Netiquette for Congregations

• There is the pastor who—after receiving an ornery e-mail at the end of a long and stressful week—hits "reply all" and then tells everyone exactly how she or he feels.
• There is the congregation that thinks e-mail would be a great way of reaching out to lots of Gen-Xers—and finds itself accused of spamming.
• There is the one vestry member who does not have e-mail and who does not appreciate being excluded from online deliberations.
• There is the online community that descends into a flame-out that never would have happened if the same people had been meeting face-to-face or speaking by phone.

How should congregations respond? It is hard to make general prescriptions. The digital world changes quickly. Different congregations are in different places in their digital journeys. One of most interesting things about congregational responses to the digital communications revolution is their diversity in the face of unique mission challenges.

Consequently, it would not be helpful for all congregations to adopt uniform best-practice responses quickly. And any advice must be offered from one angle of vision on a changing landscape.

Yet, we are far enough into the digital communication revolution in congregations that it is possible to generalize about some casualties, to give an initial inventory of some issues, and to point towards some helpful responses. We would also be interested in hearing other reports of creative, faithful responses to casualties of the digital revolution in congregations.

Common types of congregational casualties in the digital revolution seem to fit into five groups:

1. When virtual communities turn vicious. It has become easy to create free Yahoo or Ecument e-lists for communicating among board, team, or committee members. One common type of casualty arises when a group sets up such an e-list and then someone either posts a strong opinion or makes a personal attack. The speed at which such a conflict can escalate is amazing when people don’t need to wait until next month’s meeting to express themselves.
   
   While the "he said, she said" stage of analysis in a conflict is rarely illuminating, dissecting flame-outs after the fact often reveals that people perceive the borderline between frank exchange and flame to lie in very different places. In this medium, one person can easily perceive that another has crossed the border into flame and thus feel justified—if only momentarily—in fighting fire with fire.
   
   
2. All-too-easy digital communication. Every congregational leader has at some time or another left a meeting sorely tempted to let everyone know exactly how she or he felt. Unfortunately, electronic communication provides a number of ways to do this easily. It is important to note here that the problem is not "wanting to vent." Letting off steam is a time-honored tradition. Writing out anger so one can see it is good. Anger can provide the energy to finally do something about an unacceptable situation.
   
   Yet, actually hitting that "send" button might not be wise. An alternative might be to send yourself the e-mail and read it again in the morning. Or, make an agreement with a colleague outside the congregation to read drafts of such e-mails, helping to differentiate between useful initiative and folly. (A ministerial spouse interviewed for this article suggests that spouses should not be asked to play this role.)
   
   
3. That tricky "reply all" button. When using e-mail for congregational business, there is a dilemma concerning the "reply all" button. What should I do when I receive an e-mail that has been sent to a group, but I feel that I should respond only to the sender? It is probably hard to make a general rule. E-mail (like pagers and cell-phones) is definitely a triangulation tool. Speaking about one person to another in a divisive way is made all too easy by digital technologies.
   
   Thus, it might seem that the best practice when replying to a group message would be to address the whole group. This keeps the discussion in the group. Yet, some people are rather indiscriminate and send copies to people who are only vaguely or peripherally connected. In such a situation, "reply all" may load the inbox of people already overloaded.
   
   If anything other than "delete" is appropriate, it would likely be "reply" rather than "reply all." It can be hard to navigate the rocky shoals between the Scylla of "triangulation is bad" and the Charybdis of "bothering people is bad."
   
   
4. When my outreach becomes your spam. E-mail is a great tool for outreach: It is cheap. It is fast. It allows people to respond quickly. And amazingly, some people who throw fourth-class mail into the waste basket will read mass e-mails. Yet, spamming is illegal. And, when people receive mass e-mails that seem like spam, they are rarely in the mood to hear your arguments that your outreach efforts are not "really" spam.
   
   
5. The last person without e-mail. Many congregations have reached the point where entire committees or teams are on e-mail. E-mail becomes a marvelous way to review notes before a meeting, poll a group between meetings, get answers to informational questions, and maintain momentum on work. But what do you do when not quite everyone has e-mail?
   
   Often groups commit themselves to sending paper copies or phoning those who have not yet gone digital. In practice, this is a difficult discipline to maintain and is not a substitute for the immediacy of e-mail. One woman on my congregation’s board said it was like getting day-old bread—nourishing, perhaps, but not quite the same. The other most obvious solution is to aid the straggler to make the digital leap.

How might congregations avoid these casualties? In a way, the answers are simple. Some problems with digital communication arise because people allow themselves to use the new media as an occasion for forgetting old rules: "Do onto others as you would have them do unto you" pretty much covers problems with flame-outs.

While these well-tried rules usually apply, however, they often fail to cover the specifics of netiquette, the digital highway "rules of the road." And, while there are some helpful netiquette guides for congregations, two cautions are in order: First, netiquette (like the Internet itself) is evolving, and there are legitimate reasons for norms to differ in different groups. Second, adapting and using digital technology needs to involve a discussion about behavior. Realistically, there is no reason for the youth group to remember (let alone follow) a sheet of rules for digital communication unless those rules have become a behavioral covenant that they fully own and embrace (see Gil Rendle’s book, Behavioral Covenants in Congregations at www.alban.org/BookDetails.asp?ID=957).

This said, out of some painful experiences have come some increasingly standard sets of netiquette rules that many congregations are using. In fact, after going through a period of elaboration, the subject of netiquette is developing into special sets of rules. Netiquette has become enough of an issue that businesses have formed to guide corporations on the subject: see www.epolicyinstitute.com and www.emailpolicy.com. While it is not yet time to declare any of these sets of rules "best practices," they are a place to start and to raise the issues that congregations need to consider.

Copyright © 2005 by the Congregational Resource Guide. All rights reserved. This article may be freely distributed, with the following attribution:

Source: www.congregationalresources.org © 2005 The Congregational Resource Guide.