Category Archives: Liberal religion

Three pointers for success

Seth Godin offers three pointers on making a small business succeed his blog. Looking them over, I think apply equally well to small church success:

Small business success
Three things you need:
1) the ability to abandon a plan when it doesn’t work,
2) the confidence to do the right thing even when it costs you money in the short run, and
3) enough belief in other people that you don’t try to do everything yourself.

Quick thoughts on how each of these points can apply to churches:

1) Knowing when to abandon a plan: I’ve been thinking a lot about this recently, and I feel that part of knowing when to abandon plans that don’t work is having good data so that you can have some objectivity when judging a plan. Two examples: (a) A year and a half ago, we changed our advertising plan, cutting our ads in the big daily newspaper from weekly to every other week, and putting more resources into smaller weekly papers and shoppers, and the Web. Lots of complaints about the reduced number of ads from current members, but we noticed that the number of visitors doubled, so instead of abandoning our new plan we stayed the course — because we could prove that we were getting results. (b) We have an explicit goal of increasing worship attendance, and so we began to tweak our Sunday morning worship service to make it more celebratory and more fun. The worship service felt pretty good but attendance numbers didn’t budge, so we knew that we had to tweak some more. Then suddenly beginning last May we started to see our numbers rising by 20-30% — now maybe we’re headed in the right direction.

2) Do the right thing in spite of short-term cost: From my experience, I’d say the biggest example of this point in churches is — deferred maintenance. Any examples from your experience?

3) Believe in others so you don’t do everything:Given the rate of volunteer burnout in small churches, this last point may be a bigger problem than I had thought. Could it be that part of the reason small churches don’t grow is that we don’t put enough trust in potential new leaders? I’ll have to think about that….

Thanks to Carol for pointing out the Seth Godin post.

The 5% solution

Those of us who are Unitarian Universalist ministers working in southeastern Massachusetts and Rhode Island received an interesting and provocative email message from the executive committee of our local ministers group. They asked: If we were to have 5% membership growth in district congregations in the next year, how do you envision us using our district resources to be most effective? (For those of you who aren’t Unitarian Universalists, the “district” is our middle judicatory body.) I wasn’t quite sure how I would answer that question. An advertising campaign? Training sessions on how to welcome newcomers? What would really help us reach that goal of a 5% increase? I would be really curious to know what my readers think.

Another kind of church choir

I’ve got all kinds of music swirling through my head right now. We’ve organized a “folk choir” here in our church — not a formal classical choir, not a gospel choir, but a folk choir. In other words, there may be printed music but not every singer will know how to read music. The primary way the tunes are passed on is by ear; and each singer might put their own little twist on a song.

I have to admit that I’m not particularly interested in singing in a traditional choir. I admire people who can sing in carefully structured four-part harmony, but I’d rather sing in a more improvisatory style. I like the texture that arise from each singer putting a slightly different spin on a song: different signers changing the melody slightly, someone singing the first note of a phrase a little before the beat while everyone else is on the beat, one singer altering the rhythm, another signer adding her or his own little ornaments — in other words, a folk choir can tend towards heterophony (and sometimes even more full-blown polyphony) rather than the homophony more typical of a traditional choir.

And a folk choir can use some interesting musical forms that involve the rest of the congregation: call-and-response songs, partner songs, chants and rounds, songs with verses sung by a soloist and choruses sung by all, etc. That means that a folk choir is more likely to involve the whole congregation, rather than just singing as performers within the worship service. A folk choir can also draw in those who don’t read music, and those who don’t read at all (children, for example), because they can teach songs to the congregation by ear.

We’ll be singing in the worship service for the first time this Sunday, and then singing in nearly every service from now through Christmas. It will be interesting to see how it goes. I’m betting that our folk choir will improve our congregational singing another notch; liven up worship services; and I’m betting that those of us singing in the folk choir are going to have a blast. I’ll keep you posted….

Now I’m really curious to know if there are any other churches out there which have some sort of folk choir, as opposed to a more traditional choir. If so, how has it worked out for you?…

Someone call Matt Groenig, now!

All hail to commenter Paul, who has imagined what it might be like if the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) managed to get some product placement in one of Matt Groenig’s productions. Quick, someone have the UUA ad agency call Matt Groenig with these little snippets to be incorporated in the next Futurama movie:

Bender greeting visitors at a “Welcome Table” at his Unitarian Universalist church:
    â€œWho are you, and why should I care?”

Bender on an anti-racist Journey Towards Wholeness:
    â€œThis is the worst kind of discrimination. The kind against me.”

Bender contemplates the Ultimate:
    God: Bender, being God isn’t easy. If you do too much, people get dependent on you. And if you do nothing, they lose hope. You have to use a light touch, like a safecracker or a pickpocket.
    Bender: Or a guy who burns down a bar for the insurance money.
    God: Yes, if he makes it look like an electrical thing. If you do things right, people won’t be sure you’ve done anything at all.

Bender, the Unitarian Universalist congregant:
    â€œHey. Do I preach at you when you’re lying stoned in the gutter?”

(I made some slight edits for clarity, but the funny bits are Paul’s. Thanks, Paul! As a Futurama fan myself, I just had to post this on the main page.)

Church marketing sucks — or does it?

My mother-out-law (Carol and I aren’t married, so she’s an out-law, not an in-law) sent me a fascinating piece from the October 23 Wall Street Journal. In an article titled “A Congregation of Consumers,” Naomi Schaefer Riley reviews the book “Shopping for God,” by James B. Twitchell (Simon & Schuster). Riley says, in part:

Choosing a religion, [Twitchell] argues, is much like choosing any other product — from breakfast food to beer. He sets out to determine why the “spiritual marketplace” in the U.S. seems so hot right now, and, more pointedly, why evangelical megachurches have become, well, so mega. His theme can be summed up in one of the book’s smug chapter titles: “Christian Consumers Are Consumers First.”

Sociologists have long noted that religiously tolerant societies actually inspire greater religious allegiance than societies in which piety is imposed by government fiat. But “Shopping for God” adds a twist: “In a highly competitive market, suppliers have to stay on their toes. . . . Coke sells more going up against Pepsi. McDonald’s needs Burger King. When markets are supplying interchangeable products, selling can become frantic. Brand war! The complacent get killed.” The “complacent” are the mainline churches, according to Mr. Twitchell; they have basically dropped out of the competition. The evangelical churches, by contrast, are competing wildly and thriving even if, like Coke and Pepsi, they are are offering similar “products.”

So far, I basically agree with Twitchell. The mainline churches — Methodists, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and so on — have faced dwindling memberships for years, primarily because they are unwilling to get their hands dirty in marketing and publicity. Unitarian Universalists have been holding steady or slightly increasing, not because we have paid any attention to marketing, but because we have what Seth Goodin calls a “purple cow” product:– our “religious product” is so different, it advertises itself. But back to the main point of this post.

Naomi Riley does not like the idea that churches have to market themselves. She argues that churches have to answer to a higher calling than mere marketing:

If you can find a way of seeing religion primarily as a form of consumerism — skipping the (how to put it?) faith and truth part of religious belief — then Mr. Twitchell’s analysis makes some sense. And in fact there are churches out there self-consciously engaged in marketing. They hire consultants and public-relations experts to “grow” their flock, and they obey a market discipline. Mr. Twitchell notices a sign hanging in Mr. Hybels’s megachurch office that quotes Peter Drucker, the business guru.

But consultants can only do so much, and the point of church outreach surely has less to do with improving “brands” than with saving souls. Mr. Twitchell concludes by noting that, “in the Land of Plentitude, the customer is king.” Thus he asks: “Why should religion be different?” The answer to that question comes from another book.

So do you agree with Naomi Riley, or with James Twitchell? In a society that is dominated by marketing mentalities, how far may religious organizations accommodate themselves to market forces?

Let me make this question more pointed:– If your congregation is faced with declining membership, to what extent do you feel it is acceptable to employ marketing strategies to boost membership? Which specific marketing techniques are acceptable (ads in traditional media, Web and new media marketing, assisting current members to engage in word-of-mouth marketing, door-to-door solicitation, etc.), and which are not? I don’t have a firm answer myself, so consider this a brainstorming session where we’re all thinking out loud….

Unprovability of Murphy’s Law

Murphy’s Law is as follows: If anything can go wrong, it will go wrong. But a corollary to Murphy’s Law states that it is impossible to prove Murphy’s Law.

Proof: If anything can go wrong it will go wrong; when you are trying to prove that things go wrong, your proof will go wrong; thus during the proof everything will go right, thus disproving (rather than proving) Murphy’s Law. Q.E.D.

It should therefore also be obvious that any attempt to apply either Murphy’s Law, or this corollary of Murphy’s Law, to religion will result in failure; which in itself has some profound religious implications. (And you thought Kurt Godel’s Unprovability Theorem was mind-blowing when applied to religion….)

Email: [curse | blessing], part five

From the point of view of time management, email is an curse. Email seduces you into spending too much time on insignificant matters. A basic principle of time management is the 80/20 rule: you should spend 80% of your time on the 20% of tasks that are the highest priority. Almost never does reading any email message rank as one of our most important priorities; yet many of us routinely spend anywhere from a quarter to half our time each day reading and answering email.

I’ve been working on ways to apply basic time management principles to email, and here’s the strategy I have come up with so far:–

I check email only after I have outlined my daily task list, and prioritized my tasks for the day. As I check email, I skip reading all email listserves and other optional email; I also skip reading anything that doesn’t need to be read right away. I spend no more than half an hour checking email (well, OK, sometimes I spend 45 minutes). Once a week, I spend a couple of hours going through all the email that has accumulated — at which time, I find I can delete most of it.

I’m still working on my email strategy. If you have thought about email from the point of view of time management, I’d love to know what strategies you have developed for minimizing the time you spend reading inconsequential email.

Church Web cam

Just back from three days at a ministers’ retreat, I can’t resist passing along a cool idea. The featured presenter for the retreat was Scott Alexander, senior minister at the Unitarian Universalist church in Bethesda, Maryland. He told us that not long ago, the Bethesda church was engaged in a major construction project, and some of the nerds and techies at the church installed a Web cam so members of the congregation could watch the progress of the building.

When the construction project was over, Scott asked if the Web cam could be moved to the main church. It now provides a live video feed of all worship services. A Web cam may not be super high quality video, but it’s perfectly adequate for Web streamed video. The video feed is in the section of the church Web site that is password-protected, in order to protect the privacy of worshippers who might appear on the video. With the Web cam, shut-ins and people who are traveling can watch the Sunday morning worship services live. But also, when there’s a memorial service or wedding, the church can give out temporary passwords so that those who couldn’t make it to the service can still watch it live.

I’ve been thinking it would be fun to install a Web cam in the public portion of our church Web site. We would turn it off during worship services, to protect privacy of worshippers. But the rest of the time, we could leave it on so that anyone could see the play of the sunlight at different times of the day — leaving our virtual doors open so that anyone could come in and sit (virtually) and meditate in a peaceful setting.

Down by law

Mr. Crankypants’ stupid alter ego, Dan, is off at some ministers’ retreat. Dan just called here to make sure no one was illicitly logging on to his blog to write something while he was gone, and he happened to mention that the focus of the ministers’ retreat is a workshop by some guy named Scott Alexander called “Exercising Health in the Practice of Ministry.” Dan was all excited by what this Scott fellow had to say….

Dan: “I’m all excited by what Scott had to say!”

Mr. Crankypants, muttering under his breath: “You are easily excited.”

Dan: “What? What did you say?”

Mr. C: “What are you excited about?”

Dan: “Oh, Scott is telling us what everyone knows, but won’t say — that most ministers chronically work far too many hours, that chronically overworking just makes them less effective as ministers, less healthy and less able to function effectively as religious leaders.”

Fine, Dan. But what Mr. Crankypants wants to know is who is saying the same thing for the Directors of Religious Education? Many congregations routinely expect Directors of Religious Education to work far longer than the hours they get paid for. Many congregations (especially small congregations) expect Directors of Religious Education to work miracles — to accomplish fifty hours worth of work while getting paid for only seventeen with no benefits and most often no vacation. No wonder the average tenure for a Director of Religious Education is only about two and a half years — Directors of Religious Education are not stupid people, and quickly pick up on the fact that they are being exploited, so they quit.

OK, Mr. Crankypants has something to say to you Directors of Religious Education out there, so listen up. The Board of Trustees of your church is not going to change. The Board of Trustees of your church is never going to say to you, Hey you work too many hours. They are never going to say to you, Hey since you’re charged with family ministry in this church we want you to model how to be a good family member by not working any extra hours. (These lines stolen directly from what Dan reported of Scott Alexander’s workshop.) But — everyone in your church is going to notice when you work more hours than you’re supposed to, and they’re going to think, Man I can’t live up to her/his standards so I’m just not going to teach Sunday school so I’ll never measure up. There’s only one way you can get out of this double bind….

Go tell the Board of Trustees at your church that you, the Director of Religious Education, need to set a good example for all religious families, by spending lots of time with your family, and not overworking at church. Tell ’em that Mr. Crankypants said so — so they just better listen up!

Down by law. Mr. C. has got your back, yo.