Website designs are like hairstyles. They come and go out of fashion quickly—and it’s readily apparent when they’re dated.
Just consider all those Throwback Thursday pictures you’re seeing on Facebook. No one needs to tell you that the picture was taken 15 years ago. You can see it in the hair.
The same is true—exponentially so—with website design. What worked for your congregation a year ago is probably not the look that should carry you through the next eighteen months. What began as a glorified business card for many congregations (and companies) now requires an integrated, relevant, viewer-friendly design.
This is not an issue only for churches and nonprofits. Consider the evolution of websites for these multibillion-dollar companies. Their first sites are the equivalent of the mullet (which seriously, only Patrick Swayze could pull off). Today, viewers require much more than “business in the front, party in the back.” They’re used to dynamic delivery of information, of pictures, graphics, and fonts that are engaging and compelling. This doesn’t mean you have to rush out and hire a top-notch designer. But I am asking you to step back and take a critical look at your website. Is it fresh and inviting? Or so last year?
I like the tips offered here for a quick makeover. I also recommend looking at the tips in priority order.
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Sometimes I feel as if I am reading and participating in the same conversations about theology and the Bible and the future of the church and sexuality and gender I’ve been reading and participating in for years now. It’s as if we are going in circles.
And we are. It seems to me this is how life works, how growth happens. Not in a straight line, not in ups and downs, but in a spiral, that goes forward and in circles at the same time. These conversations are signs of growth. They often mean that more people are joining in and thinking out loud.
And, while I may have made up my mind about some of these issues, and I’m not particularly interested in rehashing them, I understand that others are. Talking about issues is often part of the process we go through as our ideas and beliefs change.
We are all at different places in our understanding. I sometimes have little patience for people who do not agree with me about things I feel strongly about, and then I remember that everyone isn’t at the same place (and, also, of course, that I could be wrong about a lot of things). We pull each other up and along. We broaden each other’s understandings; we help each other when we go off track. We repeat our beliefs and ask our questions again and again. We have to, because there are so many of us speaking and changing and growing all at once.
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Did everyone have a fun-and-pancake-filled Shrove Tuesday? Southside Abbey participated in the Shrove Tuesday events of a couple of Lutheran churches in our area. We came to a traditional church building to have a traditional pancake supper. That's when it struck me: this is fun! I was reminded just how often church is fun . . . and how often it isn't.
Recently, I had a wonderfully fun opportunity to participate in Play: Praising God in Life and Worship – A Fresh Expressions Worship Conference, hosted by the Diocese of Southern Ohio's Fresh Expressions office and Missioner for Fresh Expressions, Jane Gerdsen. Jane, who invited me to be a presenter, had the insight to bring together some practitioners involved in missional – also called emergent – communities. Don't get me wrong, I am a cradle (at least playpen) Episcopalian and I love and am deeply fed by “traditional” Sunday Morning worship – whatever that means – but, I am also aware that there are buckets of people who are not being reached by “traditional” means. They aren't having that kind of fun yet.
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Nota - Este artículo es disponible en español aquí.
I am working out of my home office these days and in that privacy, trying some new things. At my desk, I sit on one those large rubber exercise balls that became popular a few years back. I have to keep adjusting and rebalancing my body. It is a little unsettling because you don’t ever completely forget your body working like this. The movement can distract me as well—it is tempting to bounce a bit, just because it is fun to do. And I keep wondering how my core muscles are being strengthened, if my posture will improve. Will I get so used to this that it will become as natural as sitting on a regular office chair?
I come from a family that valued routine, the safety of how things had always been. I laughingly explain that I don’t ever remember any furniture being changed around in my childhood home. It was more than a little stunning, after my husband and I married, to realize that I could expect him to get in a furniture-moving jag with some regularity. I can’t even begin to explain how uncomfortable that made me. “But I liked the sofa where it was. The aesthetics of the room said something about me. I was careful when I put things where I did and I chose the very best spots for them”. My spouse-man would laugh and tease while I pouted.
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An English version of this article is available here.
En la actualidad trabajo la mayor parte del tiempo en la oficinita que armé en mi hogar. En la privacidad de este espacio he estado ensayando algunas cosas nuevas. Por ejemplo, estoy sentada en una de esas pelotas de caucho para hacer ejercicio que se volvieron muy populares hace unos años. Una y otra vez me obliga a reequilibrar y ajustar mi cuerpo. Es un poco inquietante, porque siempre tengo que estar pendiente de lo que hace mi cuerpo. El movimiento también se vuelve distracción y me encanta juguetear y hacerla rebotar un poco. Me pregunto si ayudará a fortalecerme los músculos y si me ayudará a mejorar mi postura. ¿Será que me acostumbraré a sentarme en ella como acostumbraba sentarme en mi silla de oficina?
Provengo de una familia que valoraba mucho la rutina, la seguridad de ver que las cosas seguían igual que siempre. Me da risa recordar que en mi niñez jamás vi cambiar de lugar un solo mueble en nuestro hogar. Me quedé aterrada poco después de casarme al descubrir que a mi marido le daban arranques y se ponía a cambiar de lugar los muebles de nuestro apartamento. Me inquietaba muchísimo: “Pero si puse el sofá ahí porque me gusta como queda en ese lugar. Había una cierta estética en la sala y estos cambios la trastocaron”. Mi marido se reía y yo me quejaba.
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Whether or not you enjoy seeing pictures of prom or scanned Polaroids from the family reunion, tbt is a thing. Standing for throwback Thursday, tbt fills my Facebook news thread each Thursday. I’m privy to slightly blurry snapshots of late-night college parties, of pre-selfies with out-of-date haircuts, and vaguely familiar friends as children unwrapping presents at Christmas or hugging on a grandparent who has long since passed.
These moments in time offer an invitation to connect with the past. And I started thinking: We in The Episcopal Church love talking about the past. We remember fondly the good ole days of full pews and gigantic youth groups, when everybody went to church and Sunday School wasn’t in competition with soccer games or smartphones. (As aside: I’m convinced that we often recall the past with blinders on, or at least while wearing rose-colored glasses. There were challenges for the churches fifty years ago, just as new and different obstacles face us today).
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I just realized something, and it’s a game changer.
For a while, I’ve been working on developing collaborative relationships with other local Episcopal congregations. Frankly, it makes no sense to me why we continue to prop up a one-parish/one-priest system while, at the same time, so many of us so often drive in and out of established, though irrelevant parish boundaries: my dry cleaner and gym is in one parish; my daughter’s school in another; go-to grocery store in a third. I also realized early in my time at St. George’s, Valley Lee that we could grow (which we continue to do) and we could increase participation and giving (which we continue to do) but we’d have a difficult time overcoming the structural challenges in our global and national economy (think: health care and rising energy costs).
That explains the need to collaborate. But simply saying that something’s not working doesn’t bring it to an end. Anyone who’s served on a church committee, for instance, knows the profound power of tradition over against growth strategies.
What we’ve done in St. Mary’s County, Maryland, then, is to start collaborating in ministry. File this under the “you’ve got to start somewhere” category. With those local Episcopal congregations who are willing to play together we’ve been doing as many non-Sunday morning things together as we possibly can: senior lunches, vacation bible school, occasional liturgies, and adult formation series. We’re also moving toward scheduling sporadic Sunday morning pulpit swaps and developing a more empowered Multi-Parish Council, about which I’ll write in future posts.
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I have been cooking new things lately. From scratch. I’ve been an expert restaurant eater for years, partaking of the wild variety of cooked food available in my Los Angeles neighborhood. But my cooking has been boring, in part because I don’t know what to do with the things for sale in my neighborhood.
I am learning about legumes. Between the Bangladeshis, the Ethiopians, and the Koreans, there may not be a legume known to humankind that is not for sale within walking distance of my house or church. I recently used red lentils, garbanzo flour, and yellow split peas all in one meal. I turned a bag of dry mung beans into little savory pancakes.
I am learning about chilies. When I set about to make homemade enchilada sauce, I discovered that the tiny Latino market around the corner carries no less than thirteen different types of dried chile. And then there is Korean chili paste. On a recent trip to my local supermarket I happened to notice they carried only three cake mixes, tucked at one end of an entire aisle of chili paste.
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If imitation is a form of flattery, then I suggest we heap some compliments on an idea out of western New York.
The Roman Catholic Diocese of Buffalo has offered a clever twist on the flash mob. In layman’s terms, a flash mob is when a group of people suddenly appears in a public place at the same time, seemingly in a spontaneous fashion, and joins together in some act such as dancing or singing. The folks in Buffalo decided to try the idea to encourage people to attend mass at one of its aging congregations.
These Flash Masses—or Mass Mobs—are coordinated through social media. People vote on which church to visit on a given Sunday and then show up, if you will, en masse, for worship. The idea is to expose people to different churches—and to bolster the dwindling numbers so they experience a full building again.
In a news story about the initiative, the founder said the purpose was to “reignite interest, support, and perhaps even membership in older churchs that ‘kind of fall off the radar screen of people.’”
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It started with a simple prayer:
“Lord, even as we enjoy the Super Bowl football game, help us be mindful of those who are without a bowl of soup to eat.”
That was fourteen years ago, in Columbia, South Carolina. The movement, led by youth, collected $7.5 million worth of cash and food donations last year—alone. If you break it down, that’s about the cost of seven or eight commercials to air during the Super Bowl. Or enough to help 6,600 charities feed hundreds of thousands of people.
If your church isn’t signed up yet, there’s still time. Even an announcement on Sunday morning might shake loose some donations. And next year, you can get started on it in January, planning some fun activities and generating enthusiasm for the Souper Bowl.
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Have your faith and eat it too.
That’s the premise of a cool blog committed to supporting young adults in The Episcopal Church.
Founders of thedailycake.org gathered in Cincinnati this past weekend to review the past year and to plan for the new one. Their goal is provide a place for conversation and commiseration, a place for young adults to talk and read and rant about being lonely, about growing up, and about faith. It’s serious stuff without the site taking its self too seriously. They, well, want to have their faith, and eat it to.
Across the country, groups are confabbing about how to attract young people, about how to stem the depressing decline of participation in the institutional church. Lots of different people think they have the answers, and they’re willing to tell you, whether or not you asked to hear them.
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The problem is common: We get so focused on the details that we miss the big picture. Sometimes it takes a stranger, an outsider to put things into perspective.
I experienced this situation over the weekend. We had a guest preacher on Sunday. This retired priest travels around the country to share information and raise money for an international ministry. He sees a lot of different Episcopal churches.
And he was blown away by our congregation.
Sunday wasn’t particularly special; it wasn’t Easter or a baptism or a bishop’s visit. The junior choir sang, but they sing every other Sunday. They’re an integral part of regular Sunday worship, not just a special-occasion choir. Despite the ordinariness of the day, every pew was filled. The overflow section was nearly at capacity. Children from third to sixth grade filled three full pews. When they sang, I counted twenty-six. The youngest children came up from Wee Worship during the announcements, and as folks lined the aisles for Eucharist, every age range was represented.
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Lose weight. Start exercising. Read the classics. Keep a journal. Find life/work balance. Pay off credit cards. Make new friends. Reconnect with old ones.
This is prime time for resolution writing. Facebook and Twitter will soon be popping with ironic comments about resolutions; George Takei will create a clever meme about the uselessness of resolutions. And by week's end, I'll have failed at most of mine.
But I wonder if part of the value is in the pre-resolution contemplation, the deep thinking about how I want my life to be in the coming year.
With this premise in hand, I propose that congregations undertake the process of making resolutions. Does the church want to be friendlier? Bigger? More financially secure? Does it want to increase spiritual formation and engagement in the community? Does the congregation need to consider merging with another or looking a a new way of being? Is it time to add a third service or build a parking lot?
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Each year since I was five or six I would attend the Christmas Eve midnight mass at the Episcopal Church where my dad was rector. Afterward we would open one present (almost always pajamas) before going to bed and, filled with anticipation of the next day, attempt to sleep.
As an adult, I haven’t been able to make it home every year, and my traditions have changed. This Christmas Eve, for example, I attended two services, neither of them the traditional Episcopal midnight service I’m used to. The first was a Christmas pageant/parade through Brooklyn with St. Lydia’s. We wore king’s crowns, donkey ears, and angel wings and sang carols and told the nativity story before ending up at a bar for snacks and drinks. It was fun, though very cold.
The second was a traditional Christmas Eve service at First Presbyterian, with a choir and candles in a warm church. Although it was not quite the Episcopal liturgy I’m used to, it was close.
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I am currently planning my wedding with my fiancée, Denise. As most people know, there’s a lot of work that goes into that single day. There are dress fittings and cake tastings. We have to decide how to feed our guests and find a venue and send out invites. I’m looking forward to the day.
At the same time, we’re working on the relationship that already exists and getting to know each other better. We’re thinking about what comes later, about family and career and what we want our lives to look out.
I guess in this way it’s a kind of Advent time, as we await and prepare, we live in existing relationship, and we look toward a particular day and beyond it.
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Not until I was sitting in the pew, listening to the lessons, did I realize how much I missed it.
Since the week before Thanksgiving, I’ve been mostly house-ridden, recovering from back surgery. The inside of our house—the places I can reach—are wrought with Christmas. Nativity sets in the dining room. Santa figurines lining the windows. A porcelain Christmas village around the second tree.
The grease-stained kitchen towels are replaced with Ho, Ho, Ho stitched clothes, and the foyer is filled with Christmas cards and snow globes. The Griswolds may have the corner on outdoor decorations, but I may give them a run for their money inside the house.
I’ve also been trolling the Internet. Since I’m (mostly) confined to the couch, online shopping has been my portal to the Christmas frenzy. Every present this year has been ordered online. The UPS folks love me.
Yesterday, I was able to attend church for the first time this Advent. (I brought my own pillow; they don’t make pews for the faint-hearted or recently stapled backs). The choirs performed the traditional Lessons & Carols. The cherub choir waved to mom and dad and fiddled with their robes. Girls from the junior choir sang the first verse of the procession. The crisp ring of the bells filled the nave. And the combined adult choir, more than forty strong, married their voices, creating beautiful music.
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Advent is a different experience when it comes at the same time as a shattered disc.
In late November, I had a two-fer – my first broken bone and first time under anesthesia. I decided to go big for the first time, or rather my body did: A disc in my lower back shattered, lodging pieces into the nerves, which made the doctors pretty nervous. I’m still numb from the waist down from the nerve damage. Apparently nerves take a long time to heal.
I need to be patient, the neurologist says.
But I’m not good at waiting. Sure, the first week or so, I caught up on every TV show, even ones I hadn’t watched before. And I slept a lot, and at times, I was pretty hilarious in my painkiller-induced fog. But at three weeks out, I’m ready to do. To wrap presents and decorate the house. To finish shopping. To bake Christmas cookies. To go to parties—and church. I want to be back at work (seriously) and pick the kids up from school. I want to help my husband with the mountain of laundry and spell him from the pressure of handling all of the household chores, plus the frenzy of Advent for a priest.
After all, who am I if I’m not able to do these things?
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Growing up in St. Louis as a kid, we had “blue laws.” Nothing but food could be sold on Sundays, and most businesses were closed. I can still see the cashier carefully sorting pencils and notebooks out of my mom’s grocery order, and putting them aside to go back to the shelves. No notebooks on Sunday. I remember embarrassing my slightly older self by rattling the liquor section of the fridge at a convenience store in Louisiana, trying in vain to open the locked case and get some beer on a Sunday. Louisiana may have allowed drive-through daiquiris the rest of the week, but not on Sundays. Sundays were special.
Sundays were special, but not anymore. Sundays are fair game for commerce, soccer, birthday parties, school events, and package delivery. As a result, Church competes with other interests on Sunday morning just as it would if it were held on Saturday, or Thursday. There is no string left on the collective little finger, no locked liquor cabinet sending the message, “Shouldn’t you be somewhere else right now...like, oh say, church?”
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This weekend I went to church with a friend, a priest. He had taken a new job, and this was his last Sunday as a curate at this church. He preached a gracious sermon about love. He told me afterward that he had been given this advice: Just make sure they know that you love them.
This seems like good advice for dealing with transitions and difficult times in many relationships in the church, where the community is founded on love for one another. Especially in the midst of change.
Relationships change, frequently. We may leave a job in the church or move away. We may have to stop attending a small group because of a schedule change or stop participating in a ministry because it’s not a good fit for our skills or we’re just too busy. All these things can alter relationships with individuals or a group, and can occasionally feel like abandonment. This is especially true when those with leadership roles, like priests or vestry members and staff, have to leave or change their relationship to someone in the community.
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I’d be the first to admit that I have a chip on my shoulder when it comes to nostalgia. It’s a generational thing. Born in 1971, I grew up hearing that the sixties were AWESOME (or maybe it was GROOVY??). Ordained in 2000, I have heard throughout my ministry that those dusty balconies and rented-out Sunday school wings used to JAMMED with people. As a woman priest, I regularly hear how the whole church thing pretty much started coming unglued...oh, somewhere in the 1970s. So you’ll indulge me if I get a little tired of hearing how much better everything was just before my generation arrived on the scene.
I’m down on nostalgia, but I’m a firm believer in history. It’s important to know the difference. Too often when we look to the past, we engage in what I like to call “Heyday History.” We remember the peak of our success (as defined by the standard “butts & bucks” formula: butts in the pews + bucks in the plate = church), and lament our current decline.
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