Here we go!

I had a professor who would begin his four hour lectures with these words, "Here we go!"  They seem appropriate as I transition from being a full-time student and nonprofit fundraiser to being the full-time vicar, or intern pastor, at a local congregation. For the past four years, I have been in seminary preparing for this move, and now it's here.

One of the gifts that internship gives me as a seminarian is a time of discovering more about living life in public Christian leadership and who I am as a pastor. Gathering up wisdom from the people who have gone before me, I am reminded of Robert Fulghum's All I need to know I learned in Kindergarten, where we discover our lives together are rooted in some basic, simple truths.

One of the basic truths I learned from that same professor was, "Take regular breaks." He could be mid-sentence, but at ten minutes to the hour, we stopped and took ten minutes to walk outside, breathe or re-caffeinate. It didn't really matter what we did as long as we got up from our desks and did something else. He didn't want to talk more than fifty minutes in one sitting and I doubt any of us wanted to listen for more than that. Another professor makes the same suggestion when she hits a wall in the process of sermon writing: take a break and do something else for 15 or 30 minutes. Don't just keep staring at the empty screen or tablet of paper. Whether it's preparing a sermon or teaching others, taking regular breaks will benefit everyone involved.

From my grandaddy, I am reminded, "Take care of the patient, not the illness." A doctor at a teaching hospital,  he saw too many new residents who never really saw the patients as real people; instead they attended to the disease and diagnosis, and overlooked the living, hurting human being who stood there. Our congregations and communities aren't numbers on offering envelopes, or statistics for the annual report - numbers on a page - they are living, breathing and hurting human beings.


Getting to know real people means having real conversations, but what those conversations look like has changed a lot in the thirty plus years since I was in kindergarten. When it comes to our conversations here and on Twitter and Facebook and other social media outlets, a United Methodist pastor in Indiana shared these guidelines which advocate, "Avoid harm, do good, be connected and help others connect to God." Pastor Keith Anderson, formerly of Woburn, Mass. and now in Ambler, Penn. writes about weaving social media and ministry, too, and a group of folks who regularly chat about church and social media using the Twitter hashtag #chsocm dove into questions of boundaries and authenticity on June 26 (here's the transcript).


I will be sharing what I am learning throughout the year in future posts and look forward to our conversations.

Friday Five (Yes, it's Sunday!)

RevGalBlogPals is a network of women blogging about ministry and life and on Fridays, we play Friday Five where someone chooses a topic and we “play” by blogging our answer. I didn’t make Friday’s deadline but I'm posting anyway.

Inspired by increasing movement from wired devices and even laptops to mobile devices, this week’s questions asked how we’re using the internet. (Here’s a snapshot of the trends from Pew Internet)

You can play along too and leave your comments with your answers.

Here are the questions:

Q1. Do you use social connections, like Facebook, Twitter, Linked-in or whatever else there is? Describe how you use it/these.
Q2. Do you text on your cell phone? Work, friends, family?
Q3. Do you play any games? Which ones?
Q4. How do you predominantly use the various electronic devices you possess?
Q5. How do you feel about blogging? Are you as involved in blogging as when you first started? What facilitates your blogging?

A1: Social media opens the corner of my world, forging connections with people in other parts of the U.S. and even across the pond.

On Facebook, I am friends with people I can recognize on the street but I can interact in groups or on pages with people with whom I share something in common – parents at a school or club where my children are involved, classmates at seminary or alumni from my high school or university. A decade ago, we might have been connected through a bound paper directory but social media keeps us up-to-date in real time.

Twitter makes conversations possible with an even broader group of folks. Often, I have not met the people I talk to on Twitter, and most of the time, physical geography makes it unlikely that we ever will meet in real life. We might talk about churches and social media (#chsocm), climbing (#climbchat), or Asheville (#avl). We might have a Lutheran connection or a ministry connection or they might be associated with someone who does. Beyond niche topics, Twitter delivers breaking news as quickly as Google News or traditional broadcast channels. While I don’t look at what’s trending on Twitter, but, unfiltered, Twitter reflects a pulse of what is getting people excited, angry or otherwise engaged with the world around them.

For the ways I use Twitter, Hootsuite  lets me create streams that I can follow for any topic I want to follow and when I’m in a chat, I can see the thread of conversation in a single column, making it easy to keep up and contribute. Someone recently joked with me that researchers say if you’re over 38 you cannot manage social media multitasking; I answered I would go and crawl back into my cave then, but I won’t. I like hearing voices from different corners of the world and hearing opinions I might miss if I was only in conversation with locals.

Linked In creates connections to people in the workplace. Again, I generally know everyone in real life – we have worked together in nonprofits, on projects in seminary or they are alumni from the school where I work. Through our shared relationships, we have opportunities to again engage more voices in conversation, whether I need advice about a solicitation strategy, best practices or researching a new vendor.

What surprised me is that as active as I am in these channels, I usually use them from a desktop computer in my office or from my laptop at home. Mobile for me remains the domain of texting, email and phone calls. I think that has as much to do with my eyesight as my age, but I guess those could be related. The notable exception is when I need information quickly. For googling information and maps, my phone is the most convenient device and is indispensable for finding out a store’s hours, what a word means, or discovering where I missed a turn.

A2: I rarely text for work or socially, but it’s the primary mode of communication for our immediate family. I think one of the reasons I don’t use it for other interactions is that I have email synced on my phone, so I can silo external communication on email accounts and preserve my privacy. That’s another sign of my age – I think privacy is being redefined, or maybe deconstructed, by youth today. Opinions about what belongs in public conversation are widely varied,

A3: Games are great time sinks for carpool lines, and I am easily addicted to backgammon and bubble games while my daughters like Temple Run and Unblock Me, but if we get tired of those, here is a top 50 list. What are your favorites?

I’m out of space and time so I’ll save the other questions as food for thought and hope you share how you’re using social media and devices to enrich your learning and life.

What would you like to be called?

Lauren Hunter at Church Tech Today published a new post this week about 5 Pinterest marketing strategies for churches.  

There’s been a lot of buzz around Pinterest (leave your email in a comment below if you want an invite) because its use, especially by women, is soaring. Recently, when Pinterest policies came under scrutiny for potential copyright issues I began thinking about how we share and promote our interests without infringing on others’ rights, and exploring what kinds of pins people are sharing. (For more on the copyright concerns, here is the February blog post from lawyer and photographer Kirsten Kowalski and a blog post from today’s Wall Street Journal. I follow a lot of people and boards on Pinterest because they pin images that reflect beauty and inspiration in ways that I understand. Here are a couple of my favorites:

Sacred paths by @ChSocm
Places by Yoichi S
Sacred Spaces By Stratton McCrady

As much fun as it is to drink in all the breathtaking images on Pinterest, I wonder how many folks dismiss it as the latest fad and at its worst, vanity and indulgence.

It isn’t.

I am not a social media savant. I still only know a sliver of how people are communicating today. In his newest book Viral, Len Sweet would call me a Gutenberger because I am about three years older than the oldest digital natives who he names Googlers; I grew up with a different language and vocabulary and my default is still paper and pen.

However, I think Pinterest is giving us new ways to answer an ancient question:

“What do you like to be called?”

When someone asks you,“What is your name?” they are asking what you were called at your birth. But "What do you like to be called?" offers something else. A friend reminded me of how differently those two questions can be heard by people who cannot or will not claim their pasts. Others want to stake their futures with their answers; creatives - graphic designers, artists, photographers - are using Pinterest to visually represent themselves by pinning their resumes. Our answers can reveal how we see ourselves and what parts of ourselves we want to share with others. 

That’s where the opportunity exists for churches on Pinterest. People are asking, “What do you like to be called?” and instead of delivering an answer people may expect, let’s answer by showing people who we are and to whom we belong. Happy pinning!

Where do we find God/Where does God find us?

Some people want to say that God can only be found in the words written on the pages of a bound Bible - that a Christian's "faithfulness" can be measured by how quickly they open the weathered pages of the book. (After all they must be weathered if they're faithful, right?)

A bound book of paper and glue isn't the only way to discover or dwell in the Word of God.

We are called to be living sanctuaries for God. 1 Corinthians 3:16 (NRSV) reminds us, "Do you not know that you are God's temple and that God's Spirit dwells in you?" 

What does it mean to be a living sanctuary? It isn't a call to shut out the world. It is a call to open myself to God,  in whom we live and move and have our being.(Act 17:28, NRSV)

The Word of God lives in our prayer and reflection, both alone and in community. And the tools we have today make it possible to access God's Word in Scripture through digital media and open ourselves to the sacred in more ways than one, whether it's worshiping with Virtual Abbey or diving into photographs of sacred places (or Stations of the Cross, or prayer beads) on Pinterest or listening more carefully to the music all around us (Chris Scharen writes more about this and Jeni Grangaard is sharing a Lenten playlist this season)

I am not taking anything away from the primacy of Scripture, but why do people insist on limiting God and arguing that there is a wrong way or a wrong place to look for God? By watching and listening for God in new ways, I can experience the beauty and mystery of God's presence even when God may feel more hidden because of the way my day is going. 

During this season of Lent while I reflect on the wilderness, I examine where I become separated from God and how God draws me near. The hymn "Sanctuary" petitions God

, 

"Lord, prepare me to be a sanctuary

Pure and holy, tried and true

With thanksgiving, I'll be a living

Sanctuary for You" 

Becoming a sanctuary for the Living God means first finding ways to recognize God in my day and my life. Some days, that will mean holding a hard bound Bible in my hands but I refuse to say God cannot reach me anywhere God chooses.

Twitter Potluck #genchurch

Tonight, a group of faith-filled folks joined in conversation, just like we were having a potluck dinner in the fellowship hall.  Moderated by @KGDebus, this discussion was about how we can foster truly multi-generational faith communities and the hashtag was #genchurch.

Our conversation focused on 4 generations defined by @KGDebus as:

• Millennials: aged 7-28, our community-minded, selfless, hopeful and interactive young adults;
• Generation X: aged 29-50, perceptive, pragmatic, self-reliant, up-and-coming leaders
  (With an identity with more depth than "the MTV Generation", I don't mind being labeled Gen X!);
• Boomers: aged 51-68, principled, resolute, creative, visionary leaders and new retirees;
• Silents: aged 69-85, our adaptive, flexible, caring, open-minded elders. 

Sharing how we define God, what our experiences in church and leadership are, why we participate in church and faith communities, the hour flew by.  I am grateful for the voices of the Millenials and Boomers that mixed with many of us Xers, and to see where we shared and differed on points-of-view, between generations and within generations.

I'm not sure why I was surprised by the give-and-take, rhythm or cadence of the conversation.  About a month ago, another group of interested, talkative and faithful folks began a Tuesday night (9 pm EDT) tweetchat #chsocm where we talk about social media and churches, covering blogs, Facebook, friending, personal vs. institutional profiles, branding, tagging, etc.  If you're interested, you can see last night's transcript on the chat's blog and plan to join us.

These two tweetchats illustrate the intersection of communication, community and faith that is happening today. Face-to face, in real life interactions aren't replaceable, but these interactions and these communities are authentic and important, and I'm grateful for the chance to meet and talk with folks who I wouldn't find in my corner of the world.

Where am I now

    Just as we begin each educational leadership class by looking at our knowledge competencies, we conclude each class by reassessing our skills, knowledge and attitudes, measuring what we have learned and how our classroom experience has informed our understanding of education.  Early on in Media and Technology in Parish Education I identified two goals that were still growing edges for me.  The first one is supporting intergenerational learning, and the second one is supporting theological and biblical reflection in a variety of contexts, and with a variety of people involved.
    Often when we talk about intergenerational learning, we talk about forging relationships between older adults and youth, but I am in the middle and personally, I am much more comfortable reaching out to older adults than children, teenagers and even college-age young adults.  However, technology and media create openings for conversations in ways that might not happen otherwise across multiple generations.   Three of us in my family shared this video with each other – my retired Navy officer father, my eleven year old flute-playing daughter and me.

    Similarly, my almost sixteen year old daughter commented recently on the way that we watch people grow up through the photographs they share on Facebook.  I have classmates who have posted scanned photographs from our high school years and for my daughter, cameras have always been digital so pictures from kindergarten through high school are easily shared online.  Comfortable with using social media and technology to tell our families' stories, now we are beginning to discover how we can use them to tell our faith stories as well. 
    Blogging our theological and biblical reflections for this class has let me invest time in Blogger, adding elements to my blog like a cloud of the tags, labels or subjects in my posts and a blog roll or listing of the blogs I subscribe to in Google Reader.  The reader itself has a search engine to find blogs based on keywords so I can search for a title or a topic and add it quickly.  And for a twist, in Blogger, when I list my favorite musicians, I can click on a name and find other bloggers who share an interest in that musician. (So look out for more bluegrass theologians.)
    These tools and resources have connected me with other people who are blogging particularly about faith, leadership, education and social media.  But just making the connections isn’t the same as having conversations.  For conversations, I will always hope to find and make opportunities to sit down across a table with other people in a concrete, physical space, but as a distributed learner, I am also very comfortable with asynchronous conversations. 
    Using Hootsuite I can read feeds from Facebook and Linked In, and even RSS feeds from blogs, but I primarily use it to follow conversations on Twitter where I tweet @christinaauch.  In Hootsuite, I set up streams or feeds – lists of Tweets by other people - in Twitter using hashtags.  Hashtags are words preceded with a pound or number sign (#).  Right now I have my main Twitter feed where I can read anything posted by someone I am following, but I also have a half-dozen or more streams that I read that are based on the hashtags or subjects:

#chsocm (people interested in how churches are using/can use social media; tweetchat begins July 11)
#isedchat (independent school education chat)
#edsocialmedia (education and social media)
#finalsite (a web communications conference in June near Hartford, CT)
#gather2011 (Bread for the World’s conference in June in Washington, D.C.)
#WGF11 (the Greenbelt-esque Wild Goose Festival held in June in NC)
#NN11 (Netroots Nation 2011 conference in June in the Twin Cities)

Here I see tweets from many more voices, anyone who uses the hashtag in fact. For tweetchats we are actually engaging in synchronous chats, at a given time and date, but you can also stumble onto them and go back to them if you can’t be online at the proposed time. 
    It is in these conversations that I hear a number of voices, including Lutheran, Episcopal, United Church of Christ and Unitarian Universalist, and other Protestant voices, and now the Pope as well.  Different nonprofits and denominational offices and ministries (Bread for the World, Vibrant Faith Ministries and David Creech at ELCA World Hunger, for example) are on Twitter, too.  Tweets are conversation starters, and the conversation grows as comments are retweeted or people reply to earlier tweets. 
    For people who don’t think real conversations happen in 140 characters or less, in the past few days, I have had a conversation about how to talk to our children about Jesus, our gathered community and worshiping together without answering “Why do we go to have to go church?” with “Because that’s what we do on Sunday.” and connected with someone who has written his thesis on themes similar to Clay Shirky’s. Earlier this year, I spoke to David Creech about a course he had taught on Christian responses to poverty and hunger.
    These are real conversations happening without the benefit of a landline phone, knowing someone’s full name or having a peer introduction. They are respectful, engaged and thoughtful conversations about God, wealth and poverty, justice, faith, fear and pain as well as places where joys and sorrows are shared. The participants often are more diverse in racial, ethnic and cultural backgrounds than I would find at a roadside diner or coffee shop in my corner of the world, and probably in my congregation, although I’m less convinced that we are any more successful at bridging class divides.  Nor do I think our digital spaces should replace our physical spaces and face-to-face conversations, but they afford unique opportunities that complement and even enrich those conversations.

"A Glimpse of the Future" (2019)

As we navigate social networks that have risen so dramatically in the last five years, a video titled “A Glimpse of the Future” from Microsoft that was first shared in 2009 illustrates what they are working on in the next ten years (2019).  Even with my own encounters with social media  and my own experience of distributed learning, it's astonishing to see what people imagine for the future.  But this is not the stuff of Star Trek. How we communicate and work are changing; how we teach and learn are changing; how we use paper and technology is changing. How we live is changing. 

Just as our paradigms for the marketplace and our classrooms are changing, we need to recognize that our ways of being congregations and communities are changing too.  We are facing an adaptive challenge that demands a response outside of our current knowledgebase and requires us to learn new ways of doing and new ways of finding answers.  Ready, set, go!

For more on leading people through adaptive challenges, listen to Ronald Heifetz.