizations.
A wonderful thing about Social Media is that it forces you to work a plan. We have published a basic plan to follow in crafting a Social Media Strategy. We adapted it from information shared in forums held for corporations. If you don’t want to work a plan, you can keep holding monthly meetings— trying one disconnected and ineffective idea after another. This can certainly keep you busy!
Here are a few models worth reviewing. There is something to be learned from each. Churches can mix and match to suit their demographic and particular needs. Most of these are examples of blogs, which is where we think congregations should start their Social Media exploration.
Pastoral Leadership in Blogging
Expect resistance until the power of the blog is understood. Pastors will be tempted to republish their Sunday sermon—which no one is likely to read. Pastors should consider a new art form in preaching—short, concise thoughts with an appealing twist that readers will come to anticipate. Aim for 200 words. The model to study: Marketing Guru Seth Godin. His daily blog offers an insight on many topics. Every so often he points readers to a longer document or even a book. He looks at things people in his field see every day and instead of just reporting them, he analyzes them, making his readers question the accepted.
Did we say this was new? It is actually a big part of the New Testament! We call them parables.
Community Building in Blogging
Jason Stambaugh of heartyourchurch.com teaches how to use Facebook to create community in the church. He uses examples from his own Facebook work in his small Maryland community church.
Teaching Through Blogging
Here is untapped potential for leadership training in the church. The model to follow is Michael Stelzner’s socialmediaexaminer.com. In just a couple of years, Mike built a business around teaching social media and is respected worldwide. His model taps into internet scalability. You can join his clubs and get advice from thousands of people.
Thought Leadership Through Blogging
2×2 attempts to engage readers in analyzing the mission of the Church to find ways to serve that complement traditional church ways but not to the exclusion of innovation. There are enough people who do little but complain that things are failing in the Church. We try to find the reasons why things are going wrong. This is hard for the Church, since tradition is important and leaders rarely like to be seen as mavericks. Questions are not likely to be raised by church-sponsored employees or media. We try to do the job they can’t—or won’t.
Inspiration Through Blogging
One of 2×2’s member churches publishes a Bible verse daily. Nothing more. Just a Bible verse in their followers inbox each day. Seems so simple. It is often very comforting to start the day with a Bible quote. These can be scheduled to go out automatically, so it isn’t as hard as it might sound. Just pick out a month’s worth of favorite quotes and schedule them using a service such as HootSuite. You can always add an insight or prayer as in devotional books.
Networking Through Blogging
Blogging excels at building networks. If you start a blogging ministry, you are likely to be surprised by the people who find you and follow you. It takes a some time but soon your congregation will have friends all over the world. 2×2 is a model for this, too.
Church Ministry Help Through Blogging
Pastors can turn to workingpreacher.org, published by Luther Seminary, to kickstart their thinking of the weekly scriptures. There is no reason why this concept can’t work for congregations and lay people too. Pastors can turn to sermons4kids for ideas for children’s sermons. Both lay and professional church workers can be part of a community serving children’s ministry. We didn’t set out to make this our specialty, but we noticed in our statistics that the number one search term which brings people to our site is “object lessons for adults.” We have responded by posting an object lesson once every week or two.
Be A Pioneer
Create your own model and share it. That’s the power of the internet!
You’ve heard the stories of the worst in Social Media.
Teenage girls lured by older men.
Bank accounts raided.
Private moments broadcast to the world by someone with a grudge.
The potential for greatness outranks the use by the criminal element.
Personal stories of inspiration abound.
Information is available to anyone, anywhere, anytime.
Dictatorships have toppled.
Long-lost friends and family members have been reunited.
The gap between classes is blurred.
Most of what is wrong with the internet was happening before there was the internet. Meanwhile the potential and effect of good has grown beyond the exponential.
Social Media is a tool. It is can be used for good. It can be used for evil. One thing is certain. It is going to be used. Better to be in the game than watching from the sidelines.
What do people in the Church fear?
We fear that someone will criticize us.
What else is new!?
We may fear that we may not meet expectations or do something wrong. Everyone makes mistakes. The online community is actually pretty good about tolerating typos and grammatical errors. We learn very quickly how easy it is to hit the send button by accident. The online community tends to be gracious about correcting one another, too. So, if a mistake is made, you can take it back.
The Church may fear that our weaknesses will be exposed. This may very well happen, but there is a good side to this. We can address concerns early and directly. This has improved the business environment. Corporate leaders know they no longer operate behind closed doors. If it has been good for corporate America, it will likely be good for the corporate Church, as well.
We may fear the exposure of our most personal concerns. This is something the world is coming to grips with. Any notion of privacy in the world is pretty well shot. Worrying about this is yearning for the past. Better to learn to be prepared to react to criticism. (This will be a new skill for many church leaders.)
We may fear not being able to predict the outcome. Well, we can predict the outcome of most of our usual evangelical efforts — and it is pretty dismal! Serendipity is a delightful part of the internet. Where’s the old pioneer spirit?!
Using Social Media is like learning to swim. You have to get wet. You have to lean forward and let yourself fall to take your first dive. You have to swallow a little bit of water. You’ll splash some of the people around you and get splashed by others, but if our hearts are in the right place, we’ll all be good-natured about helping one another keep our heads above water. Don’t be afraid to be part of the wonderful digital world God has blessed us with in the 21st century. You’ll have plenty of company!
A recent study of social media reveals that there are four main barriers to the implementation of Social Media in organizations.
They are:
Lack of knowledge and understanding
Fear
Absence of a model to follow
Unprepared leadership
The Church as an organization should study these barriers if we are to overcome them.
Each fear can be overcome. We will address each fear broadly now and later in more depth.
Lack of knowledge and understanding
The Church is no different that any other organized entity. We are facing a new world with enormous potential. We are all novices at how this new media works and we are uncertain as to how it will affect us and our mission. Scary!
Fear
There is always the fear of abuse. This is nothing new. Religion has had abusers in the past and the Church has moved forward regardless. Social Media may actually overcome some of this. It is entirely open platform. Participants lay their hearts on the line and others — anyone — can respond.
The biggest fear is not about abuse but in facing the changes that are necessary to implement Social Media. Are we prepared for the changes that are likely to happen? How do we proceed?
Absence of a model to follow
There are models to follow, but they are not necessarily in the religious realm. Until the Church adopts Social Media as a viable tool, it must follow the models of the secular world. (We might learn something in the process.) There is no way around the fact: someone has to create the first model.
Leadership
Church leaders are busy being church leaders the way they were trained to be church leaders—anywhere from one to sixty years ago. This new tool is outside the experience and comfort level of many.
The Church must recognize that leadership in Social Media may come from the bottom up. Lay people are likely to have mastered these skills while clergy were studying Greek! Both are valuable! It doesn’t do much good to understand the Gospel and then ignore the tools that will help you share your understanding.
The ELCA hitched its star to the Episcopal wagon a number of years ago and announced with great hoopla that we are now in full communion. (Called to Common Mission)
Lutherans were promised that the alliance was for flexibility, broadening the resource pool. Lutheran clergy and Episcopal priests could now vie for calls and employment in either denomination.
But it has resulted in more fundamental changes. It is changing the way we think and act, which isn’t necessarily bad. But it’s not necessarily good either. Martin Luther left a good legacy.
The ELCA and its predecessor bodies are historically a broad demographic with both low and high church values represented, often among ethnic or cultural lines. The American experience, which never answered to the Archbishop of Canterbury or any European figurehead, has traditionally no such loyalty to hierarchy.
The Lutheran tradition of congregational polity is a strength which small congregations should never be asked to sign away. Small churches must be free to adapt to their changing communities. This is harder to do under hierarchies. Hierarchies understand “big.”
Did the decision, advocated mostly by clergy, change our polity? No, but . . .
Are there statistics on how much this has benefited anyone?
How much resource sharing has been going on? (There doesn’t seem to be a lot of resources for either denomination to share!)
It is becoming increasingly clear that dissenting Lutherans were correct about many things.
Lutheran leadership has become more and more hierarchical. It began with a shift in language, then in behavior.
Lay people don’t tend to care much about things like apostolic succession. We know that our bishops (which we used to call more appropriately “presidents”) are elected. Now every Lutheran clergy to be ordained must submit to Episcopal approval. Many of them have probably never set foot in an Episcopal church, but now their calling needs their blessing.
From reading this report, it is clear that we have sacrificed the wisdom of our experience to a troubled denomination.
The Episcopalians are so concerned that some want to scrap their leadership structure entirely, realizing they cannot support, nor do they need, a hierarchy. We have written about this before.
Meanwhile, Lutheran leadership is separating itself from its constituency more and more. They are planning to have full church assemblies every three years instead of two. If they operate like our local Synod Assembly, it won’t matter much—and that’s too bad. The regional assembly is fairly well orchestrated to get the approvals it wants with as little discussion as possible. But at least there was a chance of making a difference every two years. But then, maybe this is an admission that the hierarchy has less purpose.
Regardless, the action serves to alienate lay people — who still provide the support and funding for the mistakes made by the hierarchically minded.
Soon, if Lutherans want to rise to a call to change anything, they will have to wait three years. This may save money but it is unwise. Change is happening at a faster pace. More forums are needed, not fewer.
But the deed is done. We are in full communion with a denomination that doesn’t know where it is headed to the point that some talk about starting over. Have we been set up for a bait and switch?
If you think this shift in governance isn’t part of SEPA’s attitude toward small congregations, think again. In East Falls, Bishop Claire Burkat was assisting our Episcopal neighbors—we suspect for hire—while trying to destroy her own denomination’s church a few blocks away, hoping for assets to make up their huge deficit. The Episcopal Church in East Falls was of no stronger number than Redeemer with a far less desirable location for mission purposes. Bishop Burkat gave the Episcopalians of East Falls more consideration than the Lutherans.
Touch is important in our lives right from the start.
New parents react instinctively when their child breathes its first breath. They swoop their newborn into a loving embrace.
Touch continues to be among the most powerful senses.
Here is a video of how the sense of touch is immediately embraced by very young children. It shows a baby, barely old enough to walk, looking at a magazine. This child approaches the magazine as if it were an iPad, touching the images waiting in vain for a response.
The common form of greeting and agreement, the handshake, grows from our need to touch. In ancient days the outreached hand was a way of saying, “Look, I am not armed. I am your friend.”
The power of touch is central to this story in Mark.
The apostles (sounds like there was a good number of them) have returned from their 2×2 mission trips. It’s time for debriefing! They attempt to hold a retreat.
A couple of weeks ago, the Gospel was about one woman who stole Jesus’ healing power by touching his garment with faith. Jesus responded.
Now the word is out. People far and wide have heard about Jesus.
Everyone is clamoring to touch Jesus. They are carrying their ailing loved ones across the rocky, hilly countryside to get near enough to Jesus to touch him.
Touch is important in our world. Sometimes, when words fail, a hand on the shoulder or a sudden embrace comes to our rescue.
We find comfort in a kind touch. We are repulsed when the sense of touch is abused.
We long to be touched, to be connected to one another, to be connected to God. Think about that today as we pass the peace. When we touch someone, it should mean something.
On Sunday, September 9, from 3-5 pm, the Southeastern Pennsylvania Synod (SEPA) of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) will hold a discussion of the national body’s proposed social statement on criminal justice.
The Church’s concerns for justice might be more credible coming from people who do not hold themselves out as being immune from laws which apply to everyone else.
When faced with honest disagreements concerning Lutheran polity and interpretation of its constitutions, the ELCA and at least one regional body (SEPA Synod) has used the justice system to bully its members.
Instead of working with congregations as the constitutions define, SEPA made up its own rules, replacing their founding Articles of Incorporation with conflicting bylaws, putting congregations that actually read both documents at disadvantage.
This is counter to normal law. Articles of Incorporation outrank bylaws. The ELCA Articles of Incorporation even state that the regional bodies may not amend their constitutions in violation of the statutes of the founding charter. But that hasn’t stopped SEPA (and a few other synods, too).
SEPA proceeded to violate the statutes, betting that no one would stand in their way. When Redeemer, a member church, objected, their FIRST action was to file a law suit against them. Forget the constitutional grievance process.
Once they had the court’s attention, they argued that the case, which they filed, should not be heard because of separation of church and state.
The national church has watched in silence. They are busy regarding their leaders and disregarding their members.
This issue went to the Pennsylvania Appellate Court which dodged the issue, agreeing to no jurisdiction with an important dissenting opinion. The dissenting judges ruled that if the law is applied, the congregation’s arguments have merit and should be heard. If high-ranking judges disagree, there is room for honest disagreement within the church.
SEPA Synod views itself as above the law.
It would appear that SEPA Synod’s view of the justice system is that it exists as a tool to be used against dissenting members—an alternative to actually working out problems within their polity. It is a way to bypass the inconvenience of its own constitutions.
The draft statement includes a paragraph advocating responses of love and advocacy for those embroiled in the justice system. Redeemer has seen no such tolerance within the ELCA, SEPA Synod or even within its congregations. Summary of Draft Version of the Justice Statement
We suggest the ELCA and SEPA Synod stay out of this discussion until they can enter it with cleaner hands.
Redeemer, East Falls is too small to serve its “missional” purpose (“missional” is not a word but church people seem to understand it).
That was the premise used by Bishop Claire Burkat and her coterie. It was never true. It sounded good to the people they needed to convince in order to have their way—which had nothing to do with mission but was all about money and property and synod’s habitual deficit spending.
SEPA’s actions did tons of damage to our people, our congregation and to our neighborhood, but Redeemer’s mission continues to grow. That’s what happens when you work a plan with selfless resilience and flexibility!
One of our projects was to develop our ministry online (since we had no building). We started slowly, doing research and following best practices. The site grew slowly at first, but after about six months, it was apparent there was a foundation for steady growth and an inexhaustible potential.
The site has grown steadily over all. There are day-to-day peaks and valleys, but the weekly and monthly trends reveal steady growth that is picking up.
In the last two weeks a few remarkable things have begun to happen on www.2x2virtualchurch.com.
We now have 100 people who read out posts by email each day. We have an additional 50 unique visitors every day. Our weekly unique readership (not counting those who follow us on Facebook, Twitter or email) hovered between 180 and 275 for the last six weeks. Adding our subscribers or followers to that number puts us at around 1000 readers each week.
Our global reach is picking up. There are a few countries that check in daily—France, Canada, Great Britain, Netherlands, Australia, Kenya, Pakistan, the Philippines and most recently, India. Twice this week our foreign readership outpaced United States readers, at least until the very end of the day when there is often a surge in North American readership.
People are slowly beginning to participate in the discussion, often by email rather than on the site.
Yesterday, we had a request to find a way to have the site translated into Urdu, so Pakistani Christians might have access to our posts.
We invited churches to follow the site. That invitation has led to interesting friendships with four other congregations—two in Kenya, one in Pakistan and one near to us in Philadelphia.
Redeemer was never more able to fulfill its “missional” purpose. We believe our mission and ministry activities measure well with every other congregation in SEPA (large and small) — who now have the benefit of our resources.
Our Ambassadors read a flier advertising a church’s upcoming Vacation Bible School. It advertised classes for children up to age 10. Fourth grade.
Ten!
Ten is still fairly young to be the cut off age for the type of program VBS can be.
Many adults remember very little of their childhood before the age of eight. When these children become parents in another 10 or 15 years, they will have little to remember of Bible School to want to pass on to the next generation.
When Christian education stops at age 10, you end up in a few years with a church of unknowledgeable members—and probably a lot fewer of them. These unknowledgeable members will be expected to lead the church and vote on ministry decisions both within their congregations and in the broader Christian community. Without a strong church education, they will be puppets of the strongest influencers. We will become a Church of followers.
Why is age ten the cut off?
The easiest answer is that’s the age when children become involved in other activities.
But that’s the easy answer. There are other reasons. Some of them involve the Church’s inability to serve this age group.
Admittedly, the Church competes with a broad spectrum of organized activities for older children. It would be a shame if we were abandoning our youth’s faith because we have nothing to offer.
Children, still under the influence of parents, will find time when the family sees Christian education as a priority and when the educational experience meets their developmental needs. It is not acceptable to turn our backs on youth because we don’t know how to serve them and are unwilling to find a way.
Here are the challenges:
Older children are more work! Ten or eleven is the age that children are starting to come into their own and are more difficult for inexperienced volunteer teachers to handle. If we can’t train volunteers to work with our youth, we must find them. (See VBS-Aid concept).
It’s also the age when learning must become experiential. Older children cannot be confined to classroom talk. They must be challenged.
If churches want to continue to nurture youth beyond the age of ten, they must create learning environments and experiences that meet the children where they are developmentally.
The challenge of teaching older children requires more time. Older children must participate in a program with a sense of accomplishment or they won’t return.They must be free to experiment and discover their abilities. Middle School teaching is known for being hands on. A summer program for youth requires more than five days.
Older children need camaraderie. They want to be part of groups. Five day Bible Schools are not long enough to create a sense of community unless the activity is more intense than a classroom atmosphere usually allows.
Children this age need to be silly. We expect them to try new skills. They are self-conscious and prone to taking themselves seriously. Church education for children this age should give them a chance to laugh at themselves and just open up. Allowing them to be silly gives them a soft place to fall.
At times, children this age need to be dealt with in subdivided groups. While this goes against modern inclusive thinking, other fields are meeting the challenges of interesting youth by developing some separate programming along gender lines. One reason sports is perennially popular for this age is that sports recognizes this need. The music and art world is discovering that boys become involved with enthusiasm when they are not with girls. Ask boys this age to sing with girls and you will get very few volunteers. Allow them to sing with just boys and they sing with an energy you would never see in a mixed chorus. Here is a video posted by one proud teenage boy singer. Boys-only ballet programs are cropping up and improving enrolments. Here’s video about boy dancers. Giving girls a chance to bond as girls has similar benefits. They are maturing at a different rate and may need a forum for what’s on their minds. The challenge is to make sure that their time together is enhancing their potential not excluding them.
Programs that separate boys and girls find that when the groups merge (which should be often) there is greater involvement among both boys and girls.
Churches rarely take the time to consider educational developments like this, but there may be something for us to learn.
If we want our young people to continue their church involvement into adulthood, all congregations must address the challenge. To assume lack of interest on the part of young people without any effort to interest them is short-changing them and our future.
Amos 7:7-15, Psalm 85 verses 8-13 and Mark 6:14-29
Today’s theme is all about judgment.
In the Amos story, the Lord appears to the reluctant prophet Amos with a plumb line. This would have been a common household tool at a time when people built their own houses and fences. In this passage, the plumb line is symbolic of judgment. The Lord intends to make sure his people measure up. Amos is sent off on a plumb line mission. (Talk about object lessons for adults!)
The Gospel story for today is the execution of John the Baptist, performed against the better judgment of Herod. His dilemma: do the right thing and break a bad promise or live up to conniving expectations and deflect potential criticism for not keeping his word.
For an object lesson today, use a modern tool that symbolizes people’s fear of being judged. Carry a clip board with a piece of paper and a pencil. Walk up to a willing member or two and engage them in idle chatter. (Warn them beforehand.) Ask about their work? How’s the family? While you talk, pretend to take notes or be checking boxes.
After two or three casual interviews. Return to your preaching location and engage members in a conversation about how they felt having a conversation with someone who was taking notes and in effect grading them.
Tie their answers to the Old Testament story of Amos and the role he has been assigned—to go among God’s people and prophesy in order to keep them on the straight and narrow.
Follow up the story with today’s Psalm (85:8-13). It, too, is about judgment, but it stresses restoring our relationship with God. Bring them back to the plumb line. The walls will be rebuilt. This time they will be built on a foundation of forgiveness.
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,
the moderator of 2x2,
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
Church camps are one of the Church’s greatest, relatively untapped resources.
