YoRocko!

The giggle-inducing poet and theologian Callid Keefe-Perry has made a 45 minute “documentary poem” exploring the connection between God, faith, and creativity. “Made As Makers” releases June 1 on Vimeo, and after screening it earlier this week I’m certain church leaders and thinkers should watch it and use it, but I’m not entirely sure how.

First the certainty: Callid is an interesting cat and one of the more nimble thinkers plying a trade in the church today. He does improv theater, he writes music, he crafts poetry, he gives talks. He blogs here and here. If you have a chance to interact with him you should. You may come away scratching your head, but you’ll be smiling.

Now the confusion. “Made As Makers” is 45 minutes of people talking, and I’m not sure what to do with that. Unlike a standard documentary, there’s no overarching narrative, say about the financial crisis or the emerging church. It’s snatches of trailer-side conversations with thoughtful people being thoughtful–about God, about their faith, their creative aspirations (one guy shows off a prayer wheel he made out of some driftwood, a large dagger, and an old fire insurance token), and their hopes for the church. These are conversations you’ve had before, so “Made As Makers” isn’t breaking new theoretical ground.

But it’s not trying to either. It’s trying to facilitate a conversation about creativity in the church. That such a wide array of people, from Wild Goose-goers to study-bound academics, were willing to engage Keefe-Perry on the topic says something. It will need curating, but pieces of “Made As Makers” will serve as valuable conversation starters for spurring creative work.

The most interesting person to listen to, of course, is Callid Keefe-Perry. So if “Made As Makers” serves to expand opportunities for him to do what he does for a larger audience, then God be praised.

“I would walk with my people if I could find ‘em.”

Third Eye Blind

In my early 20′s I ditched a small Presbyterian church who’s pastor and leaders had been nothing but gracious and hospitable to me for a growing church startup full of young adults, including my best friend. After a time, I ditched that young church for seminary. Both moves filled me with excitement and guilt–excitement at the prospect of a new community to which I might belong, and guilt at leaving one that had embraced me.

In her new book Christianity After Religion: The End of The Church And The Beginning of A New Spiritual Awakening, Diana Butler-Bass lifts up Belonging (along with Believing and Behaving) as an element of an emerging spirituality in America that owes less and less to Religion. Given my lingering guilt over how I’ve sought belonging in church communities, I’m interested in where she comes out.

She writes, “The question ‘Who am I?’ and its emerging answer, ‘I am my journey,’ appear to be new contours shaping our sense of selfhood. In the twenty-first century, it may be better to ask ‘Where am I?’ as a path toward understanding who I am.”

Butler-Bass is very helpfully lifting up movement as a force that has animated spirituality from the ancient Hebrews to 21st century Emergents. The Bible, in fact, is mostly a story of people moving, of following or fleeing God in this move or that. Abram and Sarai, Moses, Ruth and Naomi, Jesus, Paul: all of them experienced transformative journeys that defined who they were.

My friend Danielle pastors a church in Dallas that has taken this insight about movement so far as to call itself “Journey.” The church describes itself like this: “We seek to follow the way of God revealed to us in Jesus Christ, study the grand narrative of the Bible, and learn from the fullness of Christian tradition.”

Follow=movement.

Fleshing this insight out involves injecting lots of prepositions into our heavily propositional theological discourse. “Prepositions,” writes Butler-Bass, “invite us to consider identity by exploring how we move, to whom we are related, and where we are located.”

“Who am I in God? With God? Before God? Behind God? Beside God? Who is God in me? With me? Before me? Behind me? Beside me?”

So the flaky modern habit of eschewing membership in a church for a looser kind of affiliation might be less about people relating the church as a consumer commodity and more about a church being part of individuals’ winding journeys in God. “Church,” in Buter-Bass’s estimation, “is no longer membership in an institution, but a journey toward the possibility of a relationship with people, a community, a tradition, a sacred space, and, of course, God.”

The churches I ditched a decade ago were part of my journey. Yet I want to resist the tendency to make myself and my journey the center of how I understand what happened between us. Journeys can’t just be about the people who go; there are always people left behind. I’ve been that person too.

Who are you in God? With God? Before God?

How would you use prepositions to describe the American church’s relationship to, in, with, before, through, and beside God at this time an in this place?

Previous posts on Christianity After Religion:

A New Vision–Behaving

A New Vision–Believing

When Religion Fails

Questioning The Old Gods

The End of The Beginning

The Beginning

About a year ago I wrote a post that openly fretted about the prospects for students in mainline, progressive congregations to have an experience of camp-based youth retreats that didn’t feel completely out of step with the theology and worship of their home church.

However positive our students’ experience of the last retreat, their experience of this one seemed even better. The stock and trade of the church youth retreat is so for a reason, because those mixers, songs, and games have a proven track record of helping students make connections and feel comfortable. The staff at this retreat did those things proficiently and with characteristic gusto. I watched with admiration.

The retreat was structured around the beatitudes, and the staff very creatively helped small groups of students choose one with which to spend the weekend. Our students talked at length and in depth, guided by their volunteer adult counselors, about the blessedness of meekness, purity of heart, and poverty of spirit. I’m good right there. Full stop.

But on top of that the staff and counselors led students both in presenting their beatitude to their peers in a creative way and in “sharing” what significance the beatitude had gained for them. What struck me about this was how open-ended the process was and how unresolved many of the outcomes were. The students who presented on “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” for example, did a skit that followed two brothers who lose their mother, get disowned by their father, become criminals, and end by wondering if God cares about them at all.

The whole thing allowed for a posture of honest questioning and exploration without expected “Jesus-y” answers. In fact, with the ideas of Christianity After Religion ringing in my ears, the whole thing seemed to be after “how” students believe these beatitudes much less than “what” they believe about them. I was totally digging it.

As for the songs and the King-Jesus-God talks and the altar calls, I’m kind of over my dis-ease. Those things are the wheelhouse of church camp, and if you have a problem with those things then you kind of have a problem with camp. There are better and worse ways to do those things, for sure, but church camp is evangelicalism’s undisputed terrain, so if you’re going to get bent over an guitared avalanche of “Hims” and no hymns then you’ll be fighting an uphill battle.

That battle might be worth fighting at the youth retreat, but immersion in the conventions of a different expression of Christianity than my students are used to is a benefit that I think outweighs the cost of screwy pronouns.

For my part, I was primarily a parent of a four year-old at the retreat and not a counselor, so please excuse this gratuitous exhibit of cuteness.

My previous post lifted up the idea of a prototype advocated in Dallas by Jud Hendrix, an idea that has quickly set up camp at the forefront of my brain and is coloring everything I’m thinking about (see Jud’s presentation here)

The other major contribution that NEXT 2012 made for me was an exploration of process modalities, led by the likes of Theresa Cho and Yehiel Curry.

Theresa described an Urban Ministry Convocation that she and some of her colleagues orchestrated with 22 urban churches in a seven mile by seven mile stretch of downtown San Francisco. The gathering required getting commitments from leaders in all of the churches to come to something that wasn’t required to do they weren’t quite sure what with people they didn’t know and organized by an entity they didn’t trust. 19 of the 22 churches sent leaders. The process of recruiting participants was itself nuanced and creative.

Since it was a new thing they were doing, Theresa and her  colleagues decided early in the planning that they would need a new kind of process, a process that they would have to create themselves. What they ended up with was something that invited participants to listen to one another and share their own story, something that allowed them to sit quietly as well as move around and interact, something that gave voice to the past while also sharing the struggle of the present and prayerfully prodding people toward God’s future.

That process isn’t, I’m sure, in any book. Parts of it are, but surely not the same book. The people behind the Urban Ministry Convocation in San Francisco had to decide what they thought the gathering needed to accomplish, then they got creative about crafting a process–their own process, not somebody else’s–to make that happen. Read more of Theresa’s thoughts on it here.

The 600-or-so NEXT participants didn’t just hear people talk about process modalities, though. We were were led through one that most of us had never experienced before: Open Space. I won’t labor to explain it here, but kudos to NEXT’s organizers for allowing the time and potential confusion of such an experiment.

Finally, Yehiel Curry described an alternative process for ordination developed by the ELCA called Theological Education for Emerging Ministries (TEEM). Curry is the pastor of Shekinah Chapel in Riverdale, IL., but he didn’t start at that church as its pastor. Rather, he became involved as a church member and ministry volunteer and was invited by the ELCA to pursue ordination and become the church’s pastor. He was ordained as a result of the TEEM process and installed as the pastor in 2009, and he’s currently finishing his seminary degree (view Curry’s presentation about TEEM here).

What struck me about this was how much more responsive to a congregation’s needs it seems to be. Rather than forcing a congregation to select someone from completely outside of their system to lead them, the TEEM process allows the church to select from within the non-ordained leadership of the church candidates who may be equipped, ordained, and installed as pastor. It’s a contextual solution to a contextual problem.

For almost two years now I’ve been using Moving Beyond Icebreakers as a tool for structuring interactive gatherings. I’m using it with youth groups, presbytery teams, and retreats. Only after being in Dallas this week do I now realize what I’ve been doing with it: experimenting with process modalities.

I feel smarter already.

Something clicked for me at the session meeting last night: much of the ministry at our church is being carried out by highly-committed teams that have only emerged in the last year or so. The commission/committee apparatus is not carrying all of the missional water at our church anymore. A few examples.

1. Four members of our church have attended a week-long training called Clean Water U to learn how to install a water purification system in communities without clean water. This is part of a presbytery mission initiative in Ayacucho, Peru, and by the end of November, all four of those folks will have been to Peru at least once. Neither of the pastors have been yet.
2. A stable of almost 10 Godly Play teachers has been leading the Sunday morning children’s program since January. Not only do these teachers lead independently each week, they can often be seen in the Godly Play room during the week practicing for their lessons, and they come to quarterly “confabs,” where they practice upcoming stories and troubleshoot classroom management issues.
3. A steady group of youth ministry volunteers come each week to help run Sunday School and youth group programming. They also meet regularly to discern the shape of the church’s youth ministry, to plan, and to pray. Five adults went on last summer’s work trip, a sweltering week in south Louisiana.

Each of these teams is supported or overseen in some way by an existing commission. But none of these ministries would be doing the good work they’re doing if the existing business structures of the church were asked to create them. Instead, staff and commission leaders have tried to lay the groundwork and create the conditions where teams of volunteers can emerge to do very specific things in ministry.

The word “do” there is important. These folks are given serious responsibility to lead and make things happen. The word “specific” is also critical. Godly Play teachers may be a bit wary, for example, at the amount of work involved in that role, but it’s clearly communicated, and they’re confident “others tasks as assigned” won’t just pop up.

This observation is reminding me of a distinction between committees, teams, and communities highlighted in an article by George Bullard (and related by Joseph Myers in his book The Search to Belong–reviewed by Pomomusings way back in 2003!).  Some quotes from that article:

Committees tend to be elected or appointed in keeping with the bylaws, policies, or polity of congregations.  Teams are recruited or drafted to work on a specific task or set of tasks.  Communities are voluntarily connected in search of genuine and meaningful experiences.

Committees focus on making decisions or setting policies. Teams focus on maturing to the point that they become high task performance groups. Communities add qualitative relationships, meaning, and experiences to the organizations, organisms, or movements to which they are connected

Committees focus on making decisions that are lasting and manage the resources of the congregation efficiently at the best price. Teams focus on debating the strengths and weaknesses of the various choices to complete a task, and typically end up with the highest quality product or outcome. Communities dialogue, engage in discernment activities, and arrive at the best solutions for a particular opportunity or challenge.

Our church has grown a nice little crop of teams. I don’t agree with the title of Bullard’s article, that we need to “skip teams” so that we can “embrace communities” (nor do I think we can “abandon committees” without doing serious damage). I would suspect that in a healthy church organization, all three of those structures are employed to their best ends: committees make decisions and give ongoing oversight, teams effectively carry out important work, and communities connect people to the bigger picture. No one of those instruments is better than the others, per se, only better-suited for the particular thing it’s being employed to do.

I love seeing the teams emerging at our church. Some of them function in some very community-like ways, and all of them benefit from competent committee structures behind them. That seems healthy to me.

We are ashamed to make mistakes–as well we should be, yes? It’s our job to get things right, right? So when we make mistakes, our instinct is to shrink into a ball and wish them away. Correcting errors, though necessary is embarrassing.

This from What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis, the book I’ve been exploring here, here, here, and here.

Churches hate making mistakes. Pastors hate making mistakes. Mistakes in business mean you’re a bad business person. Mistakes in church mean you’re a bad person person.

One of What Would Google Do?’s key contentions is that, “Corrections do not diminish credibility.”

In other words, in the Google age, the maxim really is true : “It’s easier [and better!] to beg forgiveness than ask permission.”

Churches rarely say they’ve been wrong. The pull of traditional Christianity is toward stasis and consistency, so that to change one’s mind  is not encouraged. Liberal and conservative churches alike spend a lot of energy defending the rightness of the way things are right now.

So we want to have all of the i’s dotted and t’s crossed on a program before we take it public. We won’t announce a new small group until we know we have the people to support it. We poll our membership before taking a public stance on something controversial.

We understand our church programs and activities as products that  will be judged against every other product in the church marketplace. Worse, their success or failure will reflect on our merit as believing people. We need to put out high quality products.

“Today, on the internet,” Jarvis insists, “The process is the product.”

So, I want my church to help college and post-college students make meaningful connections. The product could be a “young singles group.” There’s a ton of unanswered questions about who will lead it, what it will actually do, how much time it would require, and on and on and on. And of course, there is a very real chance that it could fail.

But why not start the process of making some of those connections, open up to the world about what we’re trying to do, and, if it is to fail, help it to fail magnificently.

Won’t that be more credible in the end?

Douglas Rushkoff recently inspired me to teach media literacy to my youth group. It’s a subject I’ve paid much attention to as a layperson but not one I’ve ever formally “taught.” In looking for materials, I found this curriculum by the Center for Media Literacy. The first installment was last night.

It’s got 25 sessions in it, five dedicated to each “Key Question” is addresses. That makes for simple lessons with very specific objectives. Last night’s: define “media,” “mass media,” and “media text,” and explore the difference between one-way and two-way communication.

My kids are crazy-smart, so they get this stuff pretty easily. Maybe too easily. I was prodding them at the end of the night, “Are you guys interested in this, or should we do something else?” A few said they liked it; that’s enough for me. Next week, deconstructing advertising.

Addendum: Here’s one of the questions I tacked onto the lesson: if the Bible is a media text, is it one-way or two-way?

Addendum 2: I also asked kids to name the one-way media of communication the church uses vs. the two-way media. They identified the  worship bulletin as an interesting case study: there are two-way elements in it (call to worship, unison prayers), but it’s a printed text that participants can’t change. So it’s a one-way medium, right?

Right?

During Lent I’ve been texting our church’s junior high and high school students every day around 3:00 with a reminder to pray. I stole this idea from a colleague at another church who did something similar.

The texts have been simple:

“Pray. Now.”

“Take a moment and pray for a friend or family member. Later, tell them you did it.”

“Time to pray.”

As I’ve checked in with students each week, they’ve assured me that these texts are helpful to them.

Yesterday, I did something a little different. Mostly on a whim, I texted, “Who are you praying for today.” Three students answered. One was praying for everyone who didn’t have enough to eat; another for a teacher with a recent death in his family; another for her mother.

Getting these responses was surprisingly powerful for me. I somehow felt like a participant in the students’ prayers. To each of them I voiced my prayer with theirs in a simple reply: “Amen.”

Youth. Prayer. Texting. An alliance of technology and spirituality.

Makes me hopeful.

What Would Google Do?

Who Cares?

That’s the answer some are giving to Jeff Jarvis’s tongue-in-cheek question. We’ve already kicked a couple of the book’s tires here and here, but now I want to take a step back and ask if churches should even care what the Google-mobile is doing.

In the words of another blogger, “What would Google do?” is the wrong question. “The question,” he writes in the comment thread, “Should begin with the purpose of the church.”

“Hear, hear,” says Jarvis. “Know what business you’re really in,” he writes more than once in WWGD? The church ain’t a business, but the point stands. If churches spend themselves trying to “be distributed” or “be a platform” without a clear sense of mission and purpose, then only cosmetic changes will likely result.

The purpose of the church is too heavy a load for this post to carry (you could do a lot worse than this as a starting point, though), but I don’t agree that churches can’t make any use of Jarvis’s query.

Churches model themselves after other forms of organization. They always have and they always will. The earliest Christian congregations were modeled after synagogues of the day. Most churches in North America today are reflections either of mid-20th century civic organizations or late 20th century business and and self-help and leadership movements. These models affect everything. Worship, education, polity, dress, outreach, marketing: everything churches do reflects models borrowed from other sectors of society.

“What would Google do?” is a useful question for churches to grapple with, for sure. Google (and Facebook and Flickr and Salesforce and Zillow and on and on) is revealing–and shaping–patterns of social organization that churches are foolish to ignore.

Churches are already operating on an answer to a different question, whether it’s “What would Rotary do?” or “What would Tony Robbins do?” What would Google do? isn’t just defensible for churches to ask; it may be essential.

I blogged earlier about one of key insights about Google in “What Would Google Do?” by Jeff Jarvis. Google distributes itself all over the place instead of expecting customers to come to it.

Here’s another nugget from the book worth considering: Google is a platform that helps communities do what they want to do.

Example: Google Maps. Google provides a mapping platform that users can build upon and enhance for free on their own sites. That helps Google and it helps Google’s users. Google wants to collaborate and wants to help others thrive. It cares less about what “consumers”are supposed to do with its technology and more about what communities of “users” are actually doing with it.

Is there something here for churches to think about? What do communities use churches as platforms for?

The congregation I serve charters a Boy Scout troop. That’s a community that wants to serve God and Country. Our church helps them do that by giving them a meeting space. But could we also invite the troop to take the lead on a church-sponsored community service?

I frequently am required to chase off skateboarders from the church property for insurance and liability reasons. Yet are these skaters not simply using the church as a platform for what they want to do, which is not just skate but also hang out and connect with one another? To protect ourselves, we have to chase them away; doing so may actually be causing us harm.

Communities aren’t waiting around for permission from churches to do their thing; we ignore the great stuff they’re doing at our peril, because, if Google is right, helping them helps us.