Stone Soup is a plan (in progress) to address Emerson's identified long-term planning needs regarding growth.

The rest of the page should be links to other pages. Each of those will be one of three things:

• Initiatives, which go to committees
• Policy recommendations, which go to the board
• Discussion items (which probably means “I don't know specifically what to do here”)

“Each of those pages needs to” isn't written yet.

The page should conclude with a very brief summary of the big asks.

• Probably the most important discussion item is we need boundaries around church resources.
• Probably the most important policy items are boundaries around church resources.
  • Emerson Players is self-funded. That's great; could that include moving stuff off-site if it's just being stored for months on end? It's more than just needing the space. It's about the space being dedicated to something.
  • Volunteer effort is not allocated in any way. It's a game of Hungry Hungry Hippos. That's not okay; the church needs to be in control of its own priorities.
• A timeline, or an order of operations, remains unaddressed as a problem. Some items have explicit interdependencies listed but it needs to be more fleshed out. These initiatives support each other and that is getting lost.
• Emerson needs some work before it's ready to evangelize about itself
• We don't do post-mortems and we need to start doing them for most everything
• If we don't have a worship calendar that commits us to specific services for each of the faith traditions we're supposed to represent, we should make one.
• Rather than trying to grow the worship committee, build a worship ministry.
  • Growing the committee a person at a time is likely to continue failing. We need to train a batch of people on our workflow and get good at it together, so we've got people in all parts of the church who can get a service across the finish line.
  • The word “committee” has a connotation. “Ministry” reminds us that worship is a core mission of the church.
  • The word “team” also gets used in places; I'd rather use “team” to describe a group responsible for a given service.
• We need to grapple with the bougie, the out-of-touch, the icky…

I have been trying to avoid this for months, but I can't see any way around it: Volunteer effort and assignments need to be managed centrally.

That doesn't mean people can't have initiative and start their own things, but… (just kind of thinking out loud here)

If the rule is, everybody has at most two callings, and the first one has to be something the church needs, and it doesn't have to be something the person wants to do. The “callings people want” are secondary callings. Doing the work of the church has to be the priority.

Teams and committees should not be allowed to ask people for help directly. They should have to ask for volunteer time from a central committee.

I can't see another way to structure a volunteer organization that doesn't result in abuse of volunteers and misappropriation of volunteer time. (Don't suggest tracking hours. That doesn't work.)

• Introduction leads into
• housing first program
• leads to aid program connections
• connects to Social Action Surveys
• results in social action policy document platform thing
• causes shift in how worship programming gets selected: Social Action Sundays
• Worship Ministry Rebuild and workflow review (aka Digital Infra Overhaul Part 1)
• opens the door for the Musical Collaborations
• ditto for Jam Sessions

If this is done as a presentation, this is where the first break goes. At this point, the structure of the plan should make sense.

• an essential part of this plan is feeding me

…there's still plenty that doesn't fit in the straight line.

We need to set a boundary we have not historically had, and that is that shared interest is not enough justification to start a ministry. It needs to serve the mission of the church.

(I wrote the same damn thing three times in different places and it's still not what I need here.)

We need to elevate the quality of our worship programming. The music is great but the music program has some constraints we need to lift, and the rest of the programming… we'll talk about it. But basically, we need more barn-burners. Sunday services have to be good or a church will fail no matter what else it's doing.

Julia needs to be full-time. We also need at least four part-time musicians. (That includes Ariel.) Where possible, we should try to hire instrumentalists who can also be section leaders. Emerson is heavy into instrumental music; we need to leverage that.

Proposal: We need to pay our music director enough that this can be her only job.

Discussion: As we hire musicians, we need to hire instrumentalists who sing, not just singers.

Sunday School Organ Tour

Video Production - Still trying to find more diplomatic ways to channel our drive to perform into something that's actually good for something

No AI Content Policy

Facilities Makeover (need to split this)

Acoustic Treatment

Control Room - Convert one the offices upstairs in Westwood hall into an A/V booth.

Sunday Morning Makever (need to split this)

Digital Infrastructure Overhaul (need to split this)

Biggest Loser: Odometer Edition

Emerson and Aid (need to split this)

We need to grow by ${THIS_MUCH}.

We are not going to knock doors. Ever. It's ineffective. Our evangelism program basically has three stages:

1. making our church inviting and welcoming–not that it isn't, but there are some questions…
   • What made Emerson “home” for you?
   • What works for Emerson for you?
   • What would you change if you could?
   • Why do people choose other churches and not Emerson?
   • Why do people leave Emerson?
2. facilitating the diffusion of people in through our missionary work
   • Branded T-shirts, water bottles, then go do service in other places
3. when the time is right, get really good at inviting people in a targeted way
   • “Invite people to Sunday because we're talking about $issue”

It is (mostly) not time to start inviting people yet. Emerson is not ready.

• Service evangelists / missionaries are volunteers who commit ${hours per week} to church activity for a limited time.
• Missionary activity is done as a couple, or split assignments
• Every member, missionary or not, gets training:
  • Issues and talking points (we create these)
  • Inviting people successfully
  • Welcoming people however they are (we are already pretty good at this)
  • Being sensitive to where people are (we are not always good at this)
  • Using the technology stack we end up building
• Time spent in a car NEVER COUNTS.
• How many “full-time” missionaries do we need?
• We need a more complete accounting of everything church members are doing and everything getting done at and by our church so we can continue doing those things.

We will need to import some volunteer work, perhaps by collaborating with other churches, perhaps just by getting better at inviting people and making requests that people say “yes” to.

There's this training and effectiveness program called Landmark, and I'd like to have a couple of people from Emerson go through it. No more than three; it's potent stuff. It would be easy to start a cult by accident. Been there, done that.

Social Media Tactics - this is not a complete strategy and I don't want to be in charge of our strategy. I just have some ideas that might be really easy on a collective basis.

Sunday Block Schedule

(there's a whole thing to write here and I don't wanna)