One of my part-time jobs in high school was working for a Christian book and office supply store (yes, it was both), so this post about the unreal safety of Christian books brought a smile to my face. Though he doesn’t mention the End Times shelf at the Christian bookstore, which might be the most dangerous place on earth this side of the pages of World War Z.

I still have fond memories of talking faith, books and Bible with the bookstore staff.  I’m still grateful for the advice the old, burned out former Baptist preacher who ran the Bible department gave me.  He said, “Son, if you’re gonna go into the ministry, you need to find yourself a hobby like woodworking, something where you finish things.  Because in the ministry, you never finish anything.”

And I’ve almost finished leveling up my now level 46 dark/cold heroic corruptor in City of Heroes to level 50.  I don’t think that’s quite what he had in mind, but it doesn’t have to be woodworking to count, right?

This post has been moved to Times & Seasons. I’ll be removing it entirely soon.

September’s UU Blog Salon topic is the nature of evil.  In full awareness that I’m in danger of violating Godwin’s Law, here’s my response:

After December 1941 (if not before) it was a good thing to kill Nazis. If it was December 1941 again, it would be good to kill Nazis again. Picketing and petitions would not have stopped the Holocaust at that point (if they ever would have). Any take on evil that doesn’t deal with the Holocaust, and real ways to end it, is bunk.

Killing Nazi zombies, however, is another matter entirely.

I’ve written about Facebook before, but this time I have a bit of a cautionary tale.

We consolidated our congregation’s Facebook Page and Group into a new Page not too long ago. A volunteer stepped up to make it happen and reinvited everyone to come over to the new Page, and we now have more fans on our new Page than we did for the old. Photos were moved over, and we added our blog feed so that posts would automatically show up on our Facebook Page, where they can be “liked” and commented on.

Then the feed stopped working. Fine. I deleted the feed and readded it, and the new posts appeared.

Came back a week later. New posts not showing up again. Fine. Deleted and readded again.

Came back another week later. New posts not showing up yet again. Fine. Deleted the feed, but now it won’t let me add it back in, giving me a nondescript error message. No more time to work on it, so I put it off until the next week.

The next week I tried again. No dice. Same nondescript error message. I google it and find that others are having the same problem, with no solution from Facebook. Wait, there’s one search result pointing to a WordPress plugin that will serve as a workaround. I go to the plugin’s page to see that the plugin is broken in the current version of WordPress. Oh well.

I go back the next day to try again. Maybe it usually works, and I’m just winning the downtime lottery. Still doesn’t work. I search the Facebook help forum to find others having the same problem and finding no solution. I fill out the help ticket.

The help ticket sends me a robo-response asking for a screenshot. A screenshot of what? Of a feed not importing to my page? How am I supposed to take a screenshot of nothing happening? I ignore the message. Maybe they’ll actually read my support ticket and get back to me.

Next day, no response. So I fill out the ticket again. This time I respond to the robo-response, explaining that the feed isn’t importing and listing the six different iterations of the feed’s address that I’ve tried to import.

Which brings us to today. No response still. At least now when I try to add the feed, it give me a preview of the items it’s trying to add. But then it gives me a new nondescript error message when I confirm I want to add the feed. At least this time the error message apologizes for the error. I press the “Go back” link in the error message to try again. Rinse. Repeat, repeat, repeat. Now our Page won’t even load. I check other websites to make sure it’s not the connection. Nope, it’s Facebook. And still no feed re-added.

I tell my tale of techno-woe to point out that Facebook does not work for us—Facebook works for advertisers. It provides a “Religious Organization” category for its Pages so it can sell ads to churchfolk, not because it likes our congregations.

There are some good things to be done with a congregational Facebook Page. But we need to remember that Facebook is a for-profit corporation that makes money off our personal information. Let’s keep one eye on Facebook at all times and make sure we don’t move functions of our congregations’ lives over to Facebook that we can’t also run off Facebook, or do without. Facebook isn’t our friend, and we shouldn’t depend on it.

Thinking of taking this online course on media ethics called “Program or Be Programmed” with Douglas Rushkoff.  Looks like some good reading and good discussion.  Neato graphic summarizing his approach here.

Thank god for the honesty of “Broken Buddha.”  No need for “Love. Every. Minute.” pietism, no matter what god-talk you dress it up in.  It’s just spiritual violence with a smile.

I came across a PDF put out by the Corporation for National & Community Service called “The New Volunteer Workforce.”  It’s a good, quick take on the current conventional wisdom on nonprofit volunteer management.  It’s worth the read.

But it seems to make several assumptions that I question, some of which I’m running into elsewhere in “volunteer management literature”:

1. 66% annual retention of volunteers is a failure.
2. White collar professionals should stay “in class” when volunteering; they should not do work that doesn’t make use of their education and training.  (So much for church choirs.)
3. The volunteerism of white collar professionals is more valuable than the volunteerism of other kinds of workers.
4. If a dollar value is not formally attached to each volunteer’s efforts, organizations do not value their volunteers.
5. Volunteer managers are not professional in their work unless they have formal education in volunteer management.
6. Volunteer management must be professionalized in order to be successful.
7. Generation X is not a promising pool of potential volunteers compared to Boomers and Millennials.
8. Even though the article acknowledges that more volunteers choose to serve in religious communities more than in any other type of organization, it uses a professionalized nonprofit management model as the only lens, not asking why religious volunteerism is so much more successful than its own model and modeling itself after that.

My responses:

1. Volunteer retention can almost always be improved, and sometimes should be, but at some point increasing volunteer retention starts to cost more than its costs to find new volunteers.  I’d like to that point acknowledged, and also see something about how to know when you’re at that point and what to do about it.  There’s no point in trying to squeeze blood out of a turnip.
2. I won’t even address the clear white collarism here.  I’ll just point out that some white collar professionals want nothing to do with their professional skill set when they volunteer.  And whatever you do for a living, it can be good do something completely different when you volunteer.
3. More white collarism here.  Why isn’t there any talk of finding interesting volunteer roles for, say, retail workers that makes use of the skill sets they use all week at work?
4. I can see how it could be helpful to know this dollar amount, but it’s certainly not necessary.
5. Must we create masters degrees for everything?  I’m sure it’s often helpful to send a couple of staff to a weekend volunteer management training conference, but it’s also possible that someone with no formal training in volunteer management would know their stuff so well that those sorts of conferences would be useless for them.  When people started teaching volunteer management for the first time, none of them had any formal training in it, and yet they felt they knew enough about it to teach others.
6. See response #5.
7. Obvious ageism.
8. I’m not saying religious communities can’t do a better job with volunteers; they often can.  But they’re obviously doing something right.  Let’s start with appreciation of what they’re already doing well instead of starting with the assumption that they don’t know what they’re doing and need to adopt the professionalized volunteer management model wholesale in order to succeed.

It’s great when a white collar professional who is good at their work and enjoys it volunteers some of their expertise. But let’s not set that up as the end-all, be-all of volunteerism.  Or call people failures if they kept “only” two out of three volunteer RE teachers/ushers/choir/committee members from last year.  I think we owe each other more grace than that.

All groups starting to formally professionalize their job roles will learn to employ rhetoric that puts them on the same level as groups that have already professionalized themselves,1 or even rhetoric that advocates on behalf of other professionalized groups, as it to say, “Hey, we’re on your side. Why don’t you be on our side too?”  The article’s placement on a pedestal of the volunteer work of white collar professionals is a clear example of this.  Let’s keep in mind how this sort of rhetoric benefits those trying to professionalize volunteer management and not give it an easy equation to a benefit to nonprofit organizations, even if the two will sometimes overlap.

1. I’m told this is one of the reasons why a seminary degree, for example, is now a Master of Divinity, not a Bachelor of Divinity as it once was in many schools. [↩]