UPDATE 16 April 2018: this article has been altered to remove names of specific congregations, links to their websites, and screenshots of those websites. I have done this for several reasons and I will explain my why in a separate forthcoming article.
Forgive me for being confused. Here in Missouri, there's snow in the forecast for much of the state.
But there's a different kind of confusion about Easter that I want to address: that of Easter service times on church websites.
There's probably no other day of the year when churches work so hard (Christmas being a close second). Rectors, altar guilds, sextons, choirs, organists (ahem!), flower guilds, volunteers who spruce up the grounds and the interior, the list goes on.
And there's no other day that people are looking for church service times more desperately than they are on the night before Easter.
There has been much advice and conversation about this online lately. And I thought it was high time that I weigh in as well.
So, here's what I'm really talking about here: having the Easter service times immediately visible on the homepage of the website on the night before Easter without clicking a single link.
I'm not talking about having the service times available somewhere else on the website (under a "Worship" page or, even worse, a "Calendar" page). Easter is too big a deal for that. It needs to be listed on the front page.
I'm not talking about a "worship every Sunday" at such and such a time. Even if the services on Easter Sunday are at the same time they were last week, the front page of your website needs to make this explicit.
Any seed of doubt in a website visitor's mind on Easter Eve is too much. Bottom line: the front page of your church's website needs to be absolutely crystal clear about Easter service times.
Let's use the Episcopal Diocese of Missouri as a case study. I visited every church website in the diocese (list) between 4:30 and 5:00 p.m. on Holy Saturday (the day before Easter).
Of the 42 churches in the diocese:
- Only 13 churches had their service times listed clearly on the front page of their website.
- 23 churches had an "Every Sunday" service times listed on the front page of their website, but no mention of Easter (or Holy Week for that matter)
- 6 churches had no mention of service times whatsoever on their homepage.
A few observations:
One of these churches listed "Sunday, April 1" and the worship time, but made no mention of Easter.
Another church (it happens to be rather familiar to me), had obviously incomplete listings of Easter Day services on the homepage.
One church had Easter service times on a slide in a homepage slideshow, but not the first slide. I had already scrolled past it before the service times came up. I found it later.
Some churches just left me with questions. For example, is [redacted] really doing Morning Prayer on Easter?
[Redacted] did actually meet the criteria of having the info immediately visible on the front page, but I have to say at first glance I looked right past it. It is in a very small font on the upper left-hand corner of the site.
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One of the most distressing things I saw was [redacted] where there were conflicting service times. First, I saw a "regular" Sunday service time listing, and then, farther down the page, I saw a special Easter service time listing. The Easter Day service times are not visible without scrolling down (in most cases). I think one of the worst experiences a visitor could have would be seeing Sunday service time information on your website, but still arriving at the wrong time for Easter. This must be avoided at all costs.
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One website helpfully had a monthly calendar on display, but today is March 31, and Easter is next month. So they didn't make the cut either.
But by far the worst example I saw was [redacted]. I remain unclear if this is an Episcopal congregation or a winery.
What conclusions can we draw from this? In this diocese, fewer than a third of churches are following what I and many others consider to be a best practice for church websites in the time leading up to Easter.
We can and must do better.
In a lot of cases the problem could be solved by creating an article or event with a headline such as "Easter services: 8:00 and 10:30 a.m.", and then filling out whatever details are needed within the article itself. I think this is so much more preferable to "Easter Services" and then a "details" button, or the dreaded "click here".
You might think I'm overblowing this (though probably not if you've read to the end of this article), but consider for a moment how carefully we prepare Holy Week service bulletins and other materials. Can church staffs really not take the five minutes required to get this right?
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
A new article in Christianity Today combines two of my big interests: Evensong and the internet.
Thousands of people are turning out to hear free choral music around Britain, many for the first time.The ancient church music has been around for centuries – but is getting a new audience due to a new website set up to enable people to find choral evensong services at cathedrals, colleges and churches anywhere in Britain and Ireland.
Gledhill, Ruth. "Why are thousands of people who've never set foot in church before suddenly showing up for choral evensong?". Christianity Today, 17 August 2017.
When talking to a group of organists who had registered for an American Guild of Organists (AGO) regional convention, I borrowed some language from the mission of the AGO itself to explain why we should engage with social media: to share knowledge and inspire passion.
The mission of the American Guild of Organists is to foster a thriving community of musicians who share their knowledge and inspire passion for the organ.
One of the ways in which I think organists owe it to themselves to live out the mission of this organization is to not keep our knowledge a secret.
We all have unique interests and experiences, and one of the joys of getting together at conventions like this is sharing our stories with each other.
But while we might be able to attend a conference only a few days a year, the web affords us an opportunity to have these conversations year round.
Furthermore, we are all passionate about the organ. It does our organization and our profession no good to keep this passion under a bushel. We should unashamedly demonstrate our passion by letting our social media mirror the things we are excited about.
I always consider Halloween to be peak organ evangelism time. It's sort of like, Christmas and the church. Here, let me do one of those SAT analogy thingies:
Halloween : organ :: Christmas : Church
People who would never otherwise think about the organ are Googling words like Bach, organ, Toccata, D minor, and BWV 565. Some of them might even consider going to an organ recital for the first time.
And while interest in the instrument is always at a peak at this time of year, there is a certain level of curiosity about the organ year-round.
Organists would do well to help people find us and the organ online year-round because someone is always looking.
If your early fascination with the organ was anything like mine, you were just as fascinated with the instrument itself as with the music written for it (if not more so!).
So one of the things I think is of great value to share through social media is our instruments themselves. Photos of the console, the pipe chambers, the blowers. Videos of the stop action, the swell shades. Recordings of the individual stops themselves (in fact, one of my so far unrealized projects is an "interactive stop list" where you can click each stop name to hear a short sample of that rank of pipes).
There are so many things that are worth getting out, and so many people live more and more of their lives online.
If you're an organist who is not already on the web and social media, why aren't you? If you are already on social media, do you think you share enough about the organ?
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
It's webcasting season. In case you didn't already know it, we at Sinden.org are huge fans of listening to liturgy, church music, and organ music online.
Trinity College, Cambridge has just released a new tool to search all of their archival webcasts. All of this is free.
St. John's, Cambridge, perhaps our favorite webcast destination, has just started their choral year, and new music is appearing there. Creating an account allows free access to their archival material (very worthwhile).
The BBC has a very long-running weekly Evensong broadcast which you can hear online. Each broadcast is up for about a week, so time is of the essence!
And a welcome newcomer to the webcasting game is King's College, Cambridge. These webcasts are gussied up with spoken introductions by choristers, the chaplian, or sometimes Stephen Cleobury himself. Organ recitals are also mixed in.
We also eagerly anticipate the return of webcast Evensongs by New College, Oxford.
And if these aren't enough for you or you're not feeling quite so liturgical at the moment, don't forget the pure church music webcast of the fine radio program With Heart and Voice and the wonderful radio program dedicated to the music of the organ, Pipedreams.
And last, but most assuredly not least, you can hear no fewer than five services webcast weekly (Tuesday Evensong, Wednesday Evensong, Thursday Evensong, Sunday Eucharist, Sunday Evensong) by St. Thomas, New York. A truly outstanding gift of prayer and praise available online.
Happy listening!
Labels: church music, King's College (Cambridge), liturgy, New College (Oxford), organ music, St John's (Cambridge), St Thomas (New York), Trinity College (Cambridge), web, webcasting
Many All Episcopalians use The Lectionary Page, which is an online liturgical calendar, and many Episcopal church musicians own a copy of The Episcopal Musician's Handbook.
But until now there has not been any resource that lists the birthdays of composers and hymn writers of interest to Episcopal Church Musicians.
Behold: the Episcopal Musicians Calendar. Along with principal feasts and feasts of Our Lord, and other major feasts of course.
Submissions welcome.
Bookmark this calendar here: sinden.org/calendar
Labels: church music, liturgy, web
It's Pentecost Eve. Let the wild rumpus start!
This video may need to become an annual tradition.
You can now access the Music at St. Paul's podcast through the iTunes Music Store
http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/music-at-st.-pauls-church/id504731826
If you ever need to find it fast, just search the iTunes Music Store for "Music at St. Paul's", and it should pop up under the podcasts.
Confused by all the podcast talk? Just listen directly to the file here: Episode 1: Ash Wednesday
Why not create a list of the best anthems in the Anglican Choral Tradition?
Why not get everyone we know to help?
I've had fun setting this up and watching the results come in on list.ly, which is really simple to use. You can even sign in with your Facebook or Twitter account.
As of this writing Gibbons (pictured right) "Almighty and everlasting God" is winning.
Is your favorite anthem listed? Vote for it! Don't see it? Add it!
Looking forward to seeing what the "final" results will be.
Labels: Anglicanism, church music, web
Long-term planners, rejoice!
Kelly Puckett has posted her 2011 Liturgical Calendar
Alarmingly, there are nine Sundays after Epiphany.
Labels: lectionary, web
Twitter has all kinds of implications for Anglican liturgies. At least those that permit mobile phones.
The Instructed Eucharist
Put a laptop on the deacon's prie-dieu and they can educate catechumens about the liturgy. It's not like they're really doing much else.
At the gospel procession, for instance:
We seek God in both word and sacrament. This gospel procession honors Christ himself, present in these words. "Glory to you, Lord Christ!"
Yes, I suppose the deacon would have to send that before heading out to read the gospel.
The Interactive Sermon
@AnglicanPreacher are you almost finished?
@RestlessLayperson are you almost asleep?
The Emphasized Rubric
Congregation not in compliance? Send a friendly reminder to the flock.
¶The people *will* kneel, gosh darn it!
The Guided Procession
Hang a left on Main Street. Watch out for the donkey's most recent "offering."
From the Organ Bench
The organist can offer even more input and friendly advice about the liturgy.
Happy Easter everyone! The congregational singing of 196 was really sub-par. Let's do better on 199.
He or she can also solicit assistance.
I need a page turner for the Postlude (Dance No. 4 by Philip Glass). Anyone game?
Announcements
Announcements can be set to tweet automatically right after church. Obviously you don't want to distract people during the liturgy.
Lutheran theologian Marva Dawn's "Low Information-Action Ratio" is being picked up by scientists. The ramifications are exactly what she predicted:
New findings show that the streams of information provided by social networking sites are too fast for the brain's "moral compass" to process and could harm young people's emotional development."Scientists warn of rapid -fire media dangers" CNN 14 April 2009.
Labels: Marva Dawn, science and nature, theology, web
Can you figure this tweet out?
I've always wanted to go to Australia.
Labels: randomness, web
Christ Church, New Haven, Conn.
Today is a travel day.
We're headed to New Haven, Connecticut to take in an afternoon rehearsal of the Choir of St. John's College, Cambridge, England. They'll also be performing a concert in New Haven at 8:00 p.m. tonight.
Join us at 4:00 p.m. for some intensive Twittering of that rehearsal. You can follow the Twitter stream here by periodically refreshing sinden.org/blog, or you can follow us at twitter / sinden.
We are excited about hearing St. John's in person because they are one of the greatest choirs in the world. But we've also been excited to follow them online this academic year. The choir's website offers new service to listen to every week. These weekly webcasts (presented in a very useful interface, by the way) are accompanied by reflections by members of the choir on the music and the experience of singing it.
The whole thing is brilliant and a model how to make the heritage of Anglican choral music freely available.
More choirs should do this.
Labels: church music, St John's (Cambridge), transportation, web
For those of you who read Sinden.org/blog on a news reader, please note that the physical site now sports a scrolling Great Litany at the top of the page.
Just part of our Lenten observance.
Labels: web
Sinden.org began five years ago today.
We've recently moved this portion Sinden.org/blog, and there will surely be other changes in the next five years.
Feel free to offer us your congratulations and let us know your thoughts!
Labels: web
Mr. Lucas, I owe you an apology.
I began (I think) the custom of placing succession boxes in the Wikipedia articles of prominent church musicians. I started with some of the Cambridge college chapels, I worked on the succession for St. Thomas in New York, and I think I may have done a few for cathedrals in London, but I haven't done much since.
And even though we met about a year ago, I failed to add a succession box to your page.
I apologize.
That being said, however, I'm glad to see that you, or someone with the username Lucasorg took the liberty of adding the box on 27 September of last year.
I hope that other church musicians will follow Lucasorg's lead and help in the effort to make this information available to everyone.
Labels: web
At the risk of being too self-involved, we at Sinden.org would like to have an end-of-the-year discussion about the value of the website.
And it boils down to your response to this question: is Sinden.org useful to you? is it just occasionally entertaining?
Or is it just amateurish and embarrassing? The black sheep of the organ music family?
How could we improve? What are we already doing well?
How would you feel about a more collaborative effort between church musicians and other religious professionals?
Your feedback is greatly appreciated any and all of this.
Labels: web
©MMXVII Sinden.org: a site for fun and prophet