Can you tell me?…

The Unitarian Universalist Association recently sent out information about Leading Congregations into a Multiracial, Multicultural Future, a conference that’s taking place in February, 2008. I’m very interested in the topic — here at First Unitarian in New Bedford, we’re slowly heading towards becoming a multiracial, multicultural congregation — but I want to be really sure the conference is worth the thousand dollars per person it will cost if we send people from New Bedford.

So I’d love to know if any of you attended this conference last year. If you attended last year, are you going again this year? and did last year’s conference help you to effect change within your congregation? Tell us about your experiences in the comments….

Late fall

There are many things that I like about this time of year. I like it when the leaves are finally off the trees, and it feels as if you can really see the truth of the landscape and the cityscape. I like seeing the winter waterfowl on the harbor: I saw my first Buffleheads of the season, bobbing in the chop kicked up by the cold north wind. Even though I chill easily, I like the feel of the cold air.

But there is one thing that I truly dislike about this season. I hate the sappy versions of Christmas music that you hear in supermarkets and malls and just about every retail establishment. Christmas carols do not translate well into light rock. The Christmas songs from the 1940’s and 1950’s do not translate well into Musak, or whatever horrendous brand of eviscerated pseudo-music a particular store happens to be playing. I dread going into stores at this time of year, becauses I hate having to listen to debased Christmas music they all play.

‘Tis the season to not go shopping. ‘Tis the season to freeze your butt off outdoors, or to sit at home with a good book from the library.

New fave

My new favorite Web-comic is We the Robots. Given the title, you won’t be surprised to learn that the main characters are all robots. Cute, snarky, foul-mouthed robots (sorta like Bender from Futurama, except more relaxed).

I got hooked after I read the strip where a guy walks into a coffee shop to get a large coffee. The barista refuses to sell him a “large” coffee, because corporate policy dictates that the barista can only sell coffee in “gordo,” “jumba-jumba,” and “drei-und-zwanzig” sizes. Things devolve quickly into chaos from there. Link. This strip managed to capture the essence of a minor frustration in my life. One reason I hate Starbucks is that the baristas always roll their eyes at me when I ask for a “large decaf.” Then they say: “You mean a decaf vented Companeros?” Then I say, “No thank you, I’ll just go to Dunkins instead.”

First snow

About four o’clock it started snowing lightly. By seven, the roads and sidewalks were covered with a thin layer of snow — cat-track snow, just enough to make everything look white.

By ten, when I finally left church to head home, the air temperature had gotten just above freezing. A light freezing drizzle, barely enough to notice, was settling down and making the snow on the ground slippery and crunchy. The freezing drizzle left a thin film of ice on the windshield of the car, which the wipers barely cleared away.

As I walked back from the parking garage to our apartment, I could see the drizzle as a light fog or haze around the street lights. The city was as quiet as I’ve ever heard it.

‘Tis the season

Brief observations from the Christmas season:

  • Even if I’d somehow managed to miss the endless Christmas carols and the hideous red-and-green displays in all the stores, I’d still know it’s the Christmas shopping season because of the sudden increase of spam — both email spam and comment spam on this blog (could it be that the evil spammers sell more Viagra during the Christmas shopping season?).
  • Our church was on the annual New Bedford Holiday House Tour, and we carefully prepared scripts for our tour guides telling about our huge Tiffany glass mosaic and our renowned Flentrop organ — but what people really wanted to know about was why there were doors on the end of the pews (to keep the drafts out in winter).
  • ‘Tis the season to eat rich foods — at our church holiday fair today, the baked goods sold far more quickly than anything else (we bought our share: two jars of jelly and three loaves of pumpkin bread).

Only twenty-five more days before life becomes calm again.

More about videoblogging

My videoblog is out of action until I resolve my laptop problems. But I recently received email from a Unitarian Universalist who’s thinking about making some hip new online UU video, and wanted to know how to go about doing it. So in lieu of the usual Friday video, I’ll repeat some of the advice I gave to him, in hopes of tempting more of my readers to start making online video.

Question: What’s a good resource to help a newbie start making videos fast?

Answer: A book worth getting is “Secrets of Videoblogging” — it’s a year old and so a little dated now, but the info on compression (codec) is worth the cover price alone. This book also has a good overview of everything from storyboarding, to legal permissions, to technical stuff.

Once I got that book, I just started making videos. At first, I threw most of them away. But it’s really pretty easy to make a short video. So I guess my advice is to just start making videos and see what happens.

Q: What tools do you recommend for making online video? — camcorders, editing software, hosting sites, etc.

A: I use a consumer-grade camcorder, which is more than adequate for the quality you get once you convert a video file for the Web. I have no worthwhile advice on camcorders, because the models change so fast.

For editing software, I use iMovie ’06 on a Mac platform. (iMovie ’08 is apparently a worthless piece of crap, so be warned!) On a Windows machine, Windows MovieMaker is supposed to be perfectly adequate, and essentially equivalent to iMovie ’06.

I upload videos to blip.tv (www.blip.tv). It’s free, and I think they do a better job than YouTube — but YouTube is more than adequate, and has the potential of getting you lots more traffic.

Q: How about making videos for my church’s Web site?

A: First, look around at some of the videos that other Unitarian Universalist churches put on their Web sites, and you’ll see how easy it is to make really boring videos. Too often, the videos on church Web sites look like they were created by a committee (which they probably were), and they are often insipid and dull. And sermons do not translate well to online video, in my opinion — unless you have a professional videographer doing the work.

Q: Any last thoughts?

A: Remember that it takes a fair amount of time to make an online video! It could take me six hours to make a three minute video (two hours to develop a concept and shoot video, four hours to edit and upload).

War? What war?

Over on her blog, Dani has a really nice post on the Iraq War. She talks about how many Americans seem perfectly able to forget the fact that we’re at war:

Thich Naht Hahn has been an author and peace activist that I’ve been reading about a lot lately. I have been practicing mindfulness, and as of yet I have discovered one thing that I realized; I have been quite unaware that we are still in a war. Some discussions in my group of aquaintances or friends have, as of late, the question “We’re still in that war?”

The post continues with some wide-ranging thoughts on the intersection of war, religion, and the individual activist. It’s a little rambling at times, but a passionate and thoughtful post worth reading. Link.

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.