Every four years, United Methodist clergy must renew their sexual ethics training certification to continue serving churches under appointment by the bishop. In 2011, the team working to develop the training invited me to consult with them to make the training more interactive and to incorporate more video components to illustrate points. They wanted to highlight a new policy that protects clergy from harassment by lay members of congregations and the dangers of social media.
Through our discussions, the ideas for two scenario videos began to take shape. The first shows a clergywoman being harassed by a lay man in her congregation. We debated how to tell the story and whether we could “show” the harassment happening. We finally decided that we would need to run an internal monologue from the woman in order to tell the story as it was happening. We also decided to follow up the incident video with a video example of how the clergywoman might handle the situation with the lay man to get the harassment to stop.
I wrote the first draft of the script based on an experience related by a member of the planning team. We went through several rounds of revisions before filming with a handful of amateur actors for the final videos.
[wpvideo irGxHm2X] [wpvideo FMcE5efu]We went through a similar process for the dangers of social media. While team members were aware of immoral behavior in social media, we decided to instead focus on inappropriate venting of feelings on Facebook to illustrate our point. I wrote the draft script and we went through a couple of rounds of editing before filming the final segment.
[wpvideo CI1ryYZF]I also prepared the outline of the training script, developed the PowerPoint slides and sat with the planning team to write the script notes for the presenter teams. Additional video segments were filmed with the bishop and conference attorney, and I pulled segments from a national training event to support the presentation. View the final training presentation slides with notes.
The multimedia presentation won an Award of Excellence from the United Methodist Association of Communicators in 2011. It was used 13 times in Kansas to update clergy sexual ethics certification in 2011 and 2012.