I’m thinking about my grandmothers, each now transferred to the Church Triumphant, about their thrift in home economics. (But be warned; this post has been a draft for about a year and half. It is not Ash Wednesday. Call it recycling.)

Elizabeth of elizabeth’s little blog has written about her year-long attempt to not buy any new clothing; she alludes to a (not) recent article in the New York Times about the perils of “fast clothes” (akin to fast food) and how wasteful they are. She’s right and I hope she gives us updates.

Being Ash Wednesday, I have thought about the sin of ostentation. Surely not buying new clothes for a year is not ostentatious. The Amish and Old Order Mennonites can’t be called ostentatious (and I gather would rather be left alone in their peculiar habits) and having reviewed clothing price lists for the Old Order trade, I know some of them wear hard-wearing polyester and poly blends. People who make a public virtue of their “greenness” can be very ostentatious and defeat the purpose of using less and making less of a footprint and blah, blah, blah. Nobody likes a prig.

(Back to 2008.) Hubby and I have watched a lot of shows on the new Planet Green cable television channel, but, if you’ll excuse the phrase, the habit’s not sustainable. There are a few good ideas and news pieces but many more situations that are simply laughable, misplaced or self-deluding. Nobody’s going to save the planet by reducing dry cleaning by a third. I don’t care that mannequins can be recycled. No house is really green if it’s 6,000 square feet, has three occupants, is miles from town and sits in an ecologically fragile area.

Instead, when I try to use less, reuse more or adapt to situations, I think of my grandmothers. Here are some parts of the grandma test.

• Is it practical or not?
• Is it ostentatious?
• Can I make this change a habit? Is the effort for something extraneous?
• Can I learn something from changing a particular consumption habit?
• Can I use or reuse something I already have?
• Could I avoid the problem (or could I have avoided it) by retraining myself at some earlier time?
• How would I feel if everyone acted the way I chose?

I’m really quite happy with my blog posts from March 2006, when I focused on resource development.

Helping small non-Christian congregations: 2. Sunday by Sunday

Thursday, March 2nd, 2006

It’s tempting for the worship committee (or like) of small congregations without a regular preacher to act like talent scout for a lyceum series. (I’ve seen this among non-Unitarian Universalists, too.) If all else fails, the “sermon slot” must be filled.

Old Universalist Herald pictured

Thursday, March 9th, 2006

Steven Rowe put up a picture of the old Universalist Herald building, Canon, Georgia, on his blog.

Old Universalist genre has legs

Sunday, March 19th, 2006

Mid- to late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Universalists were masters of their own eclectic genre of publications: miscellanies and handbooks.

Don’t let expensive software stifle your church’s mission

Sunday, March 19th, 2006

Good websites can be very simple

Tuesday, March 21st, 2006

The most important tool for designing a good church website is pencil and paper.

More typefaces to consider

Sunday, March 26th, 2006

I use the typefaces released under a liberal license by Bitstream, of Cambridge, Massachusetts, almost every day.

A calm unclouded ending, part 1: eulogy and prayer aid for the bereaved

Monday, March 27th, 2006

A calm unclouded ending, part 2: saving money for the funeral

Tuesday, March 28th, 2006

Last word on Pathways

Friday, March 31st, 2006

I read the final report to the UUA Board of Trustees on the Pathways situation, (PDF format) and I was plainly disgusted by the sheer avoidable wastefulness of it all.

Like two other bloggers, I am concerned about the tone of the reportage of the Ministerial Fellowship Committee rule change [later. it has been altered] but even more about the subtle power shift it assumes. Ministers look more like employees and the congregations look more like an at-will employer, which might be a bit paranoid if it weren’t for the other changes within the Unitarian Universalist Association — say, concerning the independent affiliates — in the last few years.

There was a time in Universalist polity — from whence we get many of our current fellowship standards — that ministers and congregation alike were fellowshipped and subject to discipline. If ministers can be disfellowshipped for incompetence, why not congregations. I’m thinking of the clergy killers.

But there’s some liberation in this focus, and that’s liberation from equating the Unitarian Universalist Association and its business from the business of Unitarian Universalism. There need to be more robust and independent centers of power — say, the Unitarian Universalist Ministers Association — that must, if need be, take a contrary and even adversarial role in intra-Unitarian Universalist politics. Bloggers can play an important role in news reporting and opinion shaping along new, unofficial channels.

Even as a small denomination, we’re too big to be one happy family.

Funny what you’ll find when you look. A couple of weeks ago, I was reading old Universalist General Convention minutes, available at Google Books. The proceedings of the 1874 convention, in New York City, were particularly interesting.

The sixty-seven delegates served a different role than our General Assembly delegates today. For one thing, the General Convention created State Conventions, which handled many of the routine fellowship matters centralized in Boston today. Commercial publishing houses and what we might call independent affiliates took care of many of the program pieces. There were no workshops or celebrations apart from morning and evening worship and a Convention sermon. (Deceased ministers and significant laypersons were remembered by resolution.) This left the General Convention with committee work, report auditing and meta-responsibilities, like domestic and international mission work (including building funds) and establishing fellowship in areas not covered by a State Convention, like my own Washington, D.C. (Not so much because it is the Federal City but because it didn’t have enough churches — indeed, it has only ever had one Universalist church — to qualify for Convention status. I don’t think Maryland or Virginia did either.)

But past these differences, some business verities remain. The delegates considered fund raising, defining fellowship with churches, making policy decisions, budgeting and support for multi-cultural ministries (funding a transferring Lutheran minister to establish Universalist parishes in German ethnic communities).

Much of the decision making was hashed out in a committee created by the Convention to create subcommittees to consider the Board of Trustees report and other overtures. The membership — the Rev. A. A. Miner, Mrs. Eliza W. Bailey, Rev. E. H. Chapin, E. W. Crowell, M. R. M. Wallace, Rev. D. C. Tomlinson and the Rev. B. F. Bowles — included some Universalist heavyweights.

They introduced an omnibus resolution which included remarkable non-discrimination planks. Women’s history buffs should particularly note these:

• That it be the established polity of this Convention to exclude no person from its Board of Trustees, from any office or from any general committee now existing, or that it may create, on account of sex; and that it be its established policy to encourage the existence of no organization composed exclusively or men or women.
• That to make possible the acceptance of the forgoing invitation, we recommend to State Conventions the election of Delegates to this Convention, without reference to sex, but with reference alone to fitness.

The reasoning? I suspect it has to do with the leadership women made with fundraising through the congregation-based Missionary Box program. (Indeed, later in the same meeting, a Committee of Five was established to superintend the program, with a majority of three positions reserved for women.) The same resolution encouraged support of the program, and “gratefully recogniz[ed] the good service” of the Woman’s Centenary Association and that the “proved capacity of women” to raise fund should lead the convention not only to include women in fund raising but “awaken[ing] a religious interest.”

And, with some bumps, that’s what happened.

There’s an old lesson there, and excuse me for bringing this to date. Power flows from showing up and producing, especially money needed to keep the staff paid and the lights on. Alas, the youth and young adult resolution passed this General Assembly makes demands on principle which sound a bit too much like an ultimatum — give us what we want or we’ll leave; yet, so many already leave — and, which all too often don’t hold up in practice. (The lesson of age, perhaps?) As I said before, if the youth and youth adults raised money — as indeed their predecessor organizations did — perhaps the attrition problem would take care of itself.

All I have to get a sense of General Assembly this year is the official media, official news and bloggers. Yet I get a sense — unqualified and unquantified — that something is missing. Perhaps paler or less enriched would be more descriptive. Or at least less frantic.

So instead of speculating, I’ll ask. For those on the ground, how is GA this year?

And are there any online communities that are doing a good job capturing the sense of the event. IRC? Is anyone other than Dan Harper Twittering it?

Now that I have the order of service in an OpenOffice.org Writer document with some style added, we can break it up and add some fields.

Personalized information

If you installed OpenOffice.org like I suggested in my “Helping Lower Walnut: office suite” post, you would have filled in some user data. (I recommend the name of the church as “company” and the name details referring to the minister, in sole pastorates.)

Now, we’ll take advantage of those settings.

At the very top, I’m going to personalize the order of service for your congregation; you can make a template the same way and share it so others have the same benefit.

Select Insert > Fields > Other. Select the Document tab (the first one) and select Sender in the left-most column. Click fields which name the company/church, address, phone and what have you. These fields appear as gray boxes with text, and you can add spaces and punctuation to flesh it out.

Select Insert > Fields > Date for options to add a date field. You can offset the date by a particular number of days. If, say, you always make the Sunday order of worship on the previous Thursday, you can offset the date by three days in the future.

Breaking the service into sections

OpenOffice.org Writer allows you to insert sections into a document that can have attributes applied to them. In particular, we can code them so that some print at particular times and not others. So first we need to break the service into its constituent parts.

For each liturgical element, I created (as appropriate) a section called “head,” “rubric” and “text.” I also flirted with a section called “notes.” The head is for the title and filling in details, such as the name of the sermon or which hymn is selected for a particular service. The rubric is the directions to the minister, leader or congregation. The text is the text of the liturgical element itself. Some don’t have rubrics. Some don’t have texts, as with the sermon. All have a head. Here are they named in the Navigator box.

To create a section, use your mouse to select the appropriate text and go to Insert > Section. Name the section and select Insert. Repeat for each element; this took me about an hour. (Or you can download the project to date here: order-of-worship-project_20080626.)

Now save your work, or review that file, and we’ll meet next time.

Still not thrilled with using a proprietary media format, but first things first. I got it to work. With wifi no less. (And you get to see what my desktop looks like.)

Now, how did I do it? Not entirely sure.

I am using VLC — the Swiss Army knife of media players; available for all the operating systems people really use –  with the vcl-mozilla-plugin in place of my otherwise fave MPlayer (wth mozilla-plugin for the Firefox browser). There’s a codec (media decoder) plugin I got somewhere, but where? I’ll note it below when I find it.

Back to Fort Lauderdale. Oh, and while I’ve never liked that chalice, I do like the vortex. More vortex!

(Please read to the end; I have something to ask you.)

UU Mom was looking to watch tonight’s opening session of the Unitarian Universalist Association General Assembly (UUA GA) online, but it is only available in a proprietary Windows format. She noted:

It would be nice if they’d use an Open Source program. We missed part of the banner parade due to a streaming problem & we didn’t see our banner (if it is there). We’re now watching it with the audio & visual out of sync.

I took a post-work and by the time I roused myself, got to the computer, checked GA, and tried to both feed myself and make a work-around to see the stream on my computer, it was over. (I’ll try again tomorrow and put up as comprehensive a set of directions as I can.)

But her point about the proprietary format isn’t avoided. It seems strange that there’s only one way to see this media and that we have to go through a single company’s technology to use it. And there’s a good free and open source option.

As it happens, I spoke to an advocate in this field a few weeks ago — I run in a fun crowd at work, but too recently for this GA — and to the technology lead at the UUA. We have a meeting penciled in for July.

I hope to make an airtight case why the UUA ought to have plural streams and why one should be in a free and open-source format. Until then, if you’re interested in seeing this, leave me a note in the comments.

One of the most frustrating, time-consuming tasks I had when I was in parish ministry was getting the order of service printed right. Not written, but printed. Either I did it myself or with an assistant with rounds of edits. And still there’d be typos or skewed margins. I’m working up a robust solution and working out the process in this blog. Why show the messy details? So you can adapt the results when I’m done and not passively use what would work for me, but perhaps not you. (Indy Catholics and other full-text-in-hand traditions: press me for details that pertain to your needs.)

Because this is a bit involved, I’m releasing it in chunks. Which is fine: so many of my readers are either at General Assembly or at the beach. (It’ll be done by the time you’re back.)

For this, you will need your church’s liturgy or an assortment of recent orders of service and a computer with OpenOffice.org 2.4, the most recent update of a popular free and open-source office productivity suite. It’s available for Windows and Linux, and a less-than-glorious version for the Mac. (All should be well by September when a 3.0 version is released for all these operating systems.)

Here’s what I’m doing to automate a liturgy for variant uses as an order of service. I think this could be useful for a church at many different size levels, though not all churches would use all options. While this is based on the Universalist 1894 morning prayer service, the process could be adapted to any number of services, including those which (from the outside) seem much “freer.”

1. If you have a rite, cut and paste, or type out, the liturgy into OpenOffice.org Writer, the word processor; clean up any gremlins that appear.
2. If you have orders of service with headings dominating, insert these. Add names for liturgical elements, as suggested in the rite like Prelude, Hymn and Sermon, where missing but logical. Include all options, each in their own line in the case of directions or customs like “After that shall be sung the following Psalm, or a Hymn, unannounced.”
3. Mark headings with tags: Heading 1 for the name of the service, Heading 2 for elements, Heading 3 for parts of an element, where applicable. Say, names of particular prayers in a sequence.

You can see all your options for headings and other style features by pressing the F11 key.

Save and name your work, and we’ll start adding sections next time.

Looking back, I’m quite proud of my writing in February 2006. Quite a bit about on the practice of worship and several pages of hard-to-find transcribed Universalist General Convention documents.

Church websites should have details for Sunday servers

Thursday, February 2nd, 2006

I was reading through the list of churches of the Church of England, Diocese of Europe, and lighted on St. Ursula’s Church, Berne. Because I have Swiss German ancestors? No, because I love the name Ursula. (As in Andress.)

Emergency weather feeds

Saturday, February 4th, 2006

There’s a resource that I doubt many ministers or church administrators know about: the “Experimental XML Feeds and Web Displays of Watches, Warnings, and Advisories.” With it, you can subscribe to an RSS feed for your state, county, or in some cases, sub-county. [That’s all you need]

1925 Universalist General Convention constitution and bylaws, part 1

1925 Universalist General Convention constitution and bylaws, part 2

1925 Universalist General Convention constitution and bylaws, part 3

1925 Universalist General Convention constitution and bylaws, part 4

Happy archive memories (and church supplies)

Wednesday, February 8th, 2006

Some of my happiest memories as a child was with my father at the National Archives. Archival boxes — Hollinger boxes — are to me what baseball gloves or fishing poles to others. [Link to vendor in article.]

Report of the Commission on Comity and Unity (1927)

Comity and Unity enacting resolution and other resolutions from the 1922 General Convention

Report of the Commission of Unity and Comity (1929)

The Goth-Socialist-Unitarian-Broad Church connection

Monday, February 13th, 2006

Jim Estes (Peregrinato) has been writing about the Rev. Marcus Ramshaw, the acting vicar-chaplain of St Edward King and Martyr, Cambridge, and his Goth Eucharist outreach.

On Chutney’s morning prayer, part 2

Thursday, February 23rd, 2006

Now, a word on what is ordinary and what is proper.

Folding pulpit

Sunday, February 19th, 2006

There I saw the answer to a problem few have and even fewer have written about: a folding pulpit or reading desk for congregations that rent Sunday space in a non-church facility.

On Chutney’s morning prayer, part 3

Friday, February 24th, 2006

PeaceBang . . . and I talked recently about whether services like these are used in toto, or are essentially showrooms for elements to be pulled into locally produced service sheets. Both, we thought.

Ash Wednesday housewares

Saturday, February 25th, 2006

How does that little smudge get on the forehead? What do you use?

Copyright, licenses and sermons

Sunday, February 26th, 2006

The best reason to use an existing licensing scheme is because preacher and re-user would have a common understanding of the rights conveyed. This would probably help promote fair sermon sharing on both sides.