Naptastic

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 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:

• Initiatives, which go to committees
• Policy recommendations, which go to the board
• Discussion items

Efforts fall broadly into three categories:

1. Ministries / internal processes
2. Missionary / Activist / Outward-facing initiatives
3. Evangelism efforts

These are the three legs of the stool. Evangelism is three things:

1. Be a church people want to join
2. Be connected enough with the community that people find their way in by diffusion
3. 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.

• 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 need to grapple with the bougie, the out-of-touch, the icky…

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.

(okay, that's a good first draft. Now tie it together better.)

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.

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.

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.

Also, we're too focused on money. But that's another topic.

The first thing about service is this: It's what's needed, not what you want.

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.

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.

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?

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.

So my first proposal is not a policy or initiative, but two definitions for us to use (finish this sentence)

• 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)

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.

Arts Programs

Facilities Makeover (Don't worry, I don't want to do much.)

Sunday Morning Makever

Digital Infrastructure Overhaul (Don't worry. You've seen me tap-dance across a minefield before. I can manage this.)

Social Action Surveys

Social Action Sundays (Not what it sounds like, but if you're imagining what I'm imagining… not the worst idea ever.)

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 and Aid

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 strategy is all about engagement.

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.

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.

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.

Sunday Block Schedule

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