Thursday and Friday of last week I was part of a gathering of 10 young adult leaders to discern best practices for supporting young clergy in the UMC. This grew out of conversations that began at the UMC Young Clergy Facebook group, video documentary on young clergy and the umc young clergy website.
We named issues of isolation / community and leadership development / mentoring as top concerns among young clergy. If you are interested, you can check out the live blogged event. But this gathering was not just about talk, we are going to do something about it and you are invited.
I am on the team that is working around building community among young clergy facilitated by online resources.
- What ideas do you have that could help build community online?
- What services / sites do you actually use on a regular basis?
My previous posts on this subject:
Rev. Andrew Conard 
3 replies on “UMC Young Clergy – Online Community”
I’m a Facebook/Twitter guy.
I know that a lot of effort has been put into gathering blog data for various young adults somehow involved in Methodist life. I’d encourage a big push among young clergy to get hooked in to Facebook/Twitter. I think Twitter provides more immediate benefits for an effort like this. I’ll list a few reasons I think this to be the case.
1) Twitter provides some benefits a blog reader does not–it is easier to screen through who you’d want to read, and who you wouldn’t, but it keeps you posted on who’s active in the blog/microblog world.
2) You can read who you want, ReTweet those posts you find interesting, etc. You can also access that service from your mobile phone, if you have one, or use a client like TweetDeck to organize your contacts (creating a group for young UMC clergy, etc).
3) Simple things like, “pray for…board of ordained ministry interviews” quickly take off through the Twitterverse and alert a community to important happenings in the life of other young clergy.
Of course, Twitter won’t be for everyone. I signed up 10 months ago and didn’t really start using it until a few weeks ago. I’ve worked hard to increase my network and I’ve been surprised by the conversations and connections it has thus far yielded. Like most tools, it is something you have to commit to use. I’m not young clergy, but you can follow me @bsimpson.
I would also strongly encourage planning a face to face meet up to supplement the online “connections” you’ll be arranging. 😉
BAS
Thank you for posting, Andrew! I enjoyed meeting you, and I look forward to working with you in the future!
[…] Andrew Conard shares here. […]