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Ministering in a Design-Driven World: Branding Part 2

An article in Forbes today talks about how design is now a pivotal part of any organization’s identity.

The article speaks to the Church. Churches are accustomed to poor design in their publications. They work with poor equipment and volunteers much of the time. The church newsletter, dotted with cheesy clip art, is fairly standard even among large churches. It’s almost a universal branding—and the branding message is not a good one.

Your members will accept this approach to design. But  is it working beyond your church membership? Is it helping you communicate with the world — a world that is increasingly influenced by design.

Don’t despair. Good design is accessible even to design amateurs.

Facebook makes design simple. All you have to do is upload photos. Everything will fit into the design template. There is still an art to finding, choosing and using photos. Taking your own photos is so easy today, there should be nothing stopping you.

But Facebook is Facebook. One design fits all!

Blogging formats offer the same professional design capabilities with more variety. Start your blog by choosing a theme — there are hundreds to choose from. It will be easy to create a clean and functional web site using a theme (template).

Ask your members to spend an hour taking photos of the neighborhood for you to use on your congregation’s web site, blog or Facebook. Make a contest out of it to get more people involved and add to the fun! They don’t have to be “church” photos. They can be street scenes, store fronts, parks, schools, gardens, fields, sports, architectural features or public events. This will communicate to the unchurched that your congregation cares about the neighborhood.

Be cautious about using images of people without their permission. You can do this by artful cropping. Watch your local TV news for tips. Whenever they take school footage for example they tend to show backs of heads or images of kids walking or playing with heads totally cropped. If the people are your members and they say OK — go ahead and use full images.

Clip art has come of age. There are great sources of photos available for free use if you add a photo credit at the bottom of your post.  Try Photopin or Flickr.

Learn to use a photo image editing program.  (Type “free photo editing software” into your search engine.) Most computers have a basic application pre-installed.  Start by learning to size and crop your photos. Then learn to add type or adjust colors.

It’s time to say good-bye to the amateurish church newsletter. People expect more today. And it isn’t hard to give it to them. It helps to brand your church as progressive and forward-looking, not stuck in the past with out-dated communication skills.

04 May 2012

Ideas for Object Lessons for Adults

The most popular all time post on 2×2’s web site is a short article published last fall after Redeemer’s Ambassadors visited a small congregation in Fort Washington, Pa. We wrote about the pastor ending the service with a brown bag object lesson. An adult member of the congregation presented an object hidden in a brown bag and the pastor gave an impromptu sermonette about the object.

The feature was obviously popular with the congregation, almost all of whom were adults.

That little post gets search engine traffic every day!

We had seen this technique before—used with children who enjoyed the approach for the novelty but were not able to make the cognitive connections required in object lessons. Adults are better at abstract thinking — but we tend to limit the technique to children!

The challenge in developing object lessons for adults is to enhance the “sermon illustration”—the staple of any adult sermon. Objects for adults can be more complicated. But it’s still possible.

Next Sunday’s gospel is the “I am the vine. You are the branches” scripture.

The most obvious object is a vine and branch. Use two vines, one with a flourishing branch and one with a withered branch cut away. Vinca minor (periwinkle) is in bloom right now in Pennsylvania.

What other “adult” images would work? With adults, you don’t have to present the actual object. It helps, but adults can think abstractly. Here are some other “objects” that might illustrate the relationship Jesus describes.

  • Computer networks. Most adults know how it feels to be have your email disrupted.
  • Spinal chords. Once broken the limbs are paralyzed.
  • Family trees. People who don’t know their family backgrounds or feel separated from family devote their lives to finding family connections. Perhaps you know a story to tell from your own experience. There was a story in the news this week about a boy who grew up not knowing his background and then saw his picture on an old milk carton from 30 years ago.
  • Have someone call you while you are starting the sermon, so you can pull out your cell phone. Have a short conversation, perhaps feigning embarrassment. Then tell the person that you are in church right now and invite the people to shout out to them. Talk about connectedness. Invite the congregation to pull out their cell phones and connect with someone right then and there. Point out that their presence in the sanctuary, God’s House, is connecting to whomever they may have called and the connection can reach all over the world. Message: Stay connected to the vine, but take the role of being a branch seriously.

There is a great website for children’s sermons — almost all of which include an object. (Redeemer and 2×2 were major contributors to this site before our doors were locked.) Use this site for research and apply the ideas to adult sensibilities. Check out the sermon submission collection in addition to their featured sermon ideas.

03 May 2012

One Last Word from the Church You Love to Hate

The Annual Assembly of the Southeastern Pennsylvania Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America convenes this Friday.

In 2009, the SEPA Assembly voted to allow Bishop Burkat and SEPA to take Redeemer’s property. The vote was in defiance of their own governing rules. Someone should have challenged the constitutionality right there and then.

But they didn’t. They followed the crowd.

The vote dealt with nothing but property. Bishop Burkat interpreted the vote as permission to do anything she pleased with Redeemer. She had already declared us ineligible to vote with NO constitutional authority. This part of our appeal was ignored by Synod Assembly.

She used the vote about our property to justify a personal and vindictive attack on Redeemer members. Lesson learned: Speak up for what you believe in SEPA/ELCA and have your livelihood threatened. (In East Falls, we call it the SEPA Inquisition.)

SEPA clergy and congregations remain silent. Bullying works.

And so, with no vote of the congregation and no discussion, an entire congregation was excommunicated from the ELCA and SEPA Synod. “Get out and hand us the keys.”

At least the remaining congregations know what will become of them if they dare to challenge leadership. The pattern is well documented. Your clergy will disappear. Your calls and letters will go unanswered. There will be a knock on the door. You’ll be locked out. It’s legal now, because no one spoke up. Any individual in the Church who dares to protest will have their lives turned inside out and upside down.

No one is doing a thing to stop it.

Synod Council has been ineffective at representing the congregations they serve. They fell in line behind the bishop early on. They have been hiding behind her skirts ever since.

Redeemer is still an active worshiping congregation, despite the abuse. We still have faith that Lutherans will speak up. It’s a Lutheran tradition, after all.

Redeemer’s ministry will continue regardless of the strength of SEPA’s backbone.

Redeemer is not closed. We are locked out of God’s House by SEPA Synod — its bishop, its Synod Council, its Synod Assembly and all its congregations and clergy. Shame!

Will  SEPA Synod 2012 make a difference? Probably not.

The people of East Falls will always be the people the Lutherans of SEPA turned away.

02 May 2012

Let Go and Let God. It was never more possible!

Social Media is going to change the Church—whether or not the Church participates.

The Church is slow to embrace the power of this influence in our lives. It goes against the way the Church has worked for a very long time.

Trust and obey. Foundational words of faith. It means to trust and obey God, by the way.

Somehow the God part gets forgotten. Keeping Christians in line becomes an emphasis of anyone feeling empowered. The lines drawn by church leaders can be moving targets. Ideas change from century to century, decade to decade, and nowadays, year to year.

No one dares to quote the Bible to justify slavery anymore, but it worked for nearly 2000 years.

It worked when slaves had no voice.

Centuries of habit are going to be hard to break, but the time has come to trust the people of God. If we do something egregiously heretical, there are any number of forums for redress. There is no longer a need to monitor the thinking and voice of individual Christians.

We have always believed in this. It’s just been hard to practice.

We teach every three-year-old — Let your light shine.

Then we start to add the “buts” until their little lights are snuffed out.

The Church has never had more potential power. It can motivate and move EVERY member. You don’t have to roster us. You don’t have to qualify us. You don’t have to sort us out by race, age, status, or genitalia. We’ve been structuring our faith around such nonsense for a long time. Someday we are either going to laugh at our historical efforts to limit or exclude (thereby protecting power) — or hang our heads in shame.

This potential power of social media should spur our efforts to effectively share our faith outside the church. We are going to have to be part of the dialog outside our walls — because that’s where the conversations are taking place.

We have to be educators in many forums. We have to mix with the rest of the human race.

That approach has been taken before!

Let Go and Let God.

photo credit (retouched): crazyluca69 via photo pin cc

02 May 2012

Valuing the Church’s Chatterati

A recent business report recommended that a company’s “chatterati” are as valuable as top management and should be compensated accordingly.

Chatterati are the most effective social media employees. They chat. They personally engage the customers. They trouble shoot problems before they become crises. They know who is in charge, but they also know the people who will solve the problems — in charge or not.  They are social managers. They’ve got the gifts of gab and initiative…and they are a treasure.

How this applies to congregational social media endeavors remains to be seen, but it is an interesting development. 2×2 believes the Church is experiencing a social crisis. Its historic top-down management style is now attempting to manage people who have no familiarity with religious authority, question the need for it, and are prepared to comfortably opt out of religions that stress it.

Chatterati have been around forever. In the past, chatterati had no real value to the church because the only valued communicators were those with theological training. They had sole access to the pulpit and to publishing. If you wanted a voice in the Church, you had to be part of the system.

The challenge to the Church today is to create a channel to put the skills of natural communicators to work.

Even as the mainline Church gasps for breath, it will try to control its message, checking for doctrinal compliance and making sure no one steps on current leadership toes. This will become a futile exercise. The ability of the Church to control its message is gone. The better tactic would be to foster, nurture and take part in resulting dialog. Strong Church leaders will be influencers, not dictators.

The Pope’s recent criticism of women religious is an example. There was a day when scathing criticism from the Vatican would have the religious orders shivering in their habits. The recent reaction from female religious leaders was more on the order of a bemused shrug. 

What’s happening is not a plot or disrespectful defiance. It is a result of technology’s influence on the world. The barriers between leaders and followers have crumbled. Governments are dealing with it. Business is embracing it. The many benefits far outweigh any need for caution. It’s here to stay.

Church, get your chatterati on board. You are going to need them!

photo credit: Swamibu via photo pin cc
01 May 2012

Making SEPA a denomination we can take pride in

SEPA delegates will gather in just two days to review their year and plan a future.

They will celebrate various ministry efforts. They will elect leaders.

They will try to overlook their failures and shortcomings just as they have tried for years to sweep away their budget problems and the resulting attacks on member churches.

Adopting huge deficit budgets and targeting member churches for closure and asset acquisition was standard operating procedure for the first few years of Bishop Burkat’s tenure as bishop. As an accepted practice, it was easy to vote against the only church to protest. That was three years ago.

Few SEPA delegates and clergy realize the damage that SEPA Synod has inflicted on the lives of Redeemer members and their community. It’s not because we haven’t communicated. It’s because it’s easy to look to someone else to solve the problems created with a hasty vote that failed to take into account the issues Redeemer was raising.

What has been happening in East Falls in SEPA’s name is the Church at its worst. It has been a display of greed, pride, and misplaced priorities. It has been an abuse of power and an abdication of Gospel mandates.

Redeemer was targeted for its property and assets. There is no denying that. Statistics were fudged for presentation to Synod Assembly in 2008 and 2009. SEPA in court has admitted that there were far more than 13 Redeemer members in 2008—the number reported to Synod Assembly by four trustees. Their statistics at the time had twice that—as 2×2 documented here and one of the trustees testified in court two months ago. SEPA lawyers went on in court to hold Redeemer to a quorum for six times that number. Which is true—13, 23-26, or 78? It’s 13 when SEPA wants delegates to vote their way. It’s 78 when they want the courts to rule an improper quorum.

Redeemer’s constitutional rights were denied. Meanwhile, issues were taken to court with the church taking every legal power to attack members of Redeemer while claiming First Amendment immunity from the law.

It’s a mess, SEPA. A four-year mess. It’s been happening under your watch.

You have an opportunity this weekend to insist your leadership seek peace with Redeemer. If the church cannot find peace with its own members, the message it preaches is meaningless. The Church should model compassion, atonement and reconciliation.

If SEPA Lutherans fail to demand better behavior from their leaders this year, there will be next year. But wouldn’t it be a powerful witness to draw this conflict to a close sooner and proactively rather than experience another year of hateful maneuvering against your own?

Redeemer still has hope — and a viable, active ministry.

Peace is work. It’s supposed to be the work of the Church.

The issues are not going to disappear.

01 May 2012

God is doing something new . . . with Redeemer, East Falls

SEPA has a new website for congregations to share ministry initiatives. SEPA has been ignoring Redeemer ministry initiatives for years. We doubt our contributions to their website would be recognized.

We’ll share them here.

Please keep in mind that the initiatives we list are in addition to the work every church does — planning worship, caring for the needs of congregants, and witnessing our faith.

God has been doing something new at Redeemer for a long time. 

Ministry to and by immigrant community. God has been reaching out to immigrants through Redeemer for nearly 16 years. How is this new? There are two traditional methods of reaching out to ethnic communities.

  1. Have separate worship services with separate leadership, creating a community within a community.
  2. Have one size fits all liturgical offerings.

Redeemer’s approach differed because we worked hard to unite new church members with older community members. We could write a separate entry for many of the techniques we integrated into our community life. It has been a broad-based comprehensive outreach effort. It was successful. The congregation was growing (probably at the fastest rate of any SEPA congregation) when SEPA Synod Bishop Claire Burkat (sensing that a long-desired wish to control our property might be slipping away) declared, “White Redeemer must be allowed to die; black Redeemer…we can put them anywhere.”

God is doing something else new . . 

Community involvement.  SEPA Synod locked Redeemer members out of God’s House and kept the doors locked for nearly three years. Meanwhile, Redeemer has found new ways of maintaining our worship life. We’ve built on our existing relationships with the community. An offer of free meeting space has strengthened our connections with the local theater club. We have become more involved in the East Falls Community Council. At a recent Community Council meeting we sat and listened to SEPA Representative Rev. Patricia Davenport tell the community they are interested in having a Word and Sacrament church here. Meanwhile they haven’t a clue as to what to do with the property they took from us — that was being used as a Word and Sacrament church with a vibrant ministry.

God is doing something new . . 

Ambassadors Program. Without a church home, Redeemer representatives began visiting other churches, learning from them and sharing with them. This has broadened our traditions . . . even as SEPA calls us closed. We are seeing the common challenges of small churches and are gaining an  advantage in finding ways to serve small faith communities.

God is doing something new . . . 

Internet Ministry. We experimented with our web-based ministry with great success. We are still collecting ideas and implementing initiatives through our website and watching very carefully how the site is viewed and what problems are most on readers’ minds. We are challenged to find ways to respond to the needs we discover . . and they are very interesting.

God is doing something new . . .

Worldwide mission impact. Redeemer is in conversation with church leaders from all over the world, using the internet to grow ministry. We believe our work will have widespread influence in the regional church and worldwide among Lutherans and interdenominationally. We will create a strong base of support for initiatives that will help small churches. We believe it is possible to fund small ministries through initiatives that compensate for the challenged offering plate.

God is doing something new . . .

Justice. Redeemer is learning the cost of standing for what we believe in and are learning the weaknesses of Lutheran government. We are in conversation with other small congregations struggling with their cash-strapped synods. We hope our experience will one day make the church we love (despite its attacks on our members) stronger. We envision a church active in mission in new ways with renewed vision for a new generation ministering to a changing world.

God has more work cut out for us . . .

Reconciliation. We hope that one day SEPA Lutherans feel powerful enough in God’s love to reconcile with us. That too will break new ground.

SEPA was stronger with Redeemer than it is without us.

30 Apr 2012

“I have the power.” Where have we heard that before?

God created many small things, including small churches, with enormous power.

Today’s scripture from John 10:18 says (Jesus speaking of giving his life), “No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it up again.”

The words sound familiar to Redeemer. Bishop Burkat was heard to say four years ago at a gathering in Chicago, ELCA headquarters, “I have the power to close that church and I intend to close it.”

Within two days she came to Redeemer supposedly for a “mutual discernment” meeting. She brought with her a lawyer, a sizable posse of support which had not been announced as coming. She also had a locksmith hiding behind the property out of sight.

Constitutionally, Bishop Burkat doesn’t have the power to seize congregational property. That’s clearly spelled out in Synod’s Articles of Incorporation.  We’ve been pointing this out to SEPA clergy for three years.

Bishop Burkat is getting away with her interpretation of her power because no one dares stop her. Why?

The courts have said they do not have jurisdiction in intrachurch disputes. Four years of costly legal maneuvering and the case was never heard. Courts want church people to solve their own problems.

Church people operating under the structure of the ELCA seem to be unable to do this. We can guess that they fear the vindictive treatment received by the members of Redeemer who dared to challenge Bishop Burkat. It has been horrific, but SEPA congregations don’t want to be bothered with nastiness.

The latest judge in four years of courtroom drama pointed out to Synod that there are legitimate constitutional questions. The split decision favoring their position isn’t a “slam dunk” for Synod. Two judges agree with Redeemer’s position to the letter. That should interest SEPA Lutherans. A good number of you are no larger or stronger than Redeemer.

Good Shepherd Sunday is a good time for SEPA Lutherans to ponder how power within the church is meant to be used. Jesus used his power sacrificially. Bishop Burkat uses power for monetary gain and prestige.

It is Lutheran polity for the various arms of the church to work together, as interdependent equals. In Lutheran polity, leaders are servants. That’s true in Chicago, in Mt. Airy and in every congregation. There is no power — save that of the Gospel — in Lutheran polity. It’s time for us to insist on that.

And the courts have told you — it’s our job, not theirs.

photo credit: Creativity+ Timothy K Hamilton via photo pin cc
29 Apr 2012

Redeemer’s Entry in East Falls Chili Cook-Off Earns Mention

We didn’t win, but our entry got a prominent mention in the Roxborough Review for our inclusion of fresh pineapple. Adding fruit to spicy stews is something we learned from our African members. The sweetness cools down the fire of the chili.

This was our first year to enter the fairly new neighborhood tradition. We have grand plans for next year.

You haven’t tasted anything yet!

Redeemer is not closed: we are locked out of God’s House by SEPA Synod who claims to very much want a Word and Sacrament Church in East Falls — after working for more than a decade to destroy the Word and Sacrament church they already had here.

Meanwhile, Redeemer is still part of our neighborhood.

29 Apr 2012

The Ambassadors Celebrate an Important Birthday

Today, the Ambassadors of Redeemer will not be visiting churches. We are worshiping together on our home turf and celebrating the birthday of the ONE and ONLY SEPA pastor who took the time to know and appreciate the ministry of Redeemer Lutheran Church in East Falls before joining the throng who would see our ministry destroyed for Synod’s monetary gain.

This one pastor is a true man of God. He carries with him his Bible—its binding held together with tape, its pages curled with use. For the past three years, he has joined us in worship at least once a month, led us in communion, visited our sick and shut-ins, checked on our individual members periodically, and prayed for us daily.

Other SEPA pastors have done nothing.

SEPA, you can be proud of this dedicated servant. He is a model for you all, especially those new to ministry.

We’d use his name but we know he is not one for the spotlight. Happy birthday to a man of God.

29 Apr 2012