Naptastic

This is a living document. What follows is a description of a proposed structure, with a logic model of how I expect this structure to accomplish these goals.

FUMC's vision statement is “Turning Closed Doors Into Open Tables Where Everyone Belongs”

What are the roles that worship team plays in fulfilling that vision? What is our mandate? What does it look like for that mandate to be fulfilled completely?

Nap's first thoughts:

• The Open Table is where we…
• …are with God…
• …we express our faith…
• …we profess our beliefs…
• …we amplify…
• God's Word
• …The Holy Spirit is strongly felt

(Does Nap have a plan for everything here? [also yes]; See “Logic Model” below)

1. Increase regular attendance
2. Become robust against individuals taking over (bullies)
3. Scale up our worship program
4. Become robust against “problematic” pastors

Here is the disclosure and warning right up-front: This is going to require more and longer meetings, espcially at first. Please feel free to push back on that, but be prepared to explain why a specific meeting wasn't necessary.

Many meetings are possible to avoid by using technology to work asynchronously. We do well with that via email. There are other technologies we can employ, if we choose to, and it will move more work out of meetings. However, in my experience, God's promise to be with us when we are gathered in His name makes a big difference in whether you actually get anything done or not. So if the entire committee isn't meeting, and a specific task isn't solitary by nature, it should be done by more than one person.

The worship team will have two divisions: a continuing division, and a project division. People in the continuing division stay on the worship team for a long time. People in the project division, on the other hand, join the committee for the duration of their project, and then their obligations are over until they start in on another project.

The continuing division consists of these people:

• Committee chair
• Recorder, bordering on stenographer
• Pastor (probably can't be delegated)
• Music Director or equivalent (can't be delegated, full stop.)
• Lay Leader
• Event Coordinator (can be delegated)
• A member of the A/V and/or tech team (can be delegated)
• (?) Whoever keeps the calendar of liturgists, acolytes, ushers, greeters, etc…

The scope of their mandate consists of:

• Figuring out what niche our church can grow into successfully
• Ensuring content is always consistent with this being God's house
• Keeping the rotation
• Intervening if necessary if it seems like things are going off the rails

That's all. The only circumstance when the continuing division should make specific decisions about a service are if a project can't, doesn't, or needs to be overruled for content reasons.

That requires a 2/3 vote of the continuing division.

The project division is multiple smaller teams. A small group will be responsible for one or more Sundays and carry them from “I have an idea” through completing the service and a post-service breakdown of what went well and how we might improve.

One such group might be responsible for an ordinary Sunday, a special Sunday, multiple Sundays in a row (e.g., a series for Lent, or Advent), or a set of services happening over the course of a week or weekend.

Each project group needs to have:

• One or two people who has a clear vision and goals. They have “ultimate decision making power” for their project, other than being checked by the continuing committee.
• Other participants in the program as they are added.
• sorry, my brain just ran out of juice. Going to lie down. BBL.

All project groups that currently have services “in process” should send, at least, their project director. Most of each group's time is going to be spent listening to the continuing division talk to other project groups, but that's how we keep the plate spinning fast enough that there's continuity (not tradition) based in the congregation, rather than coming from the top down.

In short, the structure will be revolutionary instead of patriarchal.

The scope of a project group's duties is:

• Schedule service(s), freezes, rehearsals, and a retrospective
• Add people
• Come up with reasons to invite people, and see that the services are getting plugged appropriately.

The rest of the congregation has an implicit obligation to invite people to church if they think the answer is likely to be “yes”. We should cultivate a habit of plugging our next worship service as part of the sending forth.

A logic model is (my words) a mechanistic explanation of how I expect the structure described above to fulfill on the stated goals.

It is my opinion that, if we are going to “make line go up”, we have only have one path forward: we need to find our niche and grow into it like kudzu. To find the niche, we are going to have to try some things. But “try new things” is not something you do with Sunday morning worship, so we must work toward:

• More services
• Different times of day
• Different days of the week*
• A wider variety of flavors

…and we use these services to find out what people will show up for, when, for how long, etc.

No one will ever come to FUMC for a Contemporary Christian Rock (CCR) concert. That is not our niche, and we can't compete with churches in the areat that are already good at CCR. The Cathedrals have us beat on high church (literally) every day of the week. Et cetera. All of the visible niches are basically full; we have to do things no one else is doing, and for which our culture has an appetite, and make that our flavor.

We already excel at organ, piano, and orchestral music. Our choral program needs help; I have ideas there but they are outside the scope of this document. Of the churches that do better than us in the genres of music we play, none of them are “come as you are” like we are. Almost all of them are more conservative. I don't think any of them are preaching anything close to liberation theology leaving off for a bit

• Whenever “ultimate decision making power” exists, it's in different hands.
• We delegate, we trust, we communicate, and we support.

• Planning will be timely whether the pastor is timely about it or not.
• We will continue to grow into a niche that has room for us. Apologies for the bluntness, but if a pastor is “more conservative”, we need to basically shut them out of messaging decisions. They can be as conservative as they want at Centenary, but for FUMC, turning right is death.

* (No evening program if there's a game at the Delta Center, or during Movie Night season)