C is for Communications

How do we define "communications"? This is the question of the day. In a world saturated with IMAGE and MESSAGE, the ability to control the information we use to communicate identity, purpose, aspiration, and invitation is not to be undervalued. But with the public-ness of social media, the omni-presence of communications technology, it becomes ever more difficult to draw the edges of the communications domain. Is not all of our work "communications"?

I'm moving forward with a new resource for campus ministers on communications. It's an online resource giving best practices, models, and templates for communicating the work of campus ministry to a variety of audiences. Step one involves talking to campus ministers from a variety of institutions and hearing their stories. Step two involves pouring over these stories with Diocesan communications officers to cull specific concerns for this particular population and shape common communications best practices to fit.

Today I had the lucky job of interviewing one of our campus chaplains at a large public east coast university. I always enjoy the opportunities to talk at length with individual ministers about their experiences and their specific contexts. Never having served as a campus minister, yet having been involved in more than my fair share during my college years, I'm always gaining new insights and compiling a list of concerns and important questions to consider when working with a ministry. My hope in the time being is that I can get a fair sense of the knowledge I would want if I were starting a new ministry so that I can shape and package it in a way that is accessible to new campus chaplains.

While I don't want to share every bit of what I pulled from this conversation I do want to highlight a few best practices this chaplain offered toward the end of our conversation:

Beware of over-saturation: Students are constantly bombarded with information (as are most young adults). Firing too many emails, Facebook invites, and text messages can be a sure way to get students to become blind to your messages. 2/week is probably the limit, and even that should be through two different mediums.

Be Patient: Developing a presence on campus, in a community or in a person's imagination takes time and insane amounts of repetition. Find a consistent way of representing yourself. Don't start from scratch, build on the work done by others already (like the Episcopal Shield), and stick with it. Presence and trust is built over time.

Be Conscious of Your Own Media Consumption Habits: What emails do you respond to? Which go straight to the garbage? What gets your attention in the publicity of others? How many times do you see something before you really give it note? Generationally our consumption habits are more similar than the media would have us believe.

Greg, I'll call him Greg because that's his name, shared with me that he spends at least one fifth of his time every week simply communicating. That's not meeting with students, running programs, leading worship, but simply communicating. And it pays off. Ask a student or young adult how much time they spend everyday on Facebook, email, texting and talking on the phone.

Today the Church Center's department of Mission released a statement guiding staff members further into the new structure necessitated by the budget cuts at last summer's General Convention. In it was referenced the Outline of the Faith in the Book of Common Prayer in which the following question is posed and answered:

Q. What is the mission of the Church?
A. The mission of the Church is to restore all people to unity with God and each other in Christ.

Toni Daniels, co-director of mission, went on to explore the way in which this call to unity with each other is a call to deeply relational ministry inherently dependent on and situated in effective communications. I encourage you this holiday weekend to have a great and relaxing time with friends and family, but I also encourage you to think about the creative and subtle ways you communicate love to those around you. Isn't that the Gospel message? To communicate love? How might we do that more effectively in all of our "communications"? How might we imagine "communications" more broadly and be conscious of all the possible means we have for sharing Good News?

Many blessings this Memorial Day!

The World is New

With nearly every straight, liberal male I know semi-obsessed with a musical sitcom about a high school show choir on Fox, it is difficult to imagine that the world is not different than we imagined it to be. Every indicator points to a landscape dramatically altered. From Phyllis Tickle's 500 year cultural rummage sale to Bill McKibben's new Eaarth, there exist abundant images of a world transformed. The Church, like all other institutions, will fair only as well as it is capable of responding to the changing cultural environment in which it exists.

Young Adults stand at an interesting intersection at this moment of cultural upheaval. Coming into adulthood in this environment, their frame of reference is limited by the a-historicism of American culture and the lack of personal experience in any other time but this. Armed with technology they threaten the generations they follow with the capacity to leapfrog to corporate predominance. Cautioned by an economic downturn in which entire industries are being eclipsed while new ones pop up with each refreshing of the page, they approach "career" with tentativeness and education with the utilitarian concerns of keeping as many options open as they can manage to juggle.

The Church as an institution faces the cautionary scrutiny given marriage by a generation for whom divorce was felt as common as not. Like pre-marital co-habitation, spiritual path shopping is a consumer tactic meant to head off institutional incompatibility and failure. This is not a failure on our part, but it is a reality. We cannot assume the given of the post-marriage, post-childbirth return to Church. The moral elementary school model of religion is failing in a nation where Liberal Christianity has won the culture wars. The question left us is what Christ speaks to this world that is new? What image of the Reign of God do we offer to a generation for whom that reign is no longer singular?

We give many answers. The Body of Christ is continually being born anew in this world through churches that compete in a free-marketplace of loyalties, moralities, and ways of being. What is the Spirit birthing anew in the Episcopal Church? What might that look like for Young Adults and how might we work together to affirm and strengthen this new Body of which we are a part?

I'll be using this blog as a platform and as my own site for digestion. I'm new to this world. I'm a young Episcopalian adult, raised in the Church and employed to support others in this journey we take together. I invite your comments here, but more so I invite your friendship and companionship. I'll be telling my story of this journey, and I hope as it progresses it will become Our Story. I don't know how that happens but I trust that as it does, we will do it with honesty, humility, and grace.