Being Presbyterian

Wow. Remember when MySpace was the dominant social network? Seems like a long time ago, as the past three years have seen Facebook approach, catch, and blow past MySpace to become our preferred online hangout spot.

Now, new data released by Facebook and third party researchers show just how influential Facebook has become in our daily lives. Combined with several critical adjustments to how Facebook publishes “news” and intersects with other sites, the state of Facebook is mind-blowing. And important for business.

It's getting harder and harder to dismiss Facebook as the domain of young people. Indeed, according to Eric's post, a full 60% of Facebook users are over 25.

This weekend I returned home from another week of travel that took me to Atlanta and Nashville. My Atlanta trip was built around an invitation by Columbia Theological Seminary to participate in the Emergence NOW conference with Tony Jones, Phyllys Tickle and Phillip Clayton.

My week in Atlanta began with a visit to Central Presbyterian Church where I met with various configurations of the congregation: staff, session and youth. The youth group at Central and I go WAY back . . . all the way to General Assembly in San Jose where they attended as a group. We then ran into each other at the Inauguration and will see each other again in Minneapolis. What a thoughtful and faithful group of folks who just so happen to be young! Thank you!

It's that time of year again. All PCUSA congregations are supposed to turn in their statistical reports this week to Louisville.

Statistics perennially seem to make us feel bad about ourselves (membership losses!) or give us amo for feeling important (look how big my church is!) but – honestly – I have changed my mind about the usefulness of statistical reports in a positive direction.

We've been in the business of educating congregational leaders since 1974 . And over the years in some significant ways "the more things change, the more they remain the same."

Yet when you look at the educational programming offered by Alban here at the end of the first decade of the 21st century, even those who think they know us very well shouldn't be surprised to find themselves saying,

this just isn't your grandparents' Alban!

According to a recent study, most churches and non-profits are leveraging 3rd party systems for their online donation efforts coming in at 51%. 16% say they are using a whitelabel solution while a whopping 33% don’t use any at all.

Today, Pope Benedict XVI announced that priests and church leaders should be actively using digital tools, including the social web, to communicate with laypersons, particularly young people.

The occasion was the 44th annual World Communications Day, traditionally a time for the Vatican to project an annual message from the church to its people and the rest of the world. This year's message stood in sharp contrast to the missive he delivered in 2009, when the Holy See stated that mass media – including online information sources – acted as a "poison" that numbed morality and sensitivity. "'It recounts, repeats and amplifies evil," he said, "making us accustomed to horrendous acts, desensitizing us and, in some ways, poisoning us." So, why the about-face?

I really, really love Twitter, here’s why:

LOUISVILLE — The 2009 Moderators’ Conference of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) focused on technology and how it can be used in churches and presbyteries.

The theme of the conference, held here from Nov. 20-22, was “Blessings and Burdens: Where Technology and Church Life Converge.”

The church often asks itself how to reach young adults. To better reach any group of people, it’s important to understand the culture in which they live. Participants in their 80s, 70s, 60s, 50s, 40s and 30s described the events that shaped their generations — wars, music, civil rights and more.

At 25 years of age, Rev. Michael (Mike) Rundle, the new minister at St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church in Hanover, is currently the youngest serving minister of the Presbyterian Church in Canada.

A native of Nova Scotia, Rundle began his ministry in Hanover in early September.

"It's God's calling for me to be here," he said, adding that after looking at the church's profile and visiting the community, "I realized this would be the best fit for me — a place where I could use the gifts God has given to me."

Those gifts, he said, include reaching out to others, visiting and "being able to discern others' gifts, helping them to use their gifts for God's mission and purpose in this church and in the community."

Our Presbytery is no longer sending snail mail.

No more meeting packets through the USPS. No more minutes. No more directories. Okay, the most recent Presbytery Packet came through snail mail. But no more!

When we don’t communicate effectively prior to an outreach or other church event and we don’t get the volunteers we need to make it really successful, it’s easy to focus on how the communication short-comings make the work much harder for the staff and the event not as effective as it could be for guests.

That church bulletin (or worship guide or whatever you choose to call it) is for some people the very first piece of Christian literature they see. It is certainly the very first information a visitor reads about your church.

In our secularized society today many people grow up without reading the Bible or any kind of Christian material. At the same time, everyone has a spiritual vacuum inside and they will come to your church looking for a way to have it filled. When they come in they will read anything you put into their hands. You give them the bulletin.

For no other reason than to celebrate the one remaining treasure on the corner of Wellington and Fifth Streets, we all need to celebrate the 175th anniversary (the congregation was formally organized in 1835) of First Presbyterian Church (Oct. 3 to 4).

The cornerstone for this wonderful example of Richardsonian Romanesque architecture was put into place in May of 1892 and a wonderful picture survives of that event that managed, in one simple photographic image, to capture a time, a place and an age.

One of the concepts that I have been studying is the "reorganization" of denominations. As I have commented before, this is more than just the divisions and schisms that probably first come to mind, but also a couple merger-related reorganizations that formed whole new denominations as well as reorganizations that merged multiple branches together. I find it instructive that the "family trees" for American Presbyterianism and Scottish Presbyterianism are equally convoluted and the Presbyterian branch of the United Church of Canada is almost as full. (And the Canada chart does not even include the continuing Presbyterian Church in Canada.)

One of the bloggers in our web ring has done a series of posts about the value of social media in the development of faith communities:

Using Social Media to Build Community, Part I
Using Social Medial to Build Local Community, Part II
If Jesus Were a Dog, Would He Tweet, Part III

Xan does an excellent job helping understand the value of some so seemingly impersonal as social media as a tool for developing the most personal kind of community. What she wrote really makes me think in a different way about the kinds of relationships that God asks us to participate in and how those relationships work in practical terms.

Many pastors still think technologies haven't caught on or that investing in social media isn't worth their church's time. Next time you hear that from someone, perhaps you could share a few of these statistics with them:

The purpose is not to get new converts, or to find more kids to go to our church (although, new kids are always welcome). We are doing this to be good neighbours, to give to the community.