Faith Works 3-5-16

Faith Works 3-5-16

Jeff Gill

 

Proclaiming Your Particular Good News

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For Christian faith communities, the good news, the Gospel we proclaim, is Jesus Christ.

 

Gospel is simply the Old English word for "good news." It has become both the name for the books of the Bible that tell the story of Jesus, and is shorthand for the meaning and implication of his life, so when preachers talk about the gospel, or evangelists share the gospel, it's both telling people about Jesus, and also talking about who he is, and why that story matters.

 

Communities, congregations of gospel-tellers, are connected in that storytelling to the events in Israel two thousand years ago (not to mention a couple thousand years of prophecy that came before), and to our time and place where there's also a particular need to hear that good news for us. The gospel itself doesn't change, but its implications for Jewish Christians in Thessaly, for Gentiles coming to Christianity in Rome, and for Ohioans today, each makes for a different way of telling the story.

 

Since we've been talking about church communications the last two weeks, the focus has been largely internal. But I didn't want this subject to pass us by without addressing the thorny question of how churches communicate with those outside their walls, beyond their communities.

 

Some might call this advertising, or marketing. Others might say we're talking about the nuts and bolts of evangelism. I'm just going to take a very wide, general look at this issue for now.

 

If you are not a church-goer (and my e-mail and community contacts tell me many of you regular readers aren't), you have a number of ways to find out how different faith communities are sharing their take on what God is up to, that good news as it works out through their lives.

 

One common means is the church sign – quite a few have them, and we all use them a little differently. The name, denominational affiliation if any, times of services, and often a message that may give you a sense of who and how they are.

 

In this section of the newspaper, there's a church listing, and those brief notes tell a fair amount about the weekday life of the congregation. Approaching Easter, some churches will take out ads, and the look and wording of those ads say something about the priorities and emphases of that place.

 

During this season, and often before Christmas or in the lead-up to a Vacation Bible School in the summer, churches can put inserts into newspapers or shoppers that are distributed (those bagged bundles), and door-hangers can be printed up and put on houses in selected neighborhoods.

 

And you can be pretty selective by neighborhood, zip code, or city in putting out bulk mail pieces. We don't see as many of those in Licking County as you might in other places, but it's an option.

 

The statistics and anecdotal evidence is all over the map, but in general, I think it's safe to say this: most of those means of communicating what your good news is from your church to the wider community are of limited effectiveness. They have a place, each of them, but usually work best when you have a very precise plan and purpose behind putting the time and money into a print or published piece.

 

What is absolutely clear is that the best way to communicate your shared values, your spiritual priorities, your passion for Jesus, is through face-to-face contact. The ol' "word of mouth" connection from your members, your participants, to those in their circles of connection, whether family, friends, co-workers, or even casual contacts.

 

Mission projects that get your people out into the community can also be a great pump-priming activity to get folks talking about who and Whose they are. It's not the only reason you serve and share in Christ's name, but it's sincerely a part of why you go out and work on community needs. It's also the best way to help flip people of faith from saying "I don't know anyone who doesn't go to church" to realizing that every day they have around them people who are searching for some good news in their lives.

 

And you may be exactly the right person to tell that story.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he has lots of stories, and they all revolve around the central story of God's love for us. Tell him how you tell your story at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 2-27-16

Faith Works 2-27-16

Jeff Gill

 

Church Communication Should Be Aimed Outwards

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When you have lots of newsletter and bulletin articles full of acronyms, look out.

 

You're talking to those on the inside, and excluding those not yet in.

 

Alphabet soups and code words, in-group speak, church-ian language: it all says to visitors, non-members, new members . . . you don't really belong here.

 

Acronyms are not all created equal. Chi Rho, CYF, Week of Compassion . . . in my own faith tradition, these are names that get flung around in e-mails and on-line posts from our regional office, let alone within our own social media and print materials like newsletters and Sunday bulletins.

 

Someone in our church recently came up to me and said "I've been wondering why you keep saying 'Christian Women's Fellowship' instead of making it simple and saying CWF when you make announcements from the pulpit, and somehow this week it hit me: we have lots of new people who don't know what a CWF is, if you don't tell them!"

 

She was exactly right. I get frustrated with our denominational calendars and posts that say "Chi Rho" which, even when the context is pretty clearly "youth organization of some sort" doesn't communicate which age level (it's 6^th, 7^th, & 8^th graders). Likewise our senior high fellowship, usually just called CYF.

 

And while "Week of Compassion" isn't an acronym, it can confuse those who've never dealt with it. "Hey, why are we talking about the 'Week of Compassion' in April when that week was in February?" You need to explain what the effort behind that deceptive title is, unless you can just safely assume the people sitting there on Sunday are the same ones sitting there last week, and last year, and they'll be exactly the same next year.

 

First, that's almost certainly not true; second, if it is true, that's a whole 'nother problem.

 

Some of my United Methodist friends say, not to be competitive, but no one does confusing acronyms casually dropped into church conversations like the clergy and leaders of the UMC. Perhaps, but I'll let them confess their own sins!

 

So communication efforts need to always be facing out. Anytime I'm putting a flyer, an article, a Facebook post together, I try to imagine how this reads to a person who's never been involved with our church or my denomination. It does mean a certain amount of spelling out sometimes, but it's important. It's necessary. And to not do it creates an invisible barrier that is no less real to visitors, new members, the less deeply involved; it says "you don't know the code, you're not on the inside, you're on the outs." Don't tell people that the DMF through the CCF is returned to the CCIO which is how our GF giving to ODO reaches the RO.

 

(And like that last line, if you go back to spell it out and realize "no one really wants to know this, anyhow," that should tell you something. Either rephrase it or drop it.)

 

It's one of the most common . . . complaints? No, not complaints, since hardly anyone will say it, but when you see studies that go and find church visitors and ask them why they didn't return to a place they tried out for worship, it's a common piece of feedback you hear: "Everyone was talking in code."

 

Some of it is the language of churchianity: it's not that you can't say salvation or redemption or doxology, but you need to be mindful of the importance of teaching as you talk, caring in your communications. Unless you just intend to speak to an in-group (and how is *that* evangelism?), there's some cultural translation that is called for.

 

It can also be your own culture that creates the code: narthex is a word I struggle with, since it's useful, but somewhat mysterious, and we have lobbies and vestibules and entryways, but just one room at the entrance to the worship space (which can be called a sanctuary, a nave, the auditorium, etc.). And there's the very internal stuff, like the "Harriet Circle" or "out at the church lodge." How does a new person learn what those are?

 

For we who've been going to church, and sometimes one church, all our lives, the answer would seem to be "ask someone." But that comfort level comes only with time, and you can give a great gift by putting people in that position as infrequently as possible.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he has been found guilty of jargon in the past, but is currently on probation. Tell him some church words you've found puzzling at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Notes From My Knapsack 2-25-16

Notes From My Knapsack 2-25-16

Jeff Gill

 

E Pluribus, Multitudinous

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We're heading into a primary election, as if you didn't know it, whether you wanted to or not.

 

The ads are now lapping at the shores of Ohio, after the dollars and mailers and TV spots and robocalls have blanketed Iowa and New Hampshire and South Carolina. Appearances will start to happen in this state, maybe even by our own Gov. Kasich, after they've tromped through the snow in New England from diner to diner, and around the Low Country from pulpit to pulpit.

 

Debates and town halls and those obscure, real time appearances on CSPAN that we political wonks really love: maybe we'll get us some of those in Ohio in the run-up to March 15.

 

Eight years ago we were heading to a March 4, 2008 contested primary, and there were still presidential matters up in the air enough to bring candidates to the ground in Ohio. As I recall, Licking County's 125 some voting precincts then split in the Democratic contest with 8 going to Sen. Barack Obama, and 117 to Sen. Hillary Clinton.

 

And the eight Obama precincts were all Granville.

 

Our bucolic college town can claim a certain amount of prescience, perhaps, and surely a bit more diversity didn't hurt. The Obama For America meet-ups and events I saw online certainly all focused on this village, and across the rest of the Land of Legend, the union-based support for Hillary was still leaning strongly in a more traditional direction for Democratic organizational and get out the vote efforts (GOTV in pol parlance). Even so, the county as a whole went about 60% Clinton, with a very strong 40% to Obama. He had voters in quantity from the east end of Newark to Pataskala's outer edges, in pockets all over the county.

 

Just not quite as strongly as Granville supported him!

 

(Footnote: those percentages ignore a third candidate who got one to two-plus percent around the county, the now discredited and discreditable John Edwards.)

 

You could infer from all that about Granville that this is a very liberal place, but in that you would be wrong. In the Republican primary of 2008, Mike Huckabee, John McCain, Ron Paul (Rand's dad), Mitt Romney, and the late Fred Thompson got votes in this county of (in the same order) 30%, 50%, 5%, 3%, & 2%.

 

The precinct by precinct breakdowns are no doubt still available at the Licking County Board of Elections (say a prayer for them these next few weeks as the voting is already well under way in their offices!), but not on the website, where just the county totals are present as an aid to memory. (Note to editor: add this or edit it out as makes sense according to current protocols - http://www.electionsonthe.net/oh/licking/elecres.htm)

 

As I recall, Granville was fairly evenly divided in total voters between Democratic and Republican ballots; on the GOP side, unlike the county totals, Huckabee did poorly while McCain and Romney were at the front.

 

Like the country, Granville is split. There are conservatives, social and fiscal, and liberals, progressive and even Democratic Socialist in loyalties; if you assume you can walk into any gathering here and find complete unanimity, you assume wrongly.

 

Is this a bad thing? I'm sure a Granville where everyone agreed on everything would, at the very least, be a different place than the village that we know today.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; tell him how politics is a topic where you hang out at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Ronald Reagan, First Inaugural Address, January 20, 1981

“We are not, as some would have us believe, doomed to an inevitable decline. I do not believe in a fate that will fall on us no matter what we do. I do believe in a fate that will fall on us if we do nothing. So, with all the creative energy at our command, let us begin an era of national renewal. Let us renew our determination, our courage, and our strength. And let us renew our faith and our hope. We have every right to dream heroic dreams. Those who say that we are in a time when there are no heroes just don’t know where to look. You can see heroes every day going in and out of factory gates. Others, a handful in number, produce enough food to feed all of us and then the world beyond. You meet heroes across a counter—and they are on both sides of that counter. There are entrepreneurs with faith in themselves and faith in an idea who create new jobs, new wealth and opportunity. They are individuals and families whose taxes support the Government and whose voluntary gifts support church, charity, culture, art, and education. Their patriotism is quiet but deep. Their values sustain our national life. We shall reflect the compassion that is so much a part of your makeup. How can we love our country and not love our countrymen, and loving them, reach out a hand when they fall, heal them when they are sick, and provide opportunities to make them self-sufficient so they will be equal in fact and not just in theory?”

Faith Works 2-20-16

Faith Works 2-20-16

Jeff Gill

 

Bandwidth and Communications in Churches

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Doing more to get less is generally considered a sign of inefficiency, if not a lack of smarts (or just plain being out of your mind).

 

The goal of communications is to get the biggest bang for the buck, you'd think, but that's not as easy as you might think, not if you're living and working in 2016.

 

Quite a few ministers and church leaders of my acquaintance are somewhere between frustrated and exhausted, and when they come to me for comfort they're more likely to hear more bad news… not a role I like to fill.

 

The dilemma begins with internal communications, which for many faith communities is the main question when it comes to making connections (more on that in a bit).

 

What not long ago was the province of a church newsletter sent by mail weekdays, and a few calendar lines on the back of a worship bulletin Sundays, is now something much more complicated.

 

Add in pastoral care communications, which are more personal, but with an import for the whole church community: it used to be, not so very long ago, an answering machine at home for the pastor, and a secretary answering the church office phone, leaving pink "While You Were Out" slips in a mailbox or on a spike atop the parson's desk.

 

Today the average to smallish size church might have a Facebook page, messaging through that Facebook page both inbound and outbound, a Twitter account with DMs through that, a landline to the church building with voicemail, cell phones to the key leaders, and e-mail accounts for a variety of purposes. I have a personal e-mail, the more public one you always see at the bottom of this column, a church e-mail and a prayer line address. Meanwhile, I have a landline and voicemail at home.

 

All of which adds up to the possibility that prayer concerns or last minute schedule changes can come in through an e-mail to the church, to me personally, to someone else who may forward it to me or it's tucked into a prayer chain e-mail to a group, or it could come as a Facebook post, a message, or a Tweet (posted or messaged), unless it's on the church voicemail, my cell voicemail, or my home voicemail.

 

And to get that word out to people, if need be, we have in the office the options of the monthly print newsletter & calendar, the biweekly e-mail prayer notes and updates, a special e-mail (which you don't want to use too often or people start tuning out your messages), a post on the Facebook page, or putting in the next Sunday bulletin either as a calendar note, brief news article, or insert. (But people don't attend as consistently as they once did…)

 

Plus the big sign out front, which has plusses and minuses of its own.

 

I noticed over Christmas and New Year's that most of the remaining churches I knew that were still bulk mailing large numbers of newsletters had published announcements saying they would be discontinuing this practice. Some would be printed for pick-up, and a few mailed first class to the homebound, but the push was to electronic delivery. Yes, for speed, and this is a year when bulk mail will be oddly delayed on and off with the surge of mailers from political campaigns, but mostly because of cost.

 

So you pick up some monetary savings, but you add to the question "how to communicate with our congregation?" Because more and more people want to be communicated with the way they want to be communicated with, and most of our culture is delivering exactly that. Do you want to hear about it through Instagram or Vines or Snapchat? Then that's where media is going, and churches are struggling to follow.

 

Yet many still want the phone call, the printed sheets in the mailbox, so we find ourselves in church life trying to "do it all." And "all" gets broader, more complex every day.

 

Do you see what gets missed in this kind of discussion? It's all about internal communications, which are important, no question: but what about external communications? How do you share your news – your Good News! – with those not already on your mailing list or e-mail roster? How has that changed, and what can we do with those opportunities?

 

More next week, this time, looking outwards.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County. Tell him how your faith community keeps everyone on the same page, virtual or otherwise, at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 2-13-16

Faith Works 2-13-16

Jeff Gill

 

Boring is better than headline making

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There's an aspect of faith community life, of church involvements, that we all tend to dismiss – intentionally or not.

 

When it comes to the boring minutae of finance and the organizational detail of what's often called "stewardship" (a broad subject, but in board and committee-speak usually meaning the group responsible for managing finances), everyone from clergy to chairmen, from ministers to moderators, all like to wince a little as the financial report comes up.

 

Yes, it involves numbers, and true, we're talking about money. In modern-day America, we could talk about dreadful diseases or sexual activity and not see as many people start looking intently at their shoe-tops. Innumeracy may be worse than illiteracy in our society, and money is the guilty secret everyone wants to keep. So the cultural pressure is to glance, shuffle, and move on. Someone understands this stuff, right? Let them worry about it.

 

And let me (unfairly) speak for clergy. Few of us went into this calling because we loved to work over the budget analysis, or have a head for accounting. It's a different skill-set, and they don't always overlap.

 

It all adds up to church finances, and non-profit accounting, being an area that's seen as a specialist field where most of us not only don't but don't need to understand what's going on.

 

Until there's a problem.

 

Yeah. I feel like I have to write some version of this column about every two years, and it seems that it's time again, so here goes: when someone is caught stealing money from a Little League team, a Girl Scout troop, the Cub Scout pack, the church treasury? I can tell you from painful, hard experience: it NEVER starts as someone thinking "I'll swipe the cookie money from the kids." Really, it doesn't. It begins with a person who is handling too much cash with too few other participants who is dealing with some financial stresses of their own, and says – to themselves, because the set-up doesn't require they talk to anyone else, anyhow – "you know what? this won't be missed for the time being, and I need to pay something over here, and I'll pay it back over there in a few days…weeks….months."

 

And a year goes by, and you owe the club, the group, the fund something on the order of thousands, and the tax return wasn't as big as you hoped, and now you'd have to explain to people why it was going in now, and you can't figure out where to get it from anyhow, and so far no one notices, so… then it gets to five figures.

 

It can be, I've seen, almost a relief to get caught. What's horrible for some of us is having to be one of the two or three who have to sit down with someone, and work through a) denial, b) deflection, c) weeping and sobbing, and get to d) what are we going to do about it? A to D can be a long journey, and sometimes you end up stuck at B and lawyers and the police have to be involved.

 

Here's my sermon for charitable groups in general and churches in particular: if you're taking the easy way out regarding donations and money and giving, STOP. You're creating the circumstances where a decent but weak and/or hurting person could do themselves and your cause a great disservice. Fiscal reports and annual budgets and two-handed deposit and check writing processes and the occasional audit: they can all be SO tedious, and quite frankly, they can be utterly unnecessary for years on end. Until they aren't.

 

Which is why we do it month after month, year after year. The boring way. The "everyone gets a copy" way and the "nothing happens without two un-related sets of eyes on it" way. The responsible way, for your organization and for those taking on the responsibility. When you say "we trust you, just shove it in your left-hand pocket and put it in the bank on Monday!" you mean well, but you might be creating the grounds for misunderstandings later at best, outright crime that could have been prevented at the worst.

 

Do it the right way from the start, and give thanks for all of us tedious, rule-citing people. You will never (I hope) know how much pain our boring ways can prevent.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he's been a treasurer and board officer a few times, and knows why you do this boring stuff. Tell him what boredom you're thankful for at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.