Category Archives: Liberal religion

Not to be cynical or anything…

Meadville Lombard Theological School, where I took my M.Div., has announced “sweeping changes.” Less than two years after Meadville Lombard terminated full-time positions of professor of Unitarian Universalist history and professor of ethics, less than a year after the full-time professor of theology was reduced to half-time, Meadville Lombard announces that it will be hiring again:

After reading the declaration, [Meadville Lombard president Lee] Barker acknowledged that the sweeping changes outlined would require at least six months to develop a full plan and begin its implementation. Still, Barker noted that the Board was able to implement the first actions of the plan, including the creation of the position of Provost to head a new student services department that better meets the needs of Meadville’s student population, allowing these students to become the best academically and pastorally.

Barker said the Board’s commitment to this new position is demonstrated by a $50,000 donation from one of the Board members to be used to search for the right candidate for the position of Provost. [Link to the “Declaration”]

Interestingly, Harvard Divinity School has just added a fully-endowed chair in Unitarian Universalist studies. And Andover Newton Theological School has been increasing its academic commitment to Unitarian Universalist students. The new Provost at Meadville Lombard will, no doubt, be able to tell students how to take courses at Harvard and Andover Newton in order to get required coursework in Unitarian Universalist history, ethics, and theology.

Microphone tips for everyone

Anyone who speaks in public should learn how to use a microphone properly — that includes all of us who speak in churches. If you think you will ever speak in public, here is a list of things you might want to learn so you do not annoy the people who will have to listen to you:

  • If you are a scheduled speaker, arrive early and ask to do a sound check with the microphone that you will use.
  • When you do the sound check, learn where the on-off switch is so that you can be sure the mic is on before you speak.
  • When you do the sound check, learn where the on-off switch is so that you don’t accidentally turn it off while you’re speaking.
  • When you do the sound check, learn where the “pop” zone is for the mic you plan to use, so you can avoid it when you speak.
  • When it’s time for you to speak, make sure the mic is on.
  • If you hear the mic cut out while you’re speaking, assume you flipped the switch (and take your hand off the switch!) before you blame the sound system.
  • If you hear yourself causing the mic to “pop”, move your head and mouth so that you are talking beside or over the “pop” zone.
  • Be careful about bumping the mic or hitting it when you turn pages.

Here’s the short version of the same list:

  1. Know where the on-off switch is on the mic and don’t fumble with it.
  2. Don’t cause the mic to “pop”.
  3. Don’t bump the mic.

But what you should really do is spend time practicing and learning how to use a microphone well before you have to speak in public. Here are some suggestions for learning how to use a mic before you have to speak.:

  • Learn the difference between different types of microphones. Wireless mics often require you to speak very close to the mic in order to prevent feedback (a “rock ‘n’ roll” mic), whereas some stationary mics will pick you up from a long way away. If someone hands you a random mic, you need to be able to tell if you’re using a mic that requires you to hold it next to your mouth or one that you can stray away from.
  • Practice using both types of microphone in front of a friendly critic who can let you know how you sound. If possible, record yourself speaking into both types of mic so you know how you sound in each type of mic before you go live.
  • Then take the next step: learn how to hear your voice in the loudspeakers as you speak.
  • While you are practicing with the mics, listen for “pop” sounds when you use plosive consonants like b, d, p, and t. Learn to hear when you make pops come from the loudspeakers, and then learn how to adjust the relationship of the mic to your mouth (basically, talk past the mic instead of directly into the mic) so you don’t cause pops. Note that different mics have different sensitivities to popping.
  • While you are practicing with a rock ‘n’ roll mic, train your hand to hold the mic the exact same distance from your mouth all the time. In other words, don’t ever try to use your microphone hand to make gestures because doing so will make your voice fade up and down in volume as your hand moves towards and away from your mouth.
  • While you are practicing with a rock ‘n’ roll mic, train your hand to hold the mic so you never, never touch the mic switch.
  • While you are practicing with a stationary mic that can pick up your voice from a good distance, practice leaning into the mic and talking in a softer voice. This technique gives your voice an intimate quality, like a radio announcer.
  • While you are practicing with that same stationary mic, try standing back from it and speaking to the back of the room as if there is no mic there to amplify your voice. This technique gives your voice an oratorical quality, like a preacher or a politician.
  • To round out your mic skills, practice using a wireless mic, a handheld mic attached to a wire, a mic on a stand, a clip-on (“lavalier”) mic, and a mic at a lectern or pulpit. The more comfortable you are using different types of microphones, the happier your audiences will be (you can practice, or they can suffer, it’s your choice).

One last point: Practice makes perfect — and you should never stop practicing. I started doing community radio back in 1976, I preach weekly, and yet I’m continually refining my microphone technique. Just three weeks ago I went to the installation of Paul Sprecher as minister of Second Parish in Hingham, Mass., and was just stunned by the excellent mic technique of Rev. Kim Crawford Harvie of Arlington St. Church, Boston, and that of Rev. Jane Rzepka of Church of the Larger Fellowship, Boston. When I got back to New Bedford I tried out their very different techniques myself, and have now added more range to my mic technique.

Since practice makes perfect, go thou and practice.

Update: The last two paragraphs have provoked some strong reactions, expressed in a number of email messages. Let me say that no one should learn microphone technique just for the sake of producing certain vocal effects — microphone technique should serve your message, not the other way around. I learned a great deal from watching Kim and Jane, but I would never, ever use their techniques myself because I could not do so in a genuine way — as a preacher, I do not speak in a conversational tone, and I do not ever speak in an intimate tone (I think a male minister trying to preach in an intimate tone would be very creepy). Yet I still learned a lot from Jane and Kim, especially about using training and muscle memory to keep yourself a certain distance from the mic, and about learning how to listen to yourself in the loudspeakers as you speak. Now go out and practice.

Update: Another rant on microphone use: Link.

District conference

Off to the district conference today, a conference which focused on social justice issues. Vicki Weintein, minister at our Norwell (Mass.) church did a wonderful presentation on integrating social justice into your congregation. Vicki pointed out some things that should be obvious, but that we sometimes forget about (at least that I sometimes forget about). She said that if you want to get people to help you with your social justice project, guilting them into it won’t work as well as “evangelizing” them: telling them how working on your particular social justice project has changed your life, and by the way when you look at someone else you see something in them that is like what’s in you that was transformed by this work. She said that social justice can be fun (radical concept for us New Englanders for whom fun might be an alien concept). And she said that we have to be open to what we are going to get from the people whom we happen to be helping — because social justice is not a one-way process where the priveleged we help out the poor oppressed them, it’s a two-way process where we who do the social justice benefit as well (obviously, there are sometimes some boundaries that come with certain kinds of social justice work, but you get the idea).

On a less serious note — at lunch, I happened to sit beside an old friend, and I began talking about the new YouTube video featuring the bizarre purple alien being who promotes seven cosmic principles, which happen to be just like the seven principles from the Unitarian Universalist Association bylaws (here’s the YouTube link if you haven’t seen it yet). “OK, it’s really stupid, but it’s funny,” I said, “and what I like best is the fact that the bizarre purple space alien is standing in front of this U.S. Pentagon emblem, which is just surreal. It keeps you from taking the video too seriously.”

“Um, well,” said my friend, “I’m actually the guy who made that video.”

“You’re ‘alienhelper,’ the person who created that video?!” I gasped. “Of course, I should have known it was you! So… how did you make it?”

“It was easy,” he said. “One Saturday morning A—- was away, and I had this idea, so I got really wired on coffee and went to work. First I recorded the soundtrack, speeded it up, and raised the pitch. Then I used one of those cheapo $80 Web cams from Logitech. I used Vlogit software to edit the video and add titles. Vlogit has a green screen feature, so I set up some green construction paper, pointed the Web cam at it, and used this little purple alien finger puppet to sort of act out what was on the soundtrack. Then I substituted the Pentagon image for the green screen.”

End result? 200 views in 2 days. The Live Journal UUs picked it up: 2000 views in 13 days. Whoa. This is what we call viral marketing — inexpensive marketing that spreads like a virus.

Church marketing in the business pages

“Prepare Thee for Serious Marketing,” an article about church marketing techniques in Sunday’s New York Times, appears on the first page of the Business section — an unusual place for a religion article in the Times. But that’s because this article looks at how churches are borrowing the latest marketing techniques from the business world.

Reporter Fara Warner starts out with Willow Creek Church, the granddaddy of evangelical mega-churches in South Barrington, Illinois. Warner visits an example of Willow Creek’s newest venture in marketing and member retention:– a program called “The Table” that sounds remarkably like the old Unitarian Universalist “Extended Family” programs from the 1970’s, which you can still find in some Unitarian Universalist churches (my dad belongs to an “Extended Family” group in his Unitarian Universalist church in Concord, Mass.). Warner tells about Randy Frazee, one of the many pastors at Willow Creek, as he hosts a “Table” in his home:

As dusk settles on this neighborhood of 1920’s bungalows and old farmhouses northwest of Chicago, Randy Frazee strums a banjo on his front porch, waiting for his dinner guests to arrive. No cars line his curb because everyone who is coming lives within walking distance.

Once the 12 guests — ranging in age from about 7 to 70 — and the Frazee family have gathered around three tables set end-to-end, they join hands, and Mr. Frazee says a prayer. A meal of barbecued brisket, cheese potatoes, and green beans follows.

Throughout the evening, conversation occasionally touches on favorite scriptures and “walking with the Lord.” The guests tell about their best and worst moments of the week. As dinner wraps up, Mr. Frazee asks one of the couples to talk about “how Christ walked in their life.”…

…a total of more than 6,000 people recently attended several hundred weekend “Tables” in the neighborhoods surrounding Willow Creek’s campus. These “Tables” supplement small groups that the church has already organized around people with similar interests — like mothers, singles, or teenagers. But the idea of “The Table” was based on [geographic] proximity, Mr. Frazee said, so that people began to meet neighbors who weren’t just like themselves….

I don’t think you’ll find much talk of “walking with the Lord” at a Unitarian Universalist “Extended Family” group — after all, we do use a different religious lanugage. But the point of “Extended Families” and “Tables” seems much the same: to get church people to meet in an informal setting. As usual, the Willow Creek folks are very aware of the marketing strategy that lies behind this program:

Corporate marketers have been using similar events for years to try to create closer connections with their brand. Nike, for example, has worked with gyms on new workout routines to make its brand visible beyond sporting goods stores.

For churches, events like the ones created by Willow Creek are meant to offer members a similar closeness, albeit for a more profound purpose: religious worship and discussion.

“In the early church, people didn’t get on their camels to go to Bethany to worship,” said Mr. Frazee, who created similar programs as pastor of a church in Fort Worth before he joined Willow Creek in 2005. “We have adults who seem to have suffered a spiritual stroke. They go to church, but they have forgotten that wonderful sense of hanging out, that basic expression of fellowship in their neighborhoods.”

In other words, church people seem to want some unstructured hang-out time from their churches.

Warner goes on to report that the mega-churches are watching generational trends closely. The Baby Boomers like big, corporate-style worship services with thousands in attendance, but the next generation (described as people born in the 1960’s and 1970’s) is looking for churches to be more “authentic.” Warner interviews Robert B. Whitesel of Indiana Wesleyan University:

“The younger generation sees the mega-churches as too production-oriented, too precise,” [Whitesel said]. “They want church to be more authentic. There is a feeling among this generation that there has been a waning emphasis on the spiritual.”

Mr. Whitesel siad this shift was changing the focus of what a religious leader does at a church. “The boomer church has the paster at the top who is supposed to figure out what the church is,” he said. But in the newer churches he studies, he added, “the pastor has more of a marketing function in understanding what the congregations wants and finding ways to provide that.”

“The pastor has more of a marketing function” — that sounds pretty mercenary and cold-blooded. But I’ve been thinking that it might be possible to take advantage of this generational trend in a way that doesn’t seem quite so mercenary. Maybe we can frame this marketing concept in terms of how leadership should happen in a church. Instead of having pastors as CEO’s, it looks like we need to develop an understanding of the pastor as “servant-leader” who helps facilitate grass roots expressions of spiritual needs. Corporations are finding out that they have less and less top-down control over their brands, as consumers make the brand their own. So too with churches, I think: with the newer generations, we’re going to have to move beyond a centralized top-down hierarchical control of a church or of a denomination, towards a new understanding of non-hierarchical shared leadership.

Translate that back into marketing terms, and you might find that instead of advertising in conventional media, churches might be better off using new participatory media like — well, like blogs — media where you can tell me what you think.

Making progress…

One of the most important uses for technology in church is to increase accessibility. And one of the projects I’ve been slowly working on is trying to figure out the best way to make and distribute audio recordings of worship services, for members of our congregation who can’t make it to church for whatever reason.

In terms of distributing audio recordings of worship services, right now the best solution here in our church is probably putting the audio recordings onto CDs. Yes, I would prefer to distribute audio recordings via our Web site, but many of the people who would like to get audio recordings of worship services either don’t know how to use a computer to download audio files, don’t own a computer, or don’t have high-speed internet access (New Bedford is not a wealthy community, and some of our members cannot afford computers or high-speed internet access). But CD players are so cheap now, we think we can count on everyone owning a CD player.

In terms of making the audio recordings during the worship service, up until this week we have been stymied. We need to be able to process the audio recordings (cleaning up sound through compression, and deleting certain elements of the recording such as personal testimonies or requests for prayers during the worship service), and the easiest way to do that is using a computer and audio processing software (we use GarageBand on my Mac). I have been reluctant to record onto CDs because of their time limitations (about 75 minutes of recording time, not really enough to squeeze in prelude, worship service, and postlude). Fortunately, our music director, Randy Fayan, has a day job working for Avid, a company which makes digital media creation tools.

Randy borrowed a nice little digital audio recorder — it’s about the size of a deck of playing cards — which will record about 17 hours of monoaural audio in mp3 format (at 128kHz), onto its 1 gig flash memory. Yesterday we put the digital audio recorder on the pulpit and recorded the worship service, and then downloaded it onto my computer. It was incredibly easy. The sound quality was excellent, and the recorder picked up nearly all of the worship service with pretty good quality.

We still have a few problems to solve. We like to plug the digital audio recorder into the amplifier that provides sound to persons with hearing difficulties, but if we do that we will have to set up another microphone to pick up the piano. Then there’s the issue of processing the audio file. I spent yesterday afternoon editing the audio file we made and trying different compression rates, but I can’t spend four hours every week doing that and I’m going to have to learn how to process the file in less than an hour. Then we have to decide if we want to make the audio file available via our Web site, which may mean paying for more bandwidth — which we really can’t afford, and which won’t help us with our main goal of making worship services available to shut-ins.

Right now, it’s still a work in progress. But it does feel like we’re making some real progress.

Hardcore for the what?

Being middle-aged now, and not living in Boston, I think I can be forgiven for not reading the Weekly Dig. But that meant I missed this article on Hank Peirce, now minister at the Unitarian Universalist church in Medford, Mass., formerly a roadie for a number of hardcore punk rock bands. The unfortunate title for the article is “Hardcore for the Lord” — somehow, I think the writer didn’t quite grasp the essence of Unitarian Universalism. And there’s no mention of the punk rock worship services Hank did ten years ago at the Middle East in Cambridge. Still, it’s fun to read about a now-respectable minister’s former life. (And thanks to Philocrites for publicizing the article on his blog.)

But what if you don’t like electric praise bands?

Anyone who is interested in church growth should probably read Christianity for the Rest of Us: How the Neighborhood Church Is Transforming the Faith by Diana Butler Bass (Harper San Francisco, 2006). Bass studied liberal mainline Protestant churches that are currently experiencing growth, and documented what is helping them grow. (Since Unitarian Universalist churches are essentially mainline Protestant churches with a post-Christian theology, Bass’s findings for the most part apply to us.)

Her findings challenge the usual advice given by church growth experts, who tell us to copy the big evangelical mega-churches in order to grow. For example, in a chapter titled “Contemplation” Bass recounts how some successful mainline churches are introducing more contemplative, silent time into worship services. She writes:

Some church growth specialists think that successful churches entertain people during worship — the more activity, the more noise, the more loud music, the better. From that perspective, silence is boring and an evangelism turnoff. Quiet churches cannot be fun churches. Contemplation is not a gift for the whole church but something practiced only by supersaints. As a fellow historian reminded me, “The [Christian] tradition has always reserved the contemplative life, and contemplation itself, for the very few.” After all, contemplation leads directly to God’s divine presence. Such “unmediated access to divine energy” can be spiritually dangerous for novices in faith! Following this logic, it is best, I suppose, to keep everyday Christians distracted with overhead projectors, rock bands, and podcast sermons.

From my point of view, if you want to have a big projection screen and project the words to hymns on it, or if you want to have an electric praise band in worship, go right ahead. But it’s good for me to hear that there are other ways to update a worship service, since I just can’t bring myself to organize an electric praise band for our church.

In her book, Bass also discusses how new understandings of hospitality, healing, testimony, diversity, and beauty have influenced worship services in mainline congregations. A provocative book, full of ideas for creating more vital liberal congregations, and worth reading for religious liberals trying to figure out how to implement church growth without copying evangelical techniques.

Welcome to a new blog

Jessica Rubenstein, the youth director at Winchester Unitarian Society, has grown her youth group from a dozen teens to more than 80 over the past few years. Her new blog gives solid, hands-on advice on how you can do the same thing.

Most Unitarian Universalist congregations are lucky to have 15 youth, so a number of people on the Advisor-L email list for youth advisors have been asking Jessica how she’s done it. She set up this blog to spread the word to a wider audience. Everyone who works with youth in a Unitarian Universalist congregation needs to read how Jessica has challenged conventional wisdom to keep kids in church — and attract new kids from the surrounding community as well.

On a positive note…

Great video story on the San Francisco Chronicle Web site about a couple and their five adopted sons, ages 6-13.

All the boys were hard-to-adopt kids, who probably would have languished in foster care until they were 18 if this couple hadn’t come forward. Oh, and the couple happens to consist of two men. Oh, and both men happen to be white, while the boys are all kids of color. Oh, and one of the men happens to be the new minister at the Unitarian Universalist church in San Francisco. And just by chance, quite a little drama unfolds while the Chronicle is filming.

Maybe I’m a little sentimental, but this video tugged at my heart-strings and lifted my spirits: Link.