I have been pondering this idea of “start with why” for my own ministries then it had me wondering. Does our church even know the ‘why’ of its existence? Sure there are some mission statements, but those are things that the church says it wants to be. Not really why it is there. Maybe I am thinking to hard on this, but companies who live to do their why have captured mass appeal. Maybe the church doesn’t need mass appeal.. The leaders of my faith expression sure seem to want ‘vital’ mass appeal.
What is Your Best / Worst Youth Sports Story? {GIVEAWAY}
I have been given a copy of “The Sacred Acre” to review for a site like this and Amazon, etc. It is not the usual reads that I dive into but this one is different. If you are not familiar with the Ed Thomas story and legacy it is one of great triumphs and depths. ESPN E60 did a feature on him a few times.
I have been promised two free copies to our friends, so I thought it would be fun to share some of our ‘war’ stories as youth workers going to our teenagers sporting events. Throw in your funniest, worst, most inspiring, biggest headache story and we will decide amongst those who share. Depending on how fast I finish my copy I might throw mine into the mix for a third person (I know that just has you jumping for joy).
P90X your Church Email!
I happen to be subscribed to a number of church email newsletters. Some because I helped set them up and have not removed myself from the list, some because in a weak moment I wanted to know how they communicated. Many times I am feeling pretty bored with the emails. They are always doing the same things and in the same way. I know what is in there before I even open up the email.
P90X is a popular workout program that you would have to be under a rock not to have heard of it. If you own a tv you must not have it turned on ever to not have seen one of their commercials. One of their cool marketing tricks or actual solid training technique (you decide there) is their design of training called “muscle confusion.” The idea is simple, do different stuff so that your muscles never get used to the work out and will burn more calories because they are never conditioned to do a certain set of exercises.
Well, the brain is a muscle, although different than your buttocks it is a muscle and gets trained. So I had this idea. What if churches did their email communications with the p90x model of muscle confusion in mind. If you send an email each week have a different type of presenting a message, different layout, and different writers. Once you set up a few layouts and themes you can repeat using them in some random pattern. So far, it has been a concept that apparently is foreign to the people I have suggested it to because it does not compute or seems like too much work.
Funny enough, the MarketingProfs folks just put out an article with a similar thought process in mind “Variety is the Spice of Life.”
Lack of variety in email marketing is a common dilemma for marketers. Businesses newer to email marketing or with fewer resources tend to gravitate first and only to promotional messaging, but there is plenty more you can and should communicate to your list.
They go on to list 1. email newsletter 2. personal & holiday greetings 3. follow ups 4. educational entertainment as emails to spice things up instead of a constant barrage of promotional emails.
So what could mixing it up p90x style look like for a church email program?
- Email Newsletter: You want to push all your information at people in the hopes that they are now informed so go ahead, get that over with.
- Ministry Story: Find some good ministry stories to share. A paragraph or two, not more than 500 words though. If you can’t find 500 words to share some cool story about the ministry happening in your church then you have worse problems than an email communication issue. You can switch it up from choir, to youth ministry, to missions, then to worship. Again if your ministry leaders cannot come up with 500 words to share a story about their ministry then they have more problems to be dealt with than email. This practice though is helping the people of your church have stories to tell about the church family they are a part of. So when someone asks them, “what does your church do?” they will actually have some stories to answer with.
- Images Only Reflection: Put out an email that is just photos of the congregation. Sure you can link those images to something else. Please no cheesy clipart or stock photography. Really nice cameras are owned by at least a few people in your church. Charge them with photographing the work of their church as part of their mission. People love to see good photos. People love to see good photos of themselves and the intrigue that they might be featured in an email. Open rates will be huge!!
- Challenging Devotion or Message: Have a message, again less than 500 words that gives a glimpse of the Kingdom of God and gives some actionable response/challenge to people. A get out and do kind of thing.
- Other email types to throw out there. Community Prayer email: Not your prayer chain, but a prayer you want everyone to pray for the month. Poetry devotion: plug in a single email a poem written by a congregation member. What is Out There: so often church emails just share the church things, share blog posts, news articles, that give glimpse to what others are doing
There you go. Gavin’s p90x Email marketing method. Give it a go and see what happens. Tell me I’m full of crap. Tell me it has revolutionized the culture of your church. Let me know it is a whole lot more fun than just blasting out the newsletter or bulletin in another form. If it doesn’t work in 90 days I’ll give you a full refund of the money you spent on this advice.
Oh, and if you want to use an enhanced email program, I suggest you do, then go with MailChimp for your free option. There are other pay options such as Aweber or Emma I’d suggest, Emma if you want someone to hold your hand & help design.
Add Theater Class to Seminary Training
I was reading this not so exciting article titled “Why ‘Boring’ Preachers should be Fired” and it stirred some old thoughts in my warped brain.
Before I get into my warped brain let me disclaimer that I do think some preachers should be allowed a graceful exit. They have in many cases served God’s ministry well and are probably in need of walking away to heal and be fed instead of being held to a commitment where they have to feed while being barren themselves. By ‘preachers’ I am also batching together a preacher, priest, pastor not just a teaching pastor whose only responsibility is to preach.
I used to constantly rib one of my pastors I had served with about showing me his MBA. He knew where this was headed so he’d respond with a “keep looking” or “I know, and they still hired me.” Because my point who on earth would hire someone and put them in charge of leading a 1.8 million dollar entity that didn’t have some business experience. Seems like an illogical hire all the way around. But we do it all the time. Yes, committee systems are there for a checks and balances, but time and again our congregations give so much of the daily business power to the pastors, who rarely have formal business training.
Sorry, getting off that soap box.
Back to original box..
Back in the day one got away with giving a good sermon through the oratory methods shown to us in academia. John Wesley had his book of sermons and had specific instructions of, “if you can’t give a decent sermon just read this and it will work” (or something to that account). So the bar for ‘presenting’ a sermon that would engage and stimulate was not much different than a university lecture. It would teach and give the listener something to think about & learn. Today though we have a culture that is so conditioned to learning through entertainment. We also call new learning methods ‘active learning’ or ‘discovery based learning’ the list can go on. Our seminaries teach preaching and I know they give classes on teaching styles and preparations. However, do we need to encourage our seminaries to require theater work so that our preachers can shift where they can preach with a little flare? Maybe a semester of improv would do nicely..
Anyways, just a thought to help those ‘boring’ preachers.
the Fabulous Female Theologians of Twitter (some of)
No, this isn’t some calendar shoot idea, though admittedly that would be quite amusing. Yesterday Bill Reichart posted a Top 10 Theologians on Twitter and I shot back that there were no women theologians and that they all seemed to be the same stock white males that get thrown out everywhere. So Bill asked for me to add to the list. I am happy to because not that I am in any disagreement with the list (though some of the 10 are not close to my top theologians, but that’s just a flavor thing) my critique wasn’t done in a mean spirit. It is the trouble with making a list, someone gets left out.
So in the spirit of sharing, here are some Female Theologians of Twitter (not in any particular order)
Rachel Held Evans gets my first & easiest nod, mostly because we have actually hung out before. Watching her growing audience and the prophetic voice she is speaking from has been great to watch over the years. Seriously, if someone is going to take the bible seriously enough to sleep in a tent in the front yard when she is on her menstruation period has to get some props, or a honk as you drive by.
Maggi Dawn who has been a voice through the alt worship scene of the UK for over a decade plus is now moving to Yale University as their Dean of Chapel and Associate Professor of Theology which she did similar to at Cambridge for the decade prior. Also a published author as any good minister in the academic circles would be. She has also been a prolific blogger and speaker to add onto her list of good works.
Bishop Vashti McKenzie who is the first female ever elected to the highest office of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (A.M.E.) in its 200 year history and has served there since 2000. She’s pretty cool when it comes to social media podcasting, blogging, and putting up a 12k follower list on twitter (which is the largest for this listing, i think).
Diane Butler Bass first came onto my radar with her book the Practicing Congregation by Alban Press (a great read) and has been a favorite of mine since then. Probably her most prominent book has been Christianity for the rest of Us, which has actually sat in my to be read pile for some time. Promise Diane, I will get to it. &:~)
Tami Heim & Toni Birdsong I am grouping together because they are the duo behind Sticky Jesus. Met them at a TN Christian Chamber event a few months back and they are just delightful. I don’t believe they have the academic theology pedigree, but old friend Stan Grenz put its that everyone is a theologian and under that and considering their prolific capacity and passion to sharing Christ they get on my list & should be on yours.
Given, this list was actually a bit difficult to produce in that many prominent female theologians don’t do twitter, or started an account but are rather quiet on them. My criteria for this was rather simple in that they needed to be ‘active’ (totally subjective to according to me) and have around or over 1k followers. That cut into some of my list of people I like to read like a @lnwiner. Thought about adding in some folks like a @sandramccracken but she’s touring now and most of her tweets are about shows at the time of this posting, not quite a time of high theology for her now. Thought about some of the famous pastor wives, but ultimately discounted them because those seem to be ‘team’ influencers. One thing I thought was interesting was that there wasn’t any tribute twitter accounts to people like Julian of Norwich. Sadly, Teresa of Avila went quiet a few years ago.. Mother Teresa is somewhat alive in bots and tribute accounts.
Most though, I have this idea that Twitter isn’t the medium for the lady. Maybe it was the culturing of its early adopters but Twitter in many ways has a feel of self promotion mixed in with its sharing and conversation & I don’t think it is part of the female drive to get into puffing out the chest to show a “this is what I have to say” everyone.
All guy lists are not anything out of the norm. Andy Rowell put together an add on list a few years back and all his peeps were dudes, and he’s someone who is very open to the various people who take on leadership of the church. So maybe we need more ladies doing their theology thing on twitter, maybe not, someone has to be acting out their theology out in the real world and we are probably better off having the ladies do that while us fellas talk amongst ourselves about who is best.
So feel free to comment away and add more of the lovely ladies of twitter for this listing.. it really is just a start of a hopeful full recognition