Rev. Evin Carvill-Ziemer  0:03  
I want to talk a little bit about discernment. Every congregation is facing a lot of choices in discernment. And in our conversations with congregations, we're hearing really different ideas. And that is great, because you are different congregations with different circumstances. So I just want to talk about that a little bit here. One important conversation to have is where are the greatest needs right now in your community, that includes your membership, but also includes your surrounding community? Where are the greatest needs? Who has the greatest needs? That's going to look different. And really asking the question is, are those needs going to be addressed by putting our energy into something in person in the near future, if those needs aren't going to be addressed by by putting energy into in person, it's possible that putting your energy into the in person is going to take the energy away, you need to serve the greatest needs right now. There also could be that the greatest needs are met by in person experience. It isn't what other congregations are doing. Your neighbors might be trying to figure out hybrid worship, but you might be able to be meet your greatest needs in some other kind of way. I also want you to invite you don't think about who's making which decision and this is breaking down in my mind. This is just my head thinking this. If somebody's deciding when. Many of you have a team that's been looking at metrics and safety, you've got a doctor and nurses on there, you've got people looking at science. If you if you don't have that team, I did include in the pre work a link to the page or collecting guidance from other congregations who do have teams and you could ask your primary contact for that as well. So some team is deciding when, okay, it's safe enough for this kind of thing to happen. And here's, here's the standards we need. When you also need somebody to be deciding what, what is the first thing you want to be doing, what's going to meet those needs. This might be your board, it might be your staff. And then a third the how, this is I think, where the technology comes in. If we want to be doing something in person and include people online, we know that's going to include a technology question. So the how are we going to do that, that's where you need your technically competent people who are thinking about what we could do to make that work. There's, there's a dynamic between these groups, obviously, if the people say, the what people are like, let's do this thing, and the tech people say, That's not gonna work, but you know, you could do this thing. So there's some communication back and forth, right. But I'd like you all, just to take a moment to think about if, if you are primarily in the when we can do something safely, or the What should we do with a How should we do it group. It's possible you're in more than one. But I think it can be helpful to be know what our hat is at this table.

In the third area of discernment, so needs the the what, what, how, and the third, I want to point out was culture, a little discernment about your congregations culture, a couple of things here. Different congregations have different relationships to technology, some of you hopped right into zoom worship, and that was great, it was easy for most of you, you had the tech folks who could help the people who need to help. Some congregations took a few weeks to really get into zoom, and it was harder. So now, we're gonna have some congregations who are early adopters, they want to experiment, it might not go well, they might need to try something else. They've got enthusiasm, and volunteers ready to do that. And a congregation that will roll with it. Other congregations have kind of figured out what you're doing, you're going to wait for the people to experiment first, it will be, you'll be in the middle of a pack. And then there's some congregations, you may be doing outdoor, small groups, Well, before you anything that involves any new technology, you're going to wait for somebody to write the manual, someone will write a manual for their volunteers we'll help you get it,  it's no no problem and be the late adopter on this kind of technology shift. So in assessing your culture, What's your relationship to technology. Also, think about your relationship to change. If there's any way you can use this moment to nurture your cultural relationship to change, as Megan talked about, to get more nimble. And in any case, thinking about how can you increase your people's patience with tech glitches, and thinking about these big groups of things, we've been running, tech glitches happen, and accepting and expectin inperfection and rolling with that, I think is a good spiritual practice in general, it's a great spiritual practice now. And it's what the spiritual practice, we need to get more nimble. And also to keep undoing the white supremacy culture in our congregations and move into a more multicultural reality where sometimes things aren't what we expected, we better say, Oh, well, it wasn't what I expected. And roll with it. So this is a great opportunity to practice accepting that things aren't going to go the way we expected.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai