I invited our Confirmation students to share their questions about faith and related phenomena. Compiling their responses was illuminating. 

I grouped their questions into categories, because I can’t help myself. 

Jesus got more questions than anything else.

“Did Jesus plan to die?” 

“Did Jesus fight back when he was on the cross?”

“When is Christ coming back?”

“Did Jesus walk on water?”

The students’ questions about Jesus are all related to claims the faith makes about him and not about the claims Jesus makes about the kingdom of God in the gospels. I’ve had students scratch their heads over “Blessed are the meek” before, but not here. 

A close second was questions about the church. 

“What would happen if we didn’t go to church?”

“Why is church an hour long?”

“Why is church on Sundays?”

These are questions about the most basic elements of something these 8th graders have been made to do since they were children. They’re precisely the kind of questions Confirmation is for. Every one of them opens into a conversation about Christian theology and practice. 

This is what makes Confirmation fun. 

A blue stack of pages printed with a recent blog post walked into my office yesterday. The carrier confessed that he had meant to make one copy but mistakenly made 50. I was confused. “You printed this from my blog?” I asked. 

“No,” he answered. Holding up the white original he explained, “This was sitting on the counter next to the copier.”

Huh. I am not in the habit of printing out my blog posts and sprinkling them around the office. 

Write something. Share it. What happens with it after you hit “Publish” is out of your hands. 

***

I used my sports column in the college paper to criticize the rude and rowdy behavior of some male fans during women’s basketball games. A copy of that column got clipped and placed in the personal mailbox of those fans’ ringleader. Stares and whispers in the cafeteria arose instantly. I was confronted in the computer lab and my defense was shushed by the librarian. Somebody unloaded a fire extinguisher on my car. 

Write something. Share it. What happens with it after you hit “Publish” is out of your hands. 

A committee is a good vehicle for making policies and procedures. So I’m asking my Youth Ministry Committee to recommend some guidelines (cousins to policies, I know) to govern how adult staff and volunteers interact with youth using social media. 

The first draft was too rigid. It didn’t allow for adult-to-youth text messaging without the burdensome requirement to copy a parent on all communication. It also prohibited the sharing of anything but information between youth and adults in digital threads, making a problem of the simplest expression from a teenager like, “I hate homework.” So I did some revisions, and this is my crowdsourcing attempt to get feedback before I share it with the committee next week. 

Do these guidelines feel useful?

Adults should never interact with youth via Snapchat or any other platform which automatically deletes content shared by users. 

Adults should not initiate online connections with youth. This includes “friend” requests on Facebook or “follows” on Instagram or Twitter. 

If an adult is to accept a social media connection from one youth on any given platform, she should accept connection requests from all youth on that platform.

While youth are likely to openly share thoughts and feelings online, adults should take great care when expressing personal feelings to youth in digital communication. 

Absent a parent or legal guardian’s written consent, adults may not share any personal information pertaining to youth online. This includes things like the youth’s name, email address, or photographs. 

Here’s a link to the whole draft document, which includes a prefatory paragraph. 

Thanks for sharing feedback in the comments. 

I’m reading Mobilizing Congregations, in which John Wimberly spells out the difference between a team and a committee for getting things done in churches. In essence, committees are for governance and teams are for ministry work. That’s a crude distinction (governance is ministry too) but I agree with the spirit of it. Committees are best for things like overseeing and supporting staff, making budgets, formulating policies and procedures, and making reports to a higher body. Teams are a better tool for planning events, recruiting volunteers, organizing tasks, and so on. 

Wimberly’s argument is that most of what churches should be doing today require teams, not committees. That’s a helpful insight to apply to new work. Someone is suggesting a new youth-and-family camping trip? Let’s pull together a team and set it loose to make it happen (we just did this at my church). Let’s not ask the Youth Ministry Committee to plan it. Nothing against the Youth Ministry Committee–some of the same people are on it as are on the team planning the camping trip–but it has a different scope of work. It should report about the camping trip to the Session, not plan the camping trip. 

How do you turn a committee into a team, though? If you’re not starting from scratch but with a history, if a collective of people need to be working as a team but are stuck in a committee mold, how do you break that mold and reform the committee into a team? Assuming they don’t actually need to be a committee–that is, there’s no other entity for them to report to and they have no power to make enforceable policies–how do you make a body that operates that way into one that functions as a team? 

That feels like more than a process question. I did the process in my first church. Within my first six months I changed all the committees into “Ministry Teams” and wound up deflated two months later that–gasp!–they still functioned as committees. 

Maybe this: start calling it a “team.” Add new people who don’t have committee expectations. Invite people to be on a “team,” even though the people already there call it a “committee.” Allow those newbies to model a different way of working. Then invite some more. Maybe after awhile the people who were used to the committee mode will come to prefer the team mode and choose, quietly, to adapt. 

Maybe it’s a better use of a leader’s energy to just start functioning differently than it is to appeal to a committee to change into a team. 

The work of a youth retreat is multiple. In a space of under 48 hours we want students to: learn, rest, play, eat, build community, find solitude, pray, reflect, share, and listen, just for starters. 

What one person can design an experience that accomplishes all that? Nobody I know. 

My favorite experiences leading retreats have been with a collaborative team where somebody designs the recreation and someone else designs the community building and still someone else takes charge of the learning. And everybody does some of the talking; I’ve never hired a featured retreat speaker. 

You break it up however works, but the important thing is to do it with collaborators and to give one another permission to do what we do. And show your work. 

This is not without tension. Signals can get mixed. People work at different paces and hold varying standards. Theological convictions differ. Most of that tension at least has the potential to generate something interesting, though, for the leaders as much as for the youth.

I’ve come to a place where I don’t want to lead retreats unless I can work with a team that designs them from the ground up. 

There are different ways of being a team, but by far the best is way is the creative way, where every member of the team has a hand in creating a piece of what the team is making. You could be an implementing team, following the instructions of the creative person–you could even be the creative person who throws your creation over the wall to the rest of the team–but that doesn’t seem like as much fun as being a team where everyone is a creator.

It will take more time, and it will expose you to more discomfort, but being a creator on a team of creators is worth it. Making your team work that way is an investment in everyone’s leveling up, because everyone on the team gets to watch the others do creative work.

Half of what I know how to do I learned on creative teams.

Logging is valuable for more than nostalgia. When you log your work–especially if you log it in a digital, searchable, cloud-based format–you’re creating a guidebook for future work.

Example: youth group games.

I have a Google Doc for youth group games that I started seven years ago. A couple times a year I add new games I’ve learned to the document, and by this point it’s seven pages long. Every game on there I’ve led at least once. My game logging hasn’t been exhaustive, which is too bad. But it’s getting better. I’m adding tags to my game descriptions to make the log more easily searchable, and I’ve added a collaborator.

My game log saves my life when I need to plan a game for a retreat or youth group meeting but can’t think of one straight away and so feel like a terrible youth leader. Taking a few extra minutes to be a little more thorough today will save me a bit of despair a year from now.

 

 

I use Action Launcher on my phone because its developer adds new features to it all the time and communicates those new features to users. This sounds completely irrelevant and geeky; stay with me. My launcher is changing how I think about my work.

If you use a phone that runs the Android operating system, you can install a third party “launcher” which completely changes the user interface and adds functionality that doesn’t come with the phone. There are countless options here, and I’ve tried almost all of them. I’m compulsive about launchers. Given a few minutes to kill, I’ll go search for a new launcher in the Google Play Store and install it.

But I keep coming back to this one called Action Launcher because it has a couple of interesting design features and works really well. But the main reason I’ve kind of latched onto it? The developer, Chris Lacy. He updates the product frequently, and each time he produces a short video explaining what he’s added.

I want to be like Chris Lacy. I want to design things that are useful, that people choose to participate in given lots of other options. I want people to know that I designed it and to share things about it that help or hinder what they’re trying to do with it.

This is how I think of meeting agendas and retreats and blogs: like a mobile launcher developer.

Sunday keeps coming at the preacher. The youth retreat keeps coming at the youth worker. Hospitalizations keep coming at the pastor.

It terrified me when I started in ministry, the way events demanding good work kept coming at me, often at the same time. Now I love this. I depend on it. If Sunday wasn’t inevitable I might never finish a sermon, and if the youth retreat wasn’t brazenly published on a calendar months before I might never design its sessions. And if people didn’t predictably fall ill and need their insides fixed I might never practice listening and compassion.

This is one of the great advantages of the ministerial profession: work is required before we are ready. Not only does that force us to produce work we might not otherwise, but it also forces us to reckon with grace, as the people we’re doing the work with almost always will tell us that it’s enough, that it’s “good” even. It creates a healthy awareness of our own limits. It makes us less afraid, because we find that the work we’re forging out of our inexperience and our inattention is better than no work at all. Also, we find that our assessment of its value is the least important one.

A good reason to say “Yes” to things that scare you, things you’ve never done before, is that they’re only that scary the first time. After you’ve done it–no matter how well it went–you get to add that thing to your bag of tricks. Now you lead youth retreats. Now you write books. Now you moderate meetings.

It’s now among the things you do. Do well? Maybe. There’s enough value in doing it at all, though, to make “Yes” worth it when given the chance.