I’m a sucker for quick lists that really get to the point, like Sophie Keller’s recent “Five Ways to Live Your Life without Regrets” at Huffington Post.  While the five points may seem a little obvious (or even a little sappy), I think they do a good job of summing up what a life well lived is all about. They are:

1. Choose Love
2. Be here. Now!
3. Take Risks
4. Make a Difference
5. Be Patient

These are definitely traits that I would hope to find in a mature person of faith. Read more at Sophie Keller: How Happy Is: 5 Ways To Live Your Life Without Regrets.

A great post from Gretchen Rubin at Huffington Post on running a good meeting. I especially like tip number fourteen: No chairs! “Bob Sutton…points to a study that showed that people in meetings where everyone stood took 34% less time to make an assigned decision, with decisions that were just as good as those made by groups who were sitting down.” Of course, accommodations would have to be made for those who couldn’t stand for an entire meeting. But imagine a world where meetings took a third less time. The mind boggles.

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

IMG_0775.JPG, originally uploaded by psdlund.

Testing out my flickr account.

Wade and Jessica, originally uploaded by psdlund.

I was up late last night, driving around in some very snowy Saint Paul streets, to pick up Jessica York, Youth Programs Director for the Lifespan Faith Development Staff Group and OWL facilitator extraordinaire. Jessica is in town to co-facilitate a combined Elementary OWL training with Wade Zick from the United Church of Christ Minnesota conference. As you can see, I was able to get Jessica to her hotel safely, and she was able to make it to the Westminster Presbyterian Church in downtown Minneapolis for the training. We’re happy to have Jessica back in Prairie Star (this is the third training she’s co-facilitated for us).

We keep refining our “Ten Good Ideas” series of online workshops, and last night’s one on welcoming and integrating new members was one of the best yet! Justin Schroeder, Director of Congregational Development at Unity Church-Unitarian, gave an hour-long presentation to a virtual “full house” (we had 22 people registered for the workshop, which is our limit!). What’s especially exciting to me is that we recorded the workshop using a service available from FreeConference. I was able to download and edit the recording right away, so I’ve got it all ready to go as a slidecast from SlideShare. Here it is, along with Justin’s revised notes and the links we sent to the participants. Enjoy!

Pathway to Membership Presentation 2009
by Justin Schroeder

General Operating Framework:

• People come to church with a deep yearning for community, for religion, for depth – how they are received and engaged matters! (Church may be one of the few places people are truly seen.)
• Radical hospitality: The stranger offers us something valuable; the stranger holds a piece of the divine; it’s the church’s job to incarnate the radical, inclusive love that reaches out to all people.
• Who is the church for? The church exists in large part, for those who aren’t yet there, but dream of a transformative, justice seeking, liberal religious community.
• Mission and Vision: What is the church in the world to do and why? Share this with people!

OUR JOB, GIVEN THE ABOVE: Provide an adequate orientation, including a) spiritual orientation (help people understand our faith tradition and examine their own faith), b) physical orientation (getting oriented in the building, knowing where restrooms are, etc.), c) institutional orientation – helping people understand how to become members (the Pathway), articulating expectations of membership, inviting people to “grow their souls.”

How Unity does this: “Pathway to Membership – a series of three classes”

1. Notice/acknowledge guests
   Offer a guest registry, specific welcome and announcements for newcomers/guests, including basic orientation class, well trained Sunday ushers and greeters,  “Welcome Pack” for visitors cars. Have well stock brochure racks that highlight classes for newcomers.
2. Follow up with guests
   Followup emails, letters, or phone calls. “We noticed you worship with us! I’d love to hear your impressions? Any other questions?”
3. See the church through a guest’s eyes.
   Is the signage clear? How informative is the website? Is the newsletter accessible to newcomers? Be aware of insider language.
4. Crowd Control – Important for all groups, but especially for groups of newcomers/guests: Have a strong leader/facilitator in charge that can manage the group, make it “safe,” and give people the sense that this is a place “where someone is in charge.” Remember: 1 dominant or out of control person can RUIN a small group experience, and turn off visitors.
5. Ditch the “you can believe” anything you want mentality.
   You can’t believe anything you want. “An unexamined faith (an accidental faith) is not worth living.” We have a particular history and theology and we need to effectively invite guests/visitors to join our non-dogmatic, non-creedal faith.
   How? By offering a clear pathway to becoming a member…sign ups available every Sunday.
6. Welcome to Unity
   Goals: Basic overview of church – mission and vision – core aspects of the faith; invite people to share parts of their story. Offered 1 x month. (Share posters). Participants learn about church, see how they could be a part of it; leave with a packet of info. Low commitment class.
   Follow up email with a link to “A Liberal Faith” video, additional info, and times the next classes are offered.
7. Finding Yourself at Unity
   Goals: Deeper exploration of UU history, share history of Unity, tour of building, talk about expectations of membership (pledging, spiritual practice, sharing gifts, etc), covenant group experience, meet ministers. Sign up for “Three in three” – three service opportunities, one a month for three months. Helps people connect to various ministries in the church – and meet other people.
8. Committing to Unity
   Goals: Create a powerful “joining ritual.” Deeper exploration of the meaning of membership. Participants fill out gifts and talents form, pledge card, and write down “what it means to be joining the church at this point in their lives.” Ceremony at end of class as they sign the membership book (ministers join for ceremony.) Take their picture, new member bios, etc.
9. Follow up and invitations. Follow up with new members based on what you know about their gifts and talents, etc. Invite them to join a covenant group, or other small groups. Invite them to become involved in something that feeds their spirit.
10. Remind new members that they are the church, that the ministry of the church (including welcoming, etc.), and the mission and vision of the church, is theirs to live into and to own!

Here’s a link to UUA Resources mentioned during the workshop, including the UU Primer and the Voices of a Liberal Faith DVD.

UPDATE: Here’s a link to Unity’s membership class information. Unity pathways to membership.

You may have heard about the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Second Life, which is pretty cool. But you don’t have to have an online avatar in “an Internet-based virtual world” order to live a virtual life. Most of us are already living virtually whenever we used the internet for relatively simple tasks, like sending e-mail. I’m thinking about the use of e-mail right now because it’s one of the topics we’ll be bringing up during tonight’s online workshop on disaster preparations for UU congregations (and there’s still room for some more participants, so if you’re interested, get your virtual self online and register here). It’s number seven of our 10 good ideas: Beware the power of electronic communication to drive anxiety. And I think one of the best ways for us to avoid anxiety caused by electronic communication in our congregations is to have some ground rules about how we interact with one another via the internet. To that end, I’d like to share with you a great little resource from Patricia T. O’Conner and Stewart Kellerman, authors of You Send Me: Getting It Right When You Write Online. Take a look at this feature at O’Conner’s website Grammarphobia.com – Test Your E-Mail I.Q.. It’s a twenty question test she calls “Get a Virtual Life: Operating Instructions.” Regarding congregational best practices around e-mail, I find the following questions and answers most helpful:

• Are your facts right? It’s all right to be informal, but not with the facts. And check the math too. The Internet is full of misinformation, so be careful about what you pass on.
• Were you polite? Small slights are magnified in e-mail and other online writing, and offhand remarks can be taken the wrong way. Ask for something, don’t demand it. Use words like “please,” “thank you,” and “sorry.”
• Were you discreet? E-mail isn’t the place for sensitive personnel matters, criticism of third parties, off-color remarks, office romance, gossip, rumors, or tooting your own horn. And don’t share someone’s e-mail address without permission.
• Do all these people need copies? Don’t copy your every idea to everyone in your seminar or sales group or alumni association or address book. Everybody else’s mailbox is just as stuffed as yours.
• Should you sleep on it? Never e-mail in the heat of anger. You’ll regret it the next day. If there’s steam shooting out your ears, cool off before you click Send.
• Does it have to be an e-mail? E-mail is swell, but it’s not always appropriate. Maybe a letter or a phone call or a face-to-face meeting would be better.

Of course the place to start changing the online culture of a congregation is with the leadership. Perhaps O’Conner’s and Kellerman’s book should be required reading for all new staff and board members?

I was checking out the Religious Education section of the UUA’s website, and I noticed that they’ve put up a very nice slide presentation about the new(ish) Tapestry of Faith curriculum series. You can find it on this page: UUA: Tapestry of Faith, under the “What’s New” box on the right hand side. The last two items there are for either a PDF or PPT (PowerPoint) version of the presentation. I’m thinking that it might be neat to get someone from the Lifespan Faith Development Staff Group to do an online workshop based on the presentation. I’ll keep you posted.

That’s the not only reason I’m putting this post up, however. I’m trying a new service that will supposedly link my blog post to my Twitter account, and from there, to my Facebook account. We’ll see….

I’m really getting into preparing online workshops for the Mid-America District Staff Group of the UUA (that’s Prairie Star, Central Midwest, and Heartland). We’ve been offering them monthy since last August, and we’ve learned quite a bit about what we’re doing right…and wrong. One of our shortcomings has been the assumption that everyone taking the workshop is relatively comfortable with the online learning environment we’ve been using (Persony). We’ve realized that it would be helpful for newbies to have a brief tutorial available before they actually take the workshop. So I’ve prepare a less-than-five-minute lesson called “How to Take an Online Workshop.” I had a rough draft of it up on Slideshare for the last couple of weeks, and I’m happy to say that at one point the presentation was showcased on the ‘How-to & DIY’ page by their editorial team. So here’s the final version:

By the way, the next online workshop the Mid-America District Staff will be offering is Ten Good Ideas about Preparing for Disasters. It’s free and open to anyone. You can register for it here.

Two things. One, I’d like to call your attention to a very enlightening post in Scientific American (Parental rejection of gay teens worsens health: Scientific American Blog) about the how parental rejection of gay teens can adversely affect their health (”eight times more likely to have attempted suicide than those whose families accepted them…. nearly six times as likely to report depression, three times as likely to use drugs and three times as likely to have unprotected sex.”) It’s a sobering reminder of just how important it is for our congregations to offer Our Whole Lives and provide a safe environment for youth who are dealing with questions about their sexual identity. Two, I’m trying out a new tool on WordPress that allows me to post a link to something interesting I’ve found on the web using a “Press This” bookmarklet on my Firefox tool bar. I like it better than some of the other options (using the “Quick Post” feature on my WordPress dashboard, or the “Daily Blog Posting” option on delicious). Now when I run across something that’s really worth sharing, I can both bookmark it on delicious and post a quick note about it here.