Green Bay – Carnes Family Web

Meet Andrew Mortonson

My guest blogger, today, is Andrew Mortonson. He is a member of First United Methodist Church in Green Bay, Wisconsin and is active at the Wesley Foundation at the University of Illinois in Urbana/Champaign (UIUC) where he will (in August) finish his Masters degree in Aerospace Engineering. …And I am really proud of Andrew’s most recent announcement: He has already gotten a job with Rolls-Royce as an Engineering Associate after graduation!

Beginning to See God at Work

Today’s Scripture: Luke 24:45-49

There was always a plan – a reason, a goal for tomorrow. I had always known the next step in life and was always fully prepared to take it. I had a stable family, good education, and a loving church home. I knew where I would go to college since before I started high school, and there was never really any question I would get in. I was blessed in many ways as a child.

I grew up in the church, and for a large part, my faith was always laid out before me. Unlike many of the other kids my age at church, I learned and grew in my faith and continued being an active participant after confirmation. Being an active Christian wasn’t necessarily the cool thing to do, but in a Christian community like Green Bay, you never are really challenged in your faith. I often found myself in more discussions with other denominations, especially Catholics.

When I went to college, I moved into a fraternity, and most of my influences were anything but Godly. I continued to succeed in school, but I felt incomplete and often alone. The summer after my freshman year, people from my home church asked me if I had found a new church to serve at school. When I admitted I hadn’t, they often encouraged me too look, or gave suggestions. I agreed that I would look at the Wesley foundation on campus, partly just to keep people off my back. I fortunately found a new home and gained many new supportive friends.

For the next two years, I felt like I knew where I belonged. While I occasionally struggled with friends and classes, I knew that God was providing for me. However, in my senior year, that feeling began to fade. I thought I had lost God’s call; I wasn’t really sure what my future path should be. I graduated college with Honors, but like far too many people that year, I had no job, and returned to live at home. Once again, I felt very much alone. Even though I was living with my family and had many loving people around me, I was completely lost.

I can understand what the Disciples must have felt around the crucifixion. Only a week before, they entered with Jesus triumphantly into Jerusalem. Going to serve with Jesus was not easy, but I’m sure after a while, they all felt like they were where they belonged. Only a few days later, they were lost, and felt very much alone.

My story did not turn around in just three days, yet I know that even in those times, God was working in my life. I began to get involved in the praise band at my home church, and the other members often helped remind me that I was not alone. But the real point where I began to see God working was when one of the women in the church came up to me and started asking me details about my life. She knew that I had been looking for a job, and she wanted to know what kind of job, and what I was interested in. Then she told me that she needed to know all of this so she could properly pray for me. She prayed with me, and hugged me and promised me that her prayer group would continue to keep me in her prayers.

It was about this time that things started to turn around. I applied to grad school and began to attend that fall. Through the two years that I have been studying, I only recently was assured funding for the remainder of my program, but I trusted wholly in God. Within a few months of returning to school, I began dating the woman who became my fiancée, and now within the last week, I was offered a job after graduation. Almost exactly the position I had wanted three years earlier.

After Jesus arose on Easter, the Disciples went on to spread the gospel throughout the world. But they needed fellowship and support from other believers, and to fully place their trust in Jesus. In the same way, I could not be where I am today without the prayers of family and friends and the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Even more, I know that I can impact the lives of others simply through words of prayer and support. At our lowest points, the promise of God’s perfect grace, through the resurrection, allows us to put all of our faith in Him. In Luke 24, Jesus appeared before the disciples who had gathered after the crucifixion.

“Then he opened their minds so they could understand the Scriptures. He told them, ‘This is what is written: The Messiah will suffer and rise from the dead on the third day, and repentance for the forgiveness of sins will be preached in his name to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things. I am going to send you what my Father has promised; but stay in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high.’” Luke 24:45-49 (NIV)

**top image found at: http://imlivinginadream.wordpress.com/2011/06/13/on-101-goals/
**image of Andrew Mortonson found on his Facebook.

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.