Jesus Was A Stat Head: A Post for Opening Day

“Fixate on the particular and you miss the big story.”

So says John Thorn, the official historian of Major League Baseball, in a Bleacher Report post about the damage that sabermetrics have done to baseball.

I’m not buying it, for baseball or religion

For the uninitiated, a brief summary: over the past 20 years, baseball has seen the rise of a kind of player valuation that is based less and less on the perceivable “tools” of players and more and more on a searching analysis of those players’ statistical records. This has applied equally to present-day players, future prospects, and past greats. It has been a move toward measurement and quantification, and its practitioners have spawned their own measurement tools in never-before-heard statistical categories like On Base Percentage (OBP) and Value Above Replacement Player (VORP).

The most accessible account of the embodiment of this trend is Michael Lewis’s excellent book Moneyball. Lewis dug into the story of Billy Beane, the General Manager of the Oakland Athletics, who used sabermetrics data to put together a string of low-budget winning teams in the early part of the last decade. Even for non-baseball fans, it’s a great read.

The debate that Moneyball popularized, the debate that Thorn is engaging, and the debate at the heart of sabermetrics is this: what has greater value? The things you can measure or the things you can’t? Is a player’s VORP a more useful evaluation tool a scout’s observation that he can flat-out hit?

Now to religion, particularly the mainline protestant Christian version. The scouts of the mainline church have been observing for decades that membership is declining, and they’ve offered their analysis: the church can’t hit the curve balls that postmodern culture is throwing. It has no theological arm strength. It’s leadership is out of touch with the players.

None of this is based on any actual data. Like the observation of a baseball scout, this way of evaluation the church depends entirely on what one can see, and its conclusions fit nicely with the scout’s well-established narrative of success and failure. And these have been the accepted answers to questions of the church’s decline.

But what if it’s been wrong all along? What if a new generation of church sabermetricians created new tools to measure what’s really going on?

Thankfully, that’s starting to happen. In my own denomination, a Research Services division has started publishing some great analytical work that casts serious doubt on the cigar stained conventional wisdom of the church’s scouts. It’s stated goal is to help the church make “fact based decisions,” which strikes me as almost poetically consistent with the aim of sabermetrics. Because it’s debatable whether a pitcher has control problems. But it’s a fact that over the last three seasons he’s walked 6.5 batters per nine innings. It’s debatable whether the church is dying and bad theology is the culprit. But it’s a fact that in 2009 the PC(USA) saw a rise in non-white candidates for ministry, increased Asian membership and leadership, and an increase in female pastors.

The scout calls it dead arm. The sabermetrician calls it a changing delivery.

What Thorn has wrong is the forced choice between the “big story” and the particular. When applied to faith, it’s decidedly anti-incarnational to poo-poo details in favor of a grand narrative. That instinct leads to a contempt for critical study of the Bible and to half-cocked evaluations of the church’s ailments.

The Big Story is made up of the particular, the stuff you can measure and track. Further, that story arises from those particulars; it can’t be forced upon them a priori.

Play Ball and go Royals!

The Ecstasy And The Agony of The Youth Retreat

We took our junior high and high school youth to a retreat last weekend put on by our denomination’s local camp and conference center. It was the first foray in a long while for our church into this camp’s programming–or any camp programming for that matter (more on that later).

Our students made really valuable connections with students from other churches in our area, which was encouraging. To me, that’s a huge part of why you do retreats like that in favor of retreating with only your church’s youth. Literally within minutes of arriving, some of our students were talking with complete strangers on their own initiative.

The volunteer staff were college students who led high-quality group games and facilitated small groups. I think the model of faith provided by these volunteer staff for the youth was very positive.

The setting was ideal: mountains, snow, sun. It made for an entire afternoon of sledding and making snowmen and snowball fights. And students came in from the snow to a big lodge with a fire burning. Recreation meets comfort meets community. It was fantastic, and our students seemed to have an overwhelmingly positive experience.

Yet . . .

Our students came from the most theologically progressive church represented, I’m sure, and the content of the retreat was notably out of step in tone and tune from what we’re nurturing them in back home. I’m not interested in a sustained critique, and I think readers of this blog will know what I mean when I describe guitar-led, male pronoun-dominated praise songs filled with images of divine Kingship, sacrifice, and blood alongside devotional talks pressing kids to make a decision for Jesus.

I wrestled all weekend with two things: first, I believe it’s a good thing for our youth to be exposed to Christians from across the theological and denominational spectrum. Neither the church nor the world is served by communities of Christians rearing their young in isolation from one another with their own branded God talk.

But how do we both include our youth in those gatherings while also taking an active role in shaping them so that our youth can actually recognize what’s being presented and not experience it as a foreign language? For what it’s worth, I used my evaluation form to volunteer to help plan the next one.

Second, my experience has indicated that Christian camps, even those of mainline Protestant denominations, are irreducibly tilted towards the evangelical experience of faith. Liberal churches, then, are more likely to abstain from the church-wide camp or retreat experience altogether than they are to engage with that culture.

I’m certainly missing something here, right?

In Response To Timothy Eldred (or The Elephant in The Mainline Youth Ministry Room)

In a typical post on a good youth ministry blog, Timothy Eldred drills down to the core of everything youth ministry is about:

There is only one objective for youth ministry – for the whole church in fact. That goal also defines the purpose of ministry clearly and concisely. It is synthesized with one dynamic word: discipleship. It is the last word Jesus spoke when he commissioned his faithful few. It was his number one priority and our number one failure.

Because I don’t agree with Timothy, I have a problem. Or he does.

A comprehensive analysis of “discipleship” as a lens for doing ministry–any ministry–is beyond the scope of any blog post. And it wouldn’t help. Because this problem is not for lack of analysis. Timothy’s analysis is sound, and his elevation of discipleship as the sole objective for the church is compelling. Youth ministries from Kalamazoo to Kenya are surely thriving with just such an understanding.

But I’m not in that boat, and neither is the church I serve. And this is the elephant in the mainline youth ministry room. Especially among those congregations on the left side of the theological spectrum, “discipleship” does not seem to appear as a useful way of describing the life of faith. There doesn’t seem to be a singular preferred alternative, in my experience, but the longer I steward the youth ministry of just such a congregation the more I feel the failure of “discipleship” to contribute anything to my work.

The grown ups in my students’ congregation don’t employ discipleship-speak. The preachers don’t use it. It doesn’t appear in the prayers and hymns on Sunday morning, either. It’s not in the vocabulary of the faith in which they are being reared. That’s not a critique. Discipleship’s absence is surely no accident. But it doesn’t change the shape of the problem.

Succinctly put, the problem is this: Timothy and I both care deeply about youth ministry, yet we would seem to be drilling for very different minerals, so to speak. I’ll propose some alternatives to discipleship in my context in a later post, but for now, does this seem like an accurate statement of a problem? Or am I imagining things?

My Church Killed Twitter? Personal vs. Institutional Use of Social Media

Is it better for pastors and churches to use social media institutionally or personally?

I set up a Facebook organization page for the youth ministry at my church several months ago, and it has attracted all of eight followers, most of whom are parents. Most of the content the page features is pushed from a Posterous blog I created to autopost content not only to Facebook but also to a Twitter account and a Flickr photo stream, all of which are “official” church youth ministry offerings.

I’m confident nobody uses those.

By contrast, when I use my personal Facebook page or Twitter account to narrate something going on in the youth ministry or the larger church, conversation reliably ensues.

Personally, I’m interested in people: what they think, what they’re doing, what they want to know. I’m much less interested in organizations. Yet pastors and youth leaders have well-advised instincts to make the things they’re involved in about the organization, the larger collective, and not about themselves. This is standard ministerial competence.

Social media are exposing that, at bottom, things that churches are doing are being done by people, and you can put those people on social map. And that’s okay. In fact, it may be a misuse of social media tools to employ them in the service of organizations instead of actual people.

One of the things from last year’s Theology After Google event that has stuck with me is Monica Coleman’s description of how she came to attend her present church. A friend connected her to the pastor through Facebook, and it was her interest in his theology and vision for the church that drew her to participate in the congregation. It was a person (it could just as easily been an elder or another member), not the organization.

So is it okay to scrap the “official” church Facebook page and instead cultivate the church’s relationship with the world through the personal social media presence of its leaders and members?

The Pea in Landon’s Mattress: Like-Mindedness and Sleepless Nights

Landon Whitsitt has posted a thoughtful and carefully considered response to my last post. He’s been irked since the NEXT Church Indy event, and my post pushed the right buttons to bring that irk . . . age clearly into focus. You’re welcome, Landon.

You should read the post, you should read Landon’s book Open Source Church when it comes out this spring, and you should read his Open Source Gospel ebook now. Landon is an innovative thinker who is widely read and who leaves fewer stones unturned than most when it comes to proposing a way forward for 21st century mainline protestant Christianity.

Also, we’re tight. He and his wife sang in my wedding. I baptized one of his kids. You get the idea. Speak uncharitably of him and I’ll hurt you.

What Landon takes issue with is my lack of alarm at the like-mindedness that characterizes both the NEXT Church conversation and the Fellowship of Presbyterian Pastors one. Much of the criticism aimed at that latter group centered on its lack of gender, ethnic, and vocational diversity (they’re mostly white male pastors of big churches).

Yet the NEXT gathering betrayed much of the same bias (far less so, though, in the area of gender), and that has caused many hopeful progressives to throw up their hands in despair. Landon is among them.

He writes:

Regardless of a group’s defining characteristics, when group members are similar, they tend to become cohesive – or “like-minded” – fairly quickly. The more similarities, the faster the cohesion is achieved. This cohesiveness is deceptive. We interpret it as a good thing because it seemingly allows us to get our work done more effectively and efficiently. But the actual effect of this cohesion is that it promotes reliance upon the group to such a degree that members become insulated from outside opinions.

Insulation from outside opinions is a serious threat, and Landon is right to worry about it. But I don’t agree that cohesion in a like-minded group has to lead to this effect. Both the Fellowship and NEXT groups have thrown their doors wide and invited everyone in. How people are greeted when they accept the invitation–that will be the test of insularity. It’s not a foregone conclusion.

More to the point, I don’t think any association of individuals who are trying to change an institution can get very far with an unlimited plurality of opinion. It just won’t work. I’m no slave to the mantra of efficiency, but conversations like NEXT and the Fellowship PC(USA) are after some kind of concrete change. That requires a modicum of like-mindedness.

Both James Davison Hunter and Steven Johnson were mentioned at the NEXT gathering, and both have written about the importance of “networks” in innovation and cultural change.

Hunter says this:

the key actor in history is not individual genius but rather the network and the new institutions that are created out of those networks. And the more “dense” the network—that is, the more active and interactive the network—the more influential it could be. This is where the stuff of culture and cultural change is produced.

Johnson says this by way of explaining the rapid rate of innovation that took place as people transitioned from nomadic hunter/gatherer societies to life in cities:

In the dense networks of the first cities, good ideas have a natural propensity to get into circulation. They spill over, and in that spilling they are preserved for future generations.

Both Davidson and Johnson used the descriptor “density,” which I think is far more helpful than like-mindedness. The latter is a marker of the former. From a Christian theological point of view, we could substitute “community” or “kinship” for density and bring the issue more clearly into focus: how do dense networks that begin with like-minded thinkers expand to become effective communities characterized by diversity?

The church is charged to model Kingdom-of-God type community. To me, that means people at cultural margins are heard equally with those in “tall steeples.” It means that racial and gender diversity are not optional. And, for Presbyterians, it means that pastors’ voices are not privileged over the voices of Ruling Elders.

Both the NEXT and the Fellowship efforts have serious holes with respect to that charge, as has been amply pointed out by Landon and many others, and as those efforts’ organizers are well aware. But I don’t see those holes as crippling, at least not with respect to the NEXT gathering, for two reasons (I’ll save my reasons for limiting these qualifications to NEXT for a later post):

First, networks aren’t about themselves but the people in them. The people behind the NEXT conversation are people both Landon and I trust. I trust them to have their eye on the need for a diverse community of voices as they host conversations about contentious subjects. This first one, admittedly, got away from them, and you can’t expect people in progressive circles to let something like that go. They haven’t.

Second, it’s a beginning. One of the organizers tweeted in response to Landon’s post that the planners of NEXT saw the Indianapolis event as a “beta” test and not a “full release.” This was not the launch of a strategic program but of a conversation with undetermined outcomes.

The pea in Landon’s mattress is a divinely-inspired caution against self-righteous retreat into safe enclaves of shared opinion. I hope that pea gets into all of our mattresses. But I also hope we can reach in there, take the pea out, look at it carefully, and decide if it’s really worth losing sleep over.

For me–right now–it’s not. But that could change.

Presbyterian Death Match: NEXT Church vs. The Fellowship

“so what’s the difference (other than theological perspective) between #nextchurchindy and the fellowship/whitepaper? any takers? #pcusa“

I’m fool enough to take that bait, laid out by @gspcrobert yesterday amidst the waning reaction to the NEXT Church gathering in Indianapolis earlier this week. I quickly tweeted:

“@gspcrobert I’ll take that. #nextchurchindy is a gathering looking for answers. The Fellowship is an argument looking for a gathering.”

That answer generated a couple of responses that I want to get into here. @Suzemb replied:

@yorocko @gspcrobert do the answers being sought exploring ways for both sides to find common ground so the denom isn’t torn apart?

And @charlesawiley added:

@yorocko Wonder about your distinction between Next and Fellowship. Next had irenic tone-but with a pretty like-minded group #nextchurchindy

First, the basic background for the uninitiated. Several months ago, a group of Presbyterian pastors, many representing what you call “Tall Steeple” churches from the progressive/liberal regions of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), were invited to Kansas City to start a conversation about the future of the denomination. The invitation came from Tom Are, Pastor at Village Presbyterian Church in Prairie Village, Kansas, and it went out, as best I know, to people he trusts and who’s insight he values. Specific areas of concern had to do with mission and the need for a different way to engage the denomination’s areas of conflict that aren’t dependent on a political winner-take-all model.

The NEXT Church Indianapolis gathering was an outgrowth of that Kansas City conversation (and, I think, another conversation or two). The organizers invited all interested parties to come to Indy and explore different ways of doing mission, vocation, and governance in the PC (U.S.A.).

Meanwhile, last month another group of Presbyterian pastors, also representing mostly “Tall Steeple” churches but from the church’s conservative regions–and calling themselves The Fellowship of Presbyterian Pastors–distributed a letter and an accompanying white paper that asserted that the denomination is “deathly ill” and that invited folks to an August event that would explore the formation of a parallel Reformed body separate from but related to the PC (U.S.A.). That letter and white paper were followed by a brief video posted online in which Jim Singleton, Pastor of First Presbyterian Church of Colorado Springs, that further laid out the strategic vision of this Fellowship.

So what’s the difference between NEXT and The Fellowhip?

One difference is very clear. NEXT organizers want a conversation among like-minded Presbyterians. That conversation is about very specific things, and the way it’s been structured so far, it could plausibly produce a number of varying–even competing–results. It is a conversation looking for answers–and new ways of engaging the denomination’s problems.

The Fellowship, on the other hand, is proposing the answer at the outset. It is inviting like-minded Presbyterians to join in a process that has clearly articulated outcomes. The organizers have set in motion a process, and people will gather in August to join in that process.

@charlesawiley’s observation that both efforts appeal to like-mindedness is apt, as is @suzemb’s concern that NEXT transcend that like-mindedness in search of common ground. But I don’t think like-mindedness is a problem. Shared convictions and common ways of viewing problems are the fuel of effective movements for change. Both The Fellowship and NEXT are appealing to people who think like the organizers and who like and trust one another. There’s nothing wrong with that.

(Try to get people to join a gathering populated by people they know they don’t agree with and whom they don’t like–I believe that’s called a presbytery meeting.)

And, practically speaking, both efforts are intentionally trying to get beyond the tired effort of finding common ground among liberals and conservatives that leaves both feeling ignored and wronged.

In the end, the biggest difference is how NEXT and Fellowship are using like-mindedness, the former as food for an open-ended (but topically delimited) conversation, and the latter as a vehicle for accomplishing precisely defined aims.

More NEXT Church Summary: In Defense of White Male Pastors

That much of the speaking that was done in Indianapolis on Monday and Tuesday was done by white male pastors did not go unnoticed by the event’s participants. Their observation is accurate. Out of three sermons, two were given by that demographic; two of the three “testimonies” offered after the worship liturgies were also delivered by white male pastors.

In addition to the speaking that went on in the sanctuary, many of the leaders of small groups were also, you guessed it, non-female, non-ruling elder, non-non-white people.

So in the event’s final hours, when event-goers were invited to share their thoughts about the goings on, this got pointed out. And pointed out. And pointed out some more.

The qualification has been given by John Vest that, though this characteristic was something of a flaw at NEXT Church, the gathering was clearly a beginning to an important conversation, and a very good one at that. If the next NEXT event looks the same, then the movement may have a serious systemic limitation.

In addition, I want to point out two things, one by way of explanation and the other by way of correction. First the explanation. The NEXT Church gathering was conceived of and organized by a group of progressive pastors, many of whom serve tall-steeple churches. It’s a largely white male group. That at its first denomination-wide gathering the leadership gave most of the prime speaking time to itself makes organizational sense. They were framing the conversation, and since it’s a conversation they started and then invited everyone else into, they were the first to speak.

Second, it shows a bad understanding of what the NEXT conversation is aiming at to criticize the makeup of the small group leadership. A personal anecdote will illustrate my point.

One of the leaders (a white, female pastor) had her plane diverted to Louisville on Sunday night due to weather and so was not able to lead her Monday morning small group. She texted me and asked me to fill in as facilitator. I replied, “Sure, but would you rather ask an expert on the topic?”

Her answer was simple: “The facilitators aren’t meant to be experts, only listeners and recorders.”

So at least one of the white male pastor small group leaders was there by accident.

But all the others were put there for a reason: to let other people talk. I attended a Monday afternoon small group in which the white male pastor facilitator hardly said three sentences in the allotted hour, all of which were for the sake of clarification and invitation. The most frequent voices in that group came from a female seminary graduate looking for a call, a female deacon, and a female pastor (all white).

NEXT is trying to provide a platform for lots of different voices within the PC (U.S.A.). I for one am assuming the best about its intentions, intentions which were on display during its inaugural conference, especially in the role played by its small group leaders.

NEXT Church Summary

I spent the last two days inIndianapolis with a bunch of Presbyterians mulling the NEXT Church. We worshiped together and had lots of structured conversation around things like social media and young adult ministry. Of course, the reason you go to these events has less to do with actual program content than it does the people who will be there and the offering of a platform to interact with and learn from those people.

NEXT Church was full of great people. Every significant conversation is.

And while there was the expected observation that lots of people who should be in the conversation were not (ruling elders and non-white Presbyterians, namely), NEXT was a beginning. It was a good beginning, because it brought together good people–thoughtful, creative, innovative, passionate people.

Check out the event’s website for lots of video and to connect to the ongoing conversation.