RevCyn

I read the UU World article on the new logo, branding, and outreach effort with great interest.  The article tapped into some things I've been frustrated about and some things I've been excited about.  A couple of points in the article really resonated with me (the italics are mine): The Rev. Dr. Terasa Cooley, the UUA’s Program and Strategy Officer, said the new initiative developed out of a growing realization that the UUA and its congregations have been sending “inconsistent” messages about Unitarian Universalism into the larger world. and “We want congregations to think about the messages their congregations are sending out to the world that doesn’t know anything about them,” she added. “That includes thinking about how their building looks to guests, the structure of their services, their programs, whether they’re inward-oriented or serving the community, and what their online presence is like. ” and And the UUA is developing other resources for congre...

I'm leading a workshop at SUUSI this year on "Blogging for Beginners."  My mom (herself a former director for on-line learning for a university) pointed out to me that I should have handouts of my PowerPoint slides for the participants.  Handouts for a class about blogging?  That's so low-tech!  But I was trying to decide, indeed, how to share these -- whether to upload the file and share the URL or to e-mail them, or what.  Finally, I thought, "Why not just blog them?  The class is about blogging, after all!"  I remembered that I had found a way to do this once with some web-based application.  Turns out it's even easier now than it was before. If you're not in the workshop, keep in mind that these are just slides for some basic information and URLs that I thought might be helpful.  It's not everything we'll cover.

One of the reasons I created my RevCyn Facebook page was so that I could post about religion and social justice issues without subjecting ALL my Facebook friends, which includes conservative relatives and high school chums, to the full extent of my politics and faith.  I then post such things less from my own account.  One exception, however, is that because I try to draw a fine line between partisan politics and my ministry, and because I see the RevCyn page, and this blog, as an extension of that ministry, I try to refrain from endorsing a candidate here, or making statements about Republican and Democratic candidates that could be seen as an endorsement.  But my personal Facebook account,  however, is where I do feel free to be political, just as I do in my front yard and the bumper of my car.  Thus, as the election draws near, I run into more and more occasions where I risk alienating the conservatives among my Facebook friends.  The liberals among my ...

In Part 1 of this series I wrote about a proposal being generated through blog discussion about shorter sermons tied to social media in new ways.  In Part 2 I wrote about some of the limitations as I see it.  The main take-away there is that while some populations of some churches may be ready for this, others are not over the threshold yet.  The problem is that we're on a cusp right now, where some "digital natives" are ready for something different, not everyone is comfortable with the use of it.  As you go up by age/generation, a smaller percentage of people are using social networking.  So what can we do?  Well, there's still a lot.  I think for now it still means that for many congregations, having a physical space in which one holds worship is still necessary, and the cornerstone of that service is still the sermon.  And, at the same time, the UUA General Assembly changed the definition of congregation such that this is no longer the o...

So in my last post I talked about a proposal being generated to look at worship, particularly the sermon, in a new way in the light of social networking.  I think it's worth noting that the authors of the three posts I cited are all people who are not full-time solo ministers with the corresponding preaching schedule that such demands, and that Dan Harper, who comes the closest to that role in his role as Associate Minister, is in a large church with presumably some staff, and in Silicon Valley, as well.  What he describes seems less doable in a small country church such as I serve.  So here's what I see as the limitations to the model he proposes: 1.  Podcasting/Live streaming/any audio or video component -- Much as I love the idea of it, I don't have the technology for it.  And should I have the technology, I still don't have the tech support that I personally would need.  I could acquire the know-how to do it all on my own, given the technology, but r...

An interesting conversation has been going on in the UU blogosphere starting with Scott Wells at Boy in the Bands , then with Dan Harper at Yet Another Unitarian Universalist , and finally Phil Lund at Phil's Little Blog on the Prairie .  All three are UU ministers--Scott Wells works for the Sunlight Foundation ; Dan Harper is the Associate Minister for Religious Education at the UU Church of Palo Alto; Phil Lund is on staff at the Prairie Star District of the UUA.  Diving in--the original notion that Scott Wells posted is that in a digital age, the sermon is too long.  He writes, "It made sense in a education- and resource-poor (and frankly, entertainment-poor) age, but if I held forth for twenty minutes or more every Sunday, I expect to be regularly challenged (perhaps mentally, and in an unspoken way) by people who would Google for facts during my oratory."  Phil Lund echoes this: "Thing one: settling into a cozy pew for an hour or so to listen to a rippi...

There were only a couple of workshops on social media this year at General Assembly, and one of them was at the same time as another big lecture I wanted to attend the other day, so I happily grabbed the one today that was sandwiched between the plenary sections.  It was led by four ministers who talked about how they use social media.  What was really nice was that they all saw use of social media as a valid piece of ministry -- not just something they do on the side -- and they also talked about how it shows the congregation a different side of the minister, through seeing snarky blog posts or goofy cat videos or exposure to the different interests and social groups a minister interacts with.  And they all seemed to think this was largely positive for congregations to see this side of ministers.  As someone who has friended congregation members on Facebook, I have to agree.  My facebook friends see more of me than they would otherwise, and that's largely good....

As many of my readers know, I'm on sabbatical.  But I had volunteered to preach this past weekend at a colleague's church on her Sunday off.  I had volunteered a new sermon topic, rather than a "canned" one, but one I knew I would use again in my own congregation later.  I was most of the way done with my sermon, a sermon on the future of Unitarian Universalism, and had two parts left to go -- one was on the work our denomination has done on immigration reform, particularly in Arizona, and then the conclusion. That's where I had left things on Friday night.  When I got back on the computer late Saturday afternoon, I checked into Facebook, and was hit by the news of the tragic shootings in Tucson, Arizona.  I knew I couldn't complete my sermon as I had planned, and was going to have to change it.  Because I wasn't preaching in my own church, I didn't completely scrap the sermon, but as you'll see below it was greatly changed. My first instinct wa...

I have eight relatives who at one time or another attended a Unitarian Universalist church and who are on Facebook.  A quick polling of what their info pages say about their "religious views" gives the following answers: 2 list Unitarian Universalist (or some combination of those two words). 2 have the field blank or not viewable to me, which would be understandable given that I do things like this. 1 says "atheistic jew." 1 says "loving kindness." 1 says "Peace and Social Justice." 1 says "Aid to and support of the widows, the children, and the outcast." Of these eight, I think two are members of Unitarian Universalist churches--one who lists UU and one who doesn't.  Most of the others attend from time to time, but not regularly enough to consider themselves members, and mostly when visiting a relative who is church-going.  So this shows that not everyone who calls themselves a Unitarian Universalist is a member of a churc...

Last Sunday I did that presentation on Social Networking with my parents in the Detroit area, but I'm still immersed in Social Networking because I'm working on a webinar on the subject for our district... and I'm procrastinating on sermon writing, of course. What better time to blog? MySpace Having heard an NPR report and read a New York Times article (see below) which suggest that while Facebook is gaining popularity overall, MySpace is still more popular with certain minority groups, I wonder if UU churches might be further perpetuating our problem of addressing primarily white culture by being on Facebook and not MySpace.  I, and my church, have Facebook accounts and not MySpace ones.  Looking for UU churches on MySpace, I encountered only a couple.  Thomas Jefferson Unitarian Church is one.  So I decided the other day to try to create a MySpace account for the church.  My idea was to see if I could, like I did with the Ning page I set up a while ag...

I spent the morning working on a PowerPoint slide explaining how I do social networking (for a presentation that I'm helping my father on for an organization named SEMCO ). So the picture below is how one minister does social networking for a congregation. It basically amounts to this: I try to blog once a week, and I try to post on the church's Facebook page once a week. The rest pretty much automatically happens. Added note: Of course, now that I've done this picture, things seem to be not working anymore.  It's been over an hour since I posted this, and it hasn't fed into either my Twitter or the church Facebook.  Perhaps it's just a blogger delay? Second Addition:  It did eventually work and go to the Twitter and the Facebook, just like it should.  Meanwhile, I've unscrambled the picture a bit.  Here it is below:

Here at the Heartland Unitarian Universalist Ministers' Association winter conference, we're discussing 13 trends in congregational life from LifelongFaith.com .  Recognizing, as one minister pointed out, that trends are not necessarily the same as best practices, how do we adapt our congregations to respond to the changing realities?  These include the increasing racial and ethnic diversity in our country (while UUism remains at an enormously high percentage white; that people increasingly describe themselves as "spiritual but not religious," increasing use of internet, the aging population and the shifting reality of the young adult population as embodying a new stage of life that is "emerging adulthood" where marriage and children are postponed during a period of high freedom of choice and experimentation. Some of these trends work naturally with Unitarian Universalism.  Some of them we may be well-placed to respond to.  Others we will struggle with mor...

Thinking about the openness of our faith to many sources , and the way we use technology, I ran across this video of the Rev. Christine Robinson talking about open source technology and our faith, and our faith as an open source faith. Very cool. I think this should be a starting point from which we talk about technology and our faith. *Note to readers of this blog on facebook: videos may not come through to facebook. To view the original post, go to http://revcyn.blogspot.com .

Some thoughts on the new social media, as I'm wool-gathering this morning: In the last year and a half, I've started writing/using a blog, Twitter, and Facebook. I've also created a Facebook fan page for my church. Right now these things are all interwoven, and I see each as enhancing my ministry in different ways. Blogging My blog is a public site, with no hidden posts, so it's entirely open to the public. My blog is http://revcyn.blogspot.com . That might seem pretty obvious to the people who read it directly from my blog, but I also have the blog posting automatically to the church's Facebook fan page, and people comment on it there more than they do back at the home site. I sometimes also let it post to my personal Facebook page. Since in both places it comes through as Facebook "notes," it's not always apparent to people who read it there that it's really the blog from http://revcyn.blogspot.com. Having the blog post to Facebook has p...