Rev. Dr. Michael Tino preached this Sermon on December 5, 2021 in the Church of the Larger Fellowship’s Online Sanctuary

Our Universalist ancestors believed that a powerful, radical love awaited them at death, a love so powerful as to be able to cleanse them of even their most vile sins, a love so radical as to be freely available to all. In the days when John Murray ran aground on a sandbar on the coast of New Jersey, it was a wild and heretical theology, this stuff of Universal salvation.

Over the ensuing two hundred and fifty-one years, a theology that holds that all people will ultimately be saved, a theology that rejects the eternal damnation of hell in favor of a reconciliation with a greater love, that theology is not so wild anymore. It is barely even heretical in some corners.

And yet, since Thomas Potter convinced John Murray to preach Universalism  in his little chapel, our faith has struggled with the question of what Universalism calls us to in this life, before we die, right here. After all, if we’re all going to be saved anyway, why bother doing anything in this life? Why even bother being good?

Through the generations, our Universalist ancestors came up with decent responses to these questions. And today I want to call us to an answer that Clarence Skinner gave us some 80 years ago.

I don’t always agree with Clarence Skinner, 20th century Universalist theologian. For starters, his history of embracing eugenics is more than a little problematic. 

But in particular, I think he led us astray by claiming that big-U Universalism was little-u universal—that we uniquely had a religion for all people and should strive to make it so. That’s modernist, colonizer talk right there, that little-u universal religion stuff. It asks us to point to the existence of a truth that is equally valid for all people, and to claim as that truth a theology of white Europeans and Americans. I don’t believe such a truth exists, much less that white folks would hold it, so I don’t do little-u universal religion.

But when Skinner asked the question “What does Universalism demand of us in this life?” he got to some things I find worthy of holding up. 

Universalism, he insisted, call on us to fight the perpetuation of racism. In his 1945 work “A Religion for Greatness,” he wrote that racism is based in selfishness, superstition, and distortion. “If we ‘see life steadily and see it whole,’” he wrote, “we can appreciate all the parts. the part becomes misunderstood only when we see it without relationships, as an end in itself.” Each race, each culture, each difference in humanity, he wrote “has its own genius and each may contribute to a life that is ‘rounded, divine, [and] complete.’”

I believe it is our call to once again make our faith a radical, prophetic, challenge to the way things are. It is time to reclaim our place as the wild heretics pushing society forward, pushing theology forward, pushing humanity forward. It is time to re-think the powerful love our ancestors believed awaited them when they died as a powerful love available to us in the present, while we live.

I believe it’s time to re-think our theology of Universal salvation as a theology of universal liberation, right here.

I believe it’s time for Universalists to claim the radical, powerful love that our ancestors once attributed to God as a possibility of humanity.

Not as an automatic of humanity—we all know that real evil exists in our world, and that systems created by humans perpetuate evil daily—but as a possibility. Which makes our call, as Universalists, making it happen.

In 1915, ten years into his ministry and two decades before he became a professor at Tufts, Clarence Skinner published “The Social Implications of Universalism.” Here’s some of the non-problematic part of what he wrote:

“Universalism was born out of the new humanity; it is the gospel of the new heaven and the new earth. It throbs with hope. It was part of the great world movement to reinterpret life in terms of a regenerated, buoyant, self assertive human nature. Universalism believes in the world and in its potential goodness. It repudiates the gloomy and disastrous outlook of the old anti-social theology. It is not frantically searching for an escape from life.”

He continues, “Only those theologies which frankly and persistently align themselves with the world, and openly champion its potential goodness, can logically enter the great reformation of the twentieth century. They alone believe that salvation comes in, by and through a saved world. This is social salvation. All others believe that salvation comes by escaping from a world which is inherently unsavable. That is the individualistic, anti-social, mediæval faith. Goethe once said that the ideal is not an escape from reality but a completion of it. The Universalist conception of religion is not that of an escape from reality, but that of the harmonious and spiritual development of all the elements of real life.”

How do we persistently align ourselves with the world? How do we openly champion the potential goodness in our midst? What is our call? It is the collective liberation of all of humanity.

And not just the spiritual liberation of all of humanity, but the physical and emotional liberation of humanity as well. These things cannot be separated.

As long as we are not naming the white supremacy culture in our midst and openly, explicitly, constantly working to dismantle it, we are failing in our call to champion the goodness of humanity.

As long as listening to the voices of those who have experienced marginalization and naming the ways in which racism is systematized in our society are somehow controversial things to do, we are failing in our call to champion the goodness of humanity.

As long as violent, extractive capitalist systems are allowed to make policy—to block action on climate change, to enact colonial foreign policies, to abrogate the bodily autonomy of people with uteruses, to let this deadly virus run rampant in communities of color and schools because we insist that certain adult bodies are needed to show up for work, we are failing in our call to champion the goodness of humanity. These evils exist because someone is making money off them, and their money is power in a society that falls short of the radical love that is possible in this world.

And as long as our siblings are locked behind bars, as long as their bodies are fuel for the fire of our prison-industrial system, as long as we insist that punishment by dehumanization is a necessary response to breaking laws, as long as our nation’s constitution allows a loophole in our abolition of slavery for incarcerated people, we are failing in our call to champion the goodness of humanity.

And let’s make no mistake—the systems of injustice that I’m talking about today, these systems are using the very beings—the bodies and the spirits—of black people, indigenous people, people of color, of poor people, of disabled people, of queer people, of women and transgender people, as fuel for the creation of wealth for a very small number of folks.  

Let me repeat that—the very bodies of those who are marginalized in so many ways around the world are being used as fuel. Our systems dehumanize people and then turn them into commodities to be used.

As surely as the fires of hell that John Murray rejected burned, human systems of evil burn. 

And so it is our call as Universalists to reject that fire consuming our siblings.

It is our call as Universalists to amplify the radical, powerful love that we know humanity is capable of.

It is our call as Universalists to work for the liberation of all of humanity—for the spiritual emancipation that Clarence Skinner wrote of in 1915 as well as the physical emancipation so desperately needed in 2021.

“Light the fuse,” Skinner wrote, “and the fire will reach the bomb.” It is time to set off a love bomb on our world. It is time to act like we are worthy of the God of John Murray and Hosea Ballou, the God of Olympia Brown and Joseph Jordan, the God of Gloster Dalton and Amy Scott. Like we are worthy to call ourselves inheritors of a faith in which all are saved, in which all are free, in which all are loved.

It is time for us to practice radical, powerful, life-saving love. Liberation and salvation. Right here. Right now. Over and over again.

Just saw this article in UU World: Sound Systems for Better Sunday Worship

It makes some good points about why proper sound and video systems help with a sense of community and inclusion.

There are many famous Unitarian poets and writers. Examples include:

• Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888)
• Béla Bartók (1881-1945)
• e. e. cummings (1894-1962)
• Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
• Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865)
• Edith Holden (1871-1920)
• Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)
• Beatrix Potter (1866-1943)
• Kurt Vonnegut

I've just added a new worship resources page to the blog. If you have suggestions for additions to it, please post them in the comments below.

I have tried not to duplicate UALM's worship resources page too much, so if you expected to find something on the Unitarian Communications page and it's not there, have a look on UALM's page.

In preparation for the 200th anniversary of the birth of Elizabeth Gaskell, the Worship Panel has created a new information pack (PDF).

It includes worship materials, background information, a directory of events, and a list of contacts. It was compiled by Rev. Dr. Ann Peart, with two sections by Kay Millard and Rev. Jim Robinson.

(via GA Uni-News)

The Famous UUs site has a biography of Gaskell.

In Gaskell's estimation, true Christianity was not to be found in organized denominations nor in liturgy nor in theology. She believed and acted on a religion of works, "the real earnest Christianity which seeks to do as much and as extensive good as it can." Local action for change by those most intimately concerned, not government legislation, was her solution to social problems. Those who have should help those who have not. For her such charity began at or near home. She took her motto from Thomas Carlyle, "Do the duty that lies nearest to thee." Unitarian rationalist feminist journalist Frances Power Cobbe, after reading a story by Gaskell, wrote, "it came to me that Love is greater than knowledge — that it is more beautiful to serve our brothers freely and tenderly, than to hive up learning with each studious year."

This is my final post in this series on UU sermon writing.  I've been trying to establish that sermon-writing for UU ministers is a more time-intensive practice than in many other preaching traditions, that it takes a bigger percentage of time for the new minister, the long-term minister, and the part-time minister.  That being most of us, what I'm saying is it takes a whole lot of time and there are a lot of variables that make it take even longer than some might think, and it's not a one-size-fits-all thing.

So then I've turned to what we can do about it.  In my last post I reviewed the ideas of theme preaching and preaching extemporaneously, both of which I recommend.  The review of Nate Walker's upcoming book Exorcising Preaching: Crafting Intellectually Honest Worship, which he kindly mentioned in the comments of the last post, says, "all of us are smarter than any one of us."  This is why theme-based preaching is so helpful.

So I think finding ways to make the sermon-writing process easier is good.  And I think those calling for extemporaneous preaching as a way to get out of our heads and into our hearts may be right about that.  But the truth is even with talk of "congregations and beyond" and even with branding and insight into new types of ministry, right now the Sunday morning worship is still the heart of what we church ministers do.  It's appropriate that we throw much of our lives into that work, and while it's always good to find ways to make that easier, another option is to take that work that we've poured our lives into and use it more. 

One thing that the internet age has done is upped the ante for good preaching.  No longer is it sufficient to be the best preacher in town.  An "excellent sermon" is now a higher standard as we can easily compare our sermon on any subject to dozens of colleagues' sermons with a simple internet search. At the same time, we're firmly rooted in an academic tradition which prizes original writing and academic honesty.  Ministers found guilty of plagiarism face strong consequences.  And I don't disagree with that -- plagiarism is not honest.  But think about this idea for a moment.  What if instead of always crafting our own sermons we sometimes shared, openly, what we felt was the best writing out there on the subject at hand -- even if it was not our own?  Why shouldn't it be okay for some of our worship services to be focused on the work we find to be most excellent in our movement?  Right now a good sermon gets shared maybe five times, for most of us, except for those who are invited regularly as guest speakers who might use a sermon more than that.  You might preach it once in your own church, twice doing pulpit exchanges, once at a General Assembly workshop if it wins an award, and then it might get picked up and read at a UU fellowship.  Given that most of us guest-preach or do pulpit exchanges only a few times a year, I'm guessing, most of our best work ends at our own church's doors.  And sometimes we just know, let's face it, that a sermon isn't working for us, and that our words are not coming together on a subject.  Maybe it should be more okay to say, "my colleague X speaks eloquently on this subject, and today I'm going to share their sermon, with a few changes that I'll mention where I'm personalizing it to our location." We should take those award-winning sermons and archive them (with an index of topics or some other search method in place), and make our own best work more broadly available. 

It's a radical, and uncomfortable, idea, I suspect.  But I think we need to think outside the box like this in this new era.

More radical than this idea is something that's already being proposed, and that's multi-site ministries.  Look for a new webpage up about this in the next couple of weeks.  If I think about it then, I'll come back and link it in, but it's still being developed right now (for now, here's the GA workshop).  But this is the work coming out of Scott Tayler's office at the UUA and with regional staff focused on it across the country (in MidAmerica, that would be Dori Davenport).  When congregations are yoked together in different ways, it may become more the practice that the best sermons we do will get heard in more locations -- or at least the best preachers will get heard in more locations, and hopefully have the time they need to devote to their craft.  You see, it's also true that not all of us are great at everything.  It's hard to admit it sometimes, but we all have strengths and weaknesses.  And for some of us, preaching is a weakness, yet we may have other real strengths for parish ministry.  But there aren't enough associate positions to go around if they're limited to the big churches.  That's why we need to bring congregations together so that we can all play more to our strengths and have someone else helping the church in our weakness areas. 

These are just two models of how we can reinvent the preaching role.  But we need to explore a lot more ideas like these as we respond to the changing religious landscape around us.  What are the ways in which our intellectual professorial model of the sermon is working for us, and what are the ways it is not?  

My interim friends have told me I have overstated the case on interim preaching, and that there are many who always write fresh material or whose rewrites are extensive enough that it's not much of a time-saver to have old material to use.  I believe they're right, and apologize for overstating the case.  I think it's still true, however, that the time when sermon-writing takes the most time is early in ministry in general and after a number of years in a long-term ministry.  The longer you go in any pulpit the more you know you've used your best stories and examples.  Moving to a new church lets you use those pieces again, even if written into new sermons.  Early in ministry, in general, you have a lot of fresh examples, but are unused to the rhythm of regular preaching, which makes it harder.

So, turning to the focus of my last parts of this series, I've talked about how preaching in our religious tradition takes up a significant portion of the week, and a higher percentage for part-time ministries.  It's appropriate that this big percentage of our working hours goes into the production that is Sunday morning, since this is the most visible part of ministry and Sunday morning worship is the heart of the church still.  Even so, it's a lot of work for a one-time production, and it leaves less time for all those other parts of ministry which may be things that would attract the non-churched "nones," like web presence, social justice work, community building, adult religious education, and other writing and other public speaking and public presence. 

There are two things we can do to change the equation.  One is spend less time on Sunday worship.  The other is use the worship service more.

For the first (and less radical) option, I highly recommend the workshop on "Preaching by Heart" ( http://www.preachingbyheart.org) by Rev. Stephen Shick  and Rev. Dr. M'ellen Kennedy.  I went through the workshop last winter.  I'm a manuscript preacher and love the written word.  I love writing.  But I tried preaching extemporaneously from that point forward on a regular basis (less often this fall, but still using it), and the results were great.  Even though I still felt like it kept me from finding the exact perfect words that I might have chosen on paper, my congregation greatly appreciated the extemporaneous preaching, something they had always liked about my predecessor, Rev. Susan Smith.  And it saved a lot of time.

Shick and Kennedy argue convincingly that people today are suffering from spiritual disconnection, and the direct experience of connection more present in extemporaneous preaching is what they're longing for more than for the perfectly crafted theological argument.

Another way to change the equation by spending less time in worship preparation is through theme preaching, which is a movement that is sweeping our country.  The secret to this isn't that we're preaching on themes, it's that we're doing it in groups and then the groups can share resources -- stories, images, examples, quotations.  Each preacher can then frame those in their own way, but it saves a lot of research time.  Essentially we're getting that lectionary benefit that Christian ministers have by working with each other and sharing themes.

There are a number of theme-based groups, I think, across our movement.  But the two main ones I'm aware of are the "Soul Matters" group ( http://www.soulmatterssharingcircle.com) led by Scott Tayler (Congregational Life Director at the UUA) and the themes published by All Souls, Tulsa ( http://themebasedministry.org). 

I would guess that each of these tactics can decrease worship preparation anywhere from 25-50%.  For me, preaching extemporaneously probably saves me 5 hours of actual writing time, but all the other preparation time is the same, research particularly doesn't go away.  Soul Matters themes, on the other hand, changed things in the opposite way -- research is decreased by maybe as much as half, but the writing time is the same.  Since trying themes I've used less extemporaneous preaching, so I can't speak to how the two might work together, but it's conceivable that together they could decrease worship preparation time very significantly by decreasing both the writing and the research. 

Next and final: worship and the changing church -- using the worship service MORE.

I've talked about why UU sermon writing takes more time, why UU ministers don't preach every Sunday, and why the dynamics are tougher for part-time ministers.  Next I wanted to talk about some models for making this situation more workable, particularly in light of the changing dynamics of church life.  But before I do that, I want to talk about one more thing that really belongs in Part 1 or 2, which is for whom does sermon-writing take the most work?

My suspicion is that there are two categories of ministers who need the most time for sermon-writing.  The first is ministers who are new to the ministry.  These ministers don't have a large number of old sermons to draw from, although they have a handful from seminary and internship.  Their advantage is that their seminary learnings are fresh, and that they've had more recent experiences of being regular worshippers at other ministers' worship services, but they have a disadvantage of less experience in the work of writing sermons week after week without pause.

The second category of ministers who take more time for sermon-writing are those who have been in their current pulpits for several years.  Any bank of sermons they had coming into that pulpit has been used up, and they have to cover the same holidays for years running and bring new approaches each year. 

These two categories of ministers will need the most time for sermon-writing.  Those who will need the least time are those coming to a new pulpit from an old one, who have built up a bank of sermons from which to draw.  While every preacher will need new material to respond to events in the world and in the individual church, and most sermons will need a rewrite for a new context, these ministers are still at an advantage having large blocks of sermons that they can use from week to week.

This is particularly a useful feature in interim ministry, of course, because that ministry has all the regular work of ministry plus particular goals of the interim ministry period to achieve.  Having blocks of sermon-writing time freed up for the other work is important.  The down-side of this is that if the congregation gets used to the level of activity of an interim minister using old worship materials, then they may expect that same level out of their newly settled minister, as well.

Up next: changing models for the changing church

In the last couple of posts, I've outlined why it is that the sermon-writing process is different for UU ministers and why it is that we are not in the pulpit every Sunday.  And, of course, this has ramifications.  And the impact of this is different for bi-vocational (part-time) ministers.  It's important to look at this, since bi-vocational ministry is getting a lot of interest these days because of the increasing struggle of churches to afford full-time ministry, particularly in the changing religious landscape with fewer people in younger generations interested in traditional church.  The bi-vocational trend may need to look different in our UU churches than it does in other denominations.

Generally in our movement, it seems that half-time ministers preach twice a month for ten months of the year, or a total of 20 sermons.  They don't really get extra Sundays off for denominational leave; those are just scheduled into the half time that they're not working -- even though, of course, denominational work and continuing education is, indeed work.  Note that two half-time ministries would equal more than one full-time ministry -- a minister with two half-time ministries would have no off Sundays, and no Sundays free for continuing education, chapter meetings, and General and District/Regional Assemblies, unless that half-time minister was preaching at two churches on the same weeks at different times.

Now think about what percentage of a minister's time is devoted to preparing for and leading worship.  With a full-time minister, it might be as much as 20 hours a week on those weeks the minister is preaching, or 60 hours in a four-Sunday month.  If that minister is working, conservatively, 50 hours a week for those 4 weeks of the month (pretend this month is February that we're talking about), then that's 60/200 hours, or 30% of their time devoted to worship.

With a half-time minister, suppose that minister is working, again conservatively, 25 hours a week for four weeks of the month, and preaching twice using 40 hours devoted to worship preparation.  That's 40/100 or 40% of their time.  So the bi-vocational minister will need a greater percentage of their time for worship preparation. 

The problem is, what do you decrease and do less than half of?  Not pastoral care.  Trust me, you can't just refuse to answer every-other pastoral need.  You're doing 100% of that, not the 50% that half-time ministry would suggest.  So that's going to take a double percentage.  Now you need to cut something else even more.  Perhaps you only respond to half of the social justice issues in your community?  The major area to cut is committee work and administration, but administration is a hidden work of the minister to begin with, that congregations don't think you're spending much of your time on.

Basically, as every half-time minister knows, there's no such thing as half-time ministry. 

This becomes even more complicated for 3/4-time ministries, particularly when increasing from half-time ministries.  A church increasing from half time with 20 Sundays wants naturally to move to 30 Sundays for 3/4 time, which is virtually full-time ministry from a preaching standpoint.  With preaching and worship being a large percentage of the job. 

If, again, you start with assuming a 50-hour week, 3/4 time of a 4-week month would be 150 hours.  Three sermons at 20 hours each would be 60/150, or 40% again.   It's a slightly better struggle than half-time ministry, because you're still doing 100% of pastoral care and 100% of everything else that you can't really do less at, but now you're getting paid for 75% of it.  So it's closer to workable.  But the big problem is when you try to go to full-time ministry without any substantial increase in the number of Sundays, so what the congregation is getting for paying you 25% more is basically just the good feeling of knowing they're paying you fairly for the work you've already been doing, but they aren't going to see much more result for it.  I suspect, as a result, sadly, the 3/4-to-full jump is the hardest to make.

Ultimately, I want to say that bi-vocational ministry is harder in our tradition because the worship preparation time is harder in our tradition, and it's the most visible and desired part of ministry, and part-time ministers really are seldom given the amount of time they need to devote to it, without just working more and more hours for part-time pay.  This is one reason why you find ministers less willing, in our tradition, to consider part-time ministry. 

In my last post, I talked about one major reason why UU ministers usually don't preach every Sunday of the year, and why our tradition is different from Christian churches about this.  In addition, there are the following reasons:

First, and most importantly, we believe in the prophetic power of the laity.  We're not the only ones with something to say about our faith, about the big questions, about the future of the church, about social justice.  We have amazing lay people, and we believe in sharing our free pulpit with them.  This is a major difference from traditions which believe the ordained have a more direct connection with God, and a difference from traditions that don't let lay people preach without license.  While we often give ministers a quality control responsibility for how their pulpit is shared, we fundamentally believe in the "prophethood of all believers."  Our lay people are amazing, and we want to hear them.

Secondly, we have an increasing understanding that a healthy church is helped by a healthy minister, and that our ministers have high-stress jobs where they are always on call, and have little time to spend with family and friends who work or go to school in a regular work week.  We want ministers to have friends and to have family, and to get some time to spend with them.  That means they should limit their working evenings and have some Sundays off. 

So how often do we preach?  That varies tremendously.  But what I often hear is that the average UU minister (full-time) gets one Sunday off per month (for 10 months), plus 4 weeks of vacation and 4 weeks of study leave.  And then often added to this is up to 4 weeks of denomination leave for things like General Assembly, District/Regional Assembly, UUMA Institute and Chapter meetings, other continuing education, and study groups.  Some of these may not actually encompass a Sunday, but may take up enough of the week to make it difficult to prepare a sermon for Sunday.  So my math would say that full-time ministry would look like 52 Sundays a year minus 10 off minus 4 vacation minus 4 study leave minus up to 4 denominational leave, and the result would be 30-34 Sundays per year leading or participating in the worship life of the church. 

Next up:  Implications for bi-vocational ministry and implications for the changing church.

With all the discussion in recent months about bivocational ministry, it's worth discussion what implications it has for that central role of the minister: the preacher.

My assertion is that Unitarian Universalist preaching for our ministers is a very different thing from preaching in Christian traditions, and from what lay people experience when they preach.  And the reasons that this is different are also some of the reasons why many of our full-time ministers don't preach every Sunday.  Here are some of those reasons:

First, in many Christian traditions, there's an assumption that all your sermons are going to in some way tie back to that specific faith and its religious text, the Bible.  You've spent much of your seminary career studying that particular text and you know it well.  Your members are not surprised to hear the same stories coming up in worship again and again, and the same Biblical images.  You may have a lectionary that you use that tells you which passages to use for each week of the year.  You have online resources of sermon starters, stories, examples, and more, to go with that lectionary.  And you probably have a group of local or online colleagues who are doing that same lectionary that you can discuss the week's choices with.

Our lay people when they preach have something of a similar experience, in that they're often preaching on something that they're an expert on, or at least is their real passion.  And they may have months to prepare that one particular sermon.

Contrast both of these with the UU minister's experience.  While you've had four years of theological school, you're expected to be well-versed in not just our religious tradition of UUism, and not just that tradition plus Christianity, but that tradition, Christianity, and all the world's religions.  But then these world religions and theology while they may inform your preaching, will likely not comprise all of your topics.  It is a common experience for the UU preacher to tackle a number of new sermon topics each year, each of which might require extensive new reading in an area completely new to the preacher, and which may be a topic never used again. 

This is the number one reason I think our preaching takes a larger percentage of our time, and also why we don't preach every Sunday even while full-time. 

The amount of time it takes a minister will vary, but I've often heard colleagues saying it takes them two full days of sermon-writing, although most of our letters of agreement give us one sermon-writing day.  20 hours is a number I've heard multiple times, which would equal about half of a regular worker's full-time week.  That 20 hours may include research, meeting with musicians and worship associates, writing, and more.  It seems like a lot of time, but as central as Sunday morning still is to our tradition, and with our expectation of scholarly and original work, it's not surprising that we put so much emphasis on it.

Coming up next:
-- Other reasons UU ministers get some Sundays off
-- Implications for bivocational ministry
-- The changing church and implications for worship

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 only way (except for CLF) to be a congregation. The possibilities of what that can look like are endless.  And social media is evolving so quickly that whatever one creates right now has to be dynamic and flexible.  This week, for example, I got on Google+ for the first time.  Will it make other social networks obsolete?  Will it be a big failure?  Only time will tell. 

What I can do, right now, is dependent upon what will be supported by my congregation and has the most ability to be attractive to newcomers, as well.  We don't have a critical mass on Twitter or MySpace, and responding to blog posts is sporadic but increasing.  Facebook conversation, however, is plentiful.  So what is possible is putting out, primarily through blog and Facebook, a conversation starter leading into the worship service that helps shape and inform it, and after the worship service putting out some summary that continues the conversation.  This could be tied into a way to also have this conversation in a physical space before and after, for those wanting the face-to-face connection.  We have no way to record audio or video digitally at the church--when we do, it's with borrowed equipment--so that remains in the future dreams list.  The degree to which social media shapes the worship, then, is the degree to which people participate in these types of forums.

What I think is that for a time, this is going to look like not much happening.  But eventually, it has the power to shape and transform worship.  What it amounts to now is just an opening up and demystifying of the process--less of me going into the office and shutting the door and emerging with a worship service like Athena coming fully-formed out of Zeus' head, and more like writing with a bunch of people chatting around me in a coffee shop and sometimes stopping by the table.  Can I write that way?  Time will tell.  I've gotten lots of practice by having a child popping in constantly -- about ten times while writing this blog post alone.  Having constructive adults popping into the conversation should be a welcome change.

Phil Lund suggested we turn the sermon inside-out.  I'm not doing that yet, but the first step to turning something inside-out is opening it up and showing the center.  That's where I propose starting for now.

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 right now that's beyond me.

2.  Level of feedback/discussion -- right now, when I do post a sermon on my blog, or just on blog posts in general, I'm getting one or two comments, at most, and often times none, from members of my congregation.  I think that some would be interested in the types of discussions Harper suggests, but it'd be hit or miss on participation.  In a small church there just might not be the critical mass to have this kind of discussion going.

3.  Receptivity -- My cell phone has no bars at my church.  Now, I'm on the comparatively lousy Sprint network, and I know some church members have better coverage at my church, but not all of them.  So Twittering during the service is narrowed down from just the people with phones that can tweet to people with phones that can tweet who aren't on roaming.

3.  Accessibility -- I'm guessing about 75% of my church is on e-mail and Facebook, and another 10% are on e-mail but no other social media, but the other 15% (mostly seniors) are not online at all.  (All numbers pure guesses, although I could go person-by-person and get real stats later.)  If the entire nature of a sermon is changed such that it doesn't feel complete without online participation, what does that mean for the 15%?

This brings me to the expectations.  Both Lund & Wells talk about the changing expectations for a sermon.  Wells talks about thinking that if he were to give a 20-minute sermon that people would be fact-checking his data on their smart phones.  I regularly give 15-20 minute sermons (I think my average is more like 15 minutes, really), and have yet to have someone whipping out the phone and telling me my information was wrong.  Sure, I do occasionally get a fact wrong.  But that culture hasn't pervaded the sanctuary yet.  The assumption of both Lund and Wells is that people are wanting something different out of their sermon than the model we've been using for hundreds of years.  I think that they're right for the percentage of the culture that is digital natives, but the question is when has an individual church reached that point?  My church, I'm feeling, is not there yet.  People generally seem to like the longer sermons (to a point), and when the sermons are shorter and there are more other elements in the service, I get more complaints.  So my reality is not matching with what the new media guys are suggesting. Of course, and here's the rub: maybe the people who want something different are not coming, and our adherence to old forms is limiting growth.  Is it?  Quite possibly.

And so, with those limitations & expectations  in mind, next I will address what I think the evolving model could looks like, and what I think is currently possible in a small, low-tech church.

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 ripping good sermon may once have been considered a relatively inexpensive way to be entertained on a Sunday morning, but nowadays if I want to listen to someone talk about something on Sunday (or any day), all I need to do is logon to the interwebs and visit TED.com…for free."

Scott Wells suggests a different model: "It might make sense for a minister to preach briefly — tightly, eloquently, perhaps around a single point — to the “live congregation” and have it spelled out later in another way. Not print necessarily, but perhaps a podcast or video, or forgoing these perhaps a live event more in common with an interview or discussion than fighting with hymns and prayers for attention."  Dan Harper spells out some concrete steps he's proposing in response: posting a reading on a sermon blog on Thursday; on Sunday before worship post the text of the sermon, along with links; give a hashtag for twitter conversation for during and after worship; stream the worship service live; continue conversation after on the blog.  Phil Lund shares these thoughts and suggests turning the sermon inside-out, a process he promises to describe soon in an upcoming post.

That's all by way of background.  I'll post my response soon, as well.

*amended 8:31pm 7/8/11 to reflect Harper's title correctly.  Sorry!