My Wonderings

I’ve become a social media evangelist. Like any good evangelist, I’m passionate about the message. I testify every where I go — to everyone I meet — about the life changing power of new media. Many don’t take my message very seriously. They don’t understand that it will change the way we communicate. Some do ‘get it’ but are invested in keeping the status quo of old media methods. Some don’t understand why we need to change the way we communicate. They don’t see anything broken. They don’t see any problem that needs to be fixed.

So I’m going to explain my own problem with the status quo. “Old” media doesn’t enable easy, strong connections. Ever since I became “officially” connected to the diocese of Texas via my ordination (and prior to that, the process leading up to it,) I have experienced a profoundly alienated condition of being disconnected to “the Church.” In a way that is difficult for me to fully understand, much less to articulate, once I became a ‘professional religious’ person, the locus of “the Church” shifted from the parish level to the diocesan and national levels. As a clergy of the parish I had become an ‘other’ of my local faith community; it wasn’t a location where I could let my hair down, put my feet on the coffee table, share my most difficult struggles and receive support and encouragement from peers.

In this context  I am defining “peers” as those people who have no psychological need to project their faith struggles on me because I am not fulfilling the role of the priest for them (little transference). I am in no way implying different levels of faith development. This is strictly defined in relation to my ‘role’ as a priest. So, peers are those who connect to me primarily as “Sarah,” the person behind the collar. These are the people who don’t hesitate telling an irreverent story in my presence because they don’t “see” a priest. These are the people who don’t delight in telling an irreverent story in my presence just to see the reaction of a priest.

Peers in my faith community are able to listen to my doubts about prayer or the resurrection or the presence of God and hear the voice of a fellow believer and not lose confidence in a spiritual authority. Peers in my faith community are able to listen to my difficulty to like, much less love, certain people in my parish, and hear the voice of a fellow human and not feel betrayed by a pastoral authority. The compelling need for clergy to find a peer faith community has led to the popularity of clergy support groups.

Paradoxically, those who are sufficiently detached from one’s role as a priest that they are capable of providing this supportive connection, are often people with whom it is very difficult to connect. Most clergy don’t live or work in close proximity to one another. And working in the church breeds an institutionalism that becomes all-consuming and challenging for clergy to turn outward, outside the parish where one would have the greatest opportunity to find the connection of their peers. In other words, as important as clergy support is to the spiritual health of the minister, developing and maintaining those relationships is difficult. It takes a lot of effort — of a lot of communication.

Once-a-month clericus gatherings (clergy within a region of the diocese) are not enough. For many, these gatherings are so “forced” and “unnatural” that they feel dread, not comfort at attending. The establishment of mutual trust and bonding that is required for effectively supportive groupings are beyond the current system’s ability. Bi-annual clergy conferences are not enough. There are too many competing agendas during these meetings anyway to set aside time for quality fellowship.

I’ve experienced several powerful support groups where there was mutual trust and bonding. One of the first was as a pilgrim on Cursillo, a unique and intense spiritual 3-day retreat. Other experiences include staffing Cursillo, Happening and Kairos. These weekends are carefully designed to create these bonds. I’ve known this level of community in Clinical Pastoral Education groups as an intern and as a resident and through leading youth mission trips to the Appalachia with Mountain T.O.P. One of strongest experiences I had with support groups was during my 30-day stint at Hazeldon Treatment Center. The common denominator among all these experiences is an environment that deliberately (manipulatively?) forces such stress and pressure on the participants that they are forced to drop their natural defenses and cling to one another regardless of unnatural groupings. It’s a cheater’s method of group dynamics. This is NOT the kind of environment I am desiring. For one thing, I am advocating for connections that take the edge off stress, not add to it. Secondly, these easy-bake groups don’t live long outside the environment. Unless, there is a natural affinity that coincides in the group assignment.

To summarize so far:

• The problem with the status quo of the way we communicate is that it doesn’t enable easy, strong connections.
• I am one clergy person who feels disconnected from the Church.
• Church “work” makes it difficult to connect outside the parish life.
• Half-hearted attempts to enable support groups have been lame and ineffective.
• Manipulating stress environment produces quick but short-term bonds that do not last.

The advent of social media technology provides an opportunity to enable these connections. Groups are now able to form easily, along affinity lines. The Church at the diocesan and national level should facilitate these connections because that is part of the job. Just as the parish priest has a pastoral responsibility to create a community that supports a parishioner’s spiritual growth, so does the bishop and presiding bishop have a pastoral responsibility toward the clergy.

As easy as group-forming has become, I believe that the process should be initiated at the diocesan and national level because so many leaders in the church are unaware of the possibilities that now exist. These applications are so new that there is a learning curve  for non-techies that without a resource might thwart the motivation to adopt new methods.  And finally, the very institutional processes that make maintaining the status quo so sticky require strong leadership to become ‘unstuck.’

Blog Wordle

A friend of mine is a small business owner; she designs and creates jewelry, mostly spiritual. It is more than just a “job” that produces income, it is her vocation. She is an artist and her art/work reflects her spiritual life. She asked me recently if she should start a blog. She is very busy and doesn’t have time for another “hobby” or a burdensome commitment that doesn’t have substantial personal or economic benefit. And she already writes about faith and art so she doesn’t need to blog for the purpose of a spiritual discipline. So, how shall I answer her? First, I would say she needs to spend time listening online to see what others are saying about the art of religious jewelry. Are there any good examples of jewelry artists who are finding blogs as a means toward profit? I suggest she go to http://technorati.com/ the “mother lode” of blog directories.

First, she should check out her own name and company and see if anyone is talking about her. If so, I’d say she has the only reason she needs right there to begin blogging. If people are talking about you, you want to be in that conversation! She should also search for her products and her competitors. Then, she needs to search keywords for her industry (”jewelry,” “artist,” “religious” no quotes) and see if there are other business owners/artist blogging about that niche. She will find an extensive list to search through since Technorati currently searches through 22 million sites and over a billion links. But she can narrow her search by only sorting those with “a lot of authority.” High authority (like a “grade” given by Technorati) means the site is very popular. I didn’t find anything when I searched using these three tags: jewelry artist religious and clicked it to narrow the search to “with a lot of authority” (opportunity, Nancy!) So I took off “religious” and searched “with any authority.” I found three appealing blogs right off the bat, at the very top of the list. They weren’t high on the list because of their authority rank; they were listed on top because these three writers had recently published posts. Tip: fresh content is uber important!

Let’s check them out and see what we think: First up is Make Me, a blog at blog.simonewalsh.com. Immediately, I feel attracted to Simone and her weblog because her latest post is filled with bright colorful pictures of the flowerbed in her front yard and I usually like people who garden. Then I am surprised to see she’s from Australia and I think “Holy Dooley! What’s that sheila from down under doing trying to make a quid right here in my living room? Good onya!” Scanning just a bit more I find out I also like her jewelry, just not as much as my friend’s! Next, I check out http://www.roseofsharonjewelry.com/blog/ because the title of her blog is fantastic. But upon clicking, I’m almost knocked over by how “lavender” everything is and I imagine her to be old and passe  and smell of moth balls. I’m not encouraged when I see she’s talking about broken ankles and sprained body parts in her first post. but I have to smile when I read further on and she tells herself to give up the roller derby. That’s my kind of sense of humor so I decide to scroll down a bit more.  But, oh my(!) … her jewelry, like her lavender and lacey web design is too fussy for my taste. I take my exit and go to my third site The Magpie’s Treasure and once again, I find myself drawn to the artist/business owner because of her most recent post.  The artist, Jodi, tells us she’s listening to an audio book of Sue Monk Kidd on her IPod while she works in her studio and I heart Sue Monk Kidd! Jodi and I have a lot in common, I imagine. Her previous post has a picture of her sketches and she describes a bit of her creative process.

This is very fascinating but I’ve run out of time and I can’t even check out her jewelry. But I see she has lots of other social media accounts so I assume she must be very friendly and amenable. I click on her RSS feed button because I know I won’t remember to go back and check out her blog so I’ll let her RSS bring her blog to my Google Reader every time she updates! Great; good session I’ve imagined having with my friend.  But before she leaves the Technorati site, I’d also she suggest she search my blog: sarahgbennett.com/MyWonderings and click that little heart icon that says favorite it! if for no other reason than out of pity that my blog has such low authority. Favoriting will help increase my authority at Technorati. And, btw, I have substantially helped out the authority status of Simone, Sharon and Jodi because I have given them unreciprocated ”inbound links” in this blog — that’s very valuable currency in the blogosphere! I would so be your BFF if you ever gave me some link love.

Nancy Denmark 14k Ring with Diamond

If I were F2F (that’s ‘face-to-face, Mom!) with my artist friend, we’d probably take a latte break right now because I’m feeling all warm and fuzzy in friendship fever. Then I’d suggest she continue to look for possible competitors friends by doing the same type of searches at http://blogsearch.google.com/ and http://search.twitter.com. While I was surfing to see other “must search” sites, I came across this article in the Search Engine Journal and I started feeling guilty that I have neglected my own blog so much! She should probably check out this list, too; I know I am. Anyway, back to Nancy, that’s my artist friend. Nancy and I met too many years ago to politely admit (I think we staffed a Happening together) but then lost touch when I lost touch with … well, anyway. We recently reconnected on Facebook and have developed a very nice, significant relationship.

If I were in the market for a piece of a religious jewelry, prior to this reconnection, I probably would have headed over to one of the malls in Austin and grabbed something from James Avery. I wouldn’t have even thought of Nancy because I didn’t have her in my brain’s RAM. But now, because of our social networking, I wouldn’t consider going to another jeweler.  Because unlike generic jewelry, religious jewelry is bought to be an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace. To have the opportunity to add an even richer level of  meaning to that investment by actually knowing the artist and knowing what she was thinking while she was creating it — well, that would make the piece even more precious than I could have imagined. And that, at the end of the day, is why I think Nancy should have a blog, for the personal connection; to connect to people online like she has me.

In today’s market, one needs to be online. One needs to have a personal brand and a business brand online and needs to engage in online conversations. I think the extraordinary personal nature that is now so popular with social media sites is due, in part, to society’s knee-jerk reaction to the business ethos of the previous decades. As the Mom and Pop Shops got run out of business, the commercial world became so “professional” and starched. It became distant, impersonal and corporate. Any concern over market aloofness was exacerbated as more and more of the marketplace disappeared into cyberspace. You couldn’t even talk to a person on the phone; it was all automated! But recently, the internet has moved into a second stage of life, called “2.0,” and smart technology tools are enabling easy and comfortable conversations (many in real-time) for those of us who aren’t that technologically smart.  And that is changing expectations. We expect to see the human face of the marketplace because we can! Many, many people are slow to see the tectonic shift that is occurring. And that is to Nancy’s advantage. Because the early adopter gets the worm. Fortunately, there are some who have already adopted this new media way; so there are many people out there on whom to “eavesdrop.”  We need to lurk around these sites. We need to hear what’s being said, and read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest what others are doing so right.

Oh, by the way, don’t tell my mother how rude I was not to introduce Nancy to you properly at the very beginning of our conversation. Everyone, this is Nancy. This is her Facebook Page. Let me get Nancy to tell us about her work and (I copied it off her Facebook Page info):

I am an artist with a primary interest in creating jewelry to help the wearer communicate the love of God. I received a BFA with a specialization in Jewelry and Metalsmithing, from the University of Houston in 1976. I started my own business in 1980 and have since been designing and crafting jewelry as a full time vocation. I mainly work in precious metals, sterling, and 14K gold and often incorporate gemstones. I am a one person business. “I am the company and the company is me!”

In the late 80’s, after hearing a stewardship sermon, I felt called to communicate the love of God through my jewelry work. I understood it to be my responsibility, as a good steward of my artistic gifts, to create a body of work for the Glory of God. Through the years, I have continued to add to that original body of work, which is now over 60 designs strong. My ministry is sharing the love and glory of God through my design work, offering the wearer a “love story” to visibly wear and verbally share.

I also make many other things besides fine jewelry. I create jewelry beads, wall and hand crosses with polymer clay. One of my newer creative expressions is knitting scarves and belts (not yet on the website) (sarah’s edit: because it got uploaded a few days ago!). I consider my fine jewelry making my 40 hour work week and the rest is fun art therapy to keep my creative juices flowing and fresh. All my extra avenues of creative expression seem to be an endless play and experimentation with color and texture.

Don’t you just love her? I knew you would. And I’m so glad you got to know her today! Come back anytime and meet some other friends of mine. Oh, and by the way, see that RSS feed button up at the top right? Click it and I’ll bring my blog to your reader in case you forget to check in for a while. If you don’t know what a reader is, I’ll tell you in another post. In the meantime, see that email form right below the RSS feed? Fill out your email and I’ll send you my blog updates right to your inbox! Love chatting with you all and I really enjoyed the latte!

An extraordinary thing is happening on the internet: real conversations are taking place where people are listening to other people’s ideas, learning about different perspectives, and sharing their unique knowledge. It seems to me that those of us in the Church could benefit greatly from being a part of this online conversation. But for many of us, especially those of us in our 40s and beyond, feel intimidated and stressed by all this new media stuff. It’s feels as if “cyberspace” has become the proverbial “outer space.” Where users adopt wacky personas and speak in otherwordly language. Recently I came across this beautiful graphic by Brian Solis and loved the way it helped me begin to make sense of the social media tools de jour and the ways in which they are enabling these important conversations to take place.

• Social Bookmarks: You know how you used to receive tons of newspaper and magazine clippings from your mother of interesting tidbits she stumbled across in her print media readings? You know how you get tons of “You gotta see this” type emails with stupid animal antics or sappy memories of the golden days? Well, these tools do something similar. Only much faster, more cheaply and reaching a much wider audience. Also, they are “permissive” connections, meaning you only read them if you choose to go see what online info Aunt Matilda has recently marked as an interesting tidbit. These aspects of  fast, cheap, large, and permissive are true among all these categories.
  • Delicious
  • Diigo
  • StumbleUpon
• Crowdsourced Content: You know how much of what people send you as “You Gotta See This” is stupid or offensive or not worth spending your time clicking and uploading? You know how you sometimes feel like you’ve got “information overload”? Well, people use these tools and filter through the junk, by voting on whether or not the content is worthy and you can choose to only look at those things that a LOT of people, and that people that like the things you like, deem valuable.
  • Digg
  • Yahoo Buzz
  • Mixx
  • Hubdub
  • Reddit
  • Newsvine
• Blogs/Conversations: You know how you see something cool on the internet and you wonder what other people think about it? You know how you think about leaving a comment but you know you’ll never go back to see if anyone else left a comment or if anyone responded to your comment? These tools will let you know when someone has joined your online conversation. You don’t have to keep going back to the site and checking it yourself.
  • Google Alerts
  • Blogpulse
  • Radian6 (paid)
  • BuzzLogic (paid)
  • Ask.com
  • Google Blog Search
  • Technorati
• Blog Communities: You know how you can get caught up on all the scoop just waiting in the carpool line? You know how you can find out what people are talking about just by dropping by the Sunday morning coffee hour? You know the water cooler? These tools enable you to stay in touch with the latest happenings.
  • Blogged.com
  • MyBlogLog
  • BlogCatalog
  • Bloglines
  • CoComment
  • Tangler
• Micromedia: You know how sometimes you want to say to your more long-winded friends, “Just give me the short version”? Well, that’s what these tools do.
  • FriendFeed
  • Tumblr
  • Seesmic
  • Jaiku
  • Plurk
  • Utterli
  • Pinger
  • Jott
  • Kwiry
  • Twitxr
• Specific to Twitter: You know how everybody’s talking about Twitter this and Twitter that and you just can’t see the point of all the twittertwatter (pronounce this to rhyme with chitterchatter, please, thank you!)? These tools help you make sense of all the noise.
  • Tweetscan
  • Hashtags.org
  • Twemes
  • TwitterLocal
• Social Networks: You know how hard it is to keep up with all your friends from high school, college, your home town, your previous jobs? These tools keep you in the social loop!
  • MySpace
  • Bebo
  • Facebook
• Niche Networks: You know how some people think everyone else is just as interested as they are in the TV series “Lost”? Well, tell them to take all their trivial nonsense over to another niche of the world, a group devoted to the secret connections of Lost, or the legal profession, or the birthers.
  • Ning
  • Plaxo
  • LinkedIn
  • CrowdVine
• Location: You know when you’re out-of-town and you want to know where the locals hang out or what is the best route around town? Yep.
  • TripIT
  • Dopplr
  • BrightKite
  • TwitterLocal
• Live Video and Audio: You know how you’d love to watch T.V. or listen to a radio program with comments from the ‘Peanut Gallery’? Apparently, there really is a Peanut Gallery, and they use these tools.
  • Ustream
  • Justin.tv
  • Veodia
  • BlogTV
  • Kyte
  • Qik
  • BlogTalkRadio
• Customer Service Networks: You know how sometimes you don’t trust the “official” reviews or recommendations because you think there might be some hidden agenda? And how you just want somebody real and normal like you (well, anyway) to give you the skinny? Meet fellow consumers through these tools, then.
  • YahooGroups
  • GoogleGroups
  • GetSatisfaction
  • Yelp
• Video: You know how you’ve always wanted to be on T.V. or the radio? No? Well, if you did, you could, for free!
  • YouTube
  • Metacafe
  • Blip
  • Viddler
• Video Aggregation: You know how you’re working on a report and you get totally stumped on one bullet point? Well, that’s where I am with this one.
  • Magnify.net
• Pictures: You know how you know you could find just one decent picture of you from the reunion weekend if only you could  look through the photographs of every picture taken at the event? Or you know how you always forget to bring your camera? Someone could always have your back with these tools.
  • Flickr
  • Zooomr
  • Smugmug
• Documents: You know how you think everyone should read your dissertation or how you need a copy, immediately, of the white paper you wrote for the conference but forgot to bring with you? There’s a heavenly library up there in the clouds just waiting to be resourced!
  • ThinkFree Docs
  • Scribd
  • Docstoc

Stay tuned, right here, for examples of how some faith communities (or other types) are using these tools to great benefit both within their communities and reaching out to others. And if you think you might forget to come back and check my updates, try using the RSS feed. And if you “dig” this article, DiggIT!