Three New (Slightly Flawed) Signature Participation Projects I Like and How to Make Them Better

Posted on January 12, 2011 by Pastor Foley

It’s been six months or more since we last commended specific Signature Participation Projects (SPPs) to you via this blog, but three new good ones have come to my attention in the last few weeks that I want to share with you for our joint edification and encouragement along the TG Road. Each of these SPPs may be slightly or egregiously flawed, but you have to admire the chutzpah.

Here are brief summaries of each, along with my quick gloss on how I might tweak or totally rework each one in an effort to to make it better:

1. Tours of London, Led by the City’s Homeless

Inspired by London’s Sock Mob, which is a volunteer group that engages routinely with London’s homeless, Unseen Tours offer an entertaining and poignant walk through the streets of London with trained homeless guides, giving participants a historical but also unexplored perspective. The tours interweave the guides’ own stories and experiences, giving participants a view of the city through the lens of homelessness while introducing a new social consciousness into commercial walking tours. Four routes are currently available — more are coming soon, the group says — each culminating in a “merry pub trip” at the end.

Love it–the perfect SPP for a mission or homeless shelter. Helps prevent us from viewing homeless men and women as objects of pity and lets us see them as knowledgeable individuals whose insights on homelessness and poverty and grace are invaluable. For Christian orgs I’d use graduates of rehabilitation programs as the tour guides, and I’d replace the “merry pub trip” with a prayer and communion service back at the mission.

2. Journeys by the American Bible Society

Whether it’s a daily or weekly e-mail Bible study, audio, print, or a text message, you can explore the eternal truths of the Bible in the way that best fits your life. With a variety of topics topics to choose from, each journey contains verses and Bible studies each day of your journey—making God’s Word relevant and personal to you.

I like ABS’ setup which enables readers to build customized study plans of different lengths (7 days, 40 days, 100 days, ongoing) focused on different topics (Addictions, Anger, Anxiety, etc) using a variety of delivery methods (SMS, email, web, voice mail–my favorite, audio download) and searchable according to a variety of filters (themes, essentials, practices, faces, etc). My concern here would be the probability of users to fall into a perpetual “P” (participation) pattern of going from study to study rather than the study catapulting someone into an intentional formation process driven not by passing interest but rather by the desire to grow to full maturity in Christ across each Work of Mercy and Piety. An amazon.com-style “If you selected X, consider moving on to Y” could facilitate a workable Participation-to-Engagement-type conversion.

3. Crowdsourced Catholicism: New iPhone App Lets Users Forgive Sins

Penance, an application released for the iPhone in early December, allows users to absolve one another’s sins. After passing the application’s obligatory security PIN system (conventional online security measures are the app’s primary faith-orientation), you come to an interface resembling a confessional booth. Through the left door you can “confess,” offering your sins to whoever is listening; behind the closed door you can “absolve” any sins received; and at the far side you can “reflect,” considering the shared confessions of others, conveniently arranged like a pinball machine’s top-ten list.

The service requires that every user play both Sinner and Saint, and a novice is granted five bits of each one’s currency: Five Horns for confessing, and five Haloes for granting penances.

No. I like this. I really do. Well, I mean, as it currently stands it’s more atrocious than admirable, but there’s a germ of something good and helpful somewhere in here, currently wrapped up in something with all the delicacy and sophistication and health of deep fried butter.  I encourage you to read the rest of the post and see if you share my sense that if O (Ownership)-level guides mature in their faith were there to guide…and greater opportunities were given for coaching and instructing Participants…and if some decent theology could be worked in there, well, then you might have something here. I’m just saying.

In this still-innocent new church, maybe it is unsurprising that gluttons seem only to regret single instances of pizza, chicken nuggets, or cheesecake, never wrestling with longstanding food addictions, and the wrathful never repent of physical violence. But in the nearly empty pews we find traces of real pathos. One penitent doesn’t know how to forgive a friend who called him “a fat faggot” over the internet and then accused him of forging his evidence. Another was thrown out of a strip club for saying “God must hate strippers” to a dancer who confided that she had a disabled son. Here and there, Penance hurts.

And you? See any good SPPs lately?

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“Dear Missionary, Please Stop Sending Prayer Letters. Sincerely, The 21st Century”

Posted on January 10, 2011 by Pastor Foley

Here’s a new year’s resolution for all missionaries:

Stop sending prayer letters. Switch completely to regular personalized electronic communication with your donors in 2011.

I know, I know. You have no time for communication while you’re in the field, etc etc. Older donors can’t use anything more electronic than a blender, etc etc. People treasure generic letters sent out with old news months behind schedule, etc etc.

These are all great reasons to stick to printed prayer letters, except for one thing:

They’re all based on data which is staler than the Christmas cookies still remaining on your counter.

Christianity Today ran a nice update piece on missionary/donor communication just in time to help you toss out old thinking about support raising and ring in the new. Among the insights:

  • A third of Wycliffe missionaries email daily from the field with supporters back home
  • Around 70 percent of those missionaries have 40+ hours of Internet access weekly from the field; 75% have high-speed connections
  • 50% of the missionaries Wycliffe surveyed are able to stay in the field longer and make furloughs shorter because of electronic communication

Those are staggering numbers with which most missionary communication strategies have yet to catch up.

Missionaries with older constituents may be tempted to disregard this data, consoled by the certainty of the incompatibility between the elderly and the ethernet cable.

But the times, they have a-changed.

  • Facebook use among those aged 65+ increased by 100% in the last year alone, which means a quarter of those in that age category are now Facebook active (half of those between the ages of 50 and 64 are as well)
  • 11% of adults aged 50 to 64 now use Twitter
  • Old people can’t read the prayer letters you send anyway because you always make the font so small so you can fit more in on a single page

OK, so the last one is just a personal rant. But as long as I’m indulging personal rants, permit me one final question:

Why is it that the missionaries who tell me that they’re too busy to communicate with their donors while in the field are the same ones whose Farmville and Mafia Wars updates are constantly clogging up my Facebook page?

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Forget Your Brochures; Here’s A Far Better Tool to Help Your Nonprofit Help Churches Grow in Your Cause

Posted on January 7, 2011 by Pastor Foley

I am swooning with love over a booklet I received in the mail today, about which I was tipped off by Jonathan Powers at Theology in Worship.

The booklet is S.T. Kimbrough, Jr’s Songs for the Poor: Help Us Make the Poor Our Friends, a compilation of thirteen hymns written by Charles Wesley to help the church grow in its theology and practice related to the poor.

At the time I’m writing this, there is only one copy–used–remaining of this book on amazon.com. Were I you, I’d snatch it up before you finish reading this post. I mean, it’s $6.00 plus shipping.

As to what this has to do with helping your nonprofit help churches grow in your cause, let’s turn first to the thoughts of the aforementioned Jonathan Powers, who begins with the genesis of the original Methodist hymn book:

[T]he purpose of this collection was to be a daily devotional guide as much as a musical book used in worship. John Wesley writes in the prologue to the hymnbook that its purpose was to provide “a full account of scriptural Christianity” and “the experience of real Christians.”

Thus, the hymnbook was used to help focus an individual’s spiritual growth from the time of conversion to the incorporation with the fellowship of believers. The content Charles Wesley wrote was broad in theme, ranging from lyrics on the Eucharist, Trinity, and Holy Scriptures to lyrics concerning Easter, Church calendar, and other Church celebrations.

Very few of Charles’ writings on poverty made the hymnbook. In fact, many of his poems and hymns dealing specifically with the poor were never published at all. These hymns most likely were circulated around to nearby churches and pastors, but they were never bound into a collection. Yet, we do know through collections of sermons and letters that both John and Charles had a deep conviction for the poor, and often preached very bold sermons warning on wealth and extravagant living.

Charles Wesley wrote hymns as theology. The hymnal, thus, was more than a collection of songs printed so that people knew what words to sing. It was a devotional guide, given to people to meditate on and think about not only when they were in worship but when they weren’t.

The invention of the overhead projector and Powerpoint didn’t make that obsolete.

(Side note of pastoral privilege: There may be very good reason not to use overhead projectors and Powerpoint in your church worship services. Imagine purchasing or creating hymnals that church members are instructed to bring to church with them, along with their Bibles, and to take home with them when they go–for the purpose of daily singing-studying certain select songs for the coming week’s worship. Korean Christians use a combined Bible/hymnal for just this purpose. And one major denomination recently undertook just such a “take your hymnal home” campaign.)

(Second side note of pastoral privilege: And why keep switching the songs in church every week, anyway? Why not pick four songs for the month, introducing one each week and practicing it and digging into the theology of it until the church actually learns it and the theology it contains? OK–now back to the nonprofit world.)

So what’s the payoff here for nonprofits seeking to help churches grow in relation to their cause?

Develop a hymnal booklet containing hymns (for singing in congregational worship and personal devotion and family worship) related to your cause. Share this with churches rather than your brochure. Stop talking about your ministry and start supporting churches to learn how to think Scripturally and theology about your shared cause.

Talk about a useful leave behind! There’s a far greater chance that parishioners will get cause-related hymns stuck in their heads that motivate them to action than that they’ll actually do anything with that glossy prayer partner card of yours, anyway.

Got to love Charles Wesley’s lyrics. Why didn’t these ones make the main hymnal?

Ye pastors hired who undertake/The awful ministry/For lucre or ambition’s sake/A nobler pattern see!/Who greedily your pay receive/And adding cure to cure/In splendid ease and pleasures live/By pillaging the poor.

Imagine the pastor’s face when you lead the congregation to sing that one during your visit to church on Sunday.

Which of the Christians now/Would their possessions sell?/The fact that you scarce allow/The truth incredible:/That saints of old so weak should prove/And as themselves their neighbors love

And why are we stuck just preaching and showing Powerpoint during our presentations? Why not take the time to teach the congregation a cause-related hymn that they don’t know?

Savior, how few there are/Who thy condition share/Few who cordially embrace/Love, and prize thy poverty/Want on earth a resting place/Needy and resigned like thee!

Your cause need not be poverty. I’m already thinking, for example, about a hymnal booklet related to Christian persecution for our Seoul USA work related to North Korea. How many persecution hymns do you know, after all?

Oh–and if you’re the lucky person who gets the last copy of Kimbrough’s book from amazon, post a note in the comments section and let me know what you think of the book. It was my first book purchase of 2011, and I wouldn’t even be disappointed if it turns out to be my best all year.

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