Tripling Twitter presence in 60 days.

I have been watching my partner, Sue, develop her Twitter presence and I think that her experience would be useful for UU ministers, and others, who want to have a Twitter presence but don't know how to go about it.  

Her situation:  She is the CIO of a large Academic Medical Center.  She has several hundred people in her organization.  She also has a national presence among other people who do her kind of work.  In that way, she is like many ministers who have local congregants and colleagues across the country. 

She went from 150 Twitter presence to having 450 followers in about 60 days.  Here's how:

1.  She defined her Twitter presence in her profile; her profile lists her position AND her passion.  For her, her passion is connecting to young people entering her profession and starting their careers. Twitter is an excellent way to make contact with that group of people.

2.  She defined what she would be tweeting about: (1) What she is doing (2) what she is thinking/reading about and (3) What she thinks.  So she reports on meetings that she is having -- and why they are important. Example:  Met with local CIO's from all industries on recruiting young people to our area to start their career.  She retweets other people's observations and especially articles or resources that she finds interesting.  Example:  Here is a great article on social media use in health systems.   She occasionally tweets on her passion - general statements or specifics.  Example: Look to a new person to grow instead of always seeking experienced job applicant.  She also sends some more personal tweets, but this is not where she maintains her contacts with family and friends.

3.  She follows people who are interesting to her and she follows back almost everyone who follows her.  She uses the Discover option on Twitter to find new people to follow.  She changed her settings so that she did not have to approve a new follower.

4.  She tries to send three tweets a day (including retweets) and spend about 30 minutes per day reading tweets.  That has grown because she now spends less time reading her industry publications and more reading articles and resources recommended by others through Twitter.

To Sum Up: you can build a twitter presence:

1. Define "Who You Are" on Twitter  -- not just position, but passion.

2. Define "What you say" on Twitter -- what you do, what you read and what you think.

3. Look for people to follow, follow them and follow back followers.

4. Set a goal -- numbers of tweets and amount of time per day. 

Ministry Days 2013

Leaving today for Louisville for 2013 UUMA Ministry Days.  Our theme speaker this year is Lillian Daniels, the author of "When Spiritual But Not Religious Is Not Enough".  

If you have been following this blog, you would know that I am not sure I agree with the premise of her book.  Maybe "being spiritual" is enough for a person, while "being religious" is really good for religious institutions.

I will report back on what I think.

One Word for Today

It's the end of the church year in UULand.  Don't ask why our year ends in June, but it does. Something to do with the academic year, I am told.  That may have been the original reason, but I also think it is the stale hot and humid air that gathers in old New England churches during the summer.

The ministers are tired.  The religious professionals formerly known as RE Directors are very, very tired.  The musicians are tired.  Congregational leaders are tired.

The hardy go to GA for one last UUpalooza for the year, and then it's blessed withdrawal.  Reading, rest and relaxation.

Everybody thinks it's terrible, unwelcoming, unfriendly and unserious.

Yet, it persists.

The word of the day is "sustainability".

Is the way that we do Unitarian Universalism sustainable?  I don't just mean "sustainable" in the environmental sense, although that is part of it, but "sustainable" in terms of money, time and people power. I don't mean just for the religious professionals, but also for the volunteer lay folk.

I suspect the reason that we "end the year" in June, is that the way we do church is unsustainable.
 We couldn't keep up that pace 12 months a year.

My VUU buddy, Joanna Fontaine Crawford, asked "at the end of the year, have our congregants gotten anything out of it except being poorer and more tired?"

How can we simplify?  How can we focus on what is really important?  How can we match our ambitions to our the reach of our grasp?  How can we cut down on the administrative work?

The Intention and Perception

A while back, I proposed that congregations consider adopting the sentiment above to name for themselves their intention toward a generational transfer of leadership.

I meant it then, and I still believe it is crucial.

There is a lot of talk, though, about generations in church: the Boomers, GenX and the Millennials.

What is becoming clear to me, though, is that Generational analysis can turn into Generational Labeling.  It becomes part of the great identifying machine of culture: this all pervasive borg that decides that what is important about you is X (gender, race, age, body shape, sexual attractions and practices, looks, whatever) and that therefore, you are X.  

And like every form of socially determined identity, it has usually has a payoff of some type, along with a lot of dues to pay.

Baby Boomers were the second generation to be so labelled.  (The "teenagers" of the 50's were the first, but they were a smaller group and it was a negative label.)  But Baby Boomers were named and celebrated, because we were huge in number and had become a clearly identified market segment.  Boomers got social power by being "Boomers".  Generational Labeling is our thing, because it worked so well for us.

This has become clear to me from talking to both GenX and Millennial generations.  Some really hate the assumptions being made about them.

We do need to move the leadership of our churches to the next generations, because they are next, and because they are, ummm, younger. They live in the world that is coming.  (If the boomer generation stays active in leadership for as long as they are healthy, everything will start to look like the US Senate.)  But not because the next generations are any particular way: more spiritual, more activist, more this or that.

We need to check our thinking on this.  If we want to empower the next generation because they are "more spiritual" than we ought to just say that we should empower more spiritually oriented leaders.

A Closer Reading of "I Call that Mind Free"

Introduction

William Ellery Channing's sermonic prose poem defining, and honoring, the free mind is a prophetic call to all people to reach for freedom.  Possess yourself as the first step toward living a life of virtue, compassion and spiritual growth.

It is an overlooked classic, its wisdom hidden behind 19th century prose.  Yet, in its way, it speaks to all the internal and external forces that bend us toward passive acceptance of the status quo.

It was first in a sermon.  I have included the sermon text in italics.  The red letters are the portions that have been edited into a Responsive Reading in Singing the Living Tradition.  My commentary is indented.



William Ellery Channing, from “Spiritual Freedom” (1830)

It has pleased the All-wise Disposer to encompass us from our birth by difficulty and allurement, to place us in a world where wrong-doing is often gainful, and duty rough and perilous, where many vices oppose the dictates of the inward monitor, where the body presses as a weight upon the mind, and matter, by its perpetual agency on the senses, becomes a barrier between us and the spiritual world. We are in the midst of influences, which menace the intellect and heart; and to be free, is to withstand and conquer these.

Channing starts from a dualist and idealist framework, opposing the life of the spirit to the life of the body.  We now no longer make that opposition explicit.  But Channing was typical of the times; his Transcendentalist colleagues were there too. 

Remember that Channing wrote long before Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud.  Those later 19th century authors revealed that what we think is not the result of our conscious thinking processes.  

Just in Case....

there is anyone among my scores of readers who are not among the thousands of hers, this should go in your special scrapbook of good stuff...

Post-Humanist Religion

Andrew Sullivan, reporting on a 2007 interview with Barack Obama:

He was brought up in a nonreligious home and converted to Christianity as an adult. But—critically—he is not born-again. His faith—at once real and measured, hot and cool—lives at the center of the American religious experience. It is a modern, intellectual Christianity. “I didn’t have an epiphany,” he explained to me. “What I really did was to take a set of values and ideals that were first instilled in me from my mother, who was, as I have called her in my book, the last of the secular humanists—you know, belief in kindness and empathy and discipline, responsibility—those kinds of values. And I found in the Church a vessel or a repository for those values and a way to connect those values to a larger community and a belief in God and a belief in redemption and mercy and justice … I guess the point is, it continues to be both a spiritual, but also intellectual, journey for me, this issue of faith.”

For the post-humanist (and that includes everyone who has ever contemplated, even in passing, the fact that the Christian story cannot be factually true) "values and ideals" come first; they precede belief.

Not all "values and ideals" are the same. There are those that are liberal and liberating virtues and those that are conservative and promote submission to authority. But values and ideals come first.

And there are all through the human cultures, an endless variety stories, myths, art, music and poetry that teach and preserve the virtues of liberality.  For Barack Obama, the kind of Christianity that was proclaimed at Trinity UCC in Chicago was a vessel and a way to connect those values to a larger community.  That was particular to his time and place and mission in life.

I move to speculation now.  What I suspect that Trinity UCC appeared as the vessel for the Obama's because of the urgency and clarity with which it proclaimed the values and ideals they held.  It asked for a decision and a commitment and a change of heart.

Post-humanist religion does not turn on the story or the belief system.  It starts with values and virtues and succeeds because it clearly and urgently asks people to decide, and commit, to living them out.

Cosmovision

Clyde says in a comment on a previous post:

What I observe in your recent ponderings on theology and in your case study of Peter's short homily is a move away from a cosmovision. I read you as saying, the Christian way of doing theology based on "idea of god" and an "idea of the human condition" resulting in an "idea of salvation" by "an idea of a witnessing church" is impossible for UUs given our lack of consensus relative to God.
Can we not make even the basic statement witnessed by Carl Scovel that "the heart of the cosmos is good intent." That the creation in which we live and move and have our being is (created) good, and we are called to live in awareness that we children of that goodness?

Clyde, I am saying that the "Christian way of doing theology" is impossible, but for a different reason.  You think I am saying it because "UU's ... lack...consensus relative to God."

It's not just UU's.  The erosion of the Christian cosmovision as truthful is about complete.  And in the West here, there are three responses:  Disbelief, or Humanism;  Creative Reinterpretation or Liberal Christianity; and, a Fundamentalist Loyalty, Denial and Will to Believe.  And in addition, there are many directions that disbelieving former Christians have gone: Western Buddhism, Neo-Paganism, Yoga, New Age etc.

What you propose, quoting Carl Scovel, is a Creative Reinterpretation.  (Really, how far from an omnipotent and omniscient God is the assertion that somewhere at the heart of a cosmos is a good intent?  "God, He means well...")

I, personally, am firmly in that Creative Reinterpretionist, Liberal Christian, camp, in the small UUCF subdivision, in the minuscule groupiscule of Girardian/Kenotic Christians.

I don't think that Unitarian Universalists will ever reach consensus on an approach to the question of God.  That is because the broader culture cannot reach a consensus relative to God, and we embody the paradox of humanism and liberal reinterpretation.  Is Carl's statement really a statement of belief or disbelief?  You could read it either way.

The UU self-description of this paradoxical situation has been to describe ourselves as "theologically diverse", as a positive value, in and of itself.  For the most part, the world has seen us as fatally confused: unsure about the very basis of religion.  And our experience is that offering theologically diverse, welcoming religious community does not set the world on fire. For the most part, in our congregations, we do not explore that theological diversity, but speak of other, less divisive, things.

In short, we offer ourselves as the solution to general theological unsettledness in the world.  And in doing so, we plant a fatal seed of self-satisfaction in our collective soul.

My argument is also that the world does not need anyone to propose a consensus on the God of the Christian tradition.  Ever since Channing's "Unitarian Christianity", we have been proposing excellent formulations of Christian theology more in tune with the times to little effect.  So have Marcus Borg, John Shelby Spong, Karen Armstrong, Elaine Pagels, Diana Butler Bass, Marilyn Sewell.  You and I have shelves-full.

My argument:  Unitarian Universalists should stop preaching about ourselves, and stop preaching about our theological diversity.  We should instead preach about the virtues that all people need to develop for the world to be saved.  Instead of talking about the religion we want to be, we should be talking about the people we should be.  (And yes, I get the irony of my position here.)

Re-Imagining Unitarian Universalism: Another Case Study

In response to one of my earlier post, Rev. Peter Morales, the UUA President, sent me a copy of a sermon that he gave in 2012 to the Arlington, Virginia congregation.  I suspect that he gives versions of this sermon in many of the places that he speaks.

It's called Beyond Belief.  Here is the heart of it. 

True religion is about what we love, not about what we think.

True religion is about what you and I hold sacred. The practice of true religion is faithfulness to what we love.

The key religious questions you and I must answer are these: What do we love so much that we are moved to tears? What gives us unspeakable joy? What brings us peace beyond understanding? What do we love so much that it calls us to action? What do we care about so deeply that we willingly, joyfully, devote our lives to it? 

When we focus on what we truly love, we ask life’s essential questions. We ask questions like, “How shall I live?” When we ask the question together in community, it becomes, “How shall we live together? What shall we do together?” When we focus on what we truly love, we discover something wonderful: we discover that we love the same things. 

We realize that we need one another. We want to be compassionate and gentle with one another. We want to raise children who are kind, joyful and responsible. We aspire to create a religious community where we can come to know one another more deeply. We want to create a place where we can cry together, laugh together, sing together, learn together, and act together. We want a place where we can come together to remind ourselves of what is truly worthwhile. That is what worship is—it is literally an affirmation of worth. 

And we want to make a difference in the world. We are not content to be a club. We know there are hundreds, thousands, of neighbors who love what we love. And if they love what we love, they have the same religion we do. We open our hearts and our doors to them. 

Religion beyond belief is the religion millions of people long for. It is religion that transcends culture, race and class. It is religion where we can grow spiritually, a religion where we can forge deep and lasting relationships, a religion where we can join hands to help heal a broken world.... 

The central issue before us as a religious movement is not to decide what we believe. That will just set us to arguing among ourselves until the theological cows come home. (Trust me, the theological cows have been gone for millennia and they’re not coming home in our lifetime.) 

No, the central issue before us all is whether we will accept the challenge to become a religion beyond belief.

Believing in theological diversity is another form of a belief based religion.  And that is where, theologically speaking, a lot of Unitarian Universalism is stuck.  We celebrate our own diversity of opinion and belief.  But what is there beyond belief?  What is the purpose of religion if it is not to promote beliefs in its people?

Rev. Morales sets out to answer that question.  He says that we ought to base religion, which for is Unitarian Universalism, on "what we love."

He is asking the right question, and proposing a good answer.  Liberal theology has to answer the question: what is true enough to base our theology on?  If we cannot count on our knowledge of divine revelation, what is the truth we are starting from?  And if we can no longer assume that there is a truth that can be universally comprehended by all people (objectivity), where do we start?

"What We Love" is one answer to that question.  It is open-ended in that Morales doesn't define it, except situationally and relationally.  (This by the way is similar to President Obama's speech in Newtown, in which he based the moral case for "sensible gun safety" legislation on the love we feel for our children.)

The problem is that "what we love" is vague and open-ended.  We all love our children.  Do we love other people's children?  Maybe, maybe not.  Many people feel a love of country, which can have a very different content from person to person.  Everybody, especially including "white" people who are mist unaware of it, have an affinity for people of their own race or ethnicity.

Rev. Morales is confident that we will find that "we love the same things."  I am not sure, but I do believe that most of us love some things in common.  What are they?  Love of our children?  What else?

The one "sacred" belief of contemporary Unitarian Universalism is that religion should never be prescriptive.  It is thought that Religion (especially religious leaders) shouldn't tell people what to believe, or how to act, or what to value as most important.  Far too often, UU religious leaders have accepted this restriction: that the most we can do is to suggest a question for the people to consider.  That tentativeness comes out in Rev. Morales' sermon.  He does not tell us what to love.

But, I wish Rev. Morales had told us what to love: what in human life is worthy of our highest loyalty, and makes demands on us.

As contemporary people, we all know that we don't have to agree with him, or mindlessly follow his instructions.  After all, a thousand different people, companies, and institutions pitch messages to us everyday, and we are quite skilled at evaluating them and rejecting almost all of them.

What is the final message of a sermon?  In this sermon, Rev. Morales defines the central message as whether "we will accept the challenge to become a religion beyond belief."

So like so many UU sermons do, Rev. Morales ends up talking about what kind of religion UUism ought to be.  We should be talking about what kind of people UU's and others should be.

I think that the alternative to a belief-based religion is a virtue and character-based religion.  Our message should be that our lives, and the world in general, would be better and happier if we developed our capacity to act to fulfill what we love.  And we can better love if we develop certain virtues, life habits: compassion, wonder, truthfulness, humility, graceful giving, openness and self-possession.

So, I go to a different place than Rev. Morales, even though I agree with his starting point. To me, what is "beyond  belief" is virtue and character. If we go there, I believe that we can reclaim our voice to speak directly to people about what we think liberal religion asks them to do.

I am grateful that Rev. Peter sent me his sermon, and was open to me making a public comment on it.  It showed great grace.  He has a hard job, in that there are so many who are sure that they could do his job better.

Fantasy Politics

Both the Left and the Right engage in fantasy politics of insurrection.  Someday, they imagine that they will be the vanguard of the People who have risen up against the government of the United States of America.  That the People now appear to be apathetic sheep is a problem, of course.  They appear to be not very interested in revolution, and not hungering for a vanguard to lead them in one.  But the magic mechanism that will turn today's sheeple into tomorrow's heroic freedom fighters is government repression.

So a few ideas clump together into one ideological fixation.  The actions of the government right now are laying the groundwork to repress the coming Revolution; the people must be warned; and present actions, which may be reasonable, must be opposed to preserve the future feasibility of the great revolt.

For the Right, the gun registration and background checks, no matter how reasonable they are today must be opposed because they will, on that great getting up day in the future, be used by the government to confiscate the arms of the freedom fighters.

For the Left, finding out the communication links between foreign militants and people in the United States must be opposed because that spying will be used to defeat the revolution in the future.

Essential to this is the wildest exaggeration of government capability and practice.  How often do you hear that the government is on the verge of confiscating everyone's weapons?  How often in the last few days have you heard that the government is actually listening to everyone's phone calls?  The drone killing of an American citizen who had relocated to Yemen and was actively involved in Al Qaeda there turns into a government that plans to execute citizens on US soil for political reasons, perhaps for filing an improper application for a tax-exemption.

As a result, what the government does is not measured against the concrete problems they are trying to solve.  They are measured instead against a dark future fantasy: if the government was completely totalitarian and the people were in revolt, how would these limited exercises of governmental power be possibly stretched into something fatal to a free people?  It's always 1935 in Germany.

Against that grim fantasy, nothing is reasonable, prudent, measured and effective.

So hysteria reigns, making governance impossible.

As we now see.