• Parish Health Grant Apps are due May 30. See article (well) below for ideas.

• How Do Visitors Experience Your Parish - The last issue of Parish Pulse included an article summarizing reactions of unannounced visitors (so called Mystery Worshippers) to Orthodox Churches -- and churches of many other denominations. What did they find off putting? What caused them to engage with the worship? Why did they not return?  Read the article here. Then get others in your parish to read it! We've received good feedback on this.
  

• Clergy Compensation committee desires your reactions to the proposed clergy compensation policy. The full policy can be found here. You can contact them via this address: clergycompensation@midwestdiocese.org
  

• Sexual Misconduct Materials can be found here. (scroll down to "Misconduct material")  Is your parish up to date? Are you assuming unnecessary risk?
  

• One More Parish Treasurer is desired to participate in a group to define standards for parish accounting and reporting practice and to create guidelines for new treasurers. Time commitment will be a few conference calls and between call efforts on a voluntary basis. Contact Joe Kormos. (513.683.1911)

Occasionally we receive some heart warming positive feedback such as this recent comment from a priest:

"As we revamp our parish website we're finding the articles on effective web pages helpful. In particular, we're discussing how we want to better implement the following ideas from the articles: 1. Tell Your Parish Story; 2. Watch Aspect Ratio; 3. Use Photos! Lots of Them! Of People! Particularly Children! 4. Develop Awareness & Curiosity. "
OK we all like to receive compliments -- but what we love about this feedback is hearing this community is actually doing stuff! You know -- taking action. If you missed the articles you can read website article 1 here and article 2 here.  Another brief web related article follows below. (For those of you tired of this topic you have the above letter writer to blame!)

For those parishes that are growing without a website (we know of only one) you're excused from reading. Good parishes can spread good news -- naturally. (But websites can help.)

As mentioned above we think that photos --good photos -- are important to  express what can be found in your parish. When photo collections are organized into a "movie"/slideshow and combined with music the results an be powerful.

Many of you have seen the YouTube offering titled "The Orthodox Church A Visual Journey" ) As nice as it is --we think it can be improved upon.

Taking the Challenge
Recently we complemented a parish webmaster on the quality of the parish website but opined that the website needed to use photos even better. "Why not create an introductory parish 'movie' we suggested." Two weeks later webmaster Tony Core had produced same. Titled "The Life and Vocation of an Orthodox Church in America" we think you will enjoy watching it also. One of the real keys is that is not just a parish brochure - it attempts to interpret and express parish life as an active vocation.

Click here for Windows version
Click here for the Quicktime (Apple) version.

When you watch take a careful look at photo topics, composition, color  and people. What would it take to help portray your Orthodox parish with such warmth?

• Good photos  -- an eye for beauty
  
• Effort -- but not that much really
• Most importantly -- A Vocation. This parish and its parishioners seem to --more often than not be -- living a life in Christ.
  

Start an ESL Class for your neighborhood. Improve Your Sign. Better website. Plan a top notch Speaker series and invite others.

None of these are perfect examples because they don't fulfill every criteria -- but few ideas are perfect. (Read the background materials to understand criteria.) But they do illustrate different thought processes and approaches to the grant. 

OK? Get it? Are you awake out there? Let the grant apps flow!

The aforementioned  2002 survey parish life survey also provided an opportunity to examine stewardship administration methods.  Here are some points:

• Growing parishes are more likely to use a pledge form, a stewardship committee and/or an all member canvas than their declining counterparts.
  

• No parish that used dues as its primary form of stewardship claimed to be growing.

• As shown below, 90% of parishes experiencing "Good Growth" and 84% of fair growth parishes used a pledge system.
  

• Conversely not one parish in serous decline had been able to make the switch from dues to a pledge system. In our Diocese we still have parishes that continue with "dues" as their method of financial stewardship. To our knowledge not one of those parishes shows numerical growth over the past five years.

We'll provide more info on parish stewardship methods including "pledging" (how does it work, why does it work, what is involved etc.) in upcoming issues of Parish Pulse.

 
Good Practices -- Lead or Lag Growth?
Are parishes growing because they have developed the characteristics and points of emphasis mentioned in the above articles - or - have they have developed these characteristics after they grew? The above information implies but does not prove cause and effect.

We would suggest that the answer is largely irrelevant. Certainly we should always search for proper, potent approaches to help the Church grow. But the above good practices are good and proper regardless of the numerical outcome. These are what the church teaches us to do and be. The correlation with numerical growth is a welcome side benefit.