This coming Sunday is Social Media Sunday. As a regular church goer, and a social media professional, I’m recognize the value of this and will participate, at least to some extent. However, I have problems with a lot of church related social media that I’ve seen so far, so I’ll participate in my own idiosyncratic way.

It has often seemed that a lot of church social media activity has been around the nuts and bolts of churches, things like publicizing events. There is a value to this, but to me it feels a bit Martha-ish, focused on the preparations and not on the presence of Christ. I’m still looking for ways to make the presence of Christ felt online. Until then, I’ll continue to check in on social media sites at church, similar to how I check in at the transfer station on Saturday mornings. I’ll continue to post about events, at church as well as at church and in the community.

It struck me, this morning, that perhaps there are some parallels to vestry minutes. When I became Clerk of my parish’s vestry, I wondered, how do I make the presence of Christ felt in the minutes of vestry meetings? Such minutes are legal documents of a governing body. They are often terse, “after much discussion, a motion was made to …” Could I write vestry minutes as a poem? As a blog post?

With this in mind, here are some of my thoughts about our vestry meeting. One of our vestry members asked to resign from vestry due to personal reasons. We discussed whether we should fill the vacancy immediately, or wait until the annual meeting. What if there was a close vote on some vestry issue?

Fortunately, our vestry has not had to face close votes on an issue. In fact the only time I can remember anyone not voting for a motion has been when we were approving the minutes of a meeting they were not at and they abstained. Unlike a political body, where the minutes of regular meetings need to be published ahead of time and what gets included on the agenda can be a matter of conflict, vestries are leaders of Christian communities. We might not always agree, but we work hard to find consensus and work closely together.

This led into another topic. Typically, at our vestry meetings one of the first agenda items is to approve the agenda for the meeting. I don’t know how many other vestries have such an agenda item, and we discussed whether this is really necessary given the nature of our vestry meetings.

Like many churches, our church faces financial challenges. As we talked about pledges and the budget, the topic of our diocesan pledge came up. It seems like this is a frequent area of conflict in vestries. How much should we, as a church, pledge to the diocese? Perhaps it mirrors the discussion around dinner tables as families discuss how much they should pledge to their parish. We talked about how the diocesan pledge is in our budget under outreach and about the importance of program the diocese does as a community of churches that we can do individually. We talked about the upcoming diocesan convention, who would attend, what some of the topics that would be addressed were.

So far, this all still feels a bit dry and doesn’t get to what makes vestry meetings special. Yet the next discussion captures part of what makes our vestry meetings special. The budget committee talked about their meeting. We talked about how we need tighten up our budget and reduce more of our deficit. Yet a key part of the focus was about how we could use some of our assets to help refugees. Yes, we need a sustainable budget to sustain our mission, but the focus needs to be on our mission.

I was struck by how the discussion focused on things that we couldn’t do as a single parish and about the desire to work with other churches, how like the diocesan pledge?

We talked about failed ministries, successful ministries, and we prayed. God’s love for us was very present. It was present in our love for people we had helped. It was present in our love for people we tried to help and seem to have failed. It was present in our love for one another.

Can we use social media to help us rethink our relationship to our parish, to our diocese, to our mission, to God’s love? I hope so.