Some thoughts on Sandy Hook.
December 17, 2012
Like most of you the last couple of days have given me a lot of stuff to process. Here are some of those thoughts, in no particular order, not necessarily finished. but hopefully useful. Maybe in the future they will fit together better, but for now this is where they are.
1. The need for gathering together as a church. I have been down on weekly organized church meetings, they seem very routine, are often mistaken for the end of church participation that is required, and often seem devoid of a real purpose and spirit. But I must say this week was the exception. It was a week that I think saw all of the meticulous plans and sermons get thrown out and a real focus on what people needed replaced it. I have not seen very many more emotional or sincere services than the one this Sunday. I expect there are a lots of places that had that experience this Sunday.
2. The community did not wait to come together. I think that the coming together on Sunday was great and helped a lot of people, but I also saw something else, people did not wait to start processing this event in Connecticut. They started online immediately. I cannot think of a real equivalent in the social media era. 9/11 and columbine were before the advent of social media. We used to need the media to guide the national conversation, determine what to cover and when to move on. But not this time. No waiting for a newsbreak, my twitter feed was the fastest source of information beating normal news outlets to the punch by 30-60 min it seems all day. No waiting for Sunday, the encouraging words you might have gotten in a sermon to put it in biblical context was on Facebook within hours. No waiting for meet the press, the political implications we also played out quickly and publically in the social media space.
3. Help is on the way. Social media for processing and community is one thing, but the other thing that I saw was that people started pulling together real grass roots support for these families online as well. Within the day artists that I follow were volunteering their time and energy to organize a benefit concert for them. Hopemob already had fundraising and outreach efforts kicked off, so did many other online places. We as a people were able to take the initiative.
4. The quest for motive. It seems to me that the question of why is always asked. That in most scenarios there is a reason someone tries to hurt someone else, whether they took my toy, or called me names, or made me feel bad, love triangle, prejudice.. Something. But there are circumstances when that won’t ever get us all the way to the understanding we want. Like when a terrorist picks out a target, the fact could be it is easy, or close, or has some calculated “statement or shock value”. Or in this case it could be that the person had underlying mental issues that prevent them and us from thinking the same way. We can’t understand their view of the world and thought process any more than they can think like we do. Maybe that is just it.
5. The quest for security and safety. If you can’t think like the person, how can you design a security system to protect you from them? Same thing if they are intent on killing themselves, then any security model designed by people that assume self-survival is present will be inadequate. I think we saw that during 9/11, that the airport systems designed around a hijacking, were not sufficient when confronted with suicidal actors. And we can see the amount of change that airport security had to go through.
6. Media Criticism. I have been rereading “Amusing ourselves to death” and it seems that there is real current need from some of the ideas in the book. It is also refreshing to see that, although Morgan freeman didn’t say it, there is a lot of people that are seeing the issues that traditional media creates, and when we are given the keys to the social media distribution, I feel like we are doing a better job in a lot of ways, covering the parts that need to be covered, having the conversations that need to be had, and policing those that get off topic.
7. Overcoming AstroTurf. I think that having the conversations that need to happen will ultimately lead to some changes that a good for the country. I don’t know where that will lead, but I think that after all the canned talking points are spouted, and we get to a real conversation about mental health, gun rights and designing public safety systems that we will make some actual progress in preventing similar things in the lifetime of my own children and grandchildren.
The Congregation, the least used church asset?
August 14, 2012
I worked in a large company for the better part of the decade and was a hiring manager for many of those years. At one point I was part of a hiring process for a team lead/manager and one of the other people in the process made a statement to the effect of “first we take all the resumes that don’t have an advanced degree and pitch them”. No accounting for natural ability, decades of experience etc. It seemed to me to be in the extreme wrong.
There is some argument against the emerging church movement, that they are “anti-ecclesial” in that they don’t have – pardon the pun- enough reverence for the reverend.
The crux of the argument defending the need for seminary trained clergy here seems to be “they have degrees and can read greek/latin, therefore they are uniquely qualified” which immediately creates a world view that discounts the congregation. and that seems to me to be very similar to the “let’s pitch them” approach my former co-worker had.
Now you may have guessed that my co-worker had a degree which is why they thought so highly of them, It is worht noting that people with rank in that organization also tended to have a natural deference and affinity to other people with the same rank or higher. Directors liked to remind you they were directors, especially if you weren’t. Something about being invested in a particular structure tends to make it the metric by which you in turn measure others.
Don’t get me wrong. There was a day when you had to go to school and learn greek and latin to read the bible. But that ended with the translation of the bible into nearly every native tongue. And I will concede after that you still had to go to school to at least learn to read, which again until the last 50-100 years was something very uncommon for people. So the educated clergy reading to people was needed. But given the vast selection of highly accurate translations, from the most ancient sources possible, in a culture with essentialy full literacy, do we need formal training to read it?
I dont think so, but that doesn’t stop people from harboring a projected helplessness toward the “flock”. There are concerns if we let the average parrisioner just read the bible by themselves “they might read it wrong”, “they might reach different conclusions”.
But I say, they might be transformed, they might transform others.
The people that attend church are every bit as qualified to spread the gospel, do good works, provide care to others and yes even read and understand scripture, as anyone else in the room. But how many seminar trained clergy truely see them as equal partners? why?
My closing thought would be this, if you had 500 qualified volunteers show up every week at your door, and you put none of them to work, how effective are you being? Can you be more effective at making them part of the movement?
I was inspred to write this in response to the following post: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/bibleandculture/2012/08/13/the-anti-ecclesial-rhetoric-of-emerging-church-movements/
Cheapening the Church « United Methodeviations
June 15, 2012
letting McDonald’s and Wal-Mart teach us how to set up a money-changers franchise in the temple. We have been doing it constantly since the 1960s. How’s that workin’ out for us…?
This is great, so many good points in one post.
Overheard
The title kind of tells the story. I was recently at a sporting event, and happened to be within earshot of one of those people that have a “whispering volume” louder than most people have a alking volume, and they were have a conversation with someone they knew.
The person who was talking lets call her “Jennifer” (good 80s Name), and her freind whe was talking to “Amy” (another good 80′s name).
During the course of like 3 lines of dialog I know, Amy, is a mother and a widow, who used to be married to a non-methodist pastor of some sort. Actually I guess Dialog is not the right word, since I dont think I heard Amy say anything.
I dont want to go into too many details, because quite a few people I know might be able to figure out who said what if I did. (And what was said is the important bit, and who said it is not really the point here.)
So Jennifer continues.
“Hey our pastor here is single”
Amy:”"
Jennifer: “He’s cute, I should introduce you”
Amy:”"
Jennifer: “You’ve already done the pastors wife thing”
Amy:”"
Jennifer: “Besides, He is a methodist, Methodist is easy, you dont have to be all perfect”
Amy: “”
And this continues on.But I kind of stopped at the Idea that being a methodist is easy. I have heard all sorts of variations of this living in the south in heavily SBC and other evangelical fundamental demononations territory: Texas. But it has often been second hand. “my friend at work said”, “The kids in the seekers club at school said” etc.
What makes religion hard vs easy?
There are all sorts of questions and observations that this leads to. Why doesn’t Amy say anything? What do you mean you dont have to be perfect? etc. but the one I though about most was, What is the other denomination that they are comapring to, and what makes it “Hard”? What makes a religion hard?
It seems to me that the underlying assumption, is that it has more rules. You have more stuff to keep track of and things you “don’t do”. And that if you dont have a list of “dont do’s” then you are not making people “be perfect” and that is easy. That is what I am thinking is the unspoken message. To be a real serious religion, and be a serious follower of Christ, you need to have a long list of dos and don’ts.
Is that bibical?
So I have read the Bible, and I do recall a lot of lists of things to do and dont do. But I recall them mostly from the old testament.
However from what I recall, most of the red letters talking about rules are explaining why Jesus and his followers are not following a particular rule or tradition, and explaining to those who are questioning him (and the crowd) about why the questioners are foolish and don’t have a heart for God and are simply performin empty guestures.
So I cannot help but think as a follower of Christ, the goal should not be to build up a long list of things to do or not, but rather to get your heart and relationship right.
And if the implication is that the UMC as a whole is not doing a good job of creating a long list of dos and don’ts. I think I am ok with that.
Moneyball and the Church, New BFFs?
May 3, 2012
The following post of mine just appeared over at Youth Worker Movements blog:
———————————————————————————————————————–
In my last post I wrote about what I think is a critical flaw in the approach that Vital Congregations used in gathering a list of potential metrics – namely that the metrics to consider must be available, in other words, already being collected. I don’t know that I made a strong enough case in that article for why metrics, specifically new metrics that encapsulate a fundamental new insight, are truly transformative. So I hope to reconcile that in this post.
Leading Metrics
First, there are two main classes of metrics when you study a business process. One class is fairly familiar, it measure results and benefits and is straightforward to understand and as a result is most commonly used in most situations by most folks. Dollars of revenue, profit, homeruns, steals, strikeouts, grades at the end of the semester. They are easy to see, understand and use. People know what they mean, and by and large these are called trailing indicators. In other words the measure what has already happened.
The second metric class is much harder to get a grasp on sometimes since they don’t actually measure what has happened, but can and do give a measure of the probablility that things will happen a certain way. Some things like that might be manufacturing quality, employee engagement, interest rates, price of gas, pitches per at bat, deflected passes. These are all things that, in and of themselves, do not measure results. But after careful study and analysis, it turns out many are good indicators of what results will follow. These are called leading indicators, or sometimes predictors. The best part about these type of metrics is you know when things are going wrong BEFORE the bad results happen. You can make adjustments, and change from failure to success, and from losing to winning.
Leading vs. Trailing
Ok, let’s give a simple example of how this whole leading vs. trailing works. Let’s say you run a car manufacturer like GM. You have some things you can measure. Initial Owner Satisfaction, Brand Impression, Sales, Internet Searches for specific vehicles, Price of Gas, Interest Rates. Now, this is pretty simple, but you can see that these things happen in a certain order. Let’s take a stab at which ones are leading and which ones are trailing indicators:
- Price of Gas
- Interest Rates
- Internet Searches
- Sales
- Initial Owner Quality
- Brand Impression
If the actual sale is the measureable result, you can see that items 1,2 and 3 all have to happen prior to the sale, so they are leading indicators. And reports on sales have to come after the actual sale, so items 4, 5 and 6 are all trailing indicators.
In this simple example, you can see if you are looking at “Brand impression” (think of the favorability scores that the UMC just received) you may not see a problem show up in the numbers until it is WAAAY too late. So be very careful when looking at numbers that are trailing indicators, it could mean you are letting a large problem build without addressing it.
MoneyBall
Examples from the world of sports: If you have watched the movie “Moneyball,” you know in pretty good detail how identifying leading indicators, creating new metrics that capture that insight, and using them effectively has completely turned baseball upside down in the past decade. In the movie, Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane successfully puts together a baseball club on a budget by employing computer-generated analysis to acquire new players. His key insight was that avoiding outs was more important that scoring runs. If you never made an out, you could score an unlimited number of runs in baseball. You could wear out all of the other teams pitchers, and your odds of winning go up greatly.
All the prior stats that people used to keep are augmented by brand new stats that are now being made public for the first time, and there are even more stats that are being kept secret in club houses around the country and we won’t know about for years. None of these stats can be found in the baseball almanacs, and once they were conceived of they had to be created and manually maintained.
Look at basketball, and Phil Jackson during his championship runs with the Bulls and Lakers. Jackson would have assistant coaches keep track of some pretty crazy stats during the game that other people never tracked before, stats like defensive touches on the ball, even if they did not create a turn over, times diving on the ground or into the stands. Things that “don’t show up in the stats” and hustle plays, he created metrics for.
He believed that hustle and effort, even when it didn’t result in a traditional stat like a steal or block or rebound, was an important indicator of later success. They were leading indicators and eventually they would lead to steals and blocks and rebounds as long as they kept up the hustle. And, of course, in order to determine if his team was executing and hustling the same from game to game, he had to invent stats and start collecting them manually for his team.
To capture a new insight like hustle or avoiding outs, and to make it into a new metric and drive new and significantly better results REQUIRES, in my opinion, new stats.
Vital Congregation Metrics
What about the vital metrics? Do they end up measuring leading indicators? Do they end up capturing some new insights in a way that can transform the way leaders see and respond to the world?
The Vital Congregations initiative asks churches to track the following “vital signs”:
- Average worship attendance
- Number of people who joined by profession of faith
- Number of small groups, Sunday school classes and Bible studies
- Number of people from the congregation engaged in local, national and international mission/outreach activities
- Amount given to mission (including apportionments and other charitable ministries)
- Number of people who joined by profession of faith
- Average worship attendance
- Number of small groups, Sunday school classes and Bible studies
- Amount given to mission (including apportionments and other charitable ministries)
- Number of people from the congregation engaged in local, national and international mission/outreach activities
Certainly, paying attention to results and what already happened and is happening is valuable. But looking outside of that, what are the new insights and new indicators? I am afraid we have missed a great chance to ask some very smart people to think about that.
I think there is a lot of great metrics that people could track, and that there are plenty of smart people, especially the ones trying to move the UMC towards a vital congregations model.
But we did not ask them or give them the freedom to bring in the cutting edge science of engagement and new metrics. We did not give them a chance to create the UMC version of moneyball. I would love to have seen what they could have come up with if they were turned loose.
Are Vital Congregation Metrics DOA with one word?
April 24, 2012
I was reading through the Call to Action, or maybe some other code word for a report that was on the vitalcongregations website a few months back, and something struck me as I read about the drivers and metrics and so on.
The Bureaucracy Virus
First, I think it is great that the UMC is at least making an attempt to use some modern management techniques to address what is looking more and more each passing year like an organization in decline.
Not your church, and not mine, of course. But somewhere hiding in the machinery of the modern UMC is a little tiny General Motors (GM) trying to fail. Okay, maybe it is not tiny, but it is hard to catch.
I have often called organizational bureaucracy a virus, because the definition of a virus is something that is not really living but that reproduces.
A bureaucracy tends to only create more bureaucracy, therefore virus.
The Signs.
There are lots of signs of a viral infection of this sort.
At GM, there were multiple layers of middle management, decisions made by accountants instead of people that dealt with the customer and knew the product. They pioneered design by commitee, they focused on some metrics like bottom line, and did not focus on others that were harder to get like quality. They had a culture of entitlement and were slow to recognize and respond to competitors that did not directly compete with them for older, more affluent buyers but served younger people on a budget. The corporate culture at GM was very insulated and driven by insiders and political power, they had lifetime union employment and out of control retirees benefits and helathcare costs.
All of these were, of course, hallmarks of the way business operated in what is now a bygone era.
The Tools to Fight the Viral Infection
The process of starting a corporate turn around relies on clearly recognizing the problems, making some new distinctions and getting a better handle on what is happening realtime in your business. Great data drives great business decisions, in the absence of solid reliable data, managers must instead rely on gut, intuition, superstition, or worst political power calculations to determine what choices are made.
Often this is the first step to lead all other steps because, until the quality of data is improved, the quality of decisions cannot be improved, and until the decisions are improved and the execution is improved, the results cannot improve.
And I had a lot of hope for the Vital Congregations project to get to that goal. But then I read this:
In order for an indicator to be used they had to meet these criteria:
- DESCRIPTIVE
- DIFFERENTIATING
- QUANTIFIABLE
- AVAILABLE
And there it is, that one last word. Apparently the decision was made early on that the criteria for what we can use for the dashboard has to be something we already know and measure.
Maybe I am over sensitive to this and I hope I am wrong, but without some new distinctions into your problems, and some new metrics that capture this new insight you have gained, you cannot make different decisions. If your baseline is “it has to be data we already have for the decisions we currently make,” I don’t think you can expect different decisions, actions or results.
And that makes me sad.
Are All Church Visitors Equal?
April 19, 2012
I saw a post yesterday where the two most important areas fo the church to all visitors were identified.
1. The Nursery
2. The Bathroom
I had half jokingly asked, “Are those the visitors you want?” I realized later that was a sort of half finished question.. “Are those the visitors you want to focus on?”
In youth ministry, and this is different than in general ministry, not all visitors are there of their own free will. Some are actually there against all their own wishes. So my background is a little different. But there are times where people you are there to minister to are really embracing their “rocky soil” side, and thying to be “chocking thorns” to every one else.
Church in general has missed out on the large body of accepted HR practices and wisdom from the corporate world over the last 20 years or so. And while outsourcing and downsizing have given corporate HR a black eye, some of the things are particulalry useful to have as a distinction.
Today I am going to go over the Three main levels of engagement people can have with your organization.
A good summary article on the Gallup Engagement levels can be found here: http://gmj.gallup.com/content/24880/gallup-study-engaged-employees-inspire-company.aspx
The basic Idea is that people can be Actively Engeged, Not Engaged, or Actively Disengaged.
Now, if you are counting visitors as your metric, these three groups are all equal. But if you have a mission or a goal you are trying to achieve, the three groups are VERY different.
Now at this point you may be saying, everyone has to start somewhere, not everyone can start at the top, right?
Partially true, not everyone can have the same history of being “bought in” and not every one can have the knowledge to be effective day one. But people do not start Actively disengaged and grow into Fully engaged as the normal growth path.
For the most part people start at a new place Actively engaged, and then tend to fall into not engaged, or actively disengaged. This can be due to change of priority, normal concerns of the world, over commitment and lack of sabbath, bad interpersonal issues with people, changes of service times, pastorial leadership etc.
In the general congregation, once people reach not engaged, or actively disengaged they tend to stop coming. In the youth programs that is not the case.
you might be asking:
So are you saying people who are not fully engaged should not go to church?
No people that have fallen out of Actively engaged, and get re-engaged, but we have to know who they are and get them back involved.
However the actively disengaged should be treated very seriously. They can consume all your time and focus, divide the church, create drama where none existed, speak ill of you and others, interrupt lessons, prevent people from getting to engage and generally make things uncomfortable and miserable for everyone. Worse yet, their presence can and will drive off the people that are Actively engaged, or not engaged.
I am not saying be rude, judgemental, superior, but do not confuse your roles here. You need to train and equip the actively engaged. Those that are actively disengaged you need to love on, be the church to them.
So my challenge would be to think about the people you have in your ministry, are you working to make your environment that is a place where the Actively engaged, can in fact do the mission of God.
On a mission trip to Jamaica we went on, there was no child care, and there was not hot water, in fact there was not even a restroom in the building. But there is not anyone on the trip that would have skipped the trip based on those two features. And in fact had there been a lot of amenities and vacationy things, while we would have attracted more people, we also would have done less actual mission work. The larger and more would have done less.
Focus your energy on equiping the Actively engaged, and converting the not engaged to Actively engaged.
So my church was hit by a tornando yesterday..
April 4, 2012
Truth be told, that second paragraph and photo library by itself is a pretty solid blog post by themselves.
I however think that this impact to our building will allow us to do something amazing. From my point of view there are a number of things that not having a church building to go to will fore us to do.
As I put this post together, it gives me a chance to tie together somethings I have been seeing for the last 15 months or so.
Point 1. We can be deliberate about going to and experiencing different churches.
Now my proofreaders have suggested I be clear, that this section is NOT about leaving the church or abandoning it. If someone calls up and says “we need help bailing water, boarding up windows etc” by all means go and do that, now is the time to pull together as a church and show strength.
But this section is not about that, it is about taking advantage of a unique opportunity at some point over the next three months to do something we don’t normally give ourselves permission to do, learn from other churches.
In this blog post from right after our Jamaica misson trip http://blog.trainforpurpose.com/jamaica-diaries-the-secret-benefit-of-mission In this section: The hidden benefit for us: Church Hopping (not Shopping)
I proposed that we should as a church go out on purpose on a regular basis to different churches to make sure that we do not become stale. There is almost no way to do this in an acceptable fashion when your church is still standing and open at the same point that every one else is.
We have already have numerous ones contact us and offer up space and hospitality. We could go and share a service with them at least once in the next few months.
There are a number of really great churches in DFW that we can and should learn from. The building being damaged gives us as a church a convenient excuse to do that. Here is a list of the ones I thought did certain things particularly well from the 3 or four months of church hopping that I did.( The best Church in all of DFW ) You can use that list, or better yet, ask people at your office, on Facebook “If I wanted to go someplace really amazing for worship this week, do you have any suggestions?”
Point 2. We need to go out and reach people. Not having a building means we can focus on doing the church
I have had an undertone of anti-building ness in some of my posts over the past 15 months. The first post where I hinted at this thought was right after we got back from our Jamaica Mission trip. in this post: http://blog.trainforpurpose.com/jamaica-diaries-the-camera I point out the following as a lesson learned from the mission trip:
Lesson two, Mission work is more than construction. One of the side effects of our delay, was that we missed out on doing our scheduled construction work. At the time I was frustrated with that. I was ready to get to some “real work”. As it turns out, we were able to get plenty done. But the truth is no matter how well we build a foundation or room, it can never have the impact that we would have if we really reached and transformed one person’s life. So while a construction project is measurable, and definite, it felt by the end that was more about our vanity in someways.
(emphasis added)
I saw it first in our little mission trip and project, but the issue got larger as we returned to the states.
I have seen a number of things that make me question exactly what we are trying to do with our buildings. Here is an excellent thought provoking post The church is not the church building except when it is, where the author delves into our personal reasons for the church buildings we create.
In this video Rob bell talks about resurrection (if you can ignore the overuse of the special effects) Rob Bell points out that when Jesus was talking about the rebuilding of the temple he was not talking about a building, but was rather talking about a living and breathing temple, himself.
In this very excellent video http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2012/02/18/tending-the-garden-one-person-at-a-time/ former prominent evangelical leader Ed Dobson talks about the importance of one-on-one ministry to individuals.
The exciting thing about this, is that we can all be in ministry, and it only takes a space the size of our car to pull it off.
Prior to that I had became aware of the very loosely governed organization Christian Endeavor which allows young people to create their own leadership and ministries, (and has been following the same model for over 130 years) Which has been focusing on small self lead teams, meeting in small groups outside of normal church buildings.
My wife for years volunteered as a mentor in Waco, and she will tell you that one on one ministry to one person has been some of the most impactful work she has ever done.
All of this and a few more things lead me to write this post a few weeks ago, with the– now much more awkward– title RIP the Church Building where I suggest that moving out of the building and out into the world is the second path we can take forward.
To engage in real personal ministry, in small groups where all the people of the church are the church. Where we allow the temple to be destroyed, but raise it again inside of ourselves.
Point 3. We can pause and think about how we want to use our space.
I like to ask the question when trying to determine exactly how important or valuable something is: “If that ceased to exist, how would people be able to tell? What woud change?”
In general I think that most people believe that Church buildings are vacant except for one hour a week. While this is not true, most buildings are built to handle the Christmas and Easter service size, and then spend a lot of time figuring out how to use the building other times, or make sure that everything is turned off to keep electricity use down. Which means they are probably some of the most inefficiently used spaces that we tend to build.
In most cases, I think that if one specific church were to go away, the general impact would be the same as if one of the many CVS/Walgreens in your town shut down.
Not all buildings however are bad, And some would really be missed by the community. I specifically think of the best uses I have seen of church property.
First to come to mind is when the church is used as a relief staging location. I have friends in Ringgold GA, who had their entire Family Life Center turned into a Red cross triage staging location where doctors and emergency workers could care for tornado victims there.
Second is when hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, and the FLC you see with the missing roof in the pictures was converted to a refugee shelter for displace New Orleans residents and their families. For multiple weeks we were able to provide food, shelter, and place to shower to numerous families in conjunction with the Red Cross.
More long term than that I think of places like Mission Arlington or Union Gospel mission that use the facilities each and everyday to serve the needs of people. If you are familiar with either of those organizations, try to imagine how the communities they serve would answer the questions at the top of this section.
Beyond that I think of all of the travelling missionaries and mission teams that have been able to find a place to stay and a hot shower as they are going into and returning from the field.
All of the above experience convinces me of the following:
The future of the church either does not *require* a church building, or requires a very different one.
As we look to rebuild, perhaps we can
- Go out and see how others are doing ministry and learn to stay green and growing in our approach.
- Really take ownership of our own personal role in ministry, and find our garden to tend, one person at a time.
- Rethink what the important ways we can use our space going forward.
I think this is an amazing gift we have been given and I really look forward to seeing how our congregation responds.
