Pastor Ryan Gaffney

It really REALLY annoys me when someone suggests that we should do more to accommodate tech illiterate people during this time.

For the last 6 months of my life, I have been working really hard to engage people with church in a new way. In a season of Covid19 I have moved the Sunday Worship Service online, inventing along the way what that might look like.

I made important choices, for instance I eschewed livestream in favor of prerecorded services on YouTube, because livestreaming (while familiar to church leaders) does not make sense when there is not a present audience watching something live, and because with prerecorded and premiered content, we can provide better content, at higher resolution, that is enjoyably rewatchable, and easier to access. We don’t have users dealing with downtime and that sort of stuff.

I have rebuilt the church website, I have invented online tithing for our church (although we still get most of our donations in the mail) I’ve started ministries online and gone to meetings on zoom, made tutorial videos, and been on phone calls, revamped my social media, the church’s social media, and our email communications. And in everything I did I had an eye, to how each of these changes would effect change-averse elderly parishioners who were not comfortable with tech, and yet were the most vulnerable to this virus.

And there are people out there saying that what I really ought to do is focus on those people sommore.

NO!

You do not understand.

Like it or not this has been a time we have been forced to embrace tech, and this is what it looks like when we do that in the most familiar, novice-friendly, accommodating way possible. If i was ignoring people who disliked tech, I would just have opened a Discord day one. Everything is on discord, install it, get yourself a mic, we are going to play Tabletop Sim a lot together, so pick up a copy, let’s leverage telepresence and meet new people.

I haven’t done that.

It’s a golden hour for the church to reach gamers, bloggers, YouTubers, influencers… generally all of generation Y and Z. And most churches haven’t done any of that. And the reason they haven’t, is because they have been working full time to simulate the church experience they used to have in person which appealed to Baby Boomers in a way that was safe for them.

We do not need more ways to coddle and comfort older parishioners.

That’s important work that needs to be done. It has been done. It cannot be to the exclusion of all else. No. Not more of that.

Actions speak louder than words. Words speak too.

As a church, in this time, both our actions and our words are shouting that Boomers matter, and Zoomers don’t.

And that’s why your churches have no young people involved.

In my second foray into this format, I met with my friend and fellow pastor Walk Jones to talk about his favorite movie Spinal Tap and what it is about it that makes him love that movie so much, and why that matters.

Here’s the latest video

So one of the odd realities of having a blog about ministry is that there are a lot of things that come up worthy of reflection in my daily life, which really aren’t wise to talk about, especially not right then. I have talked about this before. So let’s circle back and talk about some of what was going on as I wrote that article which I couldn’t talk about then,

Basically I was planting a church. Until I wasn’t.

I got out of seminary, I was called to minister, called to preach. I didn’t have a job but I had plenty of time, and I went to work, finding people who would listen to me, people I could serve, Jesusy things to do, and I tried, Oh! how I tried so hard to follow all the rules and expectations of the PCUSA as I sought ordination following my degree.

I was weak and vulnerable, I didn’t want to tick anyone off at the moment when they were “assessing my readiness for ministry” Now that I am ordained I have no such concerns. It’s really hard to defrock someone, and you can’t do it just because you disagree with them or they annoy you. Then, not so much.

Anyway I started this church-like-thing. I preached sermons with some people, lead Bible Studies, did mission projects, but it was disorganized. Some people who did the mission projects did not come on Sundays, some people who came to Bible Studies were also at other churches.

Presbyterians (who dislike disorganization) have come up with a name for these church-like-things so that they do not have to conform to all the expectations of a normal PCUSA congregation (having elders, an ordained pastor, a filed 501c form and so on) we call them New Worshipping Communities (NWCs)

So fine, I went about trying to become an official NWC so that I wouldn’t be coloring outside the lines. I met with a committee. I met with another committee, they gave me a grant to take a trip to Florida, which lead to a trip to California, then we met back in another committee. The whole time the ministry in Texas was growing (at least it was for the weeks I was permitted to actually BE in Texas) I counted about 50 people involved, 30 of which regularly attended monthly potlucks at our tiny apartment. I was ready to take a major pay cut and work towards ordination to this emerging ministry. But the latest committee told me I wasn’t ready for that yet, that I should take more training at my own expense before moving to the next threshold. “What’s after that?” More thresholds “How many?” we’re not sure “What do I get at the end?” We aren’t sure of that either.

It came to be that as an unemployed person I had two full time jobs, one building the kingdom of Jesus Christ, and one going on trips and committee meetings and filling our forms to try to legitimate that work to people who had never visited, never seen my context, and who, by the way, had never successfully planted anything themselves.

”What would you do, as a committee” I asked “If you ever decided I was good enough?” and then came the reply “We are still figuring that out” so there it was. Turtles all the way down. Becoming an NWC, and then a Presbyterian church was not a file bound up in red tape, but rather a Gordian knot consisting of red tape entirely

So what did I do?
There is a move in Sumo called a “henka” which is perfectly legal, but considered dishonorable. When your fellow athlete comes against you full speed, you simply get out of the way.

”I’m sorry I wasted your time” I eventually said. “I thought I was planting a community that could be a church some day, that it matched what it is that a NWC is supposed to be. Really it’s not like that. It’s just a group of people who love Jesus and help each other, I’m not planting a church I’m just being a Christian, doing regular kingdom work like everyone should be doing”

They had nothing to say against that. It didn’t require any more forms or meetings. Granted, I never got any money or recognition our of them, but I wouldn’t have gotten much of that otherwise and I would have had to earn it against bias. For the hours I would have put in, I would have gotten more of both working at Starbucks.

It turns out, that there is no real way to define a church, and no real way to say what isn’t a church. A church is a gathering of people who are curious about God, so is your average 8th grade field trip, or softball team, or collection of people at a bus stop. We try to make rules and draw lines, but that’s all it is. Us making rules and drawing lines.

Today I answered a internet question challenging Christianity on the basis that we only believe this because we were told do when we were younger. Here’s my hot take: Does that really matter?

As a pastor’s kid, I have extra pet peeves that some of you don’t worry about.
This is one of them. We need way way more deep content for spiritually mature people, And I’m working on it.

Akkkk! It’s another blog about blogging!

Seriously though, I JUST got back into updating things, and I wrote several articles and timed them to be released a week apart, I was AHEAD and now this is my first post in September. It’s incredible. What it looks like to build and keep a daily discipline and sometimes it seems that these scheduled articles are ding more harm than good. I am still producing a lot, new MOVIEPASStors are coming out all the time, new Videos with Ask The Pastor.. at least till the end of the month, but I have to specially log in here in order to tell Ya’ll about it, and I literally seriously have more important things to do.

Who wants to do it for me? I’ll pay you. Nobody? No one? Good choice.