Category Archives: Liberal religion

Collaboration?

I was invited to a community meeting at University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth this morning, to brainstorm ideas for community-university collaboration on sustainability initiatives. Unfortunately, I had to leave early to meet with a family about a memorial service. But I have to admit, what I heard in the first part of the meeting did not sound like there was much room for the university to collaborate with an individual collaboration. The university was looking for sites to place service-learning students, and they were looking for community partners to apply for grants. But it’s hard to imagine placing a service-learning student in a church, and if our church was going to apply for a grant I can’t quite imagine how we would benefit from having the university as a partner. And I also have to admit that I’m wary because academia in the United States does not have the reputation of being friendly or respectful towards organized religion.

But after all, they did invite me and maybe I’m missing some potential for good collaboration. Maybe you can help me out — I’m wondering if any of my readers knows of a successful collaboration between a local congregation and a university. What would such a collaboration look like?

Too many books…

Between reading for sermons and reading for pleasure, the pile of books next to my writing table has gotten pretty high. To help me remember what I’ve read in the past two weeks, here are short takes on a few of those books:

The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and other Hangouts at the Heart of Community, Ray Oldenburg.

Oldenburg claims to be a sociologist, but this book is filled with undocumented assertions that smack of nostalgia for a time that never existed. Worse, the book is rooted in prejudices of which Oldenburg doesn’t seem to be aware. Like this sentence telling why wine bars are driving pubs out of business:

The wine bars are more comfortable [than pubs], cosmopolitan, and favored among working women and the softer male that one finds everywhere throughout the modern world these days….

Based on that statement, I guess I’m glad that Oldenburg’s favorite “great good places” are fast disappearing.

Passion: New Poems, 1977-1980, June Jordan.

Jordan claims the poetic tradition of Walt Whitman, and claims Whitman as a poet of liberation, which works for me. Her poems are certainly poems of liberation. Yet she isn’t Puritanical in her liberative message. Take, for example, the poem “Alla Tha’s All Right, but,” which Sweet Honey in the Rock made into a song:

Somebody come and carry me into a seven-day kiss
I can’ use no historic no national no family bliss
I need an absolutely one to one a seven-day kiss…

Amen. I’m already figuring out how to use this poem (and others of her poems) in a worship service….

A Man without a Country, Kurt Vonnegut.

Vonnegut’s last book is short, uneven, and slight. But it’s got some kickin prose epigrams buried in the meandering text…

Shrapnel was invented by an Englishman of the same name. Don’t you wish you could have something named after you?

…and for good measure Vonnegut throws in some delightfully vicious offhand ad hominem attacks on U.S. political leadership:

…She wrote, “I’d love to know your thoughts for a woman of 43 who is finally going to have a child but is wary of bringing a new life into such a frightening world.”

Don’t do it! I wanted to tell her. It could be another George W. Bush or Lucrezia Borgia….

…and you’re quite sure Vonnegut feels he has listed the most violent man first. Slight as it is, I’ve already read this book twice.

Drawing the Line, poems by Lawson Fusao Inada.

Not just poems, but some good clear prose too, mostly telling quiet stories with lots of depth. The prose poem “Ringing the Bell” tells about a Japanese-American boy in a multi-racial neighborhood, making friends with a Mexican-American boy and his family. “Picking Up Stones” tells about a Zen teacher in an internment camp during World War II who wrote words on stones and scattered them outdoors. Some of the poems aren’t stories; “Just As I Thought” begins…

Just as I thought: One blue jay
                        shakes
                        a whole morning.

Just as I thought: The streetsweeper
                        is related
                        to the preacher….

…and goes one for six rhythmic pages, a collection of images and sounds and feelings that makes most sense when read (or chanted) aloud.

The Case of the Perjured Parrot, Erle Stanley Gardner.

A millionaire is found dead in his mountain cabin, with a parrot watching over his body. Perry Mason is called in, and he discovers that the parrot swears like a trooper and says things like, “Drop that gun, Helen…. Don’t shoot…. My God, you’ve shot me.” By the time the novel is done, there are three parrots (one of whom is brutally and bloodily murdered), a man who may or may not be dead, and a murder case that’s solved in the middle of the coroner’s trial.

In this crazy world, if I can’t get a seven-day kiss, at least I can read a Perry Mason novel.

Email [curse | blessing], part three

The third installment in an occasional series where I think out loud about using email effectively. First installment.

I know this is a minor matter, but when it comes to email I’ve been thinking about….

Salutations and endings

We all pretty much know how to write proper letters. If it’s a formal business letter, you start out with “Dear Ms. Lastname,” then you type or print the body of the letter, and you end with “Sincerely,” followed by your signature. If it’s an informal note, you can start with “Dear Firstname,” the body can be printed or handwritten, and you end with “Yours truly, Me.”

None of us really knows how to write proper email messages, because as yet there are no widely accepted standards. I usually begin all my email messages with “Dear So-and-so,” which won’t offend the traditionalists, but which probably seems hopelessly stuffed-shirt to those with easier manners. I usually end my email messages “Cheers, Dan,” which will neither please nor offend the traditionalists, but which probably seems hopelessly boring to many others.

Yet when it comes to church business, in United States Unitarian Universalist circles at least, I do see faint signs of some standards emerging.

For longer email messages:– More often than not, salutations begin with “Dear…” and here in the United States it is usually considered acceptable to address someone by first name even if you don’t know them. When sending email messages to more than one recipient, I most often see “Dear all,” or less often “Dear friends,” (the latter is my preference, at least in church circles). Endings seem to be less formal than salutations. I never see “Sincerely” or “Yours truly.” I do see “All the best,” “Cheers,” and more specialized endings such as “Thanks,” or “My two cents worth.”

For very short email messages, or for routine replies:– For salutations “Hi,” is perfectly adequate, or no salutation at all. No ending is needed; just typing your name seems acceptable. (By “very short email” I mean maybe half a dozen lines or less.)

What are your perceptions of acceptable standards for email salutations and endings? I’m mostly interested in church business, but I’d be curious to know if other subcultures are evolving their own standards.

Next installment: Email [curse | blessing] part four

The end of a search

As of this morning, when the successful candidate signed the contract, we concluded a successful search for a part-time Director of Religious Education. We had five high-quality people apply, all of whom were qualified, and all of whom had relevant gifts and/or experience.

How good were our applicants? All our applicants identified themselves as Unitarian Universalists, which was a big plus from our point of view. All our applicants had at least two years of college. Our applicants included an experienced Director of Religious Education looking for a new job, four people with experience as religious education volunteers in their own congregations, two people with one to two years of seminary training, one life-long Unitarian Universalist, and one person with a background in counseling.

I thought other small churches might be interested in hearing why I think a tiny church like ours got such a good pool of applicants for a half-time job.

First and foremost, we committed ourselves to paying at the salary guidelines recommended by the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA), and we also committed ourselves to coming up with enough money to make it a half-time position. In the past, when we advertised for a quarter-time or one-third-time position we got only one or two applicants. Increasing the position to half-time at a fair salary made a big difference in the number of applicants.

Second, two of our applicants mentioned that they checked out our church Web site before applying. Our Web site doesn’t pretend to be flashy, but I think it does accurately reflect who we are as a congregation. Although our Web site is aimed primarily at newcomers, I suspect it is equally useful for job applicants — which we will keep in mind during future revisions of the Web site.

Third, we advertised in the right places. We sent a full job posting out in our newsletter — two applicants saw it in the newsletter, and one applicant was given the job posting by someone who receives our newsletter. We also posted the job on the Web site of the Liberal Religious Educators Association (LREDA) — two of our applicants saw the job posting there.

Fourth, we stated that we were hoping for a three-year commitment. I believe applicants heard that and understood that meant that the church was going to be committed to them for at least three years — this was more than a one year trial commitment.

Finally, it helped that we are in Massachusetts, the state with more Unitarian Universalists than any other state. Only two of the five applications came from out of the state.

Of course, having these five excellent applicants created a problem for us — the search committee had to decide between them. It was not an easy decision for them. What a great problem to have.

Hymn resource

While I was working on creating hymn accompaniments for our summer worship services (when we won’t have a live musician for several Sundays), I discovered a very useful online resource. The Christian Classics Ethereal Hymnary has hundreds of classic, copyright-free hymn tunes in a variety of formats. Not all formats are available for all hymns, but the hymns I looked at generally had the following:

  • MIDI files with four-part harmony (which allows you to listen to the hymn)
  • a score in PDF format
  • a score in one or more of the common music-authoring formats (Noteworthy, Finale, etc.)

Some hymn tunes also had partial scores, and scores in more than one key. The one canon/round I looked at (Tallis’s Canon) also had MIDI files of the melody sung as a round.

(This could be a useful resource for worship leaders who don’t read music, but who want to know what a tune sounds like. All you have to do is find the name of the tune — in the hymnal I use, Singing the Living Tradition, the tune name is in small type at the lower right of the hymn — and play the MIDI file on your computer. The only downside is that the Christian Classics Ethereal Hymnary does not include newer, copyright-protected, hymn tunes. So forget tunes written after 1922.)

What I wanted from the hymnary were the MIDI files, to use as a starting point for making less mechanical hymn accompaniments. Straight out of the box, the MIDI files sound as tacky as they usually do. But you can easily modify a MIDI file to make it sound much better. I downloaded the MIDI file to my Mac and dragged it into GarageBand. From there, I altered the type of instrument (e.g., changing it from the crummy default electronic organ sound to a less offensive “cathedral” organ sound), and played with the note durations and note velocities where necessary to make it sound less mechanical. I also checked the harmony parts, and corrected them to correspond with what’s in our hymnal. Since I’m a perfectionist, I added about half a beat at the end of each verse so the congregation can take a big breath before going on to the next verse; and I altered the last verse so that the final notes are held for an extra measure or so. Of course I looped the hymn to wind up with the correct number of repetitions of the melody (whatever the number of verses, plus once through at the beginning).

The final result of an afternoon’s work is a CD with inoffensive accompaniments for eight hymns, plus Old Hundredth for the doxology. That will be enough to get us through the summer. And if I can free up another afternoon, I might just produce another eight hymn accompaniments.

Continue reading →

Post cards

Blogger “UU Enforcer” has started up a fascinating new blog. It turns out he has a large collection of old post cards and other vintage images depicting Unitarian and Universalist churches. He’s been scanning his collection little by little, and posting the scans to his new blog. Most of the images are from the first half of the 20th C., depicting churches from Florida to the midwest to New England. His most recent post has wonderful steroscopic views of the interiors of two Universalist churches in Lowell, Mass. Link.

Be warned — he posts high-resolution images directly to the blog, so if you have a dial-up Internet connection it could take an hour to download one blog page.

More research needed

In tonight’s class for the Underground Railroad Tour Guide training at the New Bedford Historical Society, our teacher Joan Beauboin turned to me and said, “Reverent Harper [I can’t get her to call me “Dan”], you’ll be interested to know that Reverend William Jackson was converted to Unitarianism when — what was her name, now, something Watkins Harper….”

Surprised, I said, “Frances Watkins Harper came to New Bedford?”

Frances Harper was a well-known African American woman who joined the Unitarian church in Philadelphia in 1870, having been attracted to Unitarianism by the many Unitarian abolitionists she had met. Rev. William Jackson was the African American minister of the Second and Salem Baptist churches in New Bedford, known as the fugitive slave’s churches.

“Indeed she did,” said Joan Beauboin. “And she managed to convince William Jackson that he was really a Unitarian.”

Still surprised, I said, “But which church did he join? He didn’t join First Unitarian, did he?” In the second half of the 19th C., the Unitarian church in New Bedford had many of the most powerful and influential and wealthy white New Bedfordites as members; it was very much a white church.

“Well, I don’t know if he actually joined the church,” she admitted. “Perhaps he just considered himself a Unitarian.”

I find it hard to believe that socially-conscious First Unitarian Church would have allowed an African American to rent a pew or otherwise become a formal member. But even if Rev. William Jackson wasn’t a member of First Unitarian, he would have been the most prominent person of color in 19th C. New Bedford to have called himself a Unitarian. This is definitely going to call for more research on my part….

Summer hymns

Small congregations often face the problem of small budgets for music. Here at First Unitarian, we have enough money to pay a 3/8 time music director at American Guild of Organist rates for ten months a year, with enough money left over to provide guest musicians on most Sundays when the music director is off. But we have no money in the budget to pay for musicians in July and August.

We’re slowly moving towards becoming a year-round congregation (both because it’s the right thing to do, and because newcomers often drift away during the summer months if there’s a reduced worship schedule). This summer, we’re moving the summer worship services from the chapel, where we sit in plastic lawn chairs, back into the main church. I managed to come up with money to pay for a musician on one Sunday in July and one Sunday in August, and we have our annual jazz concert on the first Sunday in July. But on the five other summer Sundays, the summer worship coordinator will bring in recorded music to play following the prayer, and during the offering.

Even then, on those five weeks we also need music to accompany hymns. Here’s our latest scheme for summer hymn accompaniment:–

The worship committee has picked out a dozen of our congregation’s favorite hymns. I’m no musician, but with a cheap MIDI keyboard and audio editing software, even I (with my minimal keyboard skills) can piece together hymn accompaniments — I play each vocal line separately and at a very slow tempo, fix the timing, mix the parts together in the editing software, and then bring everything up to speed. The recordings I produce are kind of mechanical, but they’re good enough to accompany hymns. (Just to be on the safe side, we are not using any copyrighted melodies or harmonies.)

If I manage to get a dozen hymns done this year, and another dozen next year, we’ll have a decent little collection of recorded hymn accompaniments to use. Sure, we’d rather have live music, but this is something we can afford — and it’s easier than trying to sing a capella all summer long.

The perfect church Web site

I’m still searching for the perfect church Web site.

The perfect church Web site would have to have a lot of things going for it. It would allow committee chairs, staff, and others to directly add content to their pages on the Web site without going through the Webmaster; it would allow several levels of password protection including pages that can only be viewed by members; it would allow online payment of pledges, and online registration for events; it would support an online calendar of events; it would support a forum for congregational conversation; it would integrate staff blogs; it would allow easy posting of news; it would be inexpensive or free; it would be easy to navigate; it would be easy to maintain.

I spent today investigating Drupal, a free (and open-source) content management system. Drupal meets every single one of the criteria above — except the last two. It is not easy to maintain, and it’s easy to give it a bad navigation system. For example, it looks like it’s a pain in the neck to upgrade the software when security patches are released — and as for the navigation, you’ll have to invent it totally on your own. If you wanted your church administrator to maintain a Drupal-based site, you would have to send him or her to a substantial class in Drupal — and, outside of a few major metropolitan areas, where are you going to find such a class?

There’s a smaller subset of Drupal called Civic Space, which was developed in 2005 to support the Howard Dean presidential campaign. It’s now available for non-profits either as a free program, or a for-pay program with lots of technical support. However, it doesn’t look like it’s quite the right thing for a church Web site.

What I’d like to see is some Unitarian Universalist geeks commit themselves to maintaining a subset of Drupal (or similar content management system) for use by Unitarian Universalist congregations. This group of dedicated geeks would volunteer to be on-call via email for technical support (just as I make myself available to support a couple of WordPress blogging sites), and they would also come up with a basic installation of Drupal preconfigured with permission levels, basic navigation, etc. I’d say I’d take this on myself, except that it looks like the Drupal learning curve is pretty steep and I’d need a year (and training in PHP and CSS) to get to the point where I could do this. But maybe there’s some geeks out there who already have the knowledge?…