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 have spent these post-World War years of prosperity building a model for success that only a small percentage of congregations can hope to sustain. Many congregations exist and serve amid this atmosphere of hopelessness. It is not uplifting.
There is no need to wallow in this failure, pointing blame at the people, society or the clergy.
It just doesn’t matter. The model of Church as contained in a building and managed by a person trained in theology is about to be replaced. It’s long impending doom is at last being recognized. It was born of an era when the larger church controlled wealth and a feudal mentality, providing for its support, was ingrained.
When we found ourselves living in capitalist, industrial, corporate economies, it all began to crumble. The maintenance expenses exceeded the means of the communities we intended to serve. People became less and less engaged as more and more was expected.
No need to mourn this passing! What is going to evolve is going to be so much better!
The changes will be enabled by the First Estate (the Church) harnessing the power of the Fifth Estate (the web).
Imagine.
Here are just a few ways the Church is going to be transformed.
STRUCTURE
OLD: A hierarchy manages all education, communication and publishing, assuring that doctrine and tradition are maintained.
NEW: Congregations will seek help beyond denominational lines. It will be readily available to them online at a fraction of the expense.
OLD: A hierarchy oversees the placement of qualified leaders, with long “settled” ministries being the measure of success, making sure their salaries and benefits meet prescribed standards. Meanwhile, these desirable, settled congregations are constantly urged to “transform.”
NEW: Congregations will forsake the single pastor model as poor use of their resources. They will seek qualified help for specific short-term challenges and form ongoing relationships with several pastors. Flexible teams of ministers will serve without affiliating with any one congregation.
MISSION
OLD: A centralized office seeks theologically trained candidates, immerses them in a culture, provides additional training, and places them and their families all over the world. Congregations participate by giving offerings. Missionaries return every few years and make a tour of congregations to solicit continued support.
NEW: Individual congregations will begin to make contact with like-spirited Christians all over the world online. Denomination will be reflected in their actions not in their management. Many members will correspond, share and pray for one another with weekly engagement. Members of all ages will be online pen pals with multiple Christian fellowships. Eventually, congregations will raise money to send a few members of the congregation to visit, strengthening bonds begun online. The network of online churches will crisscross the world.
WORSHIP
OLD: Large structures with a dedicated building, common liturgy and accepted “playlist” of hymns is replicated across the country every few miles. One certified theologian is given status to repeat the words of our Lord from the Bible. Church members participate in assigned roles. Their names are listed a month in advance in the bulletin.
NEW: The structure of worship will embrace many cultures. Multiple church members will lead. Sermons will be preached online by the best articulators of the Word. Local discussions will elaborate on the Word. Members will become accustomed to weekly, spontaneous participation. Published liturgies and hymnals will be passe.
EDUCATION
CURRENT: Sunday School begins at age three and ends at age nine with desperate attempts to fill in the gap between childhood and old age with confirmation, youth ministry, singles clubs, and adult forums, following expensive curricula supplied by church hierarchy. Less than five percent of the congregation participate.
NEW: Churches, via their web sites, will link members to meaningful online forums, supplementing them with local engagement either online or in church. Short daily learnings will replace hour-long classes. Congregations linked online will share their resources and traditions.
STEWARDSHIP
OLD: Church members are encouraged to pledge to the maintenance of their building and sustenance of their clergy. Regional bodies, seminaries, and various social service entities within the church beg for additional funds. The national church adds to the appeal for dollars supplied by the same small pool of people.
NEW: Church buildings will have to multi-task their usage in the community to afford their cost. Many communities will rent or borrow appropriate space in the neighborhood. Regional bodies will provide fewer direct services. Their staffs and budgets will be trimmed substantially. Church social service agencies will completely abandon church affiliation as they recognize that cord was cut when they began seeking public funding. Congregations will choose to support service agencies that resonate with their sense of mission, regardless of their affiliation with religion. This will be an opportunity for church members to personally witness in the secular environment.
CHURCH MEMBERSHIP
OLD: Members are expected to attend worship regularly and to live within an easy commute of a church building.
NEW: Members can be anywhere in the world and participate in community online. Online statistics will be published along with membership and giving numbers.
TODAY
Much of this is already happening. 2×2 is part of this evolution revolution and already experiencing many of these transformations.
We can’t do it all ourselves, but we live in a world where we like to think we can.
In the world of corporate marketing, the “brand” is sacred. Corporate branders would cringe to think of sending their customers to a competitor. They would take one of these approaches.
Convince the customer they are wrong for needing something they do not offer.
You like contemporary worship? Our liturgies are much richer and more meaningful! Take a seat and listen!
You are being bullied? We are so sorry, but our mission is more about feeding the hungry. Our food pantry is open on Tuesday and Friday afternoons! Stop by!
Promise an answer so far down the line that it is likely to be useless to the person in need today.
You want youth programming? Come back in two years. We’re training someone right now in exactly what you are looking for.
This type of thinking can affect how congregations interpret their Mission Statements. Governing boards can start to weigh every challenge by measuring it against their published Mission Statement and what they are prepared to provide—not the actual needs of the neighborhood. The Mission Statement then becomes an excuse to turn a blind eye to the changing needs.
Part of the decline of the neighborhood church is that the church as a whole is unprepared for change. Denominational leaders strive to find long-term pastors for stable (they call them “settled”) positions. When this becomes problematic, lay people tend to pay the price.
Let’s learn from this failure. Do not use your Mission Statement as a rigid gatekeeper in approving every congregational venture. Instead, use it as an indicator of how you need to change.
Also realize, that the approved Mission of your congregation may not resonate with each member. Similarly, visitors to your congregation may not care at all about your mission. Most people first attend church for personal reasons. They come to be healed. They come to have their needs met.
Don’t expect everyone to embrace your lofty words.
Make sure that all the good intentions in creating a Mission do not blind you to reality.
Seekers coming to your door may not seem to fit into your Mission.
Your sense of Mission must be flexible. Otherwise, you may be a congregation with a sense of mission but no one to serve.
This can happen at every level of Church life. A congregation can go to their Regional Body and ask for help with a challenge that their neighborhood has encountered. After all, when neighborhoods change, you can expect challenges to. But it is not uncommon for the response from leaders to be some form of “That’s not in our Mission.”
What they are saying is “We don’t know how to help you.” And that’s OK, but churches and denominations must be aware of the needs and be prepared to direct people to those who can help.
Today’s Mission needs are bigger than congregations of any size! It is inappropriate to turn seekers with problems away without hope. We have to start building networks for serving. We have to start thinking in terms of team.
If a need is beyond your ability to serve, help seekers find direction. Don’t just give them a phone number. Accompany them to the agency or office that can serve them. Personally introduce them to individuals with the expertise to help. Your personal attention will build your reputation in your changing neighborhood.By personally taking part in finding help, you will strengthen your own abilities.
You Mission must be active and flexible and ideally linked to other Christians and neighborhood organizations that can help.
Denominations are well aware that the structure of the church faces challenges. As you work on branding your ministry consider these realities. Your mission/branding efforts have the best chance for success when all leaders are on the same page.
This is not always the case and lay members are often the last to know. Leadership in changing this is likely to come from lay Christians.
Church leaders know:
the church is playing a smaller role in community life.
the traditional membership base of the Church is dwindling.
for the first time in history the neighborhood demographics are shifting every ten years or less.
the mission of the Church is to embrace all populations.
Knowing all this, church leaders are dedicated to the existing structure. Until recently, it has supported them reasonably well. Mission strategy was simple: replicate the same ministry in neighborhood after neighborhood.
Today, many of the solutions they present to their congregations are both destined and designed to fail.
Church professionals come to congregations and point out that if they think they are going to reach more people like them, they are mistaken. They elaborate on what is obvious to the people living in the neighborhoods: their neighborhoods are changing. They preach a future of gloom and act surprised when people don’t jump on board.
Meanwhile, congregations see opportunity. They live and work every day in their changing neighborhoods. Their children play and attend school with the new neighborhood children. They recognize that they need leaders with different training. Help is hard to find.
The Church as a whole has been caught unprepared. Changing an institution is more difficult than changing a congregation. The Church diverts attention from its own shortcomings by concentrating on the failings of lay people.
The temptation for denominational leaders is to facilitate failure.
Finding and training leaders for congregations facing modern changes is their job/mission, but it is difficult. It is often easier to just give up on congregations that are dealing with the toughest demographic changes.
They are squandering legacy — which has enormous value!
Denominational leaders are actually taught to neglect certain parishes and allow them to die. Using Church jargon, they assign “caretaker” pastors who, unbeknownst to the congregations, are expected to do nothing but hold the hands of the faithful until they quit, move or die.
Conflict results when the faithful do not cooperate with this undisclosed agenda. Suddenly, they are “the enemy.” The only way to spread the Gospel under this “mission plan” is to destroy the existing faith community and start fresh. This buys the denomination time. They do not have to provide ANY services while they work on a mission plan. Church doors are locked for a while (weeks, months or years) until the community forgets that a church was there. This, too, is part of the plan.
The problem with this approach, outside of it being wholly unChristian, is that it is fairly easy for the people making up the new demographic to see the Church behaving at its worse.
They can see the disregard for the lay efforts of their neighbors who talked to them with pride about their church.
They can imagine where their own commitment to any “new” church might find them in 20 years or less.
They will sense that they are of value to the church only as long as they can contribute.
This must be recognized. The Church which was in serious decline before the recent recession is now in severe crisis. The lure of small congregations’ endowment funds and property values is tough to pass up. It has created predatory practices that are thinly disguised as “mission.”
The hierarchy has no confidence in its own message.
Predators soon turn to questionable, selfish strategies.
The people who have sacrificed for ministry are expendable. If they don’t leave on their own, displace them. If they resist, sue them.
We now have enough experience to know this approach is not working. Church members, during peaceful times, are taught to believe and trust in God. It is difficult to teach allegiance to God and suddenly demand allegiance to man.
Your pastor is the first person you must convince to embrace your plan. You must appeal to the passion (which may be dormant) that led him or her to seminary in the first place.
Make sure your pastor knows what your leaders envision and what you expect from leadership.
If your pastor thinks he or she may need more training, try to set up an “internship” for a week or two with a mentor that is practicing the type of ministry you now need. You may have to go outside your denomination or region.
Stress that mission is the goal. Do not let any differences become personal. If you do, your regional office will have a very long memory for any resulting problems.
Let your pastor know that lay representatives are expected to accompany him or her on any visits with the regional office. You want to be seen as a team.
We’ve discussed the need to look over your shoulder and include your denomination’s regional offices and other congregations.
We’ve discussed how branding helps your members understand their mission.
Now you are ready for outreach to your community.
A typical starting point in any branding campaign is to craft a mission statement.
The mission of every church is defined in the Bible.
Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. —Matthew 28:19-20
There are other verses you can focus on, but this one encompasses a great deal.
The task of each congregation is to refine this directive in a way that will keep your people on a chosen track of implementation.
We all know how easy it is to become distracted from our mission. This is a special challenge for small congregations. We small churches are so busy putting out fires that it is easy for us to lose our way!
There is a tendency to measure all congregations against some standard that, frankly, isn’t very well-defined. It may be a typical suburban church or a church with a well-known pastor. It is never the small church — although we outnumber larger churches!
This can be a shock to a small congregation’s self-confidence. There the driving force is often a dedicated and changing staff of lay people, who juggle uncompensated mission and ministry with work lives.
In defining your mission be true to yourself. If you are a family church, concentrate on the values of a family church—the warmth, the intimacy, the ability for newcomers to assimilate quickly. If you are a pastoral church you might have an emphasis that is a “trademark” of your leadership. That might be reaching a particular ethnic group or operating a daycare program. Your mission should express whatever binds you together as a people.
How will your group of people—with all the things you have going for you (taking into account your limitations)—fulfill Christ’s directive? In short:
How do you reach, how do you preach, and how do you teach?
You might start by asking each member this question. Their answers should help shape the “official” mission statement. Having been included in the process, they will own the mission.
Once a mission statement is adopted put it to work.
Feature it on your web site, on your stationery, and on your signage.
Hold a service to celebrate the adoption of a mission statement.
Invite several people to speak to the mission. Do this regularly!
Have a pin made or give out refrigerator magnets featuring your statement.
Make a congregational T-shirt featuring your mission. Declare T-shirt events (service projects, for example) when members should come in “uniform.”
Hang a banner over your door. (Outside where people can see it.)
Begin every service or meeting by reciting your mission together.
Write a press release and send it to local papers.
Keep your mission front and center.
But remember, your mission can change. Review it every few years to make sure you can still live up to its directive, and that, in focusing on it, you are not ignoring new opportunities. Actually, we live in such a fast-changing world that proclaiming a special mission emphasis each year might not be a bad idea. (Next post!)
We’ve spent some time discussing the politics of church relations and how they related to a congregation’s branding or sense of mission.
In the business world branding and advertising go hand in hand. What can the church learn from this?
Advertising is getting the word out. Evangelism is getting the Word out.
Congregations must learn to tell their story.
We have identified that the audience is not just the current members and the unchurched in your community. A primary audience for a congregation’s branding effort is its regional body, including the regional office, its officials and governing councils and every other congregation in your denominational territory.
Why is this important? Each congregation is vying for the same professional resources. Remember a primary task of your regional body is to fit clergy pegs into congregational holes. Making your ministry known to your regional body is an investment in making sure the peg that is placed in your congregation will move you forward.
Fact: a small church’s ability to serve—or even exist—depends on its relationship with its denomination. This runs counter to how congregations think. Church members will strategize for hours, weeks and years about how to reach and serve their communities. The regional body is out of sight and mind.
Here is a rarely discussed reality. All pastors are not created equal. Your regional body must find places for poor pastors along with the great. They will place poor pastors in the churches that are of the least perceived value to the regional body. You want them to know why your ministry, however small, matters.
Small churches must take extraordinary steps to attract the talent needed to serve members and fashion a ministry that will sustain a presence in the community. (That means meet the budget.)
This is great failing of the hierarchical church. Most communication between a congregation and the regional body is among clergy. It is usually prompted by sudden need or conflict.
Regional offices notice the big things. They will notice:
If your church burns down.
If the treasurer embezzled a few thousand.
If the congregation receives a major bequest.
If the pastor is unhappy or in trouble.
If a congregation stops sending benevolence (They won’t ask why! They will assume you are in dire straits! You must tell them!).
Regional bodies won’t take special note:
When your congregation rallies to help a family with a seriously ill child.
When your congregation supports a local charity fundraiser.
Votes to supplement a staff salary package during a trying time.
Teaches art and music to neighborhood children in an after-school program.
Does any number of small initiatives to improve the faith lives of their members and reach out to the community.
Ironic! These actions are the heart and soul of ministry.
Congregations must regularly communicate these things no matter how mundane or obvious they seem. An added challenge—so much of a congregation’s work must be done anonymously. All the more reason to be intentional about what you can share—and it’s all part of branding.
A Few Action Steps
Make sure your regional leaders and any staff assigned to your region are on your newsletter mailing list. Send it in a large envelope with a cover letter pointing to your most outstanding news. Even if you’ve gone internet with your parish communications, print a few and mail them to your regional office. Don’t rely on them looking up your newsletter or website!
Send invitations to events to church leaders and the pastors and church councils of neighboring congregations. Even if they don’t come, they will be impressed. They might start talking about you in a positive way! (It’s called buzz marketing).
Schedule events worthy of attention beyond your membership. In the past, hierarchies initiated events worthy of broad interest. That doesn’t exclude congregations from taking the lead. Consider a topic. Choose a format: guest speaker, workshop, panel discussion or webinars. Such initiatives will brand your church as thought leaders regardless of size. Does this seem impossible for your small family church? Think about a presentation on the value of the family church!
Use photos. When you hold a successful events, follow up with a card with a photo to every participant and your regional office. Personal greeting cards are great communication tools that are underused.
Insist that lay leaders be included in dialog with the regional office. It is absolutely critical that regional leaders come to know lay leaders. This will take some doing. Regional offices like to expedite all meetings. They will attempt to deal with the leaders that make their goals easy to achieve. Make sure your pastor understands that you expect your elected lay leaders to be included in the dialog.
Encountering Resistance
You may encounter resistance among your professional leadership, but it should be easy to point out that such efforts boost their image with the regional office along with the congregation’s.
The biggest obstacle is that the time and energy spent on this activity are not part of the usual pastoral routine.
But then, the “usual” doesn’t seem to be working very well these days!
In the previous post, we discussed how size affects a congregation’s relationship with its regional body.
It affects relationships in community, too, but in different ways.
Congregations rely on regional bodies for professional support. They rely on communities for financial support.
Your branding must take both “audiences” into account. This is an unusual position. Businesses (unless they are regulated) don’t have to look over their shoulders in forming their plans for outreach. Congregations are sandwiched between two audiences.
Here are some things to consider for each size church as you work on your community branding or write your mission and vision statements.
Family churches are intimate. Everyone knows one another. Many may be related. Worship is an extension of the holiday dinner table.
CHALLENGES: This size church must find a way to be inclusive of community members who come to them with a new pedigree. They must often do this with limited professional support.
_____________________________
Pastoral churches, the most common size church, rely a great deal on their relationship with their pastor. The need to foster this relationship can distract from ministry.
CHALLENGES: Complacency resulting from good relationships with a pastor can be comforting for a while, but it can easily become the focus of ministry and a mission challenge. A difficult relationship with a pastor can be devastating within the church and with the regional body. The reality of today’s world is that growing, or even maintaining, this size congregation can be beyond the skill set of a single pastor. These congregations must develop networks among members to identify, nurture, or recruit the skills they need to serve their communities. At the same time, they must continue to serve the current congregation.
_____________________________
Program churches are seen as stable financially because they can support a full-time pastor and additional staff with special skills.
CHALLENGES: The program church’s challenge is to support their staff and provide ministry for programs as well. When the community comes to you specifically for children/youth ministries, senior ministries, immigrant ministries, etc., they come to you with expectations. Like consumers, they want their needs to be met. Those needs change. Congregations must nurture member involvement to grow individual faith beyond the personal needs to lives of service. This is a huge undertaking! Program churches will have to reevaluate programming regularly and be able to switch gears. Program churches face significant expenses in doing this. Programs aren’t cheap!
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Corporate churches face challenges that result from success! They may have outgrown their ability to know their own membership in a way they can serve without being asked. Corporate churches’ positions in their communities may be seen as solid, but today’s statistics show that these churches are just as challenged in reaching their communities as small churches. The decline is a bit less noticeable because of the size, but the rate of decline is similar and may actually be more severe. Their size can be an obstacle to the intimacy many people crave when seeking a church.
CHALLENGES: Corporate churches face the challenge of maintenance. They must nurture relationships among diverse populations. They must maintain their prestige. If they continue to be successful, they will be serving people who are less able to financially support their budget.
Each of these sets of challenges must be addressed in your congregational branding. You want people to know who you are and who you can become. Know your strengths, your challenges and your goals. Search for leadership that can help you reach your goals — not just serve you the way you are before you successfully transform!
This begins a series of posts on the concept of branding in the Church.
We will cover:
The branding of Christianity
The branding of denominations
The branding of individual congregations
The branding of each Christian
The branding of Christianity
“Branding” is a marketing/business term. In short, your “brand” explains how you are perceived. This can happen on at least two levels.
There is our own ego. How do we perceive ourselves?
Second: How are perceived by people we interact with?
Both are big questions.
For now, we will totally side-step the biggest question: How are we perceived by the God we worship?
Christians have done a great deal of good in history. This has often been clouded by stupid — usually selfish — ideas that became embedded into our leadership structures and became one with our culture.
Much of the world (incorrectly) views America as a Christian nation. Christians, were in fact, front and center in the rise of democracy. Some modern historians try to minimize this by stressing a Deist emphasis, but if George and Thomas, James and John and maybe even Ben were here today, they would likely argue that they are Christians.
The history of Christianity predates the rise of democracy by many centuries. During these centuries, Christianity rose from obscurity on the fringes of the known world to a dominating cultural and political force. It began to implode in the years of the Renaissance and Reformation.
Meanwhile, religious social media experts would do well to study the topic of branding.
Let’s look at our branding legacy. Many a city was plundered in the name of Christianity. Many a life was taken. Many a voice wa silenced. Talents were restrained by the leaders of Christianity. America is still coping with the damage done by our Christian foreparents who condoned slavery and the abuse of indigenous Americans and the marginalizing of women. The Bible was quoted to support many a wrong.
We might say, “That’s history.” But it is also our “brand.” We can improve it, but we cannot ignore it. We should never want to ignore it. Our memory protects our future.
Branding is something businesses take very, very seriously. Businesses want people to understand their products and services and to tell good stories about their interactions with them. They want people to think good things when they see their logo.
Religious groups want this too. We want people to think good things at the sign of the cross (or any other symbol of our faith). This is made more difficult by a growing secular bias.
America’s Separation of Church and State, designed to help religion flourish, has actually assisted in creating a chasm between the church and society. It’s difficult for churches to get serious attention in the press — unless major laws have been broken. It is equally difficult to team with government on projects of common interest. Both sides of the equation want cooperation . . . .but!
The way to bypass this cultural bias is to concentrate on branding from the bottom up. Each individual Christian is free to tell the story. Individual Christians have the best chance of being heard today — even over the clamor of centuries of abuses.
Take the Regional Assembly of many denominations. We’ll call it Synod Assembly, since that’s what we know best.
Synod Assemblies are constitutionally mandated gatherings — the business meeting of the Church. They have two major functions—to elect regional leadership and approve the regional budget.
It’s almost October. Seven or eight months from the next rash of Synod Assemblies in the ELCA— plenty of time to plan for the hundreds of delegates who will gather in one place to discuss the ministry of the Church.
Attending the Assembly are Synod staff, every rostered leader and 2-5 lay delegates from each of about 150 congregations. They will spend the bulk of two days, mostly listening to reports. Not much more happens for all the expense. Spectacular worship experiences will start and end the gatherings. Pump people up; leave them feeling good.
Many delegates will leave long before the end of the Assembly. All will return to their congregations and report the most inspiring moments. We are supposed to feel as though we were represented and part of the process.
Truth be told, we are being shut out.
The agenda of most Synod Assemblies is controlled by the current leadership who are elected to serve but who have self-interest. The flow of information is top down even though the purpose of the Assembly is to generate bottom up involvement.
Why is this?
Function of the Synod Assembly follows form.
The form was created before the information age. It was once unwieldy to poll members of 150 congregations scattered over 100 or more square miles. Communication with every member was costly and awkward. No more. But we are stuck with the form of the past until there is a vision that this isn’t the way it has to be.
Here is what has happened in church governance in the last two decades of decline (the entire life of the ELCA).
As church attendance declined, so did the pool of knowledgeable, seasoned delegates.
Replacing older members, who spent much of their lives in church and Sunday School, are people who have little experience — as enthusiastic as they might be. Event planners plan around the sensibilities of the inexperienced, steering away from hard discussions on serious questions and filling the time with frills to engage the newly initiated.
The typical Synod Assembly includes one-third clergy, who have considerable self-interest, and two-thirds laity with a broad range of life experience but a diminishing knowledge of church business.
The delegates are most likely people close to the pastor. When unsure of decisions, to whom will they turn for advice? People with self-interest. (The ELCA has even imposed a level of control over who the delegates can be, requiring that they meet gender requirements and giving additional votes to minorities and youth.)
The Synod Assembly becomes a forum ruled by self-interest — the opposite of its purpose.
Function has followed form.
A large percentage of delegates haven’t a clue of the ramifications of the issues presented to them. They know little or nothing about the names presented on ballots. Face it, some lay delegates come because they are the only people in the congregation willing to take Friday off and donate a Saturday. Some are enthusiastic newbies being groomed for church involvement, but not knowledgeable about church history, protocol, or issues. The Church encourages this (and it’s not all bad), but the fact is many votes are taken by people who don’t know what they are doing.
Function has followed the form. Good news! The form can change. Here’s how!
The process can be opened up to include ALL the people of the church. Events can be planned to take advantage of the at home audience. (SEPA’s Assembly is already streamed live. Great move. But this year you needed a password to watch. Control!)
Make key presentations available a month before the Assembly. Post them online so congregations can watch and discuss issues. Delegates could attend the Assembly knowing what the people of their congregation think — which is how it is supposed to be. Air the same presentation at the Assembly and give the presenters an opportunity to field questions from people who have actually had time to study their message.
Make schedules of presentations available so people can watch at home.
Allow for feedback from the people. Use Twitter and Facebook. Nurture involvement and purpose.
Synods are great at demanding change at the congregational level. Can they change?
Here is a link from Coca Cola’s marketing team. They are telling us exactly how they intend to double their business by 2020. That’s a lot of sugar water!
The techniques and strategies should interest every serious evangelist. Coca Cola has a story to tell and doesn’t mind telling us exactly how they plan to do it. Their marketing people are well paid and experienced story-tellers. Let’s invest our dimes wisely and listen in for free!
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.
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).
2×2 Sections
Where in the World is 2×2?
On Isaiah 30:15b
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
A week or so ago, we proposed a social media project for the four weeks of Advent.
