Nick Holovaty, Mary Frances Sparrow and Elizabeth Grams explain some procedures for the first phase of the community-wide consultation.
Transcript
This document is a direct transcript of an audio recording, and may contain transcription errors and other minor edits for the sake of clarity.
NICK: So, for this session, we’re gonna to start talking about the material part. Charlie said that there’s a spiritual component and a material component. So, in this section we’re gonna be—we’re gonna start answering the question: How is this consultation actually going to work?
This will be part one, and we will have another session tomorrow afternoon to continue the practical discussion. And, after each of these sessions, tonight and tomorrow afternoon, we will have a panel up here, and a large-group kind of question-and-answer session. It won’t be in—at the tables. Make sense?
I recommend that y’all take notes, because we’re gonna ask y’all to be part of the process of communicating these things back to your branches. So, more on that later, but just, perhaps, a reminder.
So, our consultation is gonna have two phases. In the first phase, every member of the community is gonna have the opportunity to study our sources, which is what David talked about earlier today. And in the second phase, phase two, everyone will be talking and praying together about what’s on our hearts and minds, and what the Lord is calling us to for the future. As David put it, “A Spirit-filled dialogue about the way forward for us in the Lord.” So, that’s the consultation proper. Make sense?
So, phase one is studying the sources; phase two is the consultation part. And tonight, we’re just gonna talk about phase one, pretty much.
So, the purpose of phase one . . . David talked about quite a bit. The purpose is to understand our sources, understand where we are and how we got here, as vital preparation for the next step, which is the consultation/discernment part.
So, that’s the purpose of phase one. And how are we gonna do this? What’s the method here? So—the—I want to talk about three aspects of this.
The first is the resources themselves, and Mary Frances is gonna come up momentarily and talk about the resources themselves. The second aspect is distributing the resources, and Elizabeth Grams is gonna come up here after Mary Frances and talk about distribution. And, there’s also going to be a training conference in September. And I’m gonna to say a couple things about that.
So, without further ado: Mary Frances Sparrow!
[Mary Frances describes work on resources from 3:24 to 17:14, and then Nick introduces Elizabeth Grams. This section is not transcribed.]
[This transcription resumes at 17:32, when Elizabeth Grams begins speaking about the distribution team.]
ELIZABETH: . . . . Okay. There’s a PowerPoint; mostly–most of it is just, if you want more clarity to the things I’m saying.
So, I am on the distribution team. That’s headed up by Paul Kane, who could not be here this weekend. And, the muscle of the team is the community’s Communications Office, so it’s headed by Sean Connolly, and includes Tom Zusi, who’s doing the sound for us tonight, and Catherine Bulger and myself.
We have been working hard for the last month to figure out how we can make the resources Mary Frances was just describing both available and accessible to every community member.
There are a lot of audio recordings of talks, and we want to make them as high quality as we can for listeners. We want to offer a versatile, headache-free way to play the audio files, and we want the resources to be easy to find, easy to access, and ideally, accessible through multiple avenues—like, on hard copy, on your phone, on your computer. And, we’re exploring multiple formats for the same resources, so, transcripts for audio recordings, and audio versions of written materials, to facilitate engagement with the material.
So, it’s a lot of technical and logistical work, and we’re leaning on the distribution experience Paul Kane brings from the LaSalle Company. It’s like we have, I think, a heart full of this treasure of wisdom and experience in our sources, and the job of the distribution team is to build arteries: avenues through which to pump it out to the rest of the body. Some of the avenues will surely be dead ends, but some of them will work. And I’ll describe some highlights from what we’ve been working on and what we’ve been learning so far.
You’ve gotten a taste, just now, of some of the audio recordings and written materials that have been collected. And, our team wanted to put all those resources together into one place, one central platform to host them, that would have as few barriers to entry as possible. We’d like that to be the File Library, and we’d like to make that existing library on our website more accessible. But that is a longer-term project. So, to hold all these things together, right now—all the audio and written stuff—we’re building an app.
The app will be a single place where any community member can access, via phone or tablet or computer—which will host all the consultation materials. You won’t have to sign in, to access them! [Ripple of approval from audience.] And it’s all right there. Yes!
Our favorite feature on the app, actually, is the audio player, for all those recordings we have. We really wanted to make it easy for people to listen to audio files, either on their phone, or, you know, listen to it while they’re exercising, or doing chores, or commuting. And, the app has an excellent player, like a good podcast app would have, where if you leave off listening at one spot, you—or pause, you can come back, and it’ll be in the same spot! [Another ripple of approval.]
We’re also working to make it easy to navigate and search, so that people who are just not used to operating in technology can still find what they want.
And, I should clarify: we aren’t building the app from scratch; we’re—the structure of it, the “back end,” is built by a company called Subsplash, who created their product to serve churches who have similar distribution needs to ours. And we’re building on their skeleton, and designing the “front end” of the interface to suit our own needs. And when I say “we’re” building it, I mean mostly Tom Zusi and Catherine [Elizabeth chuckles], not me.
Their app is designed also to connect to a website. So, for us, for any community members who want to work off a computer, not via an app, they can go to this web page that’ll have the same library as the app, and include all the same sources in it, but just in web form. So, in short, between the app and the connected web page, it’ll be easy to use whatever device you want to access the material.
Another big effort that we’re making is in audio cleanup. As you’ve heard, the catalog includes these talks that date back as far as 1971, and, as you can imagine, the—or, if you’ve listened to them on the File Library—the quality, the audio quality, has degraded over time for some of those recordings. But, thanks to Tom’s work—working editing wonders, cleaning those up—this great stuff doesn’t need to be painful to listen to!
I mentioned a couple of areas that we are exploring, having to do with creating multiple formats of the resources.
First of all, transcripts. For those who prefer reading to listening, or who want a written reference to something that they have listened to, we’ve enlisted a team of volunteer transcribers and editors to create accurate, but readable, transcripts of all of these talks.
We’re trying it out for now, with the first timeframe batch of materials that have been assembled, and we expect to complete almost—there’s about 27 audio talks—complete all those transcripts in a week or so from now. And we’ve been looking into the possibility, also, of printing those out, and making booklets that we might mail out to community members, along with the other already-written materials.
So, as I say, we’re exploring this. There’s some disadvantages to using just a transcript for something that was originally an oral talk. Not everything translates to paper. So—but we’re building avenues, creating options, right now.
Another area of exploration—it’s kind of the flip side of transcription—is text-to-speech, when you’re starting with written materials. And—for those who prefer to listen to talks, we want to produce audio recordings of the working papers and the articles and other written things in the catalog. And—not recordings that are trying to imitate the writers, but just reading it clearly. So, I’m going to play a file of the guy we got to read a 1973 charismatic conference reflection article that Paul DeCelles had written.
[The voiced audio excerpt plays.]
MAN’S VOICE: We need to show more trust that the Spirit of God is active among the 25,000 people present and that we can relax in the Lord. We should in fact make every effort to tap the resources of the Holy Spirit at work among all the people during the conference itself. We should not approach the conference as basically something we “put on” for all those who are coming. Rather let us adopt the attitude that we are facilitators, servants, working to make it possible for God to work in the crowd, to be shared and lived more fully by all present.
ELIZABETH: That was a robot, if you didn’t figure it out. [Laughter.] But he does a really good job of reading! [Elizabeth chuckles and all laugh.] Specifically, he—that was one of the voices that was created by Amazon Polly, who’s Alexa’s cousin, or something. [Laughter.] And, it’s called “neural text-to-speech.” It’s basically just a really intelligent program, that can produce very lifelike readings of [sic] just, you know, spitting some text into it.
When we discovered all the progress that has been made in this field, we very quickly dismissed the idea of me sitting in a closet with a microphone and trying to read through all the talks. [Laughter.] So, we’re starting to produce audio recordings, as another possible option for engaging with all this treasure.
And, looking forward, we’re pretty jazzed about the app and all the text-to-speech and everything; but, again, the whole point here is all accessibility. We want to make the materials accessible to each community member. And, of course, everyone has their own needs, so that’s gonna take personal interaction.
To that end, we have a goal to call up each community member by the end of the fall, to make sure that they can access the materials, and to address any questions or concerns they have about the resources. How those calls will happen, who will make the calls, is yet to be determined. But that kind of contact with each community member is gonna be an important part of making this first phase of the consultation work. It’s a way we can reach Christ in the marginalized during the consultation, just like Mike was talking about this morning.
And, finally, if you would like to help with the distribution, or if you have any ideas for us, we would love to hear it. You can always talk to Sean or Tom or myself this weekend, or send us a line.
Glory to God!
[Applause]
NICK: Thanks, Elizabeth. Just a personal sharing about these resources. I got to—I got access to some of them, and—this was a few weeks ago, and I listened—I just listened to the first talk. And it was from 1971, and it was about environments, and it was from a teaching that Paul gave to the Apostolic Institute. And within a week, I was using what he had said in headship meetings. I mean, it was immediately helpful. So, yeah, it’s awesome. Thank you so much to everybody who’s working so hard now, and who has worked so hard for the last 50 years.
[Applause]
NICK: We’re going to have a conference in September. So, we need a group of people—and we haven’t identified them yet, but we’re going to—a group of people who can work with the leaders of women’s groups and men’s groups, to help the groups—help the people in the groups work with the resources. So, this conference is gonna have 60 to 70 of these people, plus the consultation team. And it’s going to be in the River Ridge center over Labor Day weekend, and the purpose of the conference is this training of these people. And, it’s to give them the tools that they’re gonna need to help the leaders of the small groups help the people in their small groups access those resources. So. More information will be coming out about that conference in September as time passes. But that’s the September conference.
A couple more observations, things to emphasize, about phase one.
This is not a teaching series or a curriculum, these resources. There’s not a teacher or a professor explaining these things. Some of us may wish there were, but that’s not the spirit of this. Everyone has direct access to these sources. Everyone is free to pursue their own interests and different topics. And, like Mary Frances said, everyone is free to draw their own conclusions about what they hear and read. So, that’s the first thing.
We’re not giving any direction about how people study the sources. But we do recommend, if people want to, that they talk about these sources with the people closest to them: with their spouses, households, their men’s and women’s groups. We are all going to get as much out of these sources as we put into them. So, if a men’s or women’s group wants to pick a particular resource and study and talk together, that’d be great! And, maybe an area could organize some kind of activity, if they want. That could be really helpful!
But, just as a caution, we want to be careful not to let this “organization” get too big, because then it could become a program. So, like, if a large branch was like, “Okay, here’s how we’re all going to study these sources,” that would be—that would kind of detract from the kind of “grassroots” aspect of it.
Okay. So, how can you help with phase one?
So, the first thing is by studying the sources yourself. And—so, these sources are gonna be coming out in an orderly fashion, as soon as possible, even this summer, and there’ll be communication about them. And so we’re asking everybody, all y’all, to get into them, study them, and share about it with the people around you. And let your enthusiasm be contagious. So that’s the first thing.
The second thing is: the board of governors is gonna—we wanna send members of the board to as many branches as we can, to talk about the whole consultation, and share about it. And our purpose in doing this is to communicate that this is our project; we’re “all in.” Like, we’re for this. And the second thing is to invite and solicit the active participation of every single member of the community.
And . . . so, we want to make these visits, you know, as soon as possible. There’s gonna be a lot of practical considerations, right? We probably can’t visit every branch, but the picture for these visits is maybe a Saturday afternoon, or, like a—kind of a—for anybody that can come to it, and then maybe the next community meeting, that we could come and talk about these things.
And so what we’re asking is. . . . We’re gonna reach out. Phil Monaco is gonna be reaching out to every branch, and—but if you want to start talking to him about how we might arrange such a branch visit, that would be great. Our expectation is that there’s gonna need to be some back-and-forth about kind of crafting how this is gonna go so that it works locally on the ground, and you know, there’s—we can send people. But that’s another thing for—that we’re hoping to do soon.
[Recording ends here.]
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