A radical proposal for digital literacy

One of the grumbles I hear in UU circles is about our congregations’ invisible buildings. We have tucked our churches into residential neighborhoods, hidden them behind trees, and set them back from the street by wide expanses of lawn.

Reticence about self-promotion seems to be part of our UU DNA. Rather than actively seeking those who would flourish as members of our congregations, we prefer that they find us––and we don’t make it easy for them to do so. Then we wonder why we’re not growing in numbers.*

I’ve been thinking about our hidden buildings as a metaphor for a lack of digital visibility in many of our congregations. In this digital age, congregations need vibrant, informative, easily accessible web pages, and an active Facebook presence as well. Twitter is quickly becoming another necessity. Visitors no longer discover a new faith community by driving by a building. They find it online, and if we’re digitally invisible, how can we hope to grow?

Last Saturday on Facebook, the Rev. Phillip Lund mentioned that he’s teaching a January Intensive at Meadville-Lombard about digital/spiritual literacy. That got me thinking about the digital skills of UU clergy.

In my work editing The Interdependent Web, I interact with the subset of UU clergy who blog. Many of them are also very active on Facebook and Twitter. Because almost all of the UU clergy I know are these bloggers, my sense of how tech-literate UU clergy really are is skewed. I think it’s worth figuring out just what percentage of UU clergy are developing their digital skills. I also think 100% digital literacy is a worthy and necessary goal.

So here’s my radical proposal: let’s make digital literacy required for all UU ministers––not just those seeking preliminary or final fellowship.**

A recent post on the MediaShift blog quoted media scholar Henry Jenkins: “Traditionally we wouldn’t consider someone literate if they could read but not write. And today we shouldn’t consider someone literate if they can consume but not produce media.”

It’s no longer enough for clergy to know how to check their email and surf the web. If we want our congregations to be digitally visible, our clergy need to be both spiritually literate and digitally literate.

So what are the requirements for digital literacy?

Here’s the bare minimum, as I see it: every UU minister needs to have a blog, Facebook and Twitter accounts, and a willingness to stay digitally current.***

I suspect that we’re letting a lot of clergy off the hook at the moment. We’re allowing ourselves to think of Facebook and Twitter (and other social media) as toys, as entertainment, and not as essential tools for a new way of being in community. We hide behind concerns about privacy, about too much screen time, rather than jumping in and helping solve these problems from the inside out. We make excuses for our illiteracy, claiming we’re “just not computer people,” rather than acknowledging our fears and our reluctance to do the hard work of learning something new.****

Unitarian Universalism has so much to offer, particularly to those without a spiritual home. We are not what everyone needs, but we are uniquely positioned to be ”a religion for our time.”

But we can’t be a religion for the digital age if those who have embraced digital media have no idea that we exist. If we’re hidden behind outdated websites. If we’re silent on Facebook and Twitter. And if our clergy speak only from pulpits and printed newsletters.

 

*Obviously, this is a broad generalization, with many exceptions.
**I know that this is a practical impossibility.  :)
***I’m looking forward to hearing what others of you think should be “required.”
****As I wrote this paragraph, I found myself thinking about a recent study that claims Alaskans are crankiest in the fall.

Occupy Wall Street: a humanist perspective

On my Facebook wall today I wrote: “If the only accomplishment of the Occupy movement is the end of corporate personhood, it will have been enough.”

As I thought about it more, I realized that this is a deeply humanist perspective.

In the same way that the work of speaking about God includes defining what is not God, so the work of speaking about humanity includes defining who––or, more accurately, what––is not a person.

Corporate personhood diminishes human personhood. The energy behind the Occupy movement is an inevitable uprising of the human spirit, too long held back, too long kept powerless, too long lied to and made cynical.

It is a movement of hope. It is a surge of desperate optimism. It is humanity re-emergent.

May we make it so.

(Photo by david_shankbone.  Used under a Creative Commons license.)

Bumper sticker theology

I caught up to her at mid-town, on C Street.

I saw her bumper sticker first:  ”Jesus died for me.”

Common enough in red-state Alaska.

But then I saw her–white, middle-aged, soft around the edges. Something about her made the obscene absurdity of her bumper sticker come into sharper focus.

She thinks that almost 2000 years ago, on the other side of the world, someone died for her. And she thinks that’s a good thing. She thinks the unimaginable suffering of Jesus saved her comfortable soul from the wrath of God.

I used to think that, too, before I studied atonement theory in my final year at Princeton. There wasn’t much left of my Christian faith after that class.

What remains is a belief that Jesus died because he followed the path of love, not to satisfy an angry God. When he faced obstacles in the path of love, he didn’t step off the path. He stayed true, and faced the consequences.

Jesus wasn’t a scape-goat, carrying our sins into the wilderness. He was a seeker of truth who spoke the truth as he saw it. He welcomed sinners, and ate with them.

He was much more than a token, much more than a pawn, and certainly much more than a bumper sticker. He was a human being––charismatic, wise for his time, holy, and complicated.

This human Jesus is the one I still remember and honor–not the distorted image of the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.

I’m not all that different from the woman in the other car. I’m white, middle-aged, soft around the edges.

But for me the message of Jesus is very different. Not a debts-paid, no-worries message. A challenge to follow the path of love. A challenge to be less soft around the edges, to live each day to the fullest, to speak and live the truth as I see it, to get to the end of my life with no regrets, with nothing left in the tank.

Bloggers among the #uulaity

UU blogger Shannon McMaster looked at his blogroll recently and noticed an imbalance:

There are a lot of Rev. people in that list, and that’s fine. But recently I’ve become aware that the voices I’m missing are the voices like my own–UU laity. So, in the comments leave blog recommendations from UU laity. Or, use the #uulaity hashtag on twitter, and I’ll run a roll here.

My UU folder in Google Reader has 211 blogs in it, so this is a list compiled with one read-through.  It includes a few religious educators, but no seminarians (I think).  For the most part, these are bloggers who post consistently.

Corrections and additions to this list are most welcome. Have fun!

• Chalice Spark (DRE)
• Dairy State Dad
• Deep River
• Everyday Unitarian
• Faith and Web
• Finding My Ground
• Just Gini (UUA moderator)
• Morning Stars Rising
• Moxie Life
• Spirituality and Sunflowers
• Strange Attractor
• Syracusan in Seattle
• The Chaliceblog
• The Curriculum of Love (DRE)
• The Weekly Sift
• This Is Worker
• thoughts ON
• Times & Seasons
• Together Boss Person
• Under the Ancient Oaks
• uuMomma
• Vive Le Flame (group blog, includes at least one seminarian)

Water communion: ‘Fill the jars with water’

Jesus said to them, ‘Fill the jars with water.’ And they filled them up to the brim.  ––John 2:7

Tomorrow the Anchorage Unitarian Universalist Fellowship will observe a ritual that we call “Gathering the Waters.”

Also known as “water communion,” the ritual is practiced in many Unitarian Universalist congregations in September, at the beginning of the church year.  Here’s how the UUA’s website describes water communion:

Members bring to the service a small amount of water from a place that is special to them. During the appointed time in the service, people one by one pour their water together into a large bowl. As the water is added, the person who brought it tells why this water is special to them. The combined water is symbolic of our shared faith coming from many different sources. It is often then blessed by the congregation, and sometimes is later boiled and used as the congregation’s “holy water” in child dedication ceremonies and similar events.

At least one source points to a women’s retreat in 1980 as the origin of this ritual, and it seems that congregations began adopting throughout the next decade.

Any UU tradition accumulates controversy, and water communion is no different.

It can feel like a competitive version of “what I did on my summer vacation,” with each participant vying for the most exotic, most exciting adventure, a practice that adds to UU classism.

Depending on the size of the congregation, water communion can be the same kind of barely-controlled chaos that made many congregations do away with spoken joys and concerns.  Each year at about this time, UU ministers blog about the strategies they’ve employed to make water communion more, well, worship-full.

Gathering the waters, as part of an Ingathering Sunday, also reinforces a UU pattern of slowing down, and even shutting down for the summer.

Invariably, I forget to bring water from my summer adventures. When I choose to participate, I have to join a whole host of people contributing “symbolic water” from the fellowship’s kitchen sink, rather than water actually gathered elsewhere.

Part of what makes a ritual work––what turns water into wine, so to speak––is repetitive practice, year after year, week after week, or day after day.

For me, many UU rituals still feel more like water than wine.  Some of this is because I am relatively new to Unitarian Universalism.  But it’s not just that.

Unitarian Universalism is itself new––fifty years past the merger of the Unitarians and the Universalists.  And we are often more fond of innovation, than we are of tradition.

For those of us who came to Unitarian Universalism from various forms of Christianity, and those raised UU who never lost their connection to Christianity, I believe that there is a longing for deeper experiences.  Dare I say sacramental experiences?

The rituals we create echo discarded sacraments of bread and wine, water and spirit.  We walk forward with our gathered community to give and receive, to pour and celebrate.  It feels partly the same.  And significantly different.