@JeffJarvis on Data (for Presbyterians?)

A Jeff Jarvis book inspired this blog into cyber-being, and since then I’ve read his blogs and books ardently. His most recent book, Geeks Bearing Gifts, advocates a complete re-think of journalism and publishing for the cloud-based, connected world. It’s a great read.

Here’s a snippet that clarifies what I’m after in my desire for an alternative to The Presbyterian Layman for Presbyterians seeking information and analysis about our denomination (hint: it’s all about the data):

Data is a critical new opportunity for news organizations. What journalists have to ask — as with the flow of news — is how they add value to data by helping to gather it (with effort, clout, tools, and the ability to convene a community), analyze it (by calling upon or hiring experts who bring context and questions or by writing algorithms), and present it (contributing, most importantly, context and explanation). . . .

Lots of readers heard my earlier post as a plea for a progressive counterweight to The Layman’s right wing commentary, but commentary is not the problem I want to solve. Data is. The Presbyterian Outlook and the Presbyterian News Service are both reputable and reliable sources of data and analysis on a church-wide, institutional scale, but lack the distribution of resources needed to gather, analyze, and present data distributed across presbyteries.

I want there to be an instrument for

gathering data about what’s happening across the PC(USA), in presbyteries, synods, new worshiping communities, seminaries, and (fill in the blank),
analyzing that data (how is what’s happening with dismissals in San Gabriel Presbytery different from what’s happening in Heartland Presbytery? What data binds together churches leaving the denomination?),
and rigorously presenting that data in a digital format with an obsessive respect for facts and sources.

And I want to call it “The Main Line: News And Analysis for Presbyterians.”

Would you read that?

The Hazards of Love

I know people who have done big, amazing things for others, the kind of thing that forces you to question why you don’t do something similar and even if you could–risky, sacrificial things for people badly in need who well-meaning friends advise are not likely to be grateful, are, in fact, potentially dangerous. I know people who have gone as far as the imagination will allow to show love and compassion and hospitality and who have been rewarded for their feat with injury of the kind their well-meaning friends warned of and worse.

“It was the right thing to do,” they say to you after. “But we’ll never do it again.”

And it strikes you for the first time how both of things can be true at the same time.

Curious Church

I wonder if curiosity isn’t the muscle churches, church bodies, and their leaders need to strengthen more than any other these days. Not conviction. Not Daring. Not Caution.

Curiosity.

Curious churches want to find out what’s going on in the lives of their worshipers and in the community where they live and work. Curiosity drives them to listen and take note first, interpret and strategize later. And then, of course, interpret and share.

Curious church bodies like presbyteries investigate issues affecting their region and challenges facing their leaders. As investigation, this work is ongoing. If its driven by curiosity, it’s energizing in itself, but it also creates energy for advocacy, service, and more learning.

Curious leaders try out new skills and new sources of inspiration (like this new podcast). They want to find out what’s happening in the culture as much as in the neighborhood as much as their friends’ schools and workplaces. All of this will issue in work, but the first work is to seek out and to scratch the surface.

What are you curious about?

Where Is The Alternative To The Presbyterian Layman?

I keep thinking that Presbyterians need an alternative to the Layman, an advocacy operation dressed in journalistic garb that can’t see fit to perform the most basic functions of journalistic due diligence. The Layman is misleading and (more to the point) useless for constructive conversation about disputed matters in the Presbyterian Church.

We need an alternative.

(The Presbyterian Outlook is, in every respect, a superior product to The Layman; it’s a bi-weekly print magazine with strong convictions about a balanced rotation of commentary. Yet its news reporting resources are deployed mostly in Louisville and at national events.)

Here are two examples of why we need an alternative to the Layman.

1) A decade ago my colleague and I had a spirited disagreement about the state of things in the PC(USA). She expressed her views on a personal blog, and I believe I added comments. Mere days later The Layman published something in news story form that reported that this pastor, my colleague, had said all of these things as if a reported had spoken with her; the piece quoted her at length and added incisive editorial comment in support of her statements.

I, of course, recognized my colleagues comments as direct quotations of her blog posts. So I called her. “Did you know you’re in The Layman?” I asked. She did not. She was gobsmacked. Nobody from the Layman contacted her before printing a “news” article full of quotes from her blog.

2) Then last Friday The Layman published this piece about the presbytery I belong to threatening to “Renege” (sic) on a dismissal agreement it had made with a church (it hadn’t). The story’s sole source is an email from a party to the dismissal proceedings sent the previous day to multiple parties (myself included), and it shows zero evidence of even the most basic fact checking. No phone calls. No emails. Nothing. It simply dresses up an aggrieved individual’s email as a news story.

We need an alternative. The future of the church could be well served by a digital, broadly-distributed instrument of news and analysis. The only alternative now is to ignore The Layman. After years of dumping their unsolicited print piece in the recycle bin, that alternative is well-practiced. I think we need something else.

I think there could be real value in a digital source for news and information pertaining to the PC(USA) that has a progressive editorial agenda but takes seriously the conventions of ethical journalism?

Who’s with me?

Monday Morning Quarterback

Stuff I learned on Sunday

We sang a hymn in worship yesterday with this verse:

Proudly rise our modern cities,
stately buildings, row on row;
yet their windows, blank, unfeeling,
stare on canyoned streets below,
where the lonely drift unnoticed
in the city’s ebb and flow,
lost to purpose and to meaning,
scarcely caring where they go.

I’ve sung this hymn at least half a dozen times, but I didn’t notice until yesterday how far off its depiction of modern city life is from my experience. “Blank, unfeeling?” “Lost to purpose and to meaning?” “Scarcely caring where they go?”

Is there anything to be gained for our witness to the gospel by characterizing our neighbors like this? I don’t think so.

I decided early in my adulthood that the happiness of people who aren’t Christians did not pose a threat to my Christian faith. The stock portrayal I was fed in the conservative evangelical church of my childhood was of non-believers who were depressed or depraved. If they were happy, it was surely because they were doing drugs of having premarital sex and would be duly punished in the fires of Hell.

Yet lots of my adolescent peers were neither churchgoers nor oversexed druggies (some were–both), and yet were nonetheless happy. Then my Aunt married a jolly little Irish-Catholic-turned-honest-to-God-Buddhist, and I knew the Miserable Heathen was a fiction for sure.

The vast majority of people I interact with lead lives full of purpose and meaning, and only a few of them claim any kind of religious faith. And I know a lot of miserable Christians. Neither the former’s happiness nor the latter’s misery affect my trust in God, as if faith has happiness as its object. It doesn’t.

I Want Seth Godin on My Presbytery’s Nominating Committee

Our presbytery’s Committee on Representation and Nominations has a hunch that the work we’re doing is not the work the presbytery needs us to be doing if it is to have a vital future.

The work we’re doing now: filling slots on committees with names we already know well–people who are already involved in leadership.

The work that needs done: inviting church members to exercise leadership in the presbytery in ways they feel called, connecting them to other leaders, and empowering and equipping them to succeed.

As we talked around the gulf between these two bodies of work, I had in mind an invitation Seth Godin put on his blog earlier in the day: a 2 day seminar with him with to “create a posture of forward motion, a platform you can use to elevate your work, your company and your team.”

That’s what a presbytery’s nominating work could be about, right? Forward motion for its church’s leaders? A platform for leaders to elevate their work, their church’s work, and the work they feel called to do with others in the presbytery?

What kind of work goes on in your presbytery that cultivates and builds up leadership? Conferences? Retreats? Small groups?

We’re kicking around the idea of a leadership development cohort like this.

Maybe Preparation Is Insurance

Maybe having a plan is insurance against having to use it.

Maybe if we study conscientiously for the exam, there will be a snow day and the exam will get postponed. Maybe if we solicit informed counsel the issue will go away on its own. Maybe if we clean the house from top to bottom the company will unexpectedly cancel.

Maybe.

God might wink at us, and we might be rewarded for diligent preparation by the challenge being taken away. Awesome if that’s true.

If it’s not, though, the worst thing to say is that we have a plan where we didn’t before. We know something we didn’t. We possess wisdom we lacked. And we live in a clean house.

We’ve learned, and we’re better.

R-A-C-E

I spent 90 minutes with a congregant yesterday plotting an adult education unit on race. We’re pretty sure what we don’t want.

We don’t want people to say, “Ugh. Are we still talking about this?”

We don’t want white self-flagellation (my congregant is African-American).

We don’t want abstract theorizing about problems “out there.”

Instead, we want candid conversation about who we are as a congregation that both acknowledges the barriers to racial diversity our worship and fellowship erect but that also is grounded in the reality of who, really, is likely to participate in a Presbyterian church in a community that is 3/4 white.

We want a space where stories are shared: stories of struggle, stories of endurance, stories of faithfulness.

We want to raise awareness about the discrepancy between the racial composition of our community and the ones to our south and east.

We want to be transformed by the gospel:

There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.

And we want all that in three 45 minute increments.

As thought bait, watch this Vox video on race and tell me what you think.

I Don’t Care What You Won’t Do

I came of age to a line-in-the-sand piety of resistance. Being a person of faith meant maintaining clear boundaries about the things one would and wouldn’t do, praying for the strength, and constructing mechanisms of accountability, to keep oneself unstained. In college this resistance had mostly to do with alcohol and making out, and it was accompanied by well-rehearsed rituals of guilt, absolution, and recommittment when–not if–one failed.

Faith is resistance.

I’m tying to resist different things now.

But I’m also more attuned to the element of faith that demands embrace, not resistance. It is a stilted faith that exhausts itself in line drawing and boundary building. There is a world of hurt and love and redemption humming beyond where we now are, and the life of faith requires following Jesus into that mess and saying “yes” at least as often as we say “no.”

Monday Morning Quarterback: Saturday Night Edition

Stuff I learned on ~~Sunday~~ Saturday

“We were expecting you.”

A smiling woman with an “Usher” name tag is beaming at me and handing me a Visitor Information card and one of her church’s pens. She is warm and welcoming and all the things you want a church usher to be, and she tells me they were expecting me, which kind of delights me and kind of makes me nervous.

I’m at this Saturday night church service at a new worshiping community with an Elder from my church and my family because the Pastor is a friend and colleague who I have recruited to speak at a national conference I’m working on and who I interviewed for a magazine column I’m writing. During that interview I mentioned I would be coming to worship. Clearly, she took note.

“We were expecting you” is a rich thing to tell a guest. More than that you are welcome, “We were expecting you” says that you are anticipated. It’s gratifying and humbling, comforting and intensifying. “We were expecting you” says that we’re happy you’re here and also that we have invested something in your being here. It’s a greeting fit for a participant, not a spectator.

Suddenly “We were expecting you” is what I want everyone at my church to hear. I have a friend visiting on Sunday morning, and so I describe him to the Usher beforehand and ask her to make him feel welcome. “Tell him we were expecting him.”