Author: Scott Wells

Universalist minister in Washington, D.C.
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Emergency weather feeds

Dan Harper has been writing about church administration and his last installment was about emergency preparedness.

There’s a resource that I doubt many ministers or church administrators know about: the “Experimental XML Feeds and Web Displays of Watches, Warnings, and Advisories.”  With it, you can subscribe to an RSS feed for your state, county, or in some cases, sub-county.

I know most people don’t read RSS feeds yet, but if you have the must-have Firefox 1.5 browser (with its integrated RSS feeds; fine if you only read a few) all it takes is a couple clicks from the orange broadcasty button in the address bar and you can have the emergency weather feed on your desktop.

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Church websites should have details for Sunday servers

I love churches in odd places — remote places, temporary chaplaincies, non-English speaking lands — in part because I like to see how churches deal with unusual situations, and especially small constituencies. Plus, these churches rarely have the “luxury” of sectarianism. Sometimes you get good ideas about managing small churches in more familiar locales. Anglican churches, via Anglicans Online, are the easiest to find.

I was reading through the list of churches of the Church of England, Diocese of Europe, and lighted on St. Ursula’s Church, Berne. Because I have Swiss German ancestors? No, because I love the name Ursula. (As in Andress.)

Well, the Bearnese church website isn’t super-60s-sexy (indeed, it is rather 1996 plain) but it does have a feature that a church dependent on a Sunday servers (volunteers) should have.

Note its “rota” (rotation) schedule, “Guidelines for those leading intercessions,” an illustrated and detailed “Setting up altar, credence table, and font,” and “Duty Council member’s duties” with its admonition that this duty is enough; no counting the offering, too!

OK, it isn’t often that your UU congregation will use the font (you do have one?) for keeping the Eucharistic gifts, so I’m highlighting the detail.

Have you seen any churches with similarly-detailed direction? Of course, I would really love it if such a church offered their guide under a generous licence for others to emulate and adapt.

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Tiny web tool

PeaceBang used a tinyurl — a short URL that forwards to one so long as to be impractical, as with many news stories — to point people to the drug-puppy story.

I was going to recommend tinyurl when another commenter noticed the links PB used were too long and broke the HTML by scrolling off into her links column.

So now I can just highlight it

tinyurl.com 

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Sighing over the UUMA

I got one of those “if you forgot to pay your dues, disregard this” letters from the Unitarian Universalist Ministers Association. They’re asking for $225, and I won’t be paying. A member of the Exec I ran into reminded me (so did the letter) there’s a 75% hardship waver, but I told her it isn’t paying (though that’s a lot of money) but wondering what services the UUMA provides that justfies the cost. I sighed after a read it, not angry but frustrated and . . . well, hell, yes I’m angry because the ministerial college needs all the help it can get.
Even when I was in a parish, I didn’t think the pre-GA workshops were that compelling, and the publications are minimal. The best reason I heard was — in so many words — “you ought to.” And that holds no water with me.

Chapter dues are astronomical, too, and now that I’m in a Day Job I haven’t had a chance to attend a meeting in almost two years. I don’t miss them on the whole and only two or three programs — one was by a locally-resident member of the Commission on Appraisal — stood out. That said, do you think I’ve gotten a phone call from any chapter member in that time? Even to say, “Wells, you cheapskate, where’s the check?” Nope. (I do get general emails about rallies to attend or wedding coverage.) I don’t want hand holding, but perhaps someone might be interested in what happend to me. Perhaps they all read this blog and already know.
Not that chapters have much in common with one another, but on the whole I’ve found official collegiality to be pretty cliquish, and as a former high school dweeb about two decades on, I can tell you that doesn’t hold any water either. Lord the blogosphere is so healthy.
So tell me — because I really am a team player at heart — what does the UUMA do that justifies the cost and the psychic room (the sat-upon franchise, to use the idiom) that excludes a different organization that might better fill its role?

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Imagining better churches

Better churches than the ones we have (as a whole) is a slippery, subjective, and potientially insulting prospect. But it still rates better than not clearly prjecting what each of us thinks would be desirable. We do not live in the best of all possible worlds.

I was thinking that rather than describing theologically (or primarily so) how we would want the UUA, perhaps it would be better to suggest how a particular hypothetical congregation would run. What would be central. How would it make decisions. The nuts and bolts stuff that follows — if done well — the metanarrative work. The machine that suggests the spirit.

Perhaps we could write some guides or fragments of guide about what would make an ideal congregation, and make them public, perhaps under the Creative Commons Attribution (or Attribution-No Commercial Use) licence, so that others can build upon them and share them.

And perhaps actually use them to help start or improve congregations.

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Plain geek

Like Happy Cindy, I took the Geek Test, but scored a mere 23.27% Some affirmations got especially close to home.

  • I own a computer currently running on Linux. (Ubuntu 5.10, but think I might get a discard and play with Debian.)
  • I married someone that I met over the Internet.
  • I play Devo. (I’m playing Q: Are We Not Men? A: We are Devo! right now, and it was in the CD drive before I started the test.)
  • I wear glasses I have repaired myself. (Not this pair, though they should count on their own merits.)
  • I know how to count in hexadecimal.
  • I know my age in binary. (100100.)
  • I have created a listserv.

There are a lot more, but obviously not enough to match Michelle or Cindy. Feh.

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Lutherans without a building; keeping mission

I was a childhood nominal Lutheran. LCA Lutheran. The people who brought you Davey and Goliath. The people who provided my life insurance policy, first through Lutheran Brotherhood, and now its with-the-Missouri-Synod successor, Thrivent Financial for Lutherans. I like reading the Thrivent Magazine I get.
It has some church news. I noted the news of the fifty-year-old inner city Chicago ELCA that has a bivocational minister and takes a sometimes familiar tack to accomodation.

True to its mission, Christ the King, an ELCA congregation with about 30 members, has never owned a building. Instead, the congregation has worshiped in more than 10 rented spaces over 50 years, including office buildings and community rooms.

A short read. Interesting. “No Walls” by Sarah Asp.

Christ the King Lutheran Church, ELCA

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Technology I'm not following

I’ve been an advocate for pushing Unitarian Universalists in technology for more than a decade now, going back to the use of Gopher and mailing lists, through the web, to PDAs and blogs, and now wikis and who-knows-what. A bunch of us did: Unitarian Universalists are relatively early-acquirers of new technology, so I write on, keeping the pulse as much or more than suggesting anything new.

That said, I’m not that much of a wonk. I don’t have a cell phone, PDA (lost one, another stolen) or an MP3 player (also lost) – I don’t even have a watch. I use a paper calendar for the most part. I’m going back and looking at how established technologies — say, spreadsheet applications — can be pressed into more service. So I need to drop some projects: they just don’t pay. These are:

  • The use of XML to re-purpose data by web and print publications. I’ll wait to see how the Bible markup language projects make out first.
  • The use of TeX/LaTeX for print publications. Too esoteric for most, and those who are interested can learn it easily enough.
  • Greenstone Digital Libraries. An interesting way to get libraries on a CD out, but good internet access will reduce its usefulness (better still for its core demographic in the developing world) and I just can’t get the publisher side to work. Maybe when version three comes out.
  • OCR. Optical Character Recognition is still too crude, even after all these years. I’d make better use of my time making image-based PDFs and learning to type faster!
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Part of my design-savings-diet-technology plan

I want a flat screen monitor at home to streamline my desk, but there’s no way I’m going to charge it. Savings and debt-reduction are big goals. So is improving the look of our apartment. Plus loosing some weight. (Nine pounds lost since 3 January, by the way.)
I’ve made a deal with myself.

Each time I walk the two miles from home to office (or back) I’ll pay myself $2.50, or double the bus fare.

That gives me time to save the money while saving money, an opportunity to shop wisely for exactly what I want, a source of exercise (and about 200 calories per trip) for the diet, and a goal that let’s me make other design improvements at home.

I hope to have the monitor (and looser clothing) by Easter.