In the first church I served as Pastor, there was a man named Keith who held a prominent leadership position in the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW). He was the first person I’d ever met who worked for organized labor. He was smart, genial, soft-spoken, and exceedingly humble. And true to every stereotype, he and his spouse, Sandra, were deeply committed (and connected) to the Democratic Party. When Keith retired, his party included speeches by Democratic members of the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate. My spouse and I were invited to that party and seated up front with those Democrats, because Keith and Sandra were very generous to us.

I wasn’t raised to think one way or another about the cause of Labor. For 35 years, my dad worked for a company notorious for busting up unions, but I never heard my parents talk about that. They mostly swam in conservative evangelical political waters, and so I imbibed more antipathy about unions than I did enthusiasm. But the people who I heard speaking about Keith at his retirement told stories of him supporting and defending and showering their generosity upon people who reminded me a lot of my parents: young workers without college educations subject to the demands of big companies to make a living. That evening changed my impression about organized labor and the people who belong to it.

Personal experience has a huge impact on how we think and feel about things like labor unions. If nobody in your family has ever been in one, they’re an abstraction, like they were for me before I was Keith’s pastor. Now, every Labor Day, he’s the person I find myself thinking about.

 

 

I caught up over the phone yesterday with a good friend to whom I hadn’t spoken in months. Sure we’ve texted and messaged and commented on one another’s Facebook statuses (stati?) in a pretty constant stream, but we haven’t actually spoken since I can’t remember when. Maybe March?

That phone call made the rest of my day better.

I don’t adequately appreciate the telephone. It’s a bloody marvel, isn’t it? You just can’t achieve the depth of conversation the phone affords with the sprawling array of text and photo-based tools we’re all using. Pace, volume, and pitch are just a few of things that a telephone conversation allows you to experience that, unless you’re face-to-face, no other medium can handle (my experience with video calling apps like Skype makes me even more enthusiastic about the phone. I was once asked by a search committee to do a Skype interview and I insisted on a telephone conference call instead–though those aren’t perfect, I guess).

I appreciate more about my friend and what’s going on in his life after an hour on the phone than I do after months of almost constant digital contact.

Reach out and touch someone today.

 

First, make the thing. Then decide what to call it. If you start with the title first, how will you avoid making design choices to fulfill the expectations of some random name?

We designed a youth retreat some years ago and started with the title, “No Question.” The name came from some insight early in the planning process, but the further we got in putting the event together, the less any of us remembered about that insight, and yet still we designed–talks, small groups, exercises–toward “No Question.”

What you call something matters. What that thing actually is, though, matters more.

If a name is required at the beginning, say if you’re launching a website or a new worship service, it’s probably helpful to make a prototype first–compose your first blog post; assemble your first liturgy–and then ask, “What does this thing want to be called?”

All this to say I always title my blog posts after I’ve written them.

I got to listen to some people gush over a retiring colleague yesterday, and now I think attending retirement celebrations must be a terrific learning opportunity.

Endorsements of a retirees best qualities and most enduring achievements are like a curriculum for someone with decades of work left in them. Take note of the generosity that earns repeated mention, and decide to be more generous. File away the unfiltered observation of his dependability, day in and day out. Decide against canceling that thing. Don’t fail to mark the effect, over the course of this person’s career, of all those things he was doing without recognition.

Be curious, then, about the absence in all these emotional speeches of the qualities you think are most prized for your work: innovation, creativity, leadership. Wonder–if you dare–if it’s possible to change the world by investing your best working years with a recurring decision to show up, to share, and to recognize as often and as publicly as you can the contributions of others.

And by all means have a cupcake. It’s a celebration.

I’m introducing myself to a room full of colleagues this morning by answering the question, “What’s saving your life right now?”

The Royals are winning again.

My spouse started a new job.

My daughter is in a really cool maker’s camp this week.

I have really supportive people.

I get to do work I love with talented, committed people.

None of those are my answer. I have an answer, don’t worry. But none of those candidates are it.

I have the fortune of work and relationships and commitments that amount to a life that doesn’t feel, most days, like it requires saving. I am tempting fate to acknowledge this, I know, and surely the days are coming (they’ve visited before) when life feels in desperate need of saving. But these are not those days, thanks be to God.

That’s not my answer either.

 

Not 24 hours after families started receiving our annual youth calendar in the mail did I start hearing about problems with it. In one particularly glaring oversight, I scheduled a summer mission trip to begin before school is out. Face, meet palm.

There are technical missteps that lead to mistakes like this, and those are easily fixed (be sure and consult the school district calendar). But my anxiety over calendar errors is symptomatic of a faulty understanding of what a calendar is and is useful for.

A calendar is never a finished product.

So the next time I do an annual calendar for youth, I’m going to release it in phases, beginning with a public beta. That first one will be watermarked. It will carry a note that it is provisional and unfinished. Only after that one’s been out there for several weeks will it become “The” calendar, and even then . . .

A calendar is always in beta, isn’t it? Opportunities present themselves sometimes weeks, not months, out from their dates. Busy people need to plan ahead, and the calendar needs to help them by getting the big dates right and leaving them alone. But there should also be some room for development in the calendar, even after its published.

A post mortem on our mostly ineffective summer experiments with youth programming produces some reliable culprits: teens are busy; families travel; new things take time to catch on. All of those explanations adequately account for why our calendar of weekly get togethers in the city and bizarre Sunday morning workshops generated such paltry participation.

But I’m grappling with another culprit: ease.

Maybe most of the youth I’m working with are simply not interested in things that are easy.

I thought about this yesterday after riding the morning train next to a 13 year old from the church who lives in my neighborhood. He was on his way to an acting class, and he was aiming to arrive an hour early. Later in the day he would get himself, again by train, to a three hour volleyball practice. He wouldn’t get home until around 8:00 that evening, and somewhere in his day’s schedule he also fits in an hour of swimming. Fall baseball practice is three days a week as well. All of this he does during his summer vacation, almost entirely on his own.

Each one of those activities challenges him mentally and physically, as does commuting on public transit by himself. He’s committed to them not in spite of their difficulty but because of it.

Churches must always always always maintain low commitment points of entry for teenagers, like relaxed youth group gatherings. Once we have that, though, I think we need to add things that are more demanding of teens as disciples.

So maybe the next experiment we attempt will be intense service experience or theology course.

 

[For those of you who were interested, here’s a link to a pdf of one of the children’s bulletins we’ve been designing this month.]

Today I want to share a thought that’s been gurgling the last several weeks. We tried a couple of experiments over the summer to stimulate unconventional youth participation, and concurrently we ran the summer thing youth are used to. The experiments floundered and the conventional thing thrived (well, the experiments didn’t totally flounder–youth participation was disappointing, but adult leaders emerged who otherwise wouldn’t have, so that’s a win). The experiments were low-cost, low-risk, low-time commitment. The conventional thing was a week-long mission trip, which is high–allthosethings.

So the conclusion I’m tempted to draw is this: these youth are better served right now by conventional programming that makes a high demand on their time and investment (lock-ins, mission trips, retreats), and less well served by things designed as easy points of entry (afternoons at the beach, meetups at the movie-in-the-park, Summer Sunday morning classes).

Yet no sooner does that thought escape my fingers than another one follows: that may be true of these youth, now, today, but that doesn’t mean we can stop experimenting with gatherings and service opportunities designed for youth who aren’t presently participating, either because they’re simply not here yet or because they are here and don’t relate to the youth ministry as it’s currently configured.

Can you double down on the approach your community is used to and commit to experimentation at the same time?

Yesterday I wrote about the children’s bulletins some of us collaborated on in August. Several people emailed to ask to see a sample, and so I’ll put one up as soon as I get a pdf made, hopefully by tomorrow.

There’s another collaboration with children’s ministry I’m working on, though, that I wanted to share and see if anyone has done something similar: a mission trip with both middle school youth and older elementary school kids, like 5th-8th graders.

The reason we want to try this is that both the Children’s Ministry person and I are interested in helping the church’s young people transition from children’s ministry to youth ministry. My added agenda is to put some of the responsibility for that transition on middle school youth.

It’s on our calendar for next summer, since I use calendar publishing as a personal challenge; once it’s on a public calendar you kind of have to do it. But neither my colleague or I have done it before. We’re thinking it needs to be close, like no more than a half day’s drive away, but that it shouldn’t be where we live. And we’re planning on a standard week-long mission trip schedule: travel Sunday, work Monday through Thursday, do something fun Friday, come home Saturday.

Anybody done this and have advice on it?

A few of us have been fooling around this month, while Sunday School is on hiatus, with worship bulletins for kids. It’s got all the same stuff as the standard bulletin, only with some prompts for kids added in: draw a picture here of what you think the Bible story might have looked like; what is something you’re thankful for this week; did anything in today’s service confuse you?

We’re adding in some activity sheets from Illustrated Children’s Ministry too.

I’ve learned a few things with this experiment.

1. Collaborating with people who do children’s ministry is fun.
2. Design is a big deal. We have a crack team of people who design our bulletins (and all the other church communication pieces), and they’re gooooood.
3. These are for kids. We thought originally that the activity sheets would work for younger children and the special bulletins would help youth, like maybe up to 8th grade, but that’s not turning out. Youth older than, say, 5th grade aren’t taking them. Which is fine. It reminds me of my previous experiment with acolytes in worship, where 3rd-5th graders were really into it, but interest tailed off after that.
4. The conversation prompts we thought were for middle schoolers are being taken up by children. The mother of a fourth grader told me on Sunday that her daughter kept asking her questions throughout the service, which she’s never done before.
5. Curiosity is its own goal. Getting kids to ask questions and wonder about things in worship is a win. We asked a question about baptism in the bulletin: “Were you baptized? Do you or your parents remember it?” A child came up to me after the service and asked, “What happens if you don’t get baptized?” The asking of that question means the bulletins are doing their job.

Sunday School starts up in September, and it runs at the same time as worship, so we won’t be doing these kids bulletins each week. But I think we’ve definitely hit upon a valuable tool for helping kids experience worship with their parents. That’s really all we were after.