Consider this post a call for rebellion against the church metrics movement.

First, you should know the worst part about being a preacher is that we tend to be critical of other preacher’s sermons. When I was in seminary, I heard a sermon on Mark 14 (CEB) where a woman breaks a jar of expensive perfume and pours it over Jesus’ head, and the . The preacher talked about Jesus’ love being extravagant, overflowing, without regard for other people. I remember thinking “Who cares that it’s extravagant? We get it. Jesus loved everyone. Grace loves everyone. Can we talk about the misogyny or the reversal of condemnation or something more relevant, please?”

It’s been in recent months that I’ve began to better realize the importance of emphasizing how extravagant grace really is.

A few weeks back, I learned a new word when I was in close proximity to Amy Laura Hall, a Duke Divinity professor and UM Elder. Her blog and twitter account are named “Profligate Grace” which was a new word for me, worth 4000 points in Scrabble (or if you are under 25, Words with Friends).

Profligate means:

recklessly prodigal or extravagant

And “profligate grace” means to Rev. Hall:

I resist the market-driven, cheesy business-model ways of the United Methodist Church these days in part because both parents taught me that there is no way to “count” people and the means or effects of grace.  Each life is a gift, a joy, and incalculably treasured by God.  So, I am against applying quantified, count-the-numbers methods in public school and church, in organizing and in parenting.

[Profligate Grace] is just a fancy way to say that grace may be hard-won, but it is also not measurable.  Solidarity, growth, and human flourishing require thought and care and tending, but that work withers when the results are put to a quantified test.

These quotes really started me thinking about “what are we measuring in the church?”

In a sermon by my Bishop a month ago at a clergy meeting, my Bishop clued us into Jim Noble’s “The King’s Kitchen” which is a not-for-profit restaurant that donates all its profits to charity–$50k last year! Plus it offers on-the-job training and skillset enhancement for homeless or transitional people. Awesome sauce.

Here’s a quick blog post with a CNN video that has the following quote that the Bishop used in his sermon:

Sometimes in life you have to make a distinction between success and significance.

Jim Noble

It is exactly this distinction that makes me wary of the Call to Action and the Vital Congregations movement of church metrics. It’s easy to measure success with dashboards, metrics, comparisons of budget. If the numbers go up, you are successful. If the numbers for a program go down, it needs retooling or scrapping.

The problem is measuring significance. As Rev. Hall emphasizes and the woman with the perfume exhibits, grace is profligate.

• It is not measurable. It flows out without regard for the boundaries.
• It is slow and quiet, immeasurable, trusting in the slow work of God.
• It is extravagant like the woman pouring expensive perfume on Jesus’ head. The church leadership of Jesus’ day (oh *SNAP* yes I went there!) criticized the quantitative success of the perfume but couldn’t measure the significance of the action.

When the emphasis is on success not significance, we lose sight of what we are really called to do. And if we focus on success, we could miss out on being significant.

Last story:

I was talking with a clergy mentor and told her about a pastoral situation where I offered grace and help to a youth in the midst of a rural Bible Belt culture that offers neither grace nor help for the situation. I can’t be more specific than that in this public blog post. The mentor’s response?

“You can know what you said is more significant to that youth than anything you’ve done up until now in ministry.”

Boom.

Here it is:

The Hacking Christianity Call to Action.

Rebel.

Tell the stories of significance in your community, of how you changed lives. Forget the financial report for the missions committee, tell about who you helped and how it changed you. Get rid of the Year To Date report in the bulletin and include a story of how faithful giving changed someone’s life. Let the only money talked about is how the Pastor emptied her Discretionary account helping the poor. This isn’t an ostrich sticking your head in the sand, it is focusing on significance not success.

Rebel.

Talk about the social holiness work you’ve done, holiness which resists metrics. Tell stories of how you extravagantly wasted money on helping people, kicked out big givers who were poisonous to the body, ended successful programs because they were just rote actions, and stayed in ministry with people who could never pay it back.

Rebel.

Seek life in the face of death. You can watch that video of the declining UMC and listen to the heartbeat machine on the Vital Congregations website (ick!). Or you can preach relevant hope to the difficult situation. Yes, we should downsize and prioritize and we have to face reality. But even if we are close to closing our doors, we can still be significant to people in our community. If numerical success does not come, the church doors can be closed in celebration of significant ministry rather than lament of a fallen church.

Rebel.

Seek significance rather than success.

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I write this in protest of the church metrics movement that I don’t believe gives a mission or hope to congregations who WILL most likely close. Stop beating them down and give them something to live for even in their twilight years.

I write this from a place of privilege, as I’m in a successful church and have had a great year in terms of giving, professions of faith, and new disciples in our youth group.

But know that when I’m filling out my end of year reports, my charge conference numbers…I will talk about the significance of our ministry rather than the success.

But the church metrics movement…when we get right down to its emphasis and what the websites report…will really only care about one.

Which one will you?

Discuss.

Recently, Hacking Christianity’s favorite Mark Driscoll instructed the media to no longer refer to his church’s multiple campuses as…oops…campuses. Instead, they are to be called churches. Here’s one of their pastors Jamie Munson explaining:

During our June meeting, the Mars Hill Board of Directors agreed to replace “Mars Hill campuses” with “Mars Hill churches.” This is more than a shift in semantics…Referring to our locations as churches rather than campuses helps articulate our theology (what we believe about God and his Word), our ecclesiology (what we believe about church), our ministry, and our mission.

In other words, instead of describing Mars Hill as “one church, many locations, one message” they now refer to them as “many churches, many locations, one message.” One message is broadcast to many sites, but each site should be seen as its own church even though the most distinctive part of it being a church is the same across the board.

But here’s the question: is a local congregation its own church if its sermon is outsourced to an outside entity?

Like most Wal-Mart or Franchise Churches (discussed on this blog previously), video broadcast allows the local parishes to have local pastors or “lead pastors” with local laity…but the Sunday message is most-often given over to the mothership church.  This phenomenon is not limited to churches that expand their roots, it also encompasses churches that absorb other churches or take over the message at other churches.

Andrew Conard recently posted on his blog that Church of the Resurrection, the largest UMC church in America, was looking for a few good men, er, a few student or lay pastors who would be willing to hand over their sermon time to Resurrection. He writes:

I am on a strategic project team at Resurrection that is looking for three small churches, currently led by lay speakers, local pastors, or student local pastors, who would be interested in testing a new model for ministry – these churches would, for one year, become a part of a multi-point circuit with Resurrection. The aim is to see what we might do together to strengthen small churches. Resurrection would provide 36 weeks of sermons via video, coaching, and other resources.

Senior Pastor Adam Hamilton’s brief writeup is similar:

There are over 15,000 United Methodist Churches with less than 50 people in worship each week. Many are vital and vibrant faith churches; others are struggling. We’ve wondered what might happen if large churches partner with smaller churches in a model that looks something like what happens with our campuses, though, under this new model, each smaller church remains its own congregation. We would provide coaching, marketing resources; training and Resurrection’s sermons would be used in these churches via video 75% of the time. We’re testing this with three churches in the next year. If it is successful, we’ll offer this model to other large and small churches to look at creating similar partnerships called “circuits.”

My comment (unresponded to as of this writing) is thus:

• Firstly, I’m personally opposed to franchising a particular church and for local churches to cede their message to people outside their community. I will watch with interest the ways how COR’s partner churches reflect on this experience.
• Secondly, with franchised churches (at least the half-dozen case studies I’ve seen) the predominant number of people you get are not converts but disenfranchised Christians from other churches. So I wonder what CoR’s goal is in offering a franchise to a local church?
• Finally, I’m particularly shocked at an outright desire to “take over” the message of student, local, and lay pastors…the ones most likely to need coaching, yes, but also the most vulnerable to the temptation to cede the message. I’m honestly concerned at why CoR is targeting not troubled churches but vulnerable pastors?

Having said all that, I don’t expect Rev. Conard to respond, given that he’s leaving his oversight of this project to go to Resurrection West this week (congrats by the way!), but these are still relevant questions, particularly why they are focusing on churches without full clergy at them. Odd.

Regardless, the rising phenomenon now is to outsource the message of a local church to outsiders so that clergy can focus on other aspects of ministry. We’ve talked about this before in a previous blog conversation, which included an intern and a staff person at CoR, so read more there.

But the question still remains: if the Gospel of Jesus Christ is preached from afar, not informed by the receiver, is that congregation an individual church or is it an extension of a mother church? If the sermons come from the top-down and community comes from the bottom-up, are they their own churches or the same church in different contexts?

Discuss.

It’s been raining for two days straight in rural Oklahoma. For a plains state used to abundant sunshine, it can wear on the soul. But from the rain also springs a very particular memory that is informing my sermon and lectionary musings for this Sunday.

In elementary school, my generation more than likely had a particular science fiction story in our textbook compilation of short stories: “All Summer in a Day” (IMDB) by Ray Bradbury. The story can be read here (only four pages. Go ahead!) or the 1980s PBS episode of it can be viewed here. Briefly, the story is of a girl Margot who is new-ish to a space outpost on Venus where it rains constantly and the sun only shines for two hours every seven years. All her nine-year-old classmates in the school cannot remember the last sunshine, but Margot has moved here from Earth more recently and remembers the warmth of the sun. The other children torment her mercilessly because she refuses to play games with them and insists that she remembers the Sun.

Finally, the day arrives and the children say that the Sun must be a myth, a joke, and in their childhood torment they lock Margot in a closet. Suddenly, the sun comes out, and the children play for 2 hours in a bright, green, beautiful world…then the rain starts back, and the children suddenly remember Margot locked in a closet. The book ends with them opening the door in shame; the video ends with the children giving Margot their flowers as atonement for their sins.

The Lectionary reading for this week is Doubting Thomas (John 20). In the story, Jesus has appeared to the Disciples and spoken to them. Thomas arrives after this encounter and, contrary to the other 10 assertions, refuses to believe that Jesus had reappeared. He holds onto this for a week, then the text says that Thomas and the Disciples are together in the house and Jesus appears. Thomas believes again, and Jesus concludes “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”

What struck me about these two stories is twofold.

First, the treatment of the one who differs by the community. In “All Summer” Margot is ridiculed, tormented, and locked in a closet on the cusp of her belief in the Sun being proven true. In “Doubting Thomas” Thomas differs with the Disciples but remains in their presence, seemingly for the whole week after Jesus had appeared. Thomas does not appear to have been expelled from the community for his disbelief in the Son. In one story the believer is punished by the community; in the other, the disbeliever remains in relationship with the community.

Second, the participation of the one who differs in community. In “All Summer” Margot isolates herself from the children, refuses to participate in their games, and emphasizes the one thing she has over them: her experience of the Sun. In the end, her refusal to participate got her dream stolen from her, though that does not excuse the violators. In “Doubting Thomas” Thomas stays with the Disciples, engages them, holds tight to his belief but does not isolate himself (at least nothing in the text indicates that). In the end, John’s beliefs are changed by Jesus but he is not excluded from the community and indeed apocryphally expands it further than any other Apostle.

From these experiences, I am feeling an inclination to focus on how we deal with the detractors, the contrarians, those who differ in our midst.

• Do we ridicule them, avoid them, hit them when it hurts the most, drive them away?
• Do we accept them, embrace them without unthinking concessions to their beliefs, remain in relationship even if they try to drive us away?

We have in our communities examples of how not to differ. Churches that exclude sexual minorities. Pastors who preach hot topics and get burned. Schismatic churches that leave their denominations because they cannot handle being identified with differing majority. What do we do to avoid these high-stress situations but also acknowledge that we are not of one mind in our contexts?

On the one hand, we have a responsibility to be a community that accepts difference. We all have those people in our lives. As a clergyperson, it is incredibly difficult to look at my congregation and not wish they all agreed with me. And yet it is usually the people who think differently than me that I learn the most from. Not from reinforcing my own beliefs like an echo chamber but from introducing dissonance that helps me better form, alter, and perhaps present the topics in a more holistic way. Thankfully my parish allows for this dissonance, not in all forms, but for the most part. I’m sure there are people who would feel differently that my parish is not a place for their particular form of dissent, but that’s to be expected in any diverse setting. What matters is how we treat one another on that journey, from the worst to the best.

On the flipside, we who differ have a responsibility to differ in healthy ways. I ran an online religion forum for years that had an incredible amount of disagreements. The members who were the most respected did not believe alike but were able to put aside hot passions and disagree helpfully. Even when hotheads prevailed, the community held together. I saw many passionate posters come and go because they couldn’t disagree with people helpfully…and banned many people who were unable to keep their spite to themselves. Similarly, when I find myself in a theological or social minority, I have to carry myself in a fashion that garners respect even from diehard opponents. I definitely don’t always succeed, and my comments on other people’s blogs may not reflect my best. But the goal is to disagree faithfully like Thomas and not like Margot (not blaming her…she acted exactly as a nine-year-old would, of course).

So in my lectionary musing for sermonizing this week, I’m intrigued by the idea of a differing ethic: what a community does with those who differ, and what differing individuals do within a community. What might that look like, informed by Doubting Thomas?

Thoughts? How do you deal with difference? What experiences do you have (healthy or unhealthy) in being the minority in a party? Other thoughts on the Doubting Thomas lectionary?

Discuss.

I got a request from a facebook friend to outline how to use texting for her church. She saw on YouthMinistryIdeas.net that they would offer the service for $10/month. While that’s a good ministry to support, she knew that I use texting with my youth and have reflected on it: “Texting Not Talking” and asked how I did it for free.

Here’s two solutions:

(1) Set up mass-texting on your cell phone.

• In this solution, most newer cell phones allow you to create texting lists or contact groups (iPhone users have app choices). Simply add all your youth to a group, type a text message, and send it to them. If you have unlimited texting from your phone (and honestly, what youth minister doesn’t?), then this is easy to do.
• Advantages: speed of delivery (text-to-text is fastest) and ability to do this away from your computer. Disadvantages: groups limited to 25 people, phone unusable while it texts, should only be used by unlimited texting plans

(2) Set up an email-to-texting service

• Did you know every cell phone is an email address? You can email directly to people’s cell phones. How? You have to know two things:
  1. Their cell phone number (duh)
  2. Their cell phone provider (Sprint, ATT, Verizon, etc)
• Then you look up their provider’s email format (all of them are different) and create the email addresses. Here’s a partial list of major carrier numbers, and a full list that is constantly updated, thanks to www.sensiblesoftware.com
  • For example, a cell phone number of 555-867-5309 that is on Sprint network would have an email address of 5558675309@messaging.sprintpcs.com // Send an email to that and it will come up as a text message (usually from your email address) on the person’s phone.
• Set up a group email and it will text all your youth or church or whoever at one time. More work beforehand but worth it for free text announcements.
• Advantages: higher number of people per email, free, easier on the thumbs, longer messages become multiple texts. Disadvantages: texts in response get sent to the email address, not your cell, there can be a delay (see below).

(3) Notes and Words of Wisdom

• There can be a delay (I’ve had as long as 20 minutes delay getting the text message from an email address), so perhaps not right before church or an event is a good use, but should be helpful!
• The BEST way to set up email-to-texting is have a sign-up sheet where people write their cell numbers AND their providers side-by-side. If you have a tech-savvy person who can test them out (input and email blast) them while at the event, that would be the easiest way to do it.
• Finally, keep doing personal texts. My youth respond much faster when I put their name in the text message so they know I sent it just to them (or did I? Mwa ha ha).

While obviously face-to-face and phone calls are more personal, youth and young people read text messages like a habit so using this format can be even more effective than mailings or voicemails at home. Be smart about how you use social technology and you should be fine.

Any other solutions people can think of? Comment below!

At a clergy meeting a few months back (before the 2010 release of the Call to Action report), a very senior pastor of a large congregation talked to a few of us young clergy. He told us to beware of “church growth bubbles,” as he called them. He said that every few years, some consultant or methodology is built up, diffused over all the clergy as “the way”, and then it flitters away a few years later or bursts into unremarkable results. These cycles happened over and over and while the pastor said he got ideas from it, he didn’t revolutionize his whole ministry plan to them…and ended up just fine by preaching the Gospel.

To this sentiment, while valid, there is little doubt that a concerted effort by the church global and local is necessary to self-examine failures and successes to find a better way to support one another through the declining presence of the United Methodist Church. But the question is: are we asking the right questions? And is the advice being given one that is grounded in the Gospel or is it grounded in pop-business principles?

Via a friend on facebook, I was clued into this section of a sermon given by Dr. Robert Hunt, the Director of Global Theological Education at Perkins School of Theology. It references the United Methodist’s Call to Action report that we’ve discussed here at length.

Following is a full-text excerpt of the sermon found here. This sermon was preached at this year’s Perkins Theological School for the Laity at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX.

==========================

Clever Myths

Peter, in [2 Peter 1:16], says, “we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we told you about the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ in power, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty.” This reminds me of second kind of distraction we have been drawn to – the contemporary version of “cleverly designed myths.”

In Peter’s time these were the old Greek and Egyptian myths that provided such a colorful basis for cultist ritual, secret societies, and temple processions. And of course quasi-metaphysical costume dramas are popular today. We have folks that find some vague religious meaning in dressing up like characters out of the Star Wars saga, or the Lord of the Rings. How much more comfortable to find one’s meaning in the mythical world of Frodo and Bilbo fighting the Dark Lord than actually engaging the prince of darkness at work in a crack house or the U.S. Congress. Peter is reminding his readers that their faith is about real-world encounters, not mythic fantasies.

Speaking of which, these days the clever myth currently vying for our attention is the “Call to Action” published in October of 2010. It appears that many United Methodist church leaders like to dress up as corporate CEO’s heading for the board-room to live out the myth of American corporation as savior. Instead of Bibles they now carry under their arms laptops full of spreadsheets with statistics and demographic surveys of potential religious markets. The result? Although the “Call” is based on an expensive analysis performed by an outside consultant it does nothing more than regurgitate into a PowerPoint presentation and Executive Summary the church growth doctrines of Donald McGavran from the 1960’s, followed by the seeker church gospel of Willowcreek from the 1990’s, and most recently the power of positively thinking about how to build an “onramp” church from a 21st century Joel Olsteen.

The recommendations, and I take these directly from the document, are:

• Many small groups particularly for youth,
• A mixture of contemporary and classical worship with the use of multi-media,
• Topical rather than lectionary based sermons,
• Strong lay leadership,
• And pastors who do not need theological education but do need to be good managers and inspiring preachers. (Of course this last interests us at Perkins, since apparently the best way to train pastors in the view of the Call is the get them a subscription to the Harvard Business Review and a membership in Toastmasters.)

These things, we are told, are the definitive characteristics of “vital congregations.” Well they are not necessarily bad things. They just aren’t worth paying a consultant for, since they’ve been repeated in dozens of church self-help books over decades. But most importantly nowhere in this list, or the document as a whole, is there any mention of the presence of the Holy Spirit, the preaching of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, or fidelity to the witness of scripture and the traditional teaching of the church. None of these are apparently regarded as signs of a vital congregation. Yet without these things our church is living in the fantasyland of a market driven business plan to sell spiritual junk food.

And that is why the entire document is a distraction, a clever myth – directing us away from the message to which Peter was an eyewitness toward a group of management and PR tricks designed to increase our share in a declining market for overt religiosity. It is pandering to a market for which we do not and should not have anything to offer. It measures success without reference to the gospel, and therefore has no grounding in reality.

==========================

I also have expressed wariness at the Call to Action report, both in its methods and its conclusions. And while I’m not about to throw it out wholesale, the way how the “business of church” has gotten so bad that it supplants the Gospel message as our first concern is disheartening.

Thoughts?

(Image credit: Desiree Palmen, 1x4x9)

Full disclosure: I am uncomfortable with targeted church growth conversations. So any impersonal language or poor word choices in this article probably reflect my discomfort. Feel free to point them out, but please don’t dwell on them.

I’ve had three exchanges with large-church pastors in the past few months that really bother me when it comes to the way the UMC seeks church growth in the 18-30 demographic. These are anecdotal but are from large-church pastors, speaking inside-the-ballpark to other clergy (an important note).

1. One pastor recounted that when the pastor was 20 in the 1960s with tattoos and listening to Led Zepplin, everyone said that age group would never be in the church. They were rebels, they saw church as irrelevant, they didn’t attend. And yet, now, the Baby Boomers are the biggest demographic in the church and possibly the last generation to heavily support the church (proportionately). The Busters and Gen-X are trickling back too. The pastors’ take? “Don’t worry about the 18-30s, they will come back when they get older.”
2. A second pastor said in a staff meeting that even though this particular church was next to a college, the church shouldn’t focus on college students. Instead, they ought to focus on the 30s-40s demographic, as they are more likely have children (potential for growth) and more likely to have money (potential for ministry support). The pastor’s take? “Don’t worry about the 18-30s, they can’t support the church ministries yet.”
3. Finally, we see across annual conferences that ministry budgets of campus ministries are being cut. Ministries that used to have full elders now get part-time local pastors or student pastors (who are undoubtedly gifted but the lack of support for a full elder indicates a lack of funds/initiative). And while large churches in proximity to colleges can have college ministries, they are rarely as effective as on-site ministry that can fit into the rhythm and flow of college life. The church’s assumed take? “Don’t worry about the 18-30s, they don’t have time to attend church anyway.”

Now for the surprising fact: None of those churches lack in outreach to 18-30s. All have great numbers in that demographic, but all three indicate that focusing on “success” in that demographic is setting oneself up for failure. And yet at every charge conference the churches are judged at their outreach to that age group (as they should be).

So on one hand we promote this outreach to this group, but on the other hand we wish away the problem by saying “they’ll come back later in life.” It may be true, but it’s not addressing the problem. It’s almost like the approach is “give them good memories so when they realize the hole in their lives they will come back to church.” Is this effective? I don’t know. Is it right? Not to my gut.

I’ve been wrestling with how I feel about this “realist” take on outreach to 18-30s. I think at the moment, I’ve taken two lessons from this:

1. 18-30s is the demographic where you will fail in quantity and succeed in quality. This demographic may not come in the numbers of the other demographics. But the ones who do come likely will be on fire and enthusiastic members of your church. And where do you think the young clergy (under 35yo) come from? This demographic, of course. So the clergy and dedicated laity you get from this demographic might be lifelong disciples of Jesus Christ. Thus, avenues of leadership and empowerment are highly important in this age group.
2. 18-30s is the demographic where churches will spend more resources than they take in. By the nature of their age, their tithes and offerings will not be numerically high enough to put mission and ministry and dedicated staff above the redline. Dan Dick explores this further. And that’s okay. They are a mission field, and any sensible church should realize that the money going out won’t come back in. That’s, of course, not a primary reason for cutting back on 18-30 ministries, but I’m sure there are some pastors who take into account cost-benefit ratios, to their shame. Thus, commitment by the finance team of a church to spend more than you take in is highly important in this age group.

A while back I taught a district class for about 150 youth on “Best Practices” for Facebook. The class was inspired by my own youth who were online but didn’t understand privacy concerns, what to do about cyberbullying, and how to ensure their online persona matches their Christian beliefs. The presentation was well-received.

I’ve been bugged about it for months by other youth ministry workers and now I’ve polished it enough to offer the presentation for distribution.

This is not a “how to sign up for facebook” or “how to fill out your profile” basics class but is the bare minimum of what a youth should know when they interact with people on facebook.

Release Notes v. 1.0

• The following is meant for a PowerPoint presentation for a 75 minute class taught to youth. Obviously you can cut whatever you want to make it fit the time. I doubt you could do it in less than 30 minutes given the amount of questions youth have even if you cut out all the media and games.
• The privacy settings are updated frequently by Facebook. These are current as of 02/15/2011.
• This blog post will be updated whenever updates need to be made to either of the files.

What you’ll need

1. The Facebook101-HackingChristianity.pptx file (see below)
2. The Facebook101Outline-HackingChristianity.docx file (see below)
3. Media Downloaded or Prepped (I use Firefox’s DownloadHelper with VLC media player for offline access)
   • Princess Bride clip with Vizzini v. Man in Black (on youtube [best quality but finishes too early] OR on veoh [lower quality but the full scene]…or on DVD of course!)
   • Talent Show Bullying Prevention Infomercial (found on youtube)
   • Facebook Girls illustration video (from BluefishTV)
4. Preparations for two games: Trivia Tic-Tac-Poke and Facebookish (see #2 Outline)
5. A heartfelt desire to help youth navigate the digital world!

Download the Files

1. http://links.hackingchristianity.net/facebook101-pptx (Google Docs – version 1.0)
2. http://links.hackingchristianity.net/facebook101-docx (Google Docs – version 1.0)

Distribution/Adaptation and Credits

• Distribution & Adaptation
  • The .pptx and .docx documents above are licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC 3.0 license. This means you can make derivative works (adaptations) for your context without permission so long as you (a) leave the Credits slide up for a reasonable time or publish the credit information below and (b) it is not used in a commercial publication.
• Credits
  • Created by Smith, J. (2011). Facebook 101: Best Practices. Local Church Leaders Workshop, Muskogee District of the Oklahoma Conference of the United Methodist Church. Wagoner, OK.
    < http://links.hackingchristianity.net/facebook101 >
  • Adapted from Coggeshall, J. (2007). Facebook: To poke or not to poke. Student Development Presentations, Bentley University. Waltham, MA.

Hope you enjoy! Take a look at the files and comment below any adaptations or questions you might have.

I hate to bring more fuss to a semi-manufactured controversy, but our blog post “Single, Female Pastor? It’s Complicated” bears revisiting and highlighting of female pastors’ perspectives on this topic.

Why? First, you can finally read Marie Claire’s article online and thus can examine the full context of the conversation (previously all we had were illegal scans for 24 hours…and then blog posts about the topic).

Second, this blog was linked to by David Gibson in AOL’s Politics Daily and Bromleigh McCleneghan in the Christian Century…thus we’ve gotten a lot of traffic and new readers!  However, the CC gives a negative spin to our blog post, indicating that we said that “prayers for the young lady are in order.” Yes, I said that, but I called for prayers that she embraces this pastoral opportunity to reach out to people like her, not that she gets her spirit checked or repented. Perhaps it’s my lingering resentment at being rejected from CC (they want “more serious essay types”), but I felt that a closer read of our actual words by McCleneghan would have been nice…

But on to the perspectives: We’ve reached 39 responses on the blog post, which places it in the top 10 most-commented articles on HX of all time. Wow. While a decent amount of it is back-and-forth between this blog’s readership and another pastor blogger, there’s a ton of  comments by female clergypersons whose perspective I cannot match but can highlight a sampling:

• April C: “It is interesting that while we work so hard for the church to be a place of hospitality, female clergy often find that hospitality seldom reaches to include them (TMI moments and all) fully” (comment link)
• Carolyn F: “When I show verve and excitement for ministry, I’m called “naive.” When I make room for others in the Church, I’m asked to provide justification and prove that I am also attending to the interests of white, straight males. I am afraid that double standards (clergy and lay, women and men, young and young at heart) cause us to lose sight of the spiritual gifts for ministry offered by our many ministers and future ministers” (comment link)
• Melissa T: “What I find much more dangerous than one young woman sharing her experience warts and all, is the pervasive refusal to have frank discussions about sexuality in the Church.” (comment link)
• Em J Case: “Being a single clergy member is hard. For so many reaons. And that is true. Its hard to do what we do, and go home at night to an empty house. Its hard when there’s not enough time to date, or you have to cancel dates because of pastoral emergencies. Its hard not to have the support of a spouse. Its tough when you feel unfulfilled in the ways a spouse might fulfill you. But, its also tough to be a married clergy member. You have responsibilities I don’t have. You have to juggle two extended families and other sets of friends and support someone when you don’t have any more energy for yourself.” (comment link)
• Stephanie G: “we operate between the two extremes of ‘whatever’ and ‘sex-demonizing abstienence’ with the effect of both being that we don’t talk about it. We have not created a space to say, sex is both a human need and a sacred act of intimacy and love and it is a challenge to honor that in a way that invites God in and welcomes God’s guidance.” (comment link)
• Becca C: “I did have someone tell me that seeing a pregnant pastor made them feel uncomfortable because, you know, you don’t really want to think about how the pastor got pregnant. I also had a male colleague report that when his wife was pregnant the overwhelming response was “way to go, pastor!” *wink, wink* So maybe it’s not about whether or not *pastors* can be sexual beings, but only pastors who are also women.” (comment link)
• Christine: “Honestly, I think it probably helped to change some readers perspectives about sexuality in the church, that yes, even a pastor has sexual desires, is truly human, rather than a pedophile or repressed.” (comment link)
• Liz A: “As a Latina I grew up not seeing pictures of girls, then teens who looked like me in magazines. (Latinas ARE finally in the wider media, now- yay!) In my “world” I often feel invisible b/c I don’t meet many female clergy women who are Latina at all. Much less do I read articals by ANY female clergy in ANY main-stream magazines. So, I’m glad Marie Clair thought to include it.” (comment link)

Read the rest of the comments here.

Two comments by me:

• One of the blogs we linked to is Beauty Tips for Ministers which after our blog published they wiped their commentary of all identifying characteristics of the pastor: name, church, magazine name. While that was done in response to “friends of Wren” who asked for the whitewashing, I saw the act as dehumanizing and insulting.
• Second is that, as pointed out by EmJ, Marie Claire has a reputation for luring women into PR stunts and hit pieces. They did this a few months back with some food blogs and they seem to have done this again by their word choice in this article (Rev. Miller says the word choice of “career” was not her own). Words of caution from Brett are noted: stay away from outlets with questionable journalistic integrity.

Thoughts?

Welcome to our new readers and your comments are appreciated.

Still one of my most embarrassing moments in ministry was when I was an intern at a UM church. For youth, I volunteered to choose a movie for movie night. I remembered a movie I watched a year previously that I thought was a great example of dealing with racism. It was called Pleasantville.

I still remember sitting in the youth room with 5 teenage girls and one female adult watching the bathroom scene where the mom is in the bathtub and…well, she ends up setting the tree on fire. Watch the movie and it makes more sense. The look on the youth sponsor’s face as she delighted in my 19yo embarrassment is burned into my head. Sigh.

However, today I can tell you that it will never happen again. I am thankful for the Internets that give people like me, who pastor youth, a simple(?) way to measure if a movie is appropriate.

Via Richard Hall, here’s the Youth Pastor’s Coefficient (originally from zoomtard.com):

The formulas are hence (most text taken from zoomtard.com though edited for my blog readership):

• S = Swear-words
• ! = Super swear-words (you know the ones…)
• b = Breasts or other PG-13 nudity
• V = Tame violence (Like a cartoon slapfest or someone getting in a playground fist-fight)
• G = Serious nudity (The kind you don’t want to watch with your mom in the room)
• m = Serious violence (The kind that is in Call of Duty that they will play when they leave)
• i = Innuendo (That most slippery of youth group movie downfalls)
• A = Alternative music laden soundtracks (Kids dig those block-rockin’ beats)
• H = Happy endings (All youth group movies ought to have it!)
• PRm = Positive Role-model (If the star of the movie prays, talks kindly to people with mental disability or t least shaves regularly then you have some prime youth group movie potential.)
• SI = Sermon Illustrations (Every scene that can be the basis of a preachy-session at the end of the night has to be very valuable)
• ir = Improper Relationships (Varies to your youth group’s level of prudishness: could be a divorced and remarried woman [shock!], to a sassy gay couple [shockiest!], up to domestic violence or teenage abuse)

The goal is to for the final total to be close to 0.5 (though depending on your students you could go up to around .75…but anything beyond 1.0 is right out, apparently!).

There you go. Now you know how to rate Saved as compared to Book of Eli on the level of youth group appropriateness. Good luck.

My first job in high school was detailing cars. It was a simple setup: I cleaned and vacuumed the inside of the car, the other guy cleaned and waxed the outside. Any problems with either area was the responsibility of one person. Two jobs, two guys…done. So we had to know our areas inside and out, and to this day while I can detail the inside of a car easily I still am terrible at waxing.

I recount this because a few months back I got my car professionally detailed for the first time in my life. I was struck that the place had six workers on each car. One did the windows, one did the tires, one de-insected the front grill, one did the interior vinyl, one waxed and one vacuumed. And…they took as long as we did back in 1996! And I doubt they could do much  beyond their assigned area. So while I was glad that more people are being employed, it was weird that over a decade later, the profession required more people to accomplish the same task in the same amount of time.

Along the same lines, InternetMonk (which has been carried forward since its creator’s death from cancer a few months back) posted two letters one day a month back talking about the “work” of church. The first is from 1972 that has a megachurch pastor claiming it takes 365 people to do the work of the church for the entire year. The second is from 2010 that has Northpoint Community Church (which we’ve blogged about before) claiming it takes 2,000 people just to run weekend church services.

So like the auto detailing business, from 1972 to 2010, it seems like the number of people required to “do” church has increased considerably. When you do the percentages (1972 church had 7,000 members = 5.5% are workers, Northpoint has 23,000 members = 8.5% are workers), it still indicates that it takes more people to do worship on Sunday morning. Keep in mind that those numbers from 1972 referenced the entire ministry of the church, not just a Sunday service, so the 1972 numbers would be significantly lower.

I examined my church this past Sunday. 148 attendees. Here’s the jobs list that I was aware of (all different people)

• 16 choir members
• 3 ushers
• 1 helping the acolytes into their robes
• 1 making coffee
• 2 setting out sweets
• 2 nursery attendants
• 7 Sunday School Teachers
• 2 adults assisting with youth sunday school
• 1 attendance taker
• 1  unlocked the children’s sunday school building
• 1 reset the thermostat.
• 1 ran the powerpoint for the first service
• 1 ran the sound for the second service
• 2 pianists
• 1 choral director

And my church doesn’t have a full tech team or media ministry. But 42/150 had or did at least one job (28% of the worshipping attendance that day). That is not including those who greeted visitors or passed notes or prayed or read the bible along with the lector (me).

I’m still wondering what to make of this.

• On the one hand, like auto detailing, it takes more people to accomplish the same task: provide worship for people. Now, we can blame technology as requiring more people but at my church, it added exactly one person per service who does the powerpoint or the audio. Many churches only require one extra person, unlike Northpoint whose sound booth, lasers, and powerpoint team is probably a dozen, at minimum.
• On the other hand, I’m excited that more people are involved in worship on Sunday morning. It’s great to have more people be passionate about worship and want to participate. By having more people up front or behind the scenes, getting them to regular discipleship isn’t too hard a leap.

What do you make of this phenomenon? Is worship becoming a bureaucracy where teams of people “present” worship and the behind-the-scenes crew will outnumber the choir or the worshippers eventually? Or is worship becoming an immersive experience such that helping with worship becomes part of worshipping God?

Thoughts?