Friday, February 10, 2023

Lessons From Pastoral Life

For the past few weeks, Musk has been worried that not enough people are seeing his tweets, even taking his account private last week to see whether it might help the ever-changing algorithm increase his audience. The change came after many prominent right-wing accounts complained that Twitter was limiting their social reach. "This is ridiculous," Musk said in the meeting, according to multiple sources who told Platformer about their direct knowledge of the meeting. 
"I have more than 100 million followers, and I'm only getting tens of thousands of impressions," he complained. 
One of the two remaining principal engineers at Twitter said that one possible reason for the lower engagement was due to public interest in him and his behavior declining. The employees showed Musk internal data and Google Trends charts regarding his account: they explained that last April, Musk's popularity reached its peak in search rankings with a score of 100. Today, Musk's score sits at just nine.

At a congregational meeting of my church (an annual event) I came prepared to discuss the topic of declining membership/attendance (this was literally over 20 years ago). It was much on everyone’s mind, I thought I should tackle it head-on. 

Like many congregations, they hadn’t yet accepted reality. I brought a dose if that, but tried to present it as good news; or at least not cause for despair. (In my partial defense I had pastored a much smaller church in seminary which embraced its smallness. They called students as pastors as their ministry. I was trying to guide my congregation to a similar acceptance of reality. Most people don’t like reality. At. All.)

I had a chart showing the decline over decades. It was normal, IOW. The neighborhood had changed, times had changed, we as a church were fine and still an important Christian witness, etc., etc., etc.

I was as naive as that engineer. If they could have fired me then and there, they would have. One member stood up and pointed out the decline had continued since I became pastor (3 years earlier). So I wasn’t fixing it, and wasn’t that my job?

I left the church, by mutual agreement, a few months later. They never called another full-time pastor. The congregation split in rancor and recriminations. It hobbled along and finally ceded the church to a gay congregation, their anathema.

Which is probably also a lesson for Twitter.

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