It was my great privilege to drop in at the Episcopal Diocese of Missouri Annual Communications Conference this afternoon.
While I was preparing my presentation, I happened to watch the latest Apple Keynote which was held at Apple's new Steve Jobs Theater. The new theater was dedicated with a video tribute to Jobs. In that video there is a recording of Jobs himself:
... one of the ways that I believe people express their appreciation to the rest of humanity is to make something wonderful and put it out there. And you never meet the people, you never shake their hands, you never hear their story or tell yours. But somehow in the act of making something with a great deal of care and love, something's transmitted there. And it's a way of expressing to the rest of our species, our deep appreciation. So we need to be true to who we are. And remember what's really important to us.
I read this at the close of my presentation today. Because I like what he says. But more than that: for those of us who work in the church, I think we can actually outdo Jobs here.
I have so much admiration for my colleagues who are bona fide church communicators. I sort of lurk on the Episcopal Communicators Facebook page, but I still don't feel like I can consider myself a real communicator. But I enjoy learning about and trying my hand at this job of communicating the messages of our church and the Church.
The communicators I have known take great pride in their work and especially in making "something wonderful." Maybe it's that month's newsletter, or the weekly email, or a new pew card, or even a brand new parish website. Could it even be a podcast? Whatever it is, the act of creation is a Christian act. We are co-creators with God.
In this way I think communicators have a lot in common with church musicians: we both strive to create "something wonderful."
But as Christian creators, our thinking is at once more expansive and more specific than Jobs's.
Jobs was creating products for an immense market. In our parish contexts, the scale is a bit more manageable, and we do hear from many the people with whom we communicate.
We also want to hear their stories and get their stories and songs out there – isn't the web a marvelous platform for this?
Hymn reference: speaking of stores and song, I just started humming "This is my story, this is my song" from the hymn "Blessed assurance". See Hymn 184 in Lift Every Voice and Sing II.
And we certainly want to tell our story as the Church.
For more along these lines, I highly recommend Madeleine L'Engle's Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art.
Labels: Apple, evangelism, social media, web
My co-presenter Mary Stutz and I created a handout which you can still access at bit.ly/SocMedOrgan. It's a Google Doc so that it can be continuously accessed by you and updated by us.
In my remarks I tried to get at something that concerns me about all this social media stuff: it doesn't last.
This is by design. Now there are even "stories" on several platforms that are only available for 24 hours, and then they disappear.
Social media is meant to be very much "in the moment", but this kind of brief shelf-life isn't entirely worth our valuable time, I would argue.
Besides, organists tend to like stuff that lasts. We play a lot of music from the eighteenth century, and some of us have had the good fortune to play organs that are older than that.
So here is my advice to organists (and others) for a digital life that has some longevity and lasting value.
- Have a basis in a website (possibly a blog)
Your footprint on the web should be permanent, and it should be as accessible as possible. If the goal is, in fact, to be social, you don't want a "login barrier" between you and your potential audience.
Content on Facebook and Twitter are not easily indexed by Google; public web pages are. If you want others to find your content, tomorrow, next week, next year, make sure that you post it to a blog (or another website) first. Then use your social media channels to point to that content.
You can always send out a new Facebook post pointing back to an essay that you wrote a year ago. Jonathan Aigner of the popular Ponder Anew blog is really good at this. His articles repeatedly spike in popularity as they make the rounds and go "viral" time and time again, sometimes years after the initial post.
Tangent: I couldn't help but notice that Aigner's latest post is about how the new anthem from First Baptist Church, Dallas, "Make America Great Again" is now licensed by CCLI, further proof that that organization is concerned with copyright but not Christianity. But I digress.
- Use social media, but make it visible on the web
Don't keep your social media presence a secret! If you use various social media channels, especially as an organization, make them visible on your website.
There's a famous English choir that does this well. King's College Cambridge embeds their Facebook page on their choir website, and their music list Twitter feed on their music list page (see links in the bit.ly/SocMedOrgan handout).
Two personal examples: 1) when I first signed up for Twitter in 2006, I thought that its key value would be embedding it on my website so that there would be something current (and timestamped) right there on my home page. Twitter and I have changed a lot in the interim, but I still keep Twitter embedded on this blog.
2) For the past two years or so I've been using SoundCloud to upload audio recordings from St. Peter's, St. Louis. I want to widen the audience beyond SoundCloud users, so we have embedded a SoundCloud widget on the church's music page along with our Twitter timeline.
How do you do this? Each particular social media service will provide you with a block of code that you can cut and paste into your website. It's that easy. For example, here's the info on how to embed a Twitter timeline.
- Automate and Integrate
My favorite social media service is Buffer. If you don't know about it, check it out. It's especially useful for managing multiple accounts.
Buffer allows you to distribute posts over specific times that you schedule. You can place general posts in your "buffer, " and each one can be sent out sequentially, or you can schedule specific posts to be sent at specific times. I think I probably use both features about equally.
If I find an interesting news story or blog post that I want to share on my own Facebook page and/or Twitter account, I'll put it in my buffer, and it will be sent out in the order that it was added.
I suggested that organists could even use the scheduling feature to "narrate" their organ playing during a service or recital on Twitter. In fact, I was tweeting about every five minutes during my presentation Tuesday morning through the magic of Buffer.
Another nifty service (which you just need to check out so I don't have to try to explain it) is IFTTT (If this, then that).
Finally, don't overlook basic integration features offered by various social media channels. If you upload a file to SoundCloud, for example, take advantage of the option to share that new upload automatically on Facebook and Twitter.
- Engage
I think that automation is probably the tool that a lot of organists need to get into social media a bit more. They might think "I don't have time to Tweet every day." That's fine, but if you work for a congregation, you're probably used to a particular weekly "product", so why not start with one tweet a week? And why not load all of those weekly Tweets into Buffer at one sitting and then forget about it for a while?
This is a great way to get started.
But a word of caution: if you only automate, and then utterly neglect your social media channels it's much more "media" than "social media". Check in occasionally and be friendly. Thank people for engaging with your content. Share other content that you find interesting.
Do you have to check your Twitter account every minute? No.
But is it nice to make new connections online? Yes.
This is the fun part.
- Be yourself, and have fun!
Be authentic. Use your own voice.
And don't assume that the social media landscape is fixed.
New innovations to existing services are rolling out all the time. And live video, while not exactly new, has all kinds of potential for musicians.
New services will probably roll out immediately after you finish reading this. Try them! Sign up! Explore! Be creative. You might be the first to discover a really neat application for a new service.
I'd love to hear what you are doing with social media. You can comment on this blog post below (I'm using Blogger, by the way). Or if you got here from Facebook or Twitter, you can find me there too.
What did I miss? What other ways can organists be using social media to be awesome on the web?
Labels: AGO, organists, social media, web
Fair warning: there's no order to these thoughts on both sides of the issue, and I haven't provided any transitions between them
Cellphones, Blackberries, and other electronic devices are strictly forbidden in the church during services.The Church Cats welcome you!
I've taken the above from the website of Church of the Advent, Boston for use in a discussion of parishioner and clergy use of social media during Christian liturgical services.
It is fairly obvious from the notice on the website (which is duplicated in service leaflets) that you would not be welcome to live-tweet the liturgy at Advent, Boston, though the welcome from the Church Cats (whom you will likely see on Sunday morning) should make it clear that this isn't a lifeless, humorless place. What gives?
Apparently, this place has a clear identity, and they're not afraid of expressing who they are as a community - at least in terms of digital devices and feline friends. In this church, one would not pull out one's iPhone and tweet without at least some expectation that one would be asked to stop.
So we're left with an encounter with Schrödinger's liturgical cats. The cats, interestingly enough, are unaffected (so we assume) by the active use of social media during the liturgy.
It's the humans in the church who are, presumably, affected by social media, either directly by their use of it, or indirectly by its use by others. And the humans at Advent, Boston (unless the cats are web savvy) have publicized that these social-media-capable devices are not to be used.
And this, I think, in America and elsewhere is a pretty commonly held social principle. People are responsible for their own behavior when they enter into the public arena -- especially those places that are open to the public but are owned and operated by particular entities. Even under the First Amendment you can't shout "fire" in a crowded movie theater.
Likewise, people are responsible for their own liturgical behavior when they enter a church. There's a lot of leeway here, and a lot of it comes from the Book of Common Prayer. You can stand or kneel. The congregation all might be doing it one way, but if it's more important for you to have your own treasured posture, go for it. This is mildly distracting, but it's not a big deal. A parishioner might wonder for a moment, "Did Mr. Smith forget to kneel? Why, yes, he's adopting that other posture provided for in the rubric. On with the Postcommunion prayer, I suppose."
And this is all well and good --until your behavior becomes an ongoing distraction.
As in: "I enjoyed the Sequence Hymn as much as anyone, but Mrs. Cadswallop has been humming it all during the sermon"
or: "I understand it's hot in the church this summer, but I would say 'no shirt, no shoes, no service at the Altar rail'", etc.
These aren't so much behaviors that are out of place in church; they would be out of place in the public library or your local McDonalds.
Cats are fine, but sheep tend to clutter up the church. Vergers were originally placed at the head of the aisle to clear the sheep out of the way of the processions. Now, mind you, he was not charged with clearing the sheep entirely out of the church; they just seem to be an established part of the way things were.
If historically, we've stood around (pews are a modern invention) for sheep infested liturgies, why can't we sit while our neighbor tweets?
Marva Dawn, in her seminal works on Christian worship (Reaching Out Without Dumbing Down, and A Royal "Waste" of Time), decries what she sees as the "technicization of intimacy", and I think that employing social media while attending a liturgy is probably falls under this category.
The liturgical moment that comes to the fore here is the passing of the Peace. This one moment in the liturgy demands that we be present to our neighbors, and if we place a screen between us or if we fail to engage at all we are diminishing the liturgy for both parties.
How do you receive the host with a Blackberry in one hand?
Tweet: "I'm just about to eat Jesus". What is the point of this?
And with the liturgy as a whole, are you not technicizing your experience of something unapologetically untechnical? We use candles, not lightbulbs. We use incense, not air freshener. We use the spoken word, not webpages. If our liturgy can survive sheep in church we can survive smartphones.
Don't pretend like this is hypothetical. I hear cell phones interrupt the liturgy every week, especially at funerals.
There's another thing that I need to address here: the fallacious argument that I/you/he/she needs to "pay attention" to worship in order to "get something out of it".
The sacraments are valid whether you pay attention or not. The sacraments are valid whether you attend or not. The sacraments are valid whether you believe in their efficacy or not.
We don't attend liturgy to "get something out of it" (see Dawn's title "'Waste' of Time" above); we attend liturgy to give God something out of us. So maybe the real issue is not that our smartphones rob us of a full experience of liturgy (which is not "for" us anyway) but that they prevent God from getting his full due.
Worship is not for us! We are not worshipping ourselves! If our smartphones should keep us from the worship that the very nature of God -- the subject and object of our worship -- elicits the very stones of the earth would cry out in praise and adoration.
In this scheme of things, you don't matter. Except that you do, of course. Your attention doesn't matter, and yet, that's exactly what the Holy Spirit is using. Lex orandi, lex credendi. How you pray shapes what you believe. How you tweet shapes what you surf.
There are larger issues about how the internet is changing the way we think -- but I don't even remember what I was going to write about that just now anyway.
Sermons are another matter altogether ("the very stones would preach . . . "? I don't think so). Like organ voluntaries, no one listens while they're happening and they're mostly not worth remembering. There will be new ones next week anyway.
If you want to tweet during the sermon (or the organ voluntary), I say, heck, go for it. I'm speaking now to people in the pews. I don't think sermon delivery would be enhanced by someone in the pulpit trying to tweet simultaneously and/or process incoming appropriately-hashtagged tweets. (And, speaking from experience, I know that I cannot check Facebook and play the organ at the same time.) In fact, the clergy and the laity should be excited that you, the congregant, are choosing to include as part of your piety that day the further dissemination of God's word.
But read, mark and inwardly digest the prayer for "Before Worship" that asks God to "Deliver us when we draw near to thee, from coldness of heart and wanderings of mind".
At the Lenten Preaching service at the church where I work, I would often tweet zingers from the celebrity preachers whose sermons were delivered daily Monday through Friday at noon. These gifted homilists deserved larger congregations who, I believe, would have benefited from their words. Without the ability to transmit all their words, I felt inspired to push out just a few from time to time. I should also note that I was in the gallery of the church, for sermon-focused liturgy that included neither Holy Eucharist nor Holy Baptism.
We could go a step further. If you are wearing a vestment, you should not tweet. In fact, your phone should be off. As a leader in the liturgy, I believe that you should be prayerfully focused on the task at hand. If you have trained to be a leader in the liturgy, which you have because you are vested for the occasion, you should not be doing something else. Choir, I'm looking in your direction.
And a step further yet, what about vesting a tweeter's guild? Seated with the acolytes in a 21st century prie-dieu, their duty in the service is to broadcast the words and action of that liturgy.
As you can see, I wrote a lengthy article because I did not have time to write a short one, but perhaps I might better organize my thoughts thusly:
- How is tweeting defined as a liturgical behavior?
- How should technology's role in our lives be adapted to/excluded from liturgy?
- How does a community go about defining its position on smartphones in the pews?
This reflection sparked by the good work at #ChSocM (Church Social Media) Tweetchat
Labels: Advent (Boston), liturgy, social media
Give the Braves this much: They have a creative organist. When Howard comes to the plate, the organist sometimes plays the theme from The Office, the Scranton-based NBC sitcom that has a character by the same name. For Raul Ibanez, he plays Werewolves of London because there's a point in the Warren Zevon song when the artist screams something that sounds like "Rauuuulll.""Phillies Extra" Philadelphia Enquirere 21 Apr 2010
The comments suggest that the organist also takes request by Twitter.
This seems like not a bad idea . . .
Labels: organ music, social media, sports
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