Saint Benedict Episcopal Church

Have you ever played that children’s game, “Telephone”? That’s the game where one child picks a phrase like, “The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain” or some other silly phrase and then whispers it into the ear of the next child and that child then whispers it into the next etc… until all the children have had a chance to capture the whispered phrase and pass it along. The end is always uproarious because 99% of the time, what we end with is very different from what was started with: the flame in pain calls to many on the train—what???

This silly game has big implications—even for us adults. This game reminds me that communication is a very fragile thing; open to all kinds of interpretations, misunderstandings and out and out break down. One parishioner recently mentioned to me that in order for the average adult to truly know something and recall it, we have to have heard it at least 12 times! Yikes! No wonder why the game of Telephone is such a set up—we only hear things once and then it is whispered and needs to be passed on quickly.

I sometimes think that communication in the church is like a game of telephone. We hear something once if we are lucky to be in church that Sunday, we pass it along to the best of our ability and then wonder why, in this big group of people, we don’t quite get it right and the results, well… uproarious to say the least.

Communication is a tricky thing. Peggy Carmichael, our Vicar’s Warden, Nancy Zabel, our People’s Warden, Lacey and I have been spending a great deal of our time talking and thinking about communication. How can we make our communication better? What systems do we have set up to relay information? How can we offer communication in a variety of venues, and ways that people can best know and hear about the many happenings of St. Benedict?

So, what have we learned or produced in our time pondering communication?

One of the things I’ve recognized about myself and communication is that I tend to think if I say something once, everyone will just somehow know and get it. Recognizing this and working with our Wardens to improve communication has helped me to name this tendency—thus for me it is very important to be aware of those assumptions or aspects of ourselves that are part of our wiring or default setting so that when we become aware of them, we can remind ourselves, oh yeah, everyone learns at different rates and speeds and the average person doesn’t just get it—we all need to hear things 12 times.

Recently, with Lacey and Peggy’s help, the three of us constructed a flow chart for communication in our parish. As you may by now know, we also constructed a form for communicating events and announcements. You will find a sample of this form printed see attachment in this month’s Benedictions along with the Bishop’s Committee Policy see attachment for verbal announcements in church.

We decided to do this work because all of us recognized that communication was somewhat broken in our community and we knew that we could do better. 

So sitting down together, I asked the question if I want to schedule, say a potluck, what should happen so that everyone knows about said potluck? 

On the next page is the wonderful chart that Lacey created to show the flow of communication. Please, take a look. Please click here for chart

Perhaps all of this seems like a weird topic to discuss in a church newsletter and perhaps it isn’t the most spiritual of topics we could talk about, but I think it’s important. By putting together forms and flow charts about our communication and then expressing this to the larger church community, my hope is that people have a sense of how things happen at St Benedict and how communication gets routed into the variety of resources we publish. 

But is it spiritual? Maybe not for some. The connection that I see is that this is one of the ways that we use words to spread the Gospel in our community. Is a potluck supper the good news? Absolutely! It is a place we go for community and fellowship as well as to be nourished. 

So all of this hard work at communication stuff is important because it is a tool for spreading the good news of God’s Kingdomat St. Benedict; it is how we use words to preach the Gospel.

As you can see there are many venues of communication available to us: announcements, emails our webpage and of course the Benedictions. The change that is very big for all of us is the utilization of forms and weekly emails and all related things. I hope that all of these different kinds of communication serve as an invitation for our community—an invitation to come hear the good news and then to take the good news to all corners and aspects of life. 

I want to put in a final plug for communication on the web. If you haven’t visited our website, then you are missing out! There are schedules online for a large variety of ministries, our Benedictions are there, biographies of our staff and clergy and dates and times for our various events.  In the future we look forward to posting music and sermons there as well.

This is a powerful tool for preaching the Gospel by using words. A big thank you goes out to David Metzler for his very good quality work as our web master, and to Lacey for maintaining it and keeping our information up to date. This communication business is onerous. However, it is part of preaching the gospel and it is central to our life together. Be on the look out over the coming months for new communication venues in our church as a whole.

Peggy and Nancy’s ministry as our Wardens is dedicated to leading and communicating. We are indeed very blessed by their leadership and diligence to live the Gospel and to think carefully about how we use words. 

In the season that follows Pentecost, flaming tongues, I find this time to be a good time to think and ponder how we speak and communicate with one another.