Haven't We All Heard Enough About Church Websites? Part II

So I am probably going to be moving this summer, and for the first time in ten years, I am looking for a church not for vocational reasons, but to be a member.  I'm looking at church websites with fresh eyes, and friends, it is a frustrating world (wide web) in which to be a seeker.

To be clear, I am not church shopping.  Well aside from one thing.  See, my children have been happy participants in a Spirit Play ministry now for two years, and it has made a tremendous difference in their spiritual lives. I really, really want them to have that ministry for at least another year or two. So yeah, in that way, I am shopping for a program (largely unsuccessfully I might add, since it seems the closest church with a Spirit Play ministry is about an hour's drive away).

No, I'm not church shopping, but seeking.

I am seeking a tribe. I am seeking a band of folks with whom my family can join for the next three to six years. Though three to six years is a relatively short-term prospect, it will cover the span of my children's lives all the way from ages five and six to ages eight and nine at least, if not to ages eleven and twelve.  Those years of their lives will be significant.

It's a big deal, this finding a tribe for my family thing.

Huge.

So, religious leaders, how can I say this delicately? When I visit a church website and can't find a photo of the minister or the professional staff, or real photos of real members, I can't really envision myself in the tribe, you know?

When I click on "leadership" and your website takes me to a list rather than a series of photos, I am just a hop, skip, and a jump away from closing out the window. I'm still browsing a few sites.  I don't really care what your names are yet. I want to see some faces behind all that text on your site because it is actually true that a picture is worth a thousand words.

When I click on "sermons," I need to hear something so I can imagine myself sitting amongst the other members of the tribe, hearing what you are hearing.  Better yet, I'd love a You Tube video (parceled into parts) so I can see and hear as if I was there.  This isn't a research project. I don't want to sit and read your sermons, I want to hear your voices.

And friends, I know you all want to have a photo directory on your website but can't make it public for safety reasons, but truly, those "for members" links and password protected parts of your site that I stumble upon so easily communicate to me that I am an outsider. Even though I totally understand the reasons you do it, I find that somehow it still feels terribly uninviting to me, this person who is considering bringing up her family among your people.

Calendars are similar.  Please, when I go to find out what is going on in your church, I don't want an actual calendar.  I know you've done that cool thing of actually putting links in for each calendar entry so I can click to get more information.  And truly, that's better than the way things used to be.  But it's cumbersome, it's boring, and it doesn't inspire me to imagine myself with you. 

Actually, the ever-fabulous Andover Newton Theological School provides a fantastic example of an alternative to a calendar.  Stay on their homepage for a few seconds and you will see the primary graphic on the page as a slideshow with events advertised.  Each one has a "headline" and a way to click for more info.  Then, look over to the right side of the page.  The first thing you see is "new and current."  Your eyes naturally lower and then you get "fall 2010: key dates."  Now that's the kind of thing that says, "join us."

Here's a screenshot:

Another issue is that if you can't tell me in three or four sentences who you are, I get the feeling that you don't really know, and then how can you expect me to imagine myself as one of you? Yes, I will want more information, but you would do so much better to keep the headlines clean so I can settle into your picture of words for a minute.

If you have links to your bylaws and your meeting minutes, I am like "whoah, TMI." We've just met one another. I feel like you are airing all your laundry, clean or dirty, and it blocks my view of you the people.  When I picture myself walking with you, I see myself carrying a big pile of laundry by your side. Not too inviting.  (By the way, your members rarely if ever use those links themselves, anyway, no matter how much they say they want them.)

That's actually the crux of the issue.  Are our websites invitational?  Do they inspire imaginings about joining our tribes?

We as religious leaders need to continue to revisit our websites again and again, asking ourselves these three simple questions:

1. When people visit our website, is it clear what kind of tribe they've stumbled upon?
2. Oh yeah, what kind of tribe is that? Is that an accurate reflection of the tribe we actually are?
3. What sights (photos of members and staff) and sounds (sermons) do we have on our website that help people imagine themselves walking with us?

Haven't We All Heard Enough About Church Websites? Part I

First, a video just for fun.  I've been reading a ton about easy church website creation through both Cloversites and Wordpress.



Church consultants, blogs, and books have given us an earfull about bad church websites.  We know we are supposed to do better.  Here are "just a few" examples: 

• http://westcoastwitness.com/tag/bad-church-websites/
• http://coldfusion-guy.blogspot.com/2010/10/on-stock-photos-on-church-websites-or.html
• http://www.churchwebsiteideas.com/
• http://www.biblestorysoftware.com/webpage.htm
• http://vandelaydesign.com/blog/wordpress/best-church-websites/
• http://djdesignerlab.com/2010/08/22/15-beautiful-church-website-designs/
• http://tonymorganlive.com/2005/05/14/10-easy-ways-to-keep-me-from-visiting-your-church-because-i-visited-your-website/
• http://www.darrenhoyt.com/2009/01/08/interviews-with-church-designers/ and http://articles.sitepoint.com/article/design-modern-church-marketing
• http://uugrowth.com/2010/04/22/facebook-like-button-will-soon-be-everywhere/ and http://uugrowth.com/2009/11/12/is-your-church-empty-online/

See what I mean?  The talk is everywhere!

So why are there still so many bad church websites out there?

This quick post series (and yes, I am still going to return to the theme of church and the economy) will contain my recent thoughts about church websites.

A Response to "Fighting Bullying With Babies"

I will return to the subject of church and the economy soon, but today I have come across something that is too powerful not to talk about right away.  It is this opinion piece from the New York Times:

Fighting Bullying With Babies

This is really powerful stuff ya'll.  We need to take note.

For religious leaders I have a few special comments:

1.  This is one more argument for multigenerational, family-style church communities. Older kids and teens *need* opportunities to interact with babies (and it probably is a good idea for plenty of us adults too, to interact more with babies).

2.  The church could be a powerful agent in lowering all kinds of community violence.  The project described in the article actually started from the need to reduce in-home violence, not bullying.  I'm dreaming up an empathy-building ministry for a whole community as we speak!

3.  I think that this program likely benefits the babies too.  Babies who have empathetic interactions with older kids have been given a powerful gift.

4.  Related to the above #3, it is so easy as a church to stay out of the conversation about how to care for babies.  After all, everyone has their own philosophy of parenting, and parents of babies are often inundated with well-meant but irritating unsolicited instructions from busy bodies about how to care for their babies.  None of us wants to be an irritating busy body. 

On the other hand, if our churches have a calling to live out God's love in the world, we need to really be there for parents as they navigate their way through all the cultural roadblocks to children's development of empathy.  That starts before folks have even had babies yet, or when babies are just babies.  Reassuring parents who are making choices that build empathy -- such as responding to baby's cries rather than letting baby cry it out -- is an important part of raising kids together with parents as a church community.

What do you think?

On Economy and Church: Part I

Here are some of my observations:

1.  The economy is still on shaky ground.  I am far from alone in questioning whether the economy is sustainable.  I still find the following link really interesting, even if I don't agree with a lot of what is on the website, and I hope others will as well (it is over 3 hours, but soooo worth the time and extremely thought-provoking): http://www.chrismartenson.com/crashcourse.  I especially find it interesting that I watched these videos long before the election of President Obama, and I am witnessing the predictions of his actions, as our next president, come to fruition, as I now believe they would have with either a democrat or republican in the White House.

2.  If the above is true, that there is a fair chance that the economy is not sustainable, then our churches need to prepare to see our communities through some rough seas ahead.  Many of our churches as they exist now could not survive those seas themselves. 

3.  Currently, environmental activists and fiscal conservatives are seen as warring parties.  Bridges need to be built between the reality that economic resources as we currently know them are not going to be available forever, and perhaps not even in the near future, and the reality that our use of those resources to date has been tremendously destructive to our shared home, the earth, and that this also is a threat to us and our children.

4.  One advantage of the economic difficulties of the last several years is that many actions toward sustainability became more mainstream.  I don't have research to back it up, but I have a good feeling waste levels on the individual plane have been reduced.  At the same time, however, because sustainability is currently a largely individual or small group action, in order to survive, many families had to resort to environmentally harmful and economically unsustainable action. 

For example, Americans benefit from what is seen as a highly efficient agricultural system and food manufacturing and shipping system.  The prices we pay for food do not reflect the food's ultimate cost, to the environment, our health, and so forth.  However, our entire sense of the cost of living is built around the availability of this system.  People own the houses that they can afford because of this system. 

The shaky foundation underneath it all, as the environmental and health costs are more and more visible, however, is also contributing to initial signs of breakdown.  Food prices have been driven up and up from what was comfortable for the majority five or six years ago.  Those of us who own homes or pay rent based on what we can afford because of a lower cost of food, especially in a time of job loss and jobs at risk, aren't able to keep it all balanced.

Because of the higher cost of food, for instance, my family can't afford to eat anymore except to the extent we shop for the vast majority of what we eat at places like Pricerite (discount grocer shipping food in from all over just like BJs, Costco, or Walmart).   With the exception of organic milk, no organics are available.  We've thus reduced the organics we eat to "occasional foods" when we can afford local.  With the exception of locally prepared pita breads, this is not local food.  We've thus reduced our locally grown and prepared food (we couldn't afford even a half share at a CSA this summer) to "occasional foods" (though to our credit, we buy very, very little pre-prepared foods, and cook nearly entirely from scratch).  On the individual level we can't afford the sustainable practices that will ultimately save our community.

5.  While questioning sustainability is more accepted now than it was even a few years ago, questioning sustainability is not yet seen as mainstream.  Those who question sustainability are largely still seen still as alarmists and millenialists.  Those who are preparing for a major economic shift are marginalized as if they are preparing for "the end of the world."  Even within "green churches," we have not yet reached a tipping point of preparation for a new economic era.

6.  The status quo has been maintained just enough that as communities, we have largely been settling back into a place of comfort about things.  Economic distress is still high, but the stress levels have been reduced just enough that we aren't questioning the entire system.  Even as recently as a few weeks ago, I was still functioning under the illusion that I can hold onto my house that I really need to sell in order to move into a position more sustainable on the individual and community level.  I was still thinking I could get a renter and downsize to a small apartment, and that everything might still be okay. 

7.  One tension: in what might turn out to be a major shift in the entire world economic system, the things that are good for us in the long-run do not feel attainable in the short-run.  Just as in my example above regarding the cost of food and the way my own family is surviving on the cheap stuff from the discount grocery outlet, our churches are also finding it difficult or impossible to choose a way of being in the world that is best for the long-run.  Our churches have staff people and ministers who need these jobs in an economy where jobs are scarce.  These jobs serve an important function for the things that churches do currently, even though those things may not be what is needed to help our communities through the rough seas ahead in the next 10, 20, 30...years. 

On the institutional level, we don't know how else to structure ourselves, and we are afraid to make any changes based on predictions of an unknown future because what if those predictions don't turn out to be true?  Won't we then just be irrelevant?  Major change is needed, but every incentive is toward the maintenance of the status quo (to understand this, please, please take the time to check out the link in observation #1).  The chance of popular support for critical changes in our churches seems remote at best.

We look at churches like those of the Rev. Ron Robinson, and we say, "Oh, that looks interesting.  What great stuff.  I want to support what they are doing.  But that is not what my own church's unique identity is all about.  That wouldn't fit us at all.  I wouldn't feel at home in that church.  Here at my own church, we're about Sunday worship..." etc. etc.  It's scary to reimagine ourselves.  And it's scary to reimagine ourselves in a future that seems uncertain.  And it's scary to imagine ourselves taking actions now based on what seem like potentially alarmist predictions, especially when those decisions involve tough issues like the jobs and the position descriptions of good people who have done good, important work and who need jobs in an economically difficult time, and whose current job descriptions make sense to what we feel like we need right now.

RSS Feed

So if you look to the right, above "followers," there is an RSS icon and a way to put this blog site into your RSS feed if that is your preferred way of keeping up with blogs.  If you are not familiar with what RSS can do for you as a blog reader, check it out:



RSS is called such because it is "really simple syndication."  The implication is that anyone can do it, which makes someone like me -- who has not been able to figure it out easily -- feel really silly having so many questions ;-).  If you have questions, you are not alone. 

Edited to add: Fortunately, my questions have been very kindly answered by the very helpful person running UUpdates, so I have deleted the question originally in this post.   

I have given my site address (now that I have done multiple things to try to make sure I have the required RSS capacity) to http://www.uupdates.net/, a great aggregate of UU blogs.  If you are not familiar with that site, I highly recommend it.  You can go there to see who has posted what within the last 24 hours, few days, or weeks, etc. on their UU blogs. 

Edited to add: The helpful person running UUpdates also tells me that if you prefer to use your own RSS feed reader and don't want to have to also go to UUpdates, you can simply subscribe to the recent additions feed of UUpdates and get a list of newly added blogs that way.  Fantastic stuff!

Characteristics of a 21st Century Pastor

While searching for something unrelated, I came across this article from the highly respected Alban Institute. 

I generally like the sound of the twelve listed characteristics for the "21st century pastor" (for much of the list, I'd say more broadly for "21st century professional religious leadership").  But I am curious.   Is this the inspiring list toward which we should aim as 21st century religious leaders?  Is the list complete?  Is it accurate?  Does it seem to encapsulate all that we are moving toward in a new century?  Is it inspiring? 

I'd love to hear what folks think of the list. 

Another Prayer

I want to get in the habit of posting more.  Today's post, however, will simply be a prayer.  I'm worried about my son right now, and it is really all I can think about tonight.  By the way, Lizard Eater wrote yet another great post this weekend, this time about "praying aloud."  Some other UU bloggers have begun to respond (and can I just say that I am so glad to have found the Deep River blog tonight?).
________________
Let us pray together:

Today the sun rose and set.
The air was crisp and autumnal.
God in your greatness, we give our thanks.

Today there were lonely hearts.
There was illness and grief.
There was helplessness and powerlessness.
There was pain and cries unheard.
For those suffering, we pray for relief,
and we offer ourselves as the ears for those cries yet unheard.
God in your mercy, hear our prayer.

Amen.

Staff Management as Open, Innovative Systems Part III

Here are several more organizational management principles for supervising staff teams in the church setting. These are, of course, just some ideas I have, and they are in development...nonetheless, here they are, for whatever they are worth:

3. Our life experiences don't come in boxes, nor should our contributions. First, a necessary preface: certainly I have an area of expertise on my staff team, as does every other member of the team. I am of course only human, and I would probably resent it if another member of the team felt they knew how to do my job better than I did. We all want to be respected for our hard-won expertise.

For this reason, no matter what opinions I have, I am not going to go around the staff team telling the Parish Minister how to preach or provide pastoral care, the Music Director how to direct the choir or play a piece of music, the Administrator what database she should use and how, nor the Bookeeper how to keep budget records or work with auditors. On occasion I share my personal experience of something if it seems that it would be a useful part of a conversation, but I have become wise enough to avoid telling people how to do their own jobs, in which they surely have far, far more expertise than I.

Folks who head staff teams are wise to keep this in mind. Ministers are usually responsible for the supervision of church staff and yet are not, as a whole, particularly thoroughly-trained themselves in all  aspects of administration, education, and bookeeping (as I am making my way into seminary, the proof is in the curricula at both the school I am attending this semester and the school I will begin attending next year). There is a reason experts are hired.

When my assistant -- who despite being "just an assistant" (as if there is a "just" in that) has tons of education and life experience in all kinds of areas that enhance our "department" -- asks me what I want her to do, I don't usually tell her how to do it. I simply tell her (1) either the outcome I am shooting for, or (2) the issue at hand. Often, she contributes a way of doing things that is way better than what I would have come up with on my own.

That said, when supervising a staff team, including volunteer staff, I expect everyone to bring their expertise -- that earned both through education and life experience -- to the table.  These don't show up in neat little boxes.  The manifestation of that is not as much that I direct certain questions to certain people (I do that sometimes too, but that isn't what I am talking about here), but that I ask questions designed to provoke collaborative innovation, and then I let the expertise come out in the way people approach the questions. In this manner I don't unnecessarily box people in and prevent good ideas from surfacing because I haven't opened up the system for the input.

Blessed is the Church Administrator I once worked with who was (and I am sure still is) the master of gathering large amounts of information. She read books, magazines, and the internet like crazy, and still found time to get out to the movies! While she could have technically done her job simply by maintaining databases, printing reports, and similar tasks, she didn't limit herself to that. She was a tremendous asset to the staff team by showing up at every staff meeting with an interesting blog or church website she'd stumbled onto, or a clipping of something interesting from "Congregations Magazine" or "UU World" or other similar resources, or a paragraph from a book, or even an idea she got from a tv show. I think she was able to do that because as a staff team we were ever-striving for an open, innovative, collaborative way of working together toward the good of the church.

4. Staff meetings are important. Some of the funniest moments in the tv show "The Office" come from bad staff meetings. I know that there are plenty of awful ways to run a staff meeting out there. I know that a bad staff meeting can be an irritation and time waster for the staff. The solution to that, I think, is not for staff teams to abandon staff meetings altogether, but to learn how to run great staff meetings. Staff need time together that goes beyond visiting one another's offices, bumping into one another at the water cooler, or even eating lunch together every day. Isolation among staff members doesn't cultivate creative, innovative collaboration.

Supervisors should not mistake their own sense of how well they are keeping up with what's going on with staff members as the fulfillment of staff meeting needs. That is, the staff meeting isn't for the supervisor. It is for the team. The more teams meet as teams, the more they will work as teams, so staff meetings should be frequent, regular, and effectively run. Because of the way most Unitarian Universalist churches are structured, it makes sense that there is a need for all-staff meetings as well as meetings just for "program staff."

5. Staff, down to the support staff, should have a part in determining the strategic direction of the congregation. Yes, it's about buy-in.  Chances are, if staff stick around for a while, they will be assisting the congregation through at least a couple iterations of strategic efforts.  While the congregation belongs to its members -- and the strategic direction of the congregation ultimately is a decision of members -- a strategic plan in which the staff have no personal investment will not be properly supported by staff, no matter how much they are willing to bend to congregational desire.

Staff who believe in the strategic mission and goals will work twice as hard to achieve them. In contrast, staff who simply bend to the will of the strategic mission and goals will spend more time trying to keep their head above water in meeting the new goals on top of everything else they do than creatively collaborating.  Creative collaboration requires effective prioritization, which requires some buy-in and a feeling of being an active, empowered part of the process.  The goal is creative collaboration.

Staff Management as Open, Innovative Systems Part II

Here are two organizational management principles for supervising staff teams in the church setting. These are, of course, just some ideas I have, and they are in development...nonetheless, here they are, for whatever they are worth:

1. Every single week of work together, church staff teams should have at least one opportunity in which they come together to innovate around a common "big picture" issue. It doesn't really matter what the issue is in any given week, but the opportunity must be nourished on a regular basis. The point isn't as much the resulting innovations (some may be quite good, but many will fail to get off the ground or to succeed), but rather the cultivation of a collaborative approach to innovation. Critically, this should not be framed as problems to solve, but rather "themes of innovation."

These themes or issues should also be "big picture" issues because especially in teams not yet accustomed to collaborative innovation, "little picture" stuff is often too easy to break up into individual-sized pieces that are then -- by habit and for ease but at the cost of innovation -- removed from the collaborative environment and taken on as individual pet issues at which to hammer away. That has a role too, but not in this principle. Here, it is all about the collaboration.

2. Relationships should be cultivated on the group level between staff and congregants, particularly lay leaders in the congregation. Individual staff members will naturally make individual partnerships with congregants with whom they work closely out of either necessity or affinity. This is generally good and most of the time quite healthy. It certainly shouldn't be discouraged. However, if you look at your church staff and see that each individual member of the staff has a narrow subset of congregants with whom the staff member works nearly exclusively, you can say with some certainty that your staff work in silos.

An innovative environment, as demonstrated in the TED video, is one in which collaboration is at the center. For this reason, since the Unitarian Universalist church really belongs to its members and not its staff or even its ministers (and thus the most fruitful innovations will come at least in part from the congregation itself), collaborative partnerships between staff and congregants should be nurtured in collaborative formations. Those leading staff teams should assist in nurturing between the teams as a whole relationships with sets of congregants.

I once served a church in which the staff meetings were attended not only by every staff member, but also by one of the older, retired volunteers who, among other things, spent most of her days at the church, serving folks from the congregational food pantry. While certainly she could have done her work in the food pantry without attending the staff meetings, she was a very important volunteer in the church, not to mention a mover and a shaker in the larger community. The staff team was enhanced by every member of the team having a solid relationship with her as a team. When I worked with this volunteer on a project or issue together in partnership with other staff, my relationship with not only the volunteer but my fellow staffer was enhanced. Meanwhile, our sense of "being in it all together" as a congregation was strengthened by this and other relationships with groups of volunteers in the congregation.

Staff members should not only have the opportunity to work with one another as a team, but to include on the team (and those are the operative words) multiple volunteer leaders from within the congregation.

Staff Management As Open, Innovative Systems Part I

One subject about which I am deeply passionate and interested is organizational development and "management" in religious settings.

If it were an option, rather than choosing between Community Minister, Minister of Religious Education, or Parish Minister, I would seriously consider a speciality in Minister of Organizational Development. One of the reasons that many faith communities are in decline in the United States is that religious organizations are not keeping up their development in pace with society's development.

Society is changing at an increasingly rapid rate. Meanwhile, religious organizations are for many good reasons on "glacial time." This serves no small number of important religious purposes (and I firmly believe that many religious leaders can improve their relationships with the folks in their organizations by slowing down on many levels), but in adapting ministries for changing populations, moving so slowly does nothing but hold us back.

For this reason, I think we would be well-served to expand our thinking about types of ministries to include the ministering that goes on at the organizational rather than individual level of any faith community. (That's my percolating argument for adding another type of ministry to the UUA ministry categories, if such categories must remain.)

I share all this to say that my interest in organizational development has led to some thinking recently about staff development and management in churches. In particular, I am interested in how staff teams can function in such a way that promotes innovation and outreach. My dad recently posted this TED video on the Facebook page for his coffee house (you'll see why), and somewhere around the six or seven minute mark, my ears started to perk up:



In the church in which I currently work, daily lunch table discussions are important for this reason. The tradition has long been that when folks are around and available, we eat together at noon. At lunch there is talk about everything from politics to the personal, but on occasion we talk a little business, and that serves a healthy purpose. The Director of Music is unfortunately rarely present, as he does not have an office nor "office hours" at the church, and neither myself nor the minister seem to be able to attend lunch on a daily basis, so the administrative staff and "support staff" are the most regular lunch attendees. Nonetheless, there are periodic occasions in which conversations over lunch are particularly fruitful in our work together.

Yet creating an innovative staff team, I have come to believe, takes more intentionality. Just being in the same room is as likely in the church setting to create a culture of camaraderie in the status quo, or even a place to vent and affirm fears about change, as it is to nurture the kind of open, collaborative systems of innovation that Steven Johnson is talking about in the TED video.

People want to have a meaningful part in something meaningful. All too many folks working as staff in churches come to find that they don't have a meaningful place in the life of their churches unless they inextricably link themselves to maintenance of systems. I'd like to see more churches breaking this mold and moving in the direction of properly supporting good, healthy, current, and relevant systems while also giving staff a meaningful place in something beyond the maintenance of those systems.

That's what I want to explore in part II of this (two part?) post series.