Category Archive

One of the reasons I’d like to see more ministers blogging is that it can help demystify what ministry is all about. Some of the best minister/bloggers out there seek to make transparent the processes behind much of what they do: from planning the liturgical year to writing their weekly sermons. And in the spirit of true blogging, they even actively solicit feedback on what they’re up to. So…I thought I’d take a moment to share a sermon project that I’m currently working on. You see, since I don’t preach in the same place every Sunday, I have the luxury of writing only one or two sermons a year. And with two preaching gigs coming up right after the new year (January 6 in Saint Cloud, Minnesota, and January 13 in Northfield, Minnesota), I figured that I’d better get working on a new sermon.

I’ve already come up with a title and a blurb (something congregations always ask for, sometime several months in advance, other times the week before my visit). I’m calling it “Starting Small,” and the blurb goes something like this:

Sometimes it seems UUs believe that the bigger the idea, the better. But when it comes to building the Beloved Community, starting small makes much more sense.

Of course, often times the title and the blurb end up having nothing at all to do with the actual sermon (which is why “Something about [fill in the blank]” is the best sermon title imaginable!), but in this case, I’ve got a pretty good idea of what I want to preach about, and it does include the notion of starting small rather than big. So here’s my line of thinking as of today.

Unitarian Universalists do, indeed, love big ideas. Our Universalist forebears had the audacity to believe–and unashamedly promote–the big idea that God was just too loving of a being to condemn anyone to eternal damnation. In fact, Universalism has often been described as “the biggest word in the English language.” And even when humanist Unitarian Universalists remove God from the equation, our ideas remain just as grand, if not grander. Consider this vision of the future from Humanist Manifesto II (which was signed by such notable UUs a Khoren Arisian and William Schulz):

The next century can be and should be the humanistic century….We have virtually conquered the planet, explored the moon, overcome the natural limits of travel and communication; we stand at the dawn of a new age, ready to move farther into space and perhaps inhabit other planets. Using technology wisely, we can control our environment, conquer poverty, markedly reduce disease, extend our life-span, significantly modify our behavior, alter the course of human evolution and cultural development, unlock vast new powers, and provide humankind with unparalleled opportunity for achieving an abundant and meaningful life.

Phew! Why not throw in world peace while you’re at it. Which is, of course, exactly what we did in our relatively down-to-earth Principles and Purposes, where we couldn’t help but include such grandiose concepts as “The goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all.” Heck, even Prairie Star’s mission statement gets into the game when it proclaims that “The purpose of the Prairie Star District is to work to achieve…a world which lives by UU principles.”

But there’s a downside to these big ideas. If we stare too long into the bright and shiny future they present, we can lose our ability to see the less spectacular (but no less important) opportunities to change the world that are right in front of us.

(Okay, so that’s where I am at the moment. More on this sermon as it develops!)

A quick report on last weekend’s workshop by Sally Patton, author of Welcoming Children with Special Needs: A Guidebook for Faith Communities. The turnout was relatively small, but the dozen people who gathered last Saturday at First Unitarian Society in Minneapolis to hear Sally’s presentation were rewarded with a wealth of information on how to make our congregations more welcoming to everyone. If you haven’t read Sally’s book, do. And if you haven’t had a chance to attend one of her workshops, keep an eye out for one and try to attend–you won’t be sorry. I was especially impressed with Sally’s tips for making religious education less like school. Things like: mix age groups; provide more experiential activities; and engage children in storytelling instead of having them read out loud. I’m really, really in agreement with Sally’s number one point in this regard–quit using terms like “Sunday school” and “religious education.” Children and youth are in school five days a week, why the heck should coming to church be more of the same. I wrote a sermon based on the really awful promotion the UUA came out with in the ’90s that featured a girl with her arm around a little boy saying, “It’s like regular school—except nobody flunks.” If that’s all we have to offer children and youth for faith development, then we’re really letting everyone down, not just kids with special needs.

(By the way, I’ve got four extra copies of Sally’s book in the district office, and I’d be happy to send them off to congregations in Prairie Star, so if your PSD congregation didn’t have anyone at the workshop, and if you don’t have a copy of Welcoming Children with Special Needs in your Lifespan Faith Development library, e-mail me at psdlund@earthlink.net and I’ll send a copy to the first four readers who respond.)

I was going to post on the outcomes for the fourth and final strand of the new Lifespan Faith Development curriculum series today, but I left my handout at the office and Mondays are a work-at-home day. So instead I wanted to follow up on something I blogged about a couple of months ago–the role logos play in projecting an image of your congregation to the wider community. What brought this to mind was an article in today’s New York Times called “Blackwater Softens Its Logo From Macho to Corporate,” which is all about how “the company’s roughneck logo — a bear’s paw print in a red crosshairs, under lettering that looks to have been ripped from a fifth of Jim Beam — has undergone a publicity-conscious, corporate scrubbing.”

The reason this caught my eye is because Blackwater has felt the need to soften it’s image, but there’s at least one church planter (blogging pastor Ben Arment) who feels that congregations should consider using more masculine logos in order to attract more men (and he claims that it may actually be working). Now I don’t know if UU congregations need logos with a “beefy look” in order to attract more men, but it does make me wonder if logos that are too new age-y may be keeping men away.

Here are the logos in question: Blackwater’s new “softer” logo,

and Reston Community Church’s “beefy” logo,

BTW, Ben Arment’s evangelical church plant in Reston, Virginia is not the first congregation there to use the name “community church.” According to Arment, a Unitarian Universalist congregation in Reston went by used that name some years ago. “Imagine the confusion it must have caused for visitors stopping in,” Arment says, “expecting a church that actually had beliefs.”

I was in Lawrence, Kansas over the weekend to do a presentation at the Unitarian fellowship there. It was basically a day devoted to getting the congregation on board with Our Whole Lives, the UUA’s (and UCC’s) comprehensive sexuality education program. I delivered a reflection at their early “spiritual” service, then did a presentation on what OWL’s all about. In between the two services there was a groundbreaking ceremony for the fellowship’s new addition, and after the second service there was a potluck, featuring some pretty tasty barbecue pork. After the potluck I participated in a panel discussion about the congregation’s commitment to the OWL program, and it looks like we’ll be offering a training for combined Elementary OWL in Lawrence next year. It also looks like there may be an adult OWL class in the fellowship’s future. All in all, it was a fun weekend (you can see a photo set from Lawrence here.)

As part of the presentation, I did one of those mock church sign photos you can do online ( www.churchsigngenerator.com). It got a pretty big laugh when it showed up during the PowerPoint presentation. Can you tell me what’s wrong with this picture?

…and religious educators and lay leaders and parishioners. Jackie Huba at Church of the Customer Blog recently blogged about Capt. Denny Flanagan, a United Airlines “rogue pilot” who has developed quite a “word of mouth” following.

• He mingles with passengers in the gate area
• He makes gate announcements himself, updating passengers about weather conditions and sets realistic expectations for delays
• He uses his cellphone to call United operations to ask about connections for passengers
• He passes out information cards to passengers with fun facts about the plane; he signs two of them, whose owners will win a bottle of wine
• He snaps pictures of animals in the cargo hold to show owners their pets are safely on board
• He writes notes to first-class passengers and elite frequent fliers on the back of his business cards, addressing them by name and thanking them for their business
• He personally calls parents of unaccompanied children to give them updates
• He instructs flight attendants to pass out napkins asking passengers to write notes about experiences on United, good or bad
• He orders 200 McDonald’s hamburgers for passengers if his flight is delayed or diverted

The motivation behind Flanagan’s actions is simple,”‘I just treat everyone like it’s the first flight they’ve ever flown,’ the very smart captain told the WSJ in a highly valuable front-page story. ‘The customer deserves a good travel experience.’” Of course this immediately got me thinking of what a similarly motivated minister might do, things like:

• Mingle with parishioners in the foyer before the service
• Let folks know about exciting opportunities for faith development and spiritual growth from the pulpit
• Pass out information cards to visitors with fun facts about the congregation
• Personally call parents of new children in the religious education program
• Visit each of the religious education classes at least once a year

You know, little things like that. I know that some of our ministers already are doing these and similar sort of things. But I also know of ministers who are so busy on Sunday mornings with the work of the church that they don’t have a lot of time left over for personal touches like these. I heard once, however, that Sunday morning was for visitors. And if all the leaders in our congregations (lay and ordained, volunteer and professional) were to treat everyone as if this were the first time they visited a congregation (including the children), then we’d probably be generating more positive “word of mouth” about our congregations. Just a thought.

This probably isn’t what best-selling Beacon Press author Viktor Frankl had in mind when he coined the work “logotherapy,” but it’s something every congregation should consider. Church logos, according to “Top 20 Church Logos,” a recent post by Kent Shaffer at churchrelevance.com, should be “distinctive, memorable, timeless” as well as “aesthetically pleasing.” Most importantly, they should “communicate the quality” of the church’s “brand.” I think this is one area where UU congregations are woefully behind. Most congregations have no distinctive logo at all, and those that do aren’t necessarily fulfilling Shaffer’s criteria for good logo design. So take a look at Shaffer’s post and see what he’s talking about.

If you’re in the mood, you may want to check out www.logomaker.com. You can play around with their free logo designer and try your hand at creating something that’s distinctive, memorable, and timeless. It’s fun and easy and you never know, you may come up with something that could shake up your congregation’s public image. I just spent about five minutes playing around with the designer, and here’s what I came up with:

That’s just a screen shot of something I was playing around with. But if you got your ministry team to agree on the need to create a new logo, you could develop one with the help of some graphic designers in your congregation that could really say something about the mission of your congregation. If you use logomaker.com, you’ll have to purchase the logo from them. But there lots of free programs out there that do similar things.

I’ll be heading down to an emerging congregation in Okoboji, Iowa to preach this weekend, by the way. I may post my sermon notes tomorrow evening. We’ll see…