How long is your Sunday service? Does it matter?

Anglicans Online has this:

Of late, we've noticed a new trend on church signboards and websites; some now indicate the time at which a service begins and the time at which it ends. A few examples: 'Most of the time the service lasts about 57 minutes'. 'Our service lasts 75 minutes'; 'Our worship takes about 40 minutes'. Others have firm start and stop times.

It is understandable that people should like to know when they'll be able to breakfast after communion or join friends for brunch. Others are keen to use what remains of Sunday to get on with some form of recreation: walking in the park or on the beach, finishing or starting a livre du jour, helping children with an essay due soon, or taking part in one of that most hallowed Sunday custom, the early afternoon post-church-and-paper nap. A clue about when a service will finish, as well as when it will start, can be undeniably helpful.

And yet we prefer to see just the starting times of services on signboards and websites. The time we give to Divine Worship is too important to be circumscribed by calculations after the manner of railway departures and arrivals. In this all-too-human world, a sermon inevitably goes longer or shorter than planned; a hymn takes longer to sing than one thought; a baby wails to the point of delaying a baptism for several minutes. The variables in worship are at least as great as those in automobile traffic.

For our part, we're unable to treat time spent in bookshops, museums, churchyards, or fleamarkets as anything but open-ended. In what Kathleen Norris has called 'quotidian mysteries', we enter a kind of supra-chronological time that can't be measured — much less planned — on a clock. This richly textured, expanding, refreshing time is magnified in worship beyond even the loveliness of occasions outside church walls when we browse and meander without recourse to our watches.

What do you think? Is it good or bad to post service lengths? I for one think it's helpful to give first-time guests an idea of what they're in for. That said, I have little patience when people complain that "church was five minutes too long."

Grants available

I just got word of several grants that are available to congregations and clergy. I hope this is useful.

Louisville Institute Offers Sabbatical Grant Program for Pastoral Leaders

Through the Sabbatical Grant for Pastoral Leaders, the Louisville Institute offers pastoral leaders a chance to step out and step back from the pace and pressures of ministry through its Sabbatical Grant for Pastoral Leaders program. The program is designed to provide clergy with the opportunity for personal renewal, study, and reflection. The Louisville Institute will award up to forty grants for eight-week ($10,000) and twelve-week ($15,000) sabbaticals. Recipients must be released from all pastoral duties during the entire grant period. Recipients are free to use the grant award at their discretion. Previous grantees have used their awards for the purchase of books, research material and equipment, conference and seminary expenses, salary replacement, travel, etc. There are no residency or travel requirements or expectations, except for attendance at the preparation consultation in Louisville February 18-20, 2008. All expenses for that consultation are covered by the institute, over and above the grant award. Recipients of a 2007 Sabbatical Grant for Pastoral Leaders shall take this sabbatical between March 1, 2008 and August 31, 2009. The program is open to Christian clergy, church staff members, denominational staff, and others employed in recognized positions of pastoral leadership, ordained and lay. Seminary administrators and faculty members are not eligible for this grant program. In past years, most successful applicants have at least five years of pastoral experience, and anticipate five or more years of active ministry after the sabbatical. The program is open to pastoral leaders in the United States and Canada. Visit the Louisville Institute Web site for complete program and application information. Deadline: September 17, 2007


Fund for Theological Education Invites Congregations to Apply for Grants

The Fund for Theological Education is a national advocate for excellence and diversity in Christian ministry and theological scholarship. To help congregations identify and nurture the next generation of leaders for the church, the fund is offering competitive grants for grassroots programs that cultivate a sense of Christian vocation and the call to ministry among youth.

The grants are awarded through the fund’s Calling Congregations initiative, a national ecumenical effort to encourage and equip churches to play a leading role in the vocational discernment of young men and women and to increase the number of gifted young people considering ordained ministry as a profession. The Lilly Endowment, Inc. funds the initiative.

Grants are made to congregations and are intended to support the "culture of call" within congregations. However, grants may include support for activities that foster partnerships between the congregation and campus ministries, theological schools, camps, denominational bodies, and other congregations in strengthening the congregation’s capacity to nurture vocation and the call to ministry.

FTE will award $200,000 in total grants over three years, beginning in 2007. Grants will range from $5,000 to $12,000 each.

Program information and application forms are available at the fund's Web site. Deadline: October 15, 2007


Wolcott Family Foundation Offers Support for Social Change and Environmental Stewardship

The Wolcott Family Foundation focuses its funding in the areas of social change and environmental stewardship, with emphasis on supporting grassroots organizations for which a small grant can make a real contribution.

Priority is given to organizations that empower individuals and communities to organize for social change; seek to strengthen civil liberties and civil rights issues; build community development that seeks to break the cycle of poverty, create economic opportunity, and build effective leadership in distressed communities; and demonstrate linkages and interdependence of ecosystems and economics with win-win solutions and collaborative approaches.

Consideration will be given to projects that emphasize environmental preservation, advocacy, and community involvement aimed at root causes of societal problems.

Eligible groups are tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organizations. Organizations based in Colorado are given preference. The foundation does not fund groups with annual budgets over $350,000. Requests will be considered for either general support or specific project support. Grants are for one year and will generally range from $1,000 to $7,500 each. Visit the foundation's Web site for complete program information.

A wing, a prayer, and a new airline?

I've been saying for some time now that we need a diocesan helicopter. You know, to save us from traffic angst before "important" meetings. Plus, think how the local news would love it when a purple helicopter landed in your church parking lot and our bishop emerged for the visitation. It's not only cool, it's evangelistic.

Turns out I wasn't thinking big enough. Pope Benedict, in between re-writing the afterlife and restoring Latin, has decided to launch an airline. I am not making this up.

Maybe we need an Anglican airline. Heathrow and Gatwick are both fairly miserable places to fly into. Maybe we could have direct flights from the US to Canterbury or Lindisfarne. Naturally, the flight would feature good food, prayer books in the seatback pockets, and red doors on the planes. The biggest shift would be rethinking our seating preference. In airplanes, you want to sit as close to the front as possible. Do you think Episcopalians could make that shift?

Now is the perfect time. Our Presiding Bishop is just the person to lead us in this new direction.

Religion on campus?

Over at The Lead, I saw a link to this, from the Social Science Research Council:

Recent studies of college students' attitudes toward religion suggest that the academy is no longer the bastion of secularism it was once assumed to be. And these studies further reveal that the spiritual landscape on today's college campuses is virtually unrecognizable from what we've seen in the past. Evangelicalism--often in the form of extra-denominational or parachurch campus groups--has eclipsed mainstream Protestantism. Catholicism and Judaism, too, are thriving, as are other faiths.

To help make sense of these changes, the SSRC offers this online guide, which was derived from a series of essays it commissioned from leading authorities in the field of religion and higher education.

Read the online guide.

A better church website in eight steps

Over on one of my favorite blogs, a posting promises this:

These days you do not need to be an internet ‘whizz’ kid to make a website. In order to demonstrate how easy it is to make a website for a church (or any other purpose) I have made one for an imaginary church in about half an hour (perhaps an hour - but I dilly-dallied along the way) and it is here: http://churchwebsite.wordpress.com/. ... You can of course make many improvements to this by spending a little more time. There are I’m sure lots of other good ways to make a website, but for someone starting from scratch I think wordpress.com is a great option.

Read the whole post for the eight steps to make a better site.

The Gospel according to St. Arbuck

Here is a news brief about what churches could learn from "St. Arbuck's"

As he drives to church, the Rev. Greg Asimakoupoulos always notices the Sunday crowd gathered at one of his favorite sanctuaries. ...

But the key to the success of St. Arbucks, he said, is that these establishments have become what researchers refer to as "third places" for people to gather or hide -- a safe zone between home and office. For generations, bars, diners, barbershops and a host of other locations have played similar roles. This kind of hospitality has become rare in this rushed world.

Regulars at St. Arbucks are greeted by name and the baristas may have their favorite drink --Asimakoupoulos is a grande-drip purist -- ready when they reach the counter. Many modern churches have grown so large that people cannot know the names of many people with whom they are praying.

It's also crucial that these coffee sanctuaries are open to all kinds of people. At the Starbucks a short walk from his church, the pastor, people watching over the top of his laptop screen, has even seen believers reading their Bibles.

Here's another take on what we church people can learn from Starbuck's. At very least, I would hope churches could start to serve a decent cup o' java at coffee hour.

iChurch -- boosting your attendance

I saw this over on Gizmodo:

...Church by the Glades will be handing out $15 iTunes vouchers to attendees of their iThemed services. The [offer] will run for three weekends, but it looks like you have just missed the first. In return you will have to complete a connection card...

The seminar series titled, "i: Successful Living in a Self Absorbed World," sounds rather interesting... Yesterday was the first night of the service and to celebrate one lucky audience member walked home with an iPhone!

Now there's a creative way to boost attendance. Think $15 per person is too much to get someone in church? Think we shouldn't pay to get people into churches? What if the alternative is paying a few hundred dollars to heat a mostly empty church? I hope more churches will try similarly creative evangelism strategies, and I hope they'll let us all know how they work.

Faith when life gets hard

You may have heard about tragedy suffered by the Petit family recently in Cheshire, CT. Their house was broken into, and three of four family members (mom and two daughters) were murdered. Only the father escaped.

Tragedy like that does all sorts of things to people. I can't even imagine what it would be like. One thing is certain: faith makes an enormous difference in trying times. Today the Petit family issued a statement. It begins:

We are a family of faith. No one ever wants their faith tested, particularly by events such as these. When there is no ability to control your life events and you are required to deal with such great tragedy and loss, however, your faith is all the more necessary.

Although we will no longer have Jennifer, Hayley and Michaela physically present with us, and we do now and we will continue to experience an extraordinary sense of loss because of that, we firmly believe that their spirits and all of the goodness that defined their characters and beautiful personas will remain with us forever. We are committed to preserving those spirits and fulfilling their lives of promise, so tragically cut short.

Then the statement enters really extraordinary territory. Demonstrating a magnanimous nature rarely found in our culture, the family says this:

Many ask what they can do.

Care about others as a regular part of your lives, not just at times of tragedy. The feelings of connectedness and the outpouring of affection for us and our family members represent the best of human emotions, for which we are extremely grateful.

Actively support causes that exist solely for the improvement of people's lives in need.

Doing these things will be our way of saying that these senseless acts of violence did not stop the wonderful, giving spirits of our beloved family members.

The sense of generosity and compassion they manifest in this challenging time is inspiring. Imagine if our world were like that -- seeking compassion and not revenge, mercy and not justice. I'm sure the Petit family must at times wish horrible things upon their attackers (that's human nature), but their deeper, public wishes are something we should all notice.

As we live in times that are increasingly shrill, filled with calls for revenge, justice, and fear, we need to take notice of rare moments of boundless love when it shines forth.

Reggae joins hip-hop and U2

From the Anglican Communion News Service:

Songs by late reggae legends Bob Marley and Peter Tosh, both devout Rastafarians, will be included in a new collection of Anglican church hymnals in Jamaica.

Marley's ‘One Love’ and Tosh's ‘Psalm 27’ will be the first reggae tunes to appear in songbooks alongside traditional worship music on the island that gave birth to reggae, said church leaders preparing a new collection of hymns.

The Revd Ernle Gordon, a church spokesman, said Friday that members of the Anglican Church of Jamaica were enthusiastic about including the reggae musicians' music in the hymnals, despite their sometimes vocal opposition to Christianity.

Many will scoff at the inclusion of popular music in an official hymnal. From my perspective, this is just continuing a venerable tradition. The music of the Reformation was rooted in popular culture, and some of the best "church" music ever since has had origins or deep connections with the world outside church.

As some will point out, there is a real danger of losing the church's identity if we "sell out" to wider culture. However, there is an even greater danger of losing our very existence if we do not engage the culture. From the Biblical period to the present, it's been a challenge: how are we related to our culture -- and how are we not related to our culture. Let's celebrate another attempt to figure this out, this time involving some great music from Jamaica.

Kathleen Kennedy Townsend on Stephen Colbert's show

Last night, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, author of Failing America's Faithful, was on the Colbert Report. If you haven't seen the show, Stephen Colbert satirizes the yelling talking heads that clog our television news channels.

Anyway, the interview is humorous, and they make some good points about Christianity and contemporary issues. (You might see an ad before the video plays.)