community – Carnes Family Web

14Dec201717Aug2018

Braving the Wilderness | Book Recommendation

Scott Carnes Finding My Way agreeing, belonging, book, BRAVING, Braving the Wilderness, Brene Brown, community, disagreeing, True Belonging

In one episode of the sitcom Modern Family we discover Phil & Claire Dunphy in the middle of a big disagreement. Throughout the episode Phil is trying to figure out what he did wrong to make her angry. As he bumbles through the episode we find that Phil has made all kinds of missteps…but none of them are the offense for which he is paying dearly. Then we make the discovery that Phil came the day before after a lunch with an ex-girlfriend. His ex suggested the wedge salad and he tried it. He couldn’t get over the wedge salad. He had gone on-and-on with Claire about how much he LOVES wedge salads and can’t believe that he’d never had one before.

Claire is angry not over any of the obvious mistakes Phil has made. Through a series of flashbacks we see that Claire had recommended wedge salads time-and-time again. Claire is angry because he never listens to her and doesn’t seem to trust her suggestions. My wife and I often refer to the Modern Family wedge salad when we act in the same way.

Brene Brown’s book, Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone, is a wedge salad. My wife talked incessantly about this book and applied Brown’s teachings to everything. Perhaps out of stubbornness– maybe out of laziness– I ignored her glowing affirmations until I finally picked up the book last week. It is remarkable. She weaves together government, politics, personal struggles and the growing sense of personal loneliness and civic divisions. She offers us a way to reconceptualize our place in our family, social group, culture, religion, and nation. It is an empowering book that I hope all of my congregation, family and friends will consider.

03Apr201228Jan2015

What Would Jesus Tweet?

Scott Carnes Communicating Christ authenticity, church, community, experience, facebook, faith, god, Jesus, online, spirituality, twitter, website

Image found on HuffPost

I’m going to steal some words from Leonard Sweet today: It’s not a question of whether Jesus would have tweeted or not. It’s a question of what Jesus would tweet.

You see, Jesus engaged in the community of the day and, I believe, continues to engage. It’s not a question of whether God would use twitter. God is using Twitter and Facebook and Google…the church may not be, but God is present and active in community and our community is ever-shifting to the internet.

Today we have to ask ourselves a lot of questions about how we are going to communicate as a church. We seem to think, these days, that the goal is to get our church on the internet and that will be ‘good enough.’ Maybe a website or a facebook page will get more people to come to us…where the real church is (behind a big stone wall). No. Not good enough. We have to take our experiences of Christ into our online communities if we are to live out our faith authentically.

Do we remind people not just to “like” the church (which, btw, is waaayyy luke-warm) with our bulletin or do we ask people to check-in to show their friends they were at church. Do we put an informational announcement out on our facebook page or do we RT (re-tweet) the pastor or church friend so that our followers become her or his followers?

What the “Googler” generation has grown up in (and what us older people may never catch onto) is a culture about relationships. It is not just about what we say, but, just as importantly, how we say it. The church needs to delve into the relationship-building connections of the web. We need to become more social and less institutional…and we need to find authentic ways to share God’s love with the people of this world.

16Apr201028Jan2015

Dynamic, Emotive Content

Scott Carnes Communicating Christ bulletin, calendar, Communication, community, emotive, face-to-face, Green Bay, mainstream, Newsletter, relational, united methodist

For the past two weeks I’ve spent a lot of time considering communications and church. You see, as a church we have typical ways of communicating: Weekly bulletin, monthly newsletter, sunday morning announcements, and let us not forget those pesky phone calls and emails from the pastor, secretary or volunteer coordinator. Now, of course we have many new ways of communicating with our congregations such as e-news emails, but if you look at the types of communication I have listed so far, I have focused on informational communication.

The newsletter or bulletin are perfect examples of informational communication. Green Bay First United Methodist Church has a beautiful example of a newsletter. I mean, the newsletter itself is perfection. It is professionally edited and printed with color and photos and graphics. Yet no matter how often it is sent out, no matter how much information is contained in it’s 12 or 16 pages, there are always people who chronically say, “Why didn’t I know about [church event of choice goes here]?” How many church communicators have had this very problem? Now before I try to diagnose this issue let me step back and say that the newsletter is very effective for those people who receive it and read through the whole thing from cover to cover. (and this is not exclusively the action of the elderly despite common misconceptions)

Well, for one thing, everyone wants to stuff a newsletter or bulletin full of their committee’s or groups news items not to mention local community announcements. Well, this isn’t a bad thing. The newsletter is meant to be a clearing house for information, like a newspaper. Yet, Newspapers are barely surviving right now. Is it perhaps time to recognize that (generally speaking) a new generation receive their news differently than the past? The problem is not how much information is in the newsletter (sometimes, it is actually an issue of prioritizing news: but this is not the subject of this blog) but simply the way in which people are now trained to receive news and information.

For me, I have iGoogle setup so that when I bring up my browser, I have my favorite calendars (my personal, school and church calendars) which show up to the left of the screen, weather in evanston, pittsfield, and st. louis to the right and top news stories in the center. As I get into blogging I’m also beginning to setup a list of favorite blogs and youtube channels. You see, I don’t have to sift through 12 pages of newsprint with information of no interest in order to find the things that are important to me. I can type words into a search engine or have dynamic content streamed right into my browser.

If the church is interested in communicating effectively we need to look carefully at how people already communicate outside of the church. How they calendar; what their texting and facebooking habits are; and how they ‘surf the web.’ What we will find is that church websites that are generally static, have proprietary calendars and are information driven are already antiquated. So what would be effective?

The most memorable and effective communication we do is face-to-face communication. Whether it is a sermon, a story or a simple greeting in the hallway we are communicating information, sure. But we are, more importantly, communicating relationally. We are sharing stories and it is not just one-way. This is what Communicating Christ, when done effectively, will look like. Our websites should have dynamic content streaming in from parishioner’s blogs and youtube channels. We would tell stories and express testimony as our primary goal on the website of the church with concise and clear information with those stories. We will utilize mainstream communication avenues to provide content so that those interested in our programs can pipe our blogs, calendars, and videos into their existing programs and websites and do away with the need for people to sift through long articles and complicated websites for the information that pertains to them.

It is time for our churches to rethink communication and not in emulation of other churches, but we must look at our own communities and ascertain how they already communicate, clarify what conversations our church community should be engaging, and find creative ways for these conversations to take place in ways and through forums which is accessible for our community.