It was at our many Marketing meeting this past week that something unique happened.
As you may know by now, your dedicated Marketing Team meets a couple of times a month to keep the ideas coming and the juices flowing in this ultra important window of time as we prepare to let the world (beginning with our immediate neighborhood) know who and where we are.
It was during the Founders Grove plant exchange discussion when my marketing teammates made a tentative request that is rarely made from congregant to minister.
For context, one should appreciate that less than one week before a Sunday service, a minister’s head is usually pretty far into the makings (or at least cognitive and spiritual rumblings) of a reflection for the upcoming service.
The mosaic of songs and readings that will be pieced seamlessly with the overarching message (or so it appears, hopefully) is beginning to take shape.
In my little ministerial fiefdom, the elements had taken good shape for the upcoming May 10th Mother’s Day’s service.
But our Marketeers weren’t thinking about mothering. They were thinking about marketing. Here’s how the conversation went:
-The annual plant exchange on the 16th is something we definitely want to crash (i.e., have a presence at).
-If we do we have to use our new tagline…NCC: Church Reimagined. (Uncommonly Christian, Profoundly Progressive out, Church Reimagined in).
-If we use our new Church Reimagined tagline, we have to be ready to speak to what it means.
-Yeah, we need an elevator speech. What’s Reimagined mean, anyway?
-We should get input from the congregation about what it means. (Kind of like the Life cereal ad…”We should ask Mikey!”)
– How should we do that? There’s only one service (today’s service) between now and then.
And that’s when it happened. I remember it as if in slow motion, 5 of us sitting around the coffee-time table, when somebody (it was Elizabeth) turned to me and said,
“Hey Lori, how about if you ditch whatever you were planning to talk about this Sunday, and talk about how it is that we’re a re-imagined kind of church?”
And then somebody else (Sandy Polley) said, “Yeah, that wouldn’t be a big deal to change, would it?”
You know those deer-in-the-headlights moments when you’re momentarily frozen by something unexpected hurled at you? That was basically it… “Uh…”
They noted this rare speechless moment, and graciously backed away, considering instead an after-service, share-your-ideas-on-a-post it- note idea.
By the time we adjourned that evening I’m sure I was the only one still thinking about their audacious but astute suggestion.
I mean, it would be Mother’s Day, for goodness sake. And we’d be talking about quippy snippy taglines?
And then it occurred to me…If Mother’s Day can be about birthing and the infusion and support of new life (which of course it is) and can be done by anyone, as we heard in our reading, then this tagline topic is absolutely relevant.
Friends, in the last 18 months we have been in the process of rebirth.
We’ve always known what we stood for, what’s in our DNA. But putting down roots here and determining where we belong denominationally has been nothing short of a metamorphosis. Huge stuff.
Shortly after the move, when we were beginning to set our sights on the next phase – marketing – Karen Rousey said something I’ve quoted before and will again.
She said, “Before I thought our moving and answering the affiliation question was the goal. Now I see that those things were just our preps for the real job at hand.”
The ‘real job at hand’ being establishment in the community, in this community.
It’s like cleaning house and setting the table for a dinner party. The bottom line isn’t the preps, it’s the party, the connections beyond the four walls of your house.
Now that we have readied ourselves, it’s time to send out the invitations.
How do we get people interested in our arrival/our birth in this neighborhood? How do we render ourselves an entity that would pique someone’s attention? Who, in fact, are we what makes us worthy of awakening someone’s curiosity?
Some of you may know that our theme for May is Awakening Curiosity.
I’m going to pause here to tell you about an epiphany I had.
After the Marketing Meeting, when I decided to go with their bold idea of ditching Sunday service Plan A, I had started writing this reflection, and I had gotten up to this point where we are now.
I had written: There’s one entity (the wider community, and more specifically, Founders Grove) being exposed to and stretching and learning, and there’s another entity (our church) about whom the exposure and learning is being done.
For the longest time it has seemed imperative that our neighborhood learns about us. A one-way vision – you learn about us.
“Hey, yo, Founders Grove, we’re here, we’re awesome, and you need to know how awesome we are.”
When I’ve pondered us as being a Church Reimagined tagline, the ‘reimagined’ is how we’re theologically unique…a distinctive and wonderful blend of Christianity and Unitarianism.
And then there was an a-ha! moment about ‘’reimagined’ being more than that.
To back up a moment, the Marketing Team immediately liked the idea of this word reimagined.
Suzie, with her educator’s mind, put words to it when she said it calls to our imagination, where mightn’t this church take you…your imagination is the limit!
I want you to take note of something. Do you see in your bulletin, did you notice in the slide that the title of today’s service, is Enticing Their Curiosity.
If you’re wanting to get to know someone, and you decide to have a dinner party, so you clean and set up, and send invitations, is your best approach making the crux of the event about you?
Of course, that’s part of it…you are part of it. But for true connection to occur, there needs to be a two-way avenue.
Early on that’s primarily where my head was – in the admin aspects of our launch.
- Do we have one big event or do we spread it out over more time with smaller things.
- Should we get yet another batch of t-shirts made with the new tagline?
- Do we want the letters of our new tagline in all caps to look stronger and have more of a presence in our logo.
- Branding, branding, branding…get our name out there!
There’s nothing wrong with that. In the world of advertising there’s merit in it.
But the world of advertising exists largely with one goal…self promotion. It’s external. It’s, well, worldly.
A community of faith with this game plan alone will not flourish, because that isn’t our endgame.
You might think, “Right! We need to let people know how much we love God.”
Yes, we do. But, all due respect to our beloved Creator, every church does that.
And “We’re here, God’s there, and we love him” isn’t really us. We’re more, “God manifests in all of creation, including in you. I see God in you, I serve God in you, I love God through you.
It reminds me of the recent morning after all the tornados when I went to Sandy Polley’s house to check on her just around the block from here. I ended up chatting also with some of her neighbors, inquiring if they were ok.
That apparently left an impression – how good it was that a minister was in their midst, having curiosity and concern about them.
There are three very important words embedded into that phrase… a minister in their midst, having curiosity and concern about them.
Ministering, curiosity, them.
It’s as much about us ministering to them, our curiosity being awakened about them as it is their curiosity about us.
That’s part of the meaning behind Church Reimagined for me.
There are numerous reasons, attributes of our church that renders this descriptor fitting for us.
As it continues to roll around in my head and heart, my imagining and reimagining brings me to a vision of our church – this space – being a hub in this neighborhood.
A go-to place, a community center, where elements of neighborhood life beyond Sunday morning services happen.
What that looks like can organically unfold…maybe have the plant exchange here, Girl Scouts, potlucks, game nights.
To borrow from Abe Lincoln… ours could be a church / a space of the neighborhood, by the neighborhood, for the neighborhood.
These are my thoughts about what Church Reimagined could be.
We’re unique in the way we ‘do’ religion, yes. But it could go beyond that.
What makes us unique? If we’re at an event like the Founders Grove annual plant exchange next Saturday (because we will be!), what will we concisely and accurately say about who we are?
What will we say that awakens their curiosity about us, and reflects our genuine curiosity about them?
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