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--- emerson:stone-soup [2025/04/10 15:18] – [Introduction] naptastic
+++ emerson:stone-soup [2025/04/19 03:23] (current) – [Ministries] naptastic
@@ Line 1: / Line 1: @@
 ====State of This Page====
-Stone Soup is a plan (in progress) to address Emerson's identified long-term planning needs regarding growth. This introduction needs to establish:
+Stone Soup is a plan (in progress) to address Emerson's identified long-term planning needs regarding growth.
-  * Stone Soup grows the church
-  * The pathways and mechanisms for growth are clear
-  * The way to get there is to shape Emerson into an engine for expressing our values in the world
-  * The evangelism effort needs to be the right kind of scary
-The lead needs to be really brief. I want to put everything in there and I need to not. The rest of the page should be links to other pages. Each of those is an item of one type:
+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
+  * Discussion items (which probably means "I don't know specifically what to do here")
-Efforts fall broadly into three categories:
+"Each of those pages needs to" isn't written yet.
-  - Ministries / internal processes
-  - Missionary / Activist / Outward-facing initiatives
-  - Evangelism efforts
-These are the three legs of the stool. Evangelism is three things:
+The page should conclude with a very brief summary of the big asks.
-  - Be a church people want to join
-  - Be connected enough with the community that people find their way in by diffusion
-  - Invite people who are likely to accept and join
-The first part is a function of having good ministries and programs. Worship programming has to be excellent, and church programs have to do obvious good in the world. People join churches like that without having to be marketed to.
-That's the structure of the plan in a nutshell.
-The page should conclude with a very brief summary of the big asks.
 ====Points Currently Lost====
   * Probably the most important discussion item is **we need boundaries around church resources**.
@@ Line 33: / Line 18: @@
   * 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...
+----
+=====The In Order Part=====
-=====Introduction=====
+  * [[emerson:stone-soup:introduction|Introduction]] leads into
-Welcome to Stone Soup. This is a plan to address needs identified by the Long Range Planning Task Force and generally revitalize Emerson Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston over the next few years, and to get us onto a path of growth and sustainability.
+  * housing first program
+  * leads to aid program connections
+  * connects to [[emerson:stone-soup:social-action-surveys|Social Action Surveys]]
+  * results in social action policy document platform thing
+  * causes shift in how worship programming gets selected: [[emerson:stone-soup:social-action-sundays|Social Action Sundays]]
+  * Worship Ministry Rebuild and workflow review (aka Digital Infra Overhaul Part 1)
+  * opens the door for the [[emerson:stone-soup:musical-collaborations|Musical Collaborations]]
+  * ditto for [[emerson:stone-soup:sunday-morning-jams|Jam Sessions]]
-(okay, that's a good first draft. Now tie it together better.)
+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.
-Emerson is not the church I joined 10 years ago. I were choosing a UU church today under the same circumstances, I'd choose a different one. Our worship is mediocre, we spend very little on it, we have almost nothing in terms of programs, and we spend the lion's share of our time and energy either raising money or on non-mission activity. If we were a non-profit, I wouldn't donate to us. Our overhead is too high and our deliverables are meh.
+  * an essential part of this plan is [[emerson:stone-soup:feed-the-hobo|feeding me]]
-I'm not saying this to tear us down; I'm saying this to point at an opportunity we have to change ourselves from a church people **visit** to a church people **join**.
+...there's still plenty that doesn't fit in the straight line.
-I think the fundamental issue that we need to fix is simple to understand: we don't have a strong culture of service. Actually, I don't think it's going too far to say, we don't know the first thing about service.
+=====Ministries=====
+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.
-Also, we're too focused on money. But that's another topic.
+(I wrote the same damn thing three times in different places and it's still not what I need here.)
-The first thing about service is this: It's what's needed, not what you want.
+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.
-For example, one place where we got this wrong was the orchestra. The whole reason I joined Emerson instead of First Church in 2015 was because Emerson had an orchestra. But our minds weren't on service; we wanted to do Schubert and Dvorak and all these really ambitious pieces, and we did. But what was needed was frequent accompaniment of church services. We should have been able to cover any time our keyboard artist had to be out but we never reached that point. We weren't trying to reach that point. We were focused on doing what we wanted, rather than what was needed. We were not serving the mission of the church.
+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.
-Every church has two missions--the same two missions: worship and service. Praising our God, and making the world a better place. A church that's better at those things is a better church, full stop.
+Proposal: **We need to pay our music director enough that this can be her only job.**
-As a church of mostly secular people, we don't have the same built-in drive for praise and worship that believers have. If there's no higher being whose will to seek, what do we worship? The piano?
+Discussion: As we hire musicians, we need to hire instrumentalists who sing, not just singers.
-When I gave my sermon on homelessness, I said our core ministries were being neglected. That was March 23rd. It had not yet occurred to me that the seasons had changed and that we, as a church, did not mark it. I asked about it later, and found out the services marking the seasons have been organized by just one person for some time, and they don't have bandwidth for it anymore.
+[[emerson:stone-soup:organ-tour|Sunday School Organ Tour]]
-So my first proposal is not a policy or initiative, but two definitions for us to use (finish this sentence)
+[[emerson:stone-soup:video-production|Video Production]] - Still trying to find more diplomatic ways to channel our drive to perform into something that's actually good for something
-  * **Spirituality** is the experience of being connected to something larger than yourself. That larger thing can be completely imaginary. It's the experience of being connected to it that matters.
-  * **Worship** means creating those spiritual experiences for the people who attend our services. **Sharing** that experience is why we come.
-I believe these spiritual experiences are an essential part of the human experience, whether you're a believer or not. I assert that one of our weaknesses as a church is that our worship is not a reliable source of spiritual experiences. (write this again like you're not wearing a bowtie)
+[[emerson:stone-soup:ai-content-policy|No AI Content Policy]]
-=====Ministries=====
-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.
-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.
+[[emerson:stone-soup:facilities|Facilities Makeover]] (need to split this)
-[[emerson:stone-soup:arts|Arts Programs]]
+[[emerson:stone-soup:acoustics|Acoustic Treatment]]
-[[emerson:stone-soup:facilities|Facilities Makeover]] (Don't worry, I don't want to do much.)
+[[emerson:stone-soup:control-room|Control Room]] - Convert one the offices upstairs in Westwood hall into an A/V booth.
-[[emerson:stone-soup:sunday-morning-makeover|Sunday Morning Makever]]
+[[emerson:stone-soup:sunday-morning-makeover|Sunday Morning Makever]] (need to split this)
-[[emerson:stone-soup:digital-infra-overhaul|Digital Infrastructure Overhaul]] (Don't worry. You've seen me tap-dance across a minefield before. I can manage this.)
+[[emerson:stone-soup:digital-infra-overhaul|Digital Infrastructure Overhaul]] (need to split this)
 =====Activism=====
-[[emerson:stone-soup:social-action-surveys|Social Action Surveys]]
-[[emerson:stone-soup:social-action-sundays|Social Action Sundays]] (Not what it sounds like, but if you're imagining what I'm imagining... not the worst idea ever.)
-===Climate Change===
-The only idea I have for something we can do for climate change would be an interfaith game of The Biggest Loser where different congregations take members' odometer readings every week and see who can lower their average the most. It starts a conversation, gamifies part of the solution, and puts it at a scale where I think it might actually be approachable.
-The only other idea I have is engineered self-replicating C4 photosynthesizers that can take over the surface area of the ocean in 15 years. I don't know enough bioengineering for that and, despite our proximity to the gulf, I don't think it would make a good church ministry.
+[[emerson:stone-soup:climate-game|Biggest Loser: Odometer Edition]]
 ===Direct Aid===
-[[emerson:stone-soup:aid|Emerson and Aid]]
+[[emerson:stone-soup:aid|Emerson and Aid]] (need to split this)
 =====Evangelism=====
@@ Line 122: / Line 113: @@
 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===
+[[emerson:stone-soup:social-media|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.
-Social media strategy is all about **engagement**.
-==YouTube==
-We need people to engage on YouTube. The Algorithm likes engagement. We should ask our audience to comment with timestamps to bits they found meaningful. (We should also capture those comments with other feedback on the service.)
-Some sermon segments might make good short-form content. We should do that.
-==Discord==
-We need an official Emerson Discord server. For those of us who use it, it's just too damn convenient. Nothing else comes close in terms of usability and utility. But for right now, it should probably be invite-only, because configuring a Discord server can get really complicated, and moderating an unruly server can become a big time sink.
-I'm willing to set one up and do very basic administration as long as the moderation requirements stay very small.
-If there's another church in the Houston UU Churches Network that uses Discord heavily, whoever runs their server might be willing to run one for us as well, or at least let us copy their configuration.
 =====What I am asking (and not asking) of YOU=====
-====What I Need====
-I'm just putting this up top so it doesn't get lost.
-This is a lot of plates to spin. There are some large parts that I simply have to do myself. I can't do it from Cypress.
-I need a place of my own that is close enough to church I can get myself back and forth, preferably via a single bus ride on a high-frequency route. I need enough room that I don't have to have a storage unit anymore. I need enough room to set up two desks, one for audio work.
-I need enough money that I can pay my bills, buy groceries, pay for medications. I'm not that expensive to keep around.
-How it gets structured matters. I have serious trust issues right now. Something needs to be in place that says the church can't change its mind and abandon me.
 [[emerson:stone-soup:block-schedule|Sunday Block Schedule]]