We did a little informal poll about worship with junior high students yesterday morning, asking them things like, “What is your favorite part of the worship service?” and “What do you think is the most important part?” and then inviting them to describe their ideal worship service.

Some of the input you could have guessed: we want donuts. The service is too long. Make it more fun. There should be a band.

Some of it was kind of surprising. More than one youth loves sermons. One even said the offertory anthem was his favorite thing. Some said they want a worship service with “no distractions,” one that is “peaceful” and even “serious.”

Then, when ambushed with an invitation to volunteer as a worship leader, four of them leaped.

They’re not disengaged during worship, these youth. They’re paying attention and waiting for an invitation to take their part.

If you want there to be a youth retreat, call up someone you think you could work with and put it on the calendar.

If you want there to be a network of leaders running youth mission immersion programs, make some calls and propose a get-together.

If you want there to be a mission trip, make some cal–you get the idea.

Could some of the people you call think, “Who does she think she is?” “Who gave him permission to propose this?” Yes. But is that what you would say if someone called you to invite you to experiment with a new idea? Probably not. The pros–the ones you want to be working with–don’t criticize permission-taking. They join it.

Either the thing you’re dreaming up gets a chance to fly and to make an impact or you get to remain comfortably obscure and give no one the opportunity to criticize you as too big for your britches, which, face it, they probably won’t do anyway. And even if they do, if the retreat/network/mission trip isn’t potentially valuable enough to absorb that kind of nonsense, then why take it seriously at all?

 

 

One of my colleagues shared a reflection about harvest time, that it’s a season for storing things up for the winter. That’s mostly a metaphor for people in modern technological societies, because we have the same access to food in January as in July. You may commit to eating “seasonally,” but that won’t mean only eating in this season what you preserved from the last.

What of that metaphor, then? Winter is coming. What should we be banking now so that we thrive later, when the days are shorter and darker and colder?

1) Habits. It is easier to establish a new habit in nice weather than in bad: getting up that extra hour early; exercising; praying. If we can bank these as habits now, we will probably have them when the weather turns. My experience is that it will be much harder to start those things in the dark of winter.

2) Friends.I’m preaching on the parable of the dishonest steward from Luke 16 this Sunday, and my preparation for that sermon resonates with this thought about storing things up for winter. The steward is about to be fired and is staring down the barrel of a bleak winter of social rejection and financial destitution. His shrewd action is to curry the favor of folks who will welcome him into “eternal homes” once his current setup implodes, which it’s about to. Who knows how long any of our secure situations will last? Are we investing in relationships that will sustain us and our friends through snow and darkness?

 

There have been a couple of seasons in my work that felt awful for how little control I felt I had over what I was doing, how little effect I thought it was having, and how exasperating every new effort felt. The first year of working with a particular group of junior high guys was one of those seasons. So was the first nine months of leading weekly Godly Play sessions with preschoolers. The challenges were strikingly similar.

I can now see how valuable those seasons were. Having to make it up as you go, trying something new each week, creating new problems by solving existing ones–there is no book, blog, or conference that can expand your skill set and knowledge base so dramatically. It feels downright awful some days, but it’s so worth it in the long run.

Remember that when you feel over your head and out of your league.

Bonus observation: the work of ministry allows for this kind of learning and growth in ways that I’m not sure many other types of work do. Teaching, probably. Community organizing? Making art? Those of us working in churches are lucky for the experience of feeling out of our depth and having the freedom–nay, the responsibility–to figure it out as we go.

I appreciate David Dark’s concept of “Attention Collections,” laid out in his book, Life’s Too Short To Pretend You’re Not Religious. Attention Collections are the songs on your mixtape, quotes from films that stuck with you, “your stories, your jams, your beloved enthusiasms.” Everyone has them, Dark argues. As much as any explicit religious catechesis, our Attention Collections indicate our religion.

Some of the pieces in my Attention Collection:

“Always double down on 11.”

“To be entirely romantic a thing must be irrevocable.”

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

This weekend I’ll start exploring faith with our 8th grade Confirmation students, and I’m enthusiastic about the concept of an Attention Collection as a way for them to start to own the religion they’re walking around with every day, even though they don’t know it. Dark does this with college students, so it will need adapting for young adolescents.

I’m totally doing it though.

Let’s make a collaborative Attention Collection. Share a line, a quote, a song, a film, in the comments–a jam, a beloved enthusiasm.

 

It’s great when the turnout is more than you expect and more than you’re ready for. People are flexible, even helpful. They grab extra chairs and squeeze in next to strangers. Some of them even sit on the floor. There’s an energy born of good will and anticipation that makes it work.

You go with it, tweaking your program to suit this larger-than-you-were-ready-for crowd. It works.

Now you know. Next time be ready. You can’t ask for patience and flexibility over and over again and keep getting it. Adjust. Season to taste. Enjoy.

I saw Jenny Lewis and the Watson Twins do a show last night where they celebrated an album they made 10 years ago by playing the whole thing, start to finish, like it was brand new. It wasn’t nostalgia.

What did you make a decade ago that you can still use?

I act like the work I’m doing today is only for today and that tomorrow and ten years from now require something new, different, better. I always want to be getting better, but the bonus of doing good work is that it lasts–you can use it more than once.

Let’s dig up some old work and put it to use again and see what happens.

You showed up to the meeting with that thing you worked on, and you presented it with conviction. The room fell silent. Then someone on the team said, “I’m not sure this is what we’re going for.” Uh oh. The thing you made isn’t the thing the team needs.

Good.

Especially when you’re new, opportunities for people to tell you that you’re off the mark and then–and this is critical–work with you to find the mark are valuable. They turn head-nodding into collaboration, and collaboration is almost never not good.

Our work is being perfected. Let’s not expect it to emerge from our brilliance fully-formed and gleaming like an iPhone prototype. If that’s what we’re waiting for we’ll never do anything that matters. Let’s make stuff our people need, share it, and then work together to fix it.

That’s a life right there.

I don’t ask, “Who gives this woman to be married to this man?”

I don’t announce the couple as, “Mr. and Mrs. [His First Name].”

And I don’t give permission to the groom to kiss the bride.

All of these traditional elements of a wedding service reflect a patriarchal, women-are-property expression of marriage. Nobody I know uses them.

I’m officiating six weddings over the next four months, and preparing for the first one is reminding me of all the things people expect in weddings, owing to how they are portrayed in film and television, that simply are not part of the wedding service my church uses. That’s because a wedding is a worship service. You never see that on TV.

When I first started out, I yielded to the demand for giving the bride away, because that subject never came up until the rehearsal, and by that time I was staring down the bride’s life-long expectation of being “given away.” I also said, “You may kiss the bride” early on because, again, I got caught flat-footed; it didn’t occur to me either that such a thing wouldn’t actually be in the service. I’ve learned since to be prepared for it, and I have really smart colleagues whose habits I copy when it comes to kiss instructions. “You may celebrate your vows with a kiss” probably works best, but Marci’s, “You may kiss your husband” is pretty irresistible.

Now my favorite elements of the wedding are the Declarations of Intent, where the couple expresses commitment to the covenant of marriage and everybody gathered voices their their support for the couple, and the sermon. I keep it short, but I revel in the chance to expound theologically upon marriage as a covenant, as an adventure, as resistance. I use this Chesterton quote in my sermons all the time: “Posting a letter and getting married are among the few things left that are entirely romantic; for to be entirely romantic, a thing must be irrevocable.”

All this to say: bring on the weddings, man.

 

“Painful as growing is we can’t forget it’s our ticket to taking the reins.”

Today is Daughter’s first day of third grade and her first day at a brand new school. She’s afraid she won’t find a friend. She’s also afraid of the science teacher who reportedly hangs a skeleton from the ceiling.

We’ve managed first-day-of-school with her before, but not while we, her parents, were also navigating first-days of our own; Meredith is in the third week of her new job, and I’ve got seven months under my belt but staring down the barrel of the start of youth programs this weekend. It’s not great. You’d much rather accompany your kid on her first-day with a clear head, confident of where you stand in the world.

But this is how growth and learning happens, isn’t it? You don’t get to set the conditions for the challenges you face. They show up–sometimes on schedule, sometimes not–and call on you to respond, to meet them with whatever you’ve got. You don’t get to wait until you’re on your A-Game before acting.  That’s true for parenting, pastoring, and every other meaningful work we want to do.

So here’s to pushing through, faking it, putting on a brave face, and all the other strategies we employ on the first-days.