Category Archives: Ministry

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Agile Church: Beyond the Committee Structure

It’s been a long fabulous day at Preacher Camp.

This evening at dinner I was sitting with a friend who is helping coordinate the NEXT Church conference in Dallas in just a few weeks. (Not too late to register! 400+ and counting.) He was fiddling with his phone as we all ate and talked, and I found out he was receiving updates as people have begun registering for workshops. “14 people are registered for your workshop, MaryAnn.” A few minutes later: “Now it’s up to 20.”

The workshop is called “Agile Church” and will be partly about our experience at Tiny Church. When I got there, we had nine elders and eleven committees, many of which were committees of one—or zero. We have moved to something that is messier and still nascent but hopefully more agile. And no committees. We will be reading and working with the agile manifesto, mining this business/software development resource for wisdom in how we do our work as a church community. It’s not all directly translatable, but I contend that much of it is.

But I need your help. I also want to talk about other churches that have moved beyond outdated bureaucratic structures into other models that are more effective and life giving.

Do you have ideas to share?

Do you know someone I should be talking to?

Failures and challenges are important to hear about as well. I especially need to hear from folks in larger churches. Are committees the worst structure except for all the others? Or can large churches also move beyond the committee?

Comment here or e-mail me at maryannmcdana at gmail dot com. I’d be grateful, and I know those 20 people (and counting?) will be thankful too.

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Design Your Own Preacher Camp: A Reprise

I’m off today to Preacher Camp in Montreat so I thought I’d re-run my post about how our group got started, hopefully to inspire others

A couple of things have changed since I wrote this, but the basic gist is the same.

Get yourself a Preacher Camp. You’ll be glad you did.

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The Well. By the way, did you know that the Hebrew word for well is beer? Yes indeed.

I leave on Sunday for my yearly meeting with a group of clergy that calls itself “The Well.” (The story of how we ended up with that name is a post in itself.)

We patterned ourselves after a group of hoity-toity pastors that have been meeting together for something like 25 years. I think there are other groups like ours too. This is our fourth year to meet, and here’s how it works:

We are each assigned two Sundays in the upcoming lectionary year, and for each of those Sundays, we are responsible for writing and presenting an exegetical paper. These papers analyze the text and typically provide 2-3 sermon “trajectories.” There are currently 15 people in our group, which means we leave with a head start on 30 weeks of preaching. From time to time we think about adding members, but haven’t figured out how to do so without cutting into evening free time, something we are not willing to do.

People have said to me, “Aww, I wish I had a group like that.” I always tell them, “Just do it!” It’s really not that complicated to put a group together. I would love to see these groups propagate. So to encourage people to give this a try, I thought I would write down a few things we did to get started or keep going. I think most of this is taken from the hoity-toity group, so no claims at originality.

1. Start with a core and invite. Our group began with a few seminary friends kicking around the idea of a yearly lectionary study group. Once this core group was locked in, each of us invited another person. If you still need more, have the invitee invite someone else. That casts the net wider. Decide what kind of denominational/ regional/ theological/ seminary diversity you want, or don’t want.

2. Have a covenant. We were advised to set the expectation: if you don’t have your papers done, you don’t come. That sounds harsh, but the integrity of the group depends on everyone doing the work. We have granted exceptions for truly dire situations—in those cases, the folks brought one paper instead of two. Nobody has arrived empty handed.

3. Have a “dues guy.” We charge dues for basic operations of The Well—this is collected ahead of time by one of our members and kept in an account through the church he serves. Dues might pay for a few lunches, a dinner or two, evening snacks and drinks, etc. We use a sliding scale based on how big people’s continuing education budgets are, but it’s somewhere between $100-$200. Then each person is responsible for their travel expenses plus accommodations.

4. Divide the jobs and respect the royalty. We start with a short worship every morning, and someone new handles that each year. Another person draws names out of a hat to figure out who’s assigned to which date in the lectionary year. We make these determinations about 9 months ahead of time so people have time to write the papers (though I assure you, there is plenty of cramming going on as we speak). We also take turns “hosting” the event. That doesn’t mean it necessarily takes place in that person’s city, but one person is in charge of securing lodging (we like B&Bs), a place to meet (a local church, perhaps) and also moderates any discussion that needs to take place in between meetings (via e-mail). We’ve taken to calling that person the King or Queen, because they are “the decider” for that year. We have a lot of type A people in our group (if I ever write a book about our group it will be called “Too Many Alphas”) so it’s good to have someone in charge.

5. Use Dropbox. We’ve tried a number of things in terms of paper collection and distribution. We used to bring copies of our own papers for everyone, but lots of us preferred electronic copies for various technical and environmental reasons. This year we’re uploading our papers to Dropbox so people can download them onto their laptop and/or print them, if they’re a scribbling type. We make them due by Saturday morning before we leave, and if you miss the deadline, you are responsible for bringing copies of your own paper for everyone.

6. Schedule for the week: We do 40 minutes per paper. The person reads the text, reads the paper, and then the discussion begins. Someone watches the time so we stay on schedule. In the past, we’ve had a block of time with a scholar or pastor to talk shop, and this year we even have a free afternoon. Heaven.

7. Leave evenings free. I’ve heard that the hoity-toities do papers into the evening, and honestly, I don’t know how they do it—by the time we finish for the day, I’m fried. Guess that’s why they’re hoity-toity. Our group likes to have a leisurely dinner, then hang out late into the night. We also started a yearly competition, with a trophy awarded to the person with the most outrageous ministry story. And yes, there’s an actual trophy.

So, there it is. The Well is one of the best things I do as a clergy person and one of my happiest weeks of the year. And I say that despite the fact that I preach the lectionary less than half the time. The scripture study is awesome and stimulating, and of course, spending time with other people who “get it” and with whom you can be real is HUGE. I think I laugh more that week than I do the rest of the year.

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Today’s Video: “Human”

I’ve been wanting to write this one down but just haven’t had the time… so here’s a video. Five minutes.

Background: We have Services for Wholeness each quarter. It’s a time for people to come and receive prayer for whatever they’re dealing with. In December the service is called Blue Christmas.

Further Background: I occasionally do dumb things.

Human from MaryAnn McKibben Dana on Vimeo.

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Does Sunday School Work?

A few years back, I was talking to a parent whose children had been enrolled in her church’s Sunday School and evening children’s program. By all accounts, and from what I could tell as an uninvolved observer, this church has an absolutely exemplary children’s ministry. And yet this mother was looking for another church. “I recently asked my kids some basic questions about the Bible and some of the foundational stories of Christianity,” she told me. “They couldn’t answer the most basic questions. What are they learning in Sunday School? Is all this programming even doing what it’s supposed to do?”

I thought about that mother this week when I saw this article from Associated Baptist Press about a new documentary. It should go without saying that the theology that undergirds the study, and the video (excerpt) at the link are quite foreign to me. But here’s the gist:

In Divided, young filmmaker Philip Leclerc sets out to discover why so many people of his generation are leaving the church. …Leclerc acknowledges grouping kids and age and developmental stages makes sense on the surface. In the Bible, however, parents are given the responsibility for religious instruction of their children. 

The modern idea of age-graded Sunday school, youth ministry and children’s church came from somewhere else. When it started in the 1800s, Sunday school was intended for poor children without Christian parents. In most American churches today, Leclerc insists, Christian fathers [sic] relinquish their leadership to programs based on secular educational theories instead of the teaching of Scripture.

The video uses the word “carnal” about eleventy-five times, and I didn’t even watch the whole thing. I don’t resonate with many of the article’s comments either. But I suspect the basic thrust is right. Now I want to go back to that mother and say, “What about your responsibility as a parent? What could the church do to support you as your child’s primary Christian educator?”

Let’s take my church as an example. We are small, with a good number of kids for our size, but the “Sunday School” aged kids range from kindergarten through third grade, with a smattering of middle and high school students.

We have Sunday School twice a month, during the worship hour—it is not practical to have Sunday School at other times—and we have a team of teachers who take turns leading. We went to this model because, well, our old model of having one teacher lead every week until s/he gets burned to a crisp didn’t feel very biblical.

But even if we had a top-notch Sunday School every week, our most dedicated families are here maybe twice or three times a month, due to sports, out of town trips, and other weekend activities.

This is insane.

Churches are smaller, budgets are smaller. Tiny Church is not unusual. I look at this situation and think, This doesn’t make any sense. Why are we trying to have a traditional Sunday School? Why aren’t we offering truly intergenerational worship, and training parents to do religious education at home? 

I could easily dismiss this study as so much patriarchal BS. (Why is it only the father who bears primary responsibility for faith formation in the family? That’s rhetorical; don’t answer.) But I can’t dismiss it outright.

It reminds me of the REVEAL study that came out of Willow Creek church some years back. The study found that greater involvement in church activities did not foster deeper commitment to the way of Jesus. (My paraphrase.) Some mainline folks crowed about the study, feeling vindicated that seeker-sensitive megachurches were finally admitting that they were serving up the thin gruel we’d always suspected. But the REVEAL study is not cause for smug rejoicing, but serious self-reflection. We are often no different in our mainline churches.

So what is the answer? I wish I knew. But I’d like to get some people together to talk about this. Let’s start here. What do you say? Has your church figured this out?

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Let’s Argue about Advent/Christmas Music Again

(Prepare away, but a little "Away in the Manger" never hurt anybody either.)

I got a comment yesterday on a post I wrote a year ago defending Christmas carols in Advent. Wow! These posts really do hang around forever.

I looked at them again and mostly stand by what I wrote. Here is the whole string of posts:

First, I detected a genuine longing for Christmas, beyond some grabby-greedy-gimme kind of consumerist thing, and wondered if other people were feeling that too. (For what it’s worth, I don’t feel that same urgency for the Christmas message that I did last year at this time… you?)

Next, I unpacked some of the tensions between Advent and Christmas hymns and mounted a theological defense for singing Christmas carols in December.

Finally, I looked at some non-theological reasons for the same… some of them more substantive than others.

Discuss…

Actually, you guys argue—I have a book to finish.

And if you’d like a soundtrack for your discussion, may I recommend Peter Mayer’s Midwinter—beautiful Adventy stuff there, with a bit of Christmas thrown in. These are all original songs—no chestnuts roasting on an open fire here.

Indeed, his song “Where is the Light?” is a perfect example of an Adventish song that has a celebratory, upbeat tone—which is something I talk about in my second post.

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Moneyball

Robert and I went to see Moneyball last night. Excellent flick—I can see why it’s 95% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes.

I was bowled over by how the story resonates with issues of leadership and church transformation.

Anyone? Anyone?

Please tell me someone has already written this post so I don’t have to.

 

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How I Do the Podcasting

A friend of mine asked me how I got the podcasting thing set up. I decided to write my response here in case other church folk are interested, sorta like I did with the Twitter post.

This is my own MacGyvered method, done on the cheap. I’m not claiming it’s the best way or the easiest, though I think it’s ridiculously simple to do, and I wish I’d done it earlier. The programs I use, I found through a bit of searching, but not exhaustive searching. So perhaps others can share what they do in the comments.

First I downloaded Recorder Pro onto my iPhone from the App Store for $.99. From there I can just sit the phone on the pulpit and hit record when I’m ready to go. Sound quality is great. (Here is where people point out that the trick is remembering to hit record before preaching and to hit stop afterwards. Yes… there’s no such thing as a free lunch. I put a reminder in my manuscript/notes.)

Then I get the sound file from my phone to my computer. There are a couple of different ways to do that. I upload it to the Recorder Pro site, where they will keep it for 10 days for you to download. You can also e-mail it to yourself (HUGE e-mail!). Do it on Wifi.

Recorder Pro doesn’t record in mp3 format, which is what iTunes and the others all use. So I downloaded a free program onto my Mac called Switch that lets you convert. (PC people: google “free mp3 converter” and you should find plenty.) It’s a simple drag and drop thing to convert the .wav to .mp3.

The podcasting program I use is called SermonDrop. I looked at several and there are plusses and minuses to all of them. I finally went with SermonDrop because I liked the ease of use and thought the interface was attractive, and they made it easy to get listed in iTunes. The process is as simple as uploading a photo to Facebook.

I have the free version of SermonDrop, which keeps the 10 most recent podcasts on their site. You can also upload one attachment for each sermon, if you use PowerPoint, or want to upload your manuscript. We still keep the manuscripts on our website.

I have a friend who uses GoDaddy for his podcasting. That site and others, as well as the Premium version of SermonDrop, let you have unlimited podcasts available. Something in me bristled at that, oddly. I think it’s because I heard a stat the other day that 10 hours of video gets uploaded to YouTube every minute. That’s just ridiculous on some level. So perhaps keeping the most recent 10 podcasts is a way of building in a little humility, that not every word I say from the pulpit needs to be accessible to everyone until the end of time.

Also, sermons are temporal events. And for a church our size, I’m not sure sermons-in-perpetuity is worth the cost. Sorry to any fangirls and fanboys out there, you only get 2 1/2 months of me at a time. :-)

If you know you want your podcasts up there forever, let me say that SermonDrop Premium is on the expensive side.

And one thing Robert brought up that I don’t know—if I decide to quit SermonDrop and go with a more robust paid service at some point, how do I get iTunes to point to the new host? I have no idea.

So that’s how it’s done.

One final thing. The friend who asked the question was feeling frustrated about his church’s process because while they do record the sermon each week, it takes forever for it to get uploaded to the website. Here is where we have that tension as pastors, between equipping others to share the ministry and just doing something simple yourself. It is SO easy to do this—it honestly takes me five minutes a week and minimal thought. I think it would take more mental bandwidth to find someone else to do it. And as my friend has found, you can’t always trust the result.

Here is where technology makes complicated stuff accessible to anyone. If you have a smartphone and a computer (which I realize is not universal), you can do this.

That said, it would be simple for an admin person to do this each week. Even if you record it onto your own phone, just e-mail the admin the link in Recorder Pro and let them take it from there.

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Beyond Shepherd

I was given a great gift on Saturday. It’s the kind of gift that makes a person feel humble, blessed and profoundly grateful. (I’m not even talking about the wonderful meal Robert cooked for me—it was our anniversary—although that was fantastic too.)

As a fun opening to last Saturday’s transformation training, the teams from the four participating congregations were given a list of fanciful titles (Empress, Chief) and were asked to give each other titles, which we wrote on name tags for one another. Our team’s names included Charioteer, Scribe, Sprite, Sage and Attaché. I’ve bragged before about the team from Tiny Church, how open they are to new ideas, how willing they are to ask difficult questions, to pray for each other and to go the extra mile with the work they’re doing. They’re also delightfully creative.

The other teams that were present gave their pastors the title “Shepherd.” It’s a perfectly good title, and not one I disparage. It’s biblical, and suggested right there in the name “pastor.” One group embellished the title and added “Sheepdog trainer.” I know that pastor was proud! That’s a huge part of transformation work—for churches to see the pastor not as someone who does the ministry for the congregation, but who trains other leaders to do ministry too.

My team gave me a different title. I looked it up later because it was intriguing to me. It has philosophical and mythological overtones. It speaks of a person who brings about transformation of something ordinary into something extraordinary. And it resonated with me because part of my work has been to help Tiny Church see, or remember, that though they are small, and their building is showing its age, and they never have quite as much money as they’d like to, they are mighty people indeed.

It should be said that the title they gave me, like shepherd, is not really mine. It actually belongs to Jesus, who’s the one who does the work; as pastors, we simply bear witness. We notice and name what God is doing.

The title is Alchemist.

Again… it is God’s work that I hope I am doing. But I am happy to be a part of it and to be given such a winsome title.

“Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people.”

Image: Nicholas Flamel, alchemist.

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The Wonderful Wooden Board

Tiny Church has a large sheet of plywood on a base, which makes it a movable wall with great flexibility of use. One side is covered in cork… actually, it’s partially covered in cork. Someone ran out of cork sheets, so the bottom has a ragged look to it.

But the other side is painted a pale yellow. When I first arrived I thought This is a little weird but I’ve used it in worship as a prayer wall, and for other random things.

Right now it’s our CROP Hunger Walk commitment board. Our CROP walk coordinator and I were talking about how hard it is to come up with new ways to inspire participation. It tends to be the same folks every year. But realistically, the number of folks who can do the walk is pretty limited.

So this year we’re using the board as a place to encourage alternate means of support. We’re posting one flyer for each walker with the person’s name at the top. On that sheet are places for people to sign up to do other tasks to support that person. Of course people can sponsor a walker with $$, but we’ve also added the opportunity to be a prayer partner for a walker, or to provide lunch for a walker on the day of the walk. (We’ve always found it a challenge to get ourselves fed between church and the walk.) I’m hoping this means that everyone from the homebound nonagenarian to the busy mother of twins plus an infant can be involved in some way.

Wooden board =  tool for ministry.

At any rate… a friend posted the following image on Facebook last night. Something like this will definitely make an appearance on the board:

What do you need today?

By the way, you can sponsor our family for the CROP walk here.

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I’m in iTunes

After a lot of hemming and hawing and playing around with the technology, Tiny Church is podcasting my sermons, as well as those of any guest preachers who want to record themselves preaching…

Here is our page at SermonDrop. In the next few days we’ll have a link from our website to this site, but you can always go there directly.

We are also listed in iTunes. Search for “Idylwood Presbyterian Church.”

So far, SermonDrop has been easy to use, and I like the features. Right now we’re using the free version which means only the 10 most recent sermons are available. We might upgrade at some point, but honestly… how much preaching can a person take?