our conference office sent this announcement out just last evening via our listserv.

i am pretty close to these situations, so i was at first confused.. why give an announcement that you are going to announce seven days (at least) from now? especially when holding off information got in the way of the original process that has led us all the way to here.

for those that do not remember, i became the face and an undermining voice (in some opinions) with my position at conference youth coordinator and this blog here, not to mention all the various social networks that i am a part of or created, when our conference office terminated both our youth & children's positions at the conference level for a joint position. part of that firestorm came because communication was not in a timely manner, ie. now. people were not getting information from the office so they talked to whomever they could, and sometimes just created stuff. i have taken some responsibility for some of the information that went out, partly because i wasn't being called or communicated with either. i did, as i do, tried to convey as much information without telling people what to think. i never told someone what to write or call and say,.. anyways, thats old news i care not to relive. i have pissed off some people, made some new fans, become fan of many people, and all in the name of holding together our conference youth ministries. since we went from a joint ministry person to a full-time person (which is actually an improvement from where we were) i consider our groundswell of people to have some element of success. but as with anything like this, no one wins happily.

back to my initial confusion.

what is in this news alert is true. i can speak for the youth portion of this process. myself, opal, loyd, brad (the new incoming youth coordinator back during all this) and an assortment of youth, young adults, and youth leaders got together a number of times to talk about ministries in the conference area. we dreamed up some big stuff and challenged each other. we then produced a document based on that which contained some plans, a description of sorts, and some goals to hit for an incoming person. no one asked me to be on the personnel group to go over candidates, knowing my track record with some of the people, i didn't expect to be invited either. i know who we hired and i am very content with that decision. i have also known who we hired for the children's position, which i am indifferent about that. from the children people i've communicated with, they know too.

what our conference leadership needs to learn from this (and i know you read this), is that appropriate communication is needed. now 'appropriate' is a perception term, so let me share that the perception is 'now' or like yesterday. no, its not fair all the time, but with people finding out that there was a plane crash or terrorist attack via hyper news outlets as twitter acts frequently, people are only going to be more expectant of information they care about quickly. going days weeks, months, without saying anything is giving your
audience license to create and say whatever they need to fill their
information gaps. you allow people like me to speak & give words to others opinions, which may or may not be a good thing. bad communication undermines peoples confidence in you and your mission.

a great case in point in the obama campaign using various tools to keep people, in the know. their only slip up seemed to be when the txt updates for vp candidate were lost in a huge database of people that the news got to burst the story before millions got their message. he's keeping to that communication commitment by doing weekly 'fireside' chats via youtube talking about what/why of some of his decisions. wonder if he will share why he's chosen rick warren?

this process has gone on for over 9 months now, its time to say something. name people and lets move on.