Customer Service 101 for churches

c. 2006 Religion News Service

Listen up, church leaders. This parable is for you.

Dell Computer Corp. is losing a repeat customer, because their process and data requirements overwhelmed my need to buy their product.

Last week I wanted to order a $39 USB memory key. Dell's Web site required me to locate a username and password (serving their purposes, not mine). Dell's toll-free number led me into a labyrinth of voice commands. A second toll-free number landed me with a live person who insisted on creating a "profile" for me. No, I said, I simply want to make a $39 purchase.

I persevered long enough to complete my purchase. But I will think twice before making another one. No business can afford to make purchasing its products this difficult.

Voices

Where is the church on Thursday and what is it doing?

I have a mischievous habit of asking pastors the question: "What's going on with your church on Thursday afternoon?" Their predictable answer is usually some equivalent of "nothing much."

That question was provoked by the chapter title in a book I read a few years ago, Where Is the Church on Thursday Afternoon? The response of most pastors is a predictable "Christendom" answer. After all, the church is about the clergy and about properly authorized services and sacraments and the custodial care of passive members. Responders think only of the "church gathered" for its meetings and assemblies, and under the supervision of the church's duly ordained leadership.

Voices

A prayer

Your Spirit, O Creator God,

your brooding, bright imagining Spirit,

is inviting us, cajoling us, entrancing, inducing,

yes, even seducing us, beyond life into creation,

into imagination, into all the shapes and hues,

the textures, postures, melodies of grace.

So let that flaming, flagrant Spirit

be afire now among us here.

Lift our imaginations through the laughter of the soul.

Restore to us our poetic vision,

that we may see this world anew

as your mighty work-in-progress,

that we may see ourselves as others see us,

that we may see you, the unseen God,

as the source and goal and heart of all delight.

Through these moments of welcoming,

of sustenance, of encouragement, mirth and wisdom,

move up, across, among us once again

with your Spirit of inspiration and of ecstasy.

We ask this in the name of the living Word,

that Word we seek and find and lose,

and then are found by.

Let us say . . . AMEN.

Editorials

Deer in the headlights?

So now comes the biennial (formerly annual) convention of the deer in the headlights. If past patterns hold, then 80% of the General Assembly commissioners and 95% of advisory delegates will be serving for the very first time. They will have tried to wade through enough reading to earn a graduate degree. They will feel the weight of a highly conflicted denomination. When asked upon their Birmingham arrival, "How do you feel?" the most common responses will be "bewildered," "befuddled" and "overwhelmed."

Voices

How do you spell relief?

As Americans brace themselves for yet another hurricane season, they might look at one congregation and its response to the Gulf Coast disaster. Perhaps it will become a blueprint for the future.

Suspended between Orlando and Daytona Beach is a small town, DeLand, Fla., home to Stetson University. Across from the campus, along a major tree-lined boulevard, is First Presbyterian Church, a congregation of 550 (Web site: www.firstpresdeland.com .)

In 2004, when hurricanes Charley, Frances, and Jeanne hit Central Florida, residents were sensitized to the pain caused by evacuations, flooding, damaged homes, and lack of electricity. The face of suffering was personal. Then Katrina slammed into coastal Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama, touching the hearts of DeLand's people like Jim and Rachael Winter, Mississippi natives.


Poet Ann Weems with artist Becky Bane painting in the background	Dancers led by Dianne Wright, far left

The Presbyterian Outlook

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