I used to write these Monday Morning Quarterback posts that narrated Sundays (like this one). It was a fun way to process what was, for a season, a very demanding day full of unpredictable church and family responsibilities.

After a couple of years of writing it, though, Sunday got to be less demanding. I figured some things out on the church end and family stuff changed, mostly as my daughter got older. Writing Monday Morning Quarterback started to feel like a performance, like Sundays weren’t hectic and random enough on their own anymore; they needed some embellishment.

So now here is a Monday following a Sunday completely unworthy of a blog post. There was worship and our experimental kids and family bulletins. There was a youth leader confab that went just great. And there was an evening walk with Wife and Daughter (btw, it is the eve of Wife’s new job). That kind of day does not merit a time stamped recitation. It merits gratitude.

No, really. It’s awesome.

These people come together at least once a week to rehearse a good news story about sacrificial grace and ultimate redemption. They sing (who sings anymore?!). They pray–sometimes with one person speaking and everyone else listening; sometimes with everyone speaking at the same time; sometimes taking turns! They even partake together of the rarest of substances in the modern world: silence.

And all of that is just the hour they spend together on Sunday morning.

Then they tutor local kids. They feed hungry folks and make blankets for babies born at the nearby hospital. They visit one another in sickness, and even visit one another’s friends and families. Who does that?

I just want you to know how awesome your church is. If your budget can bear that half time youth ministry position filled by a seminary (or even college) student, please go for it. Don’t sweat the long term staffing strategy just now. Put it out there that your awesome church is looking for a part time youth leader for a one year position. Then don’t take just anyone. Insist on responsibility and maturity, because you deserve that. And then hand over the keys, but don’t get out of the car. Surround your person with support and encouragement. Volunteer for the lock-in.

Your awesome church is going to churn out some awesome leaders if you let it, because there simply is no work experience like church work experience. You have that going for you.

I just wanted you to know that.

(Hat tip to Trinity Presbyterian Church in Cherry Hill, New Jersey for handing me the keys for a year back in 2003. You taught me much.)

T’is the season for start-of-the-year mailings: calendars, flyers, letters, sign-up forms, consent forms. Watch the website. Watch your email. Watch your mailbox.

Yes, your actual mailbox.

I’m ready for a straight up analog experiment this fall. Every event announcement we post to our Facebook page and our website and a Constant Contact campaign is also going home to somebody’s mailbox. I’ve come to the end of the digital road; there’s not another platform I’m adopting to reach youth and their parents with information. Not Instagram, and absolutely not Snapchat. Okay, maybe Instagram?

 

Preparation is toward fulfillment of the objective. Preparation is not toward perfection.

Measure the success of your preparation less in terms of polish and more in terms of proficiency. Did the thing you made do the job you made it to do? Then that’s enough.

Could it do the job better? Optimize and enhance by all means, then. But keep the objective in sight. Don’t be distracted by sheen. If the sheen is what people notice about your work, it’s probably not having the kind of impact you want it to.

All this to say I have a volunteer training event this weekend that needs to accomplish some important objectives. Impressing the participants with slick presentation, however, is not one of them.

https://www.amazon.com/Tribe-Homecoming-Belonging-Sebastian-Junger/dp/1455566381

This is a swift little book and powerful. There are some gaps between it’s central claim (the individualism of modern life is destroying people) and a robust body of data, but Junger’s observations are prescient enough to warrant careful attention. 

Here’s my favorite anecdote from the book: a man urges a young body to stop picking the legs off of spiders. “Why?” the boy asks. “Spiders don’t feel pain.” 

The man’s reply will stick you ‘tween the eyes. “It’s not the spider I’m worried about.” 

Guilt is a developmental milestone. The capacity for contrition when you’ve done something you shouldn’t have or failed to do something you should have done signals maturity. The absence of remorse is a maturity problem.

But the ability to move beyond guilt is also a developmental milestone. Wallowing in shame becomes something of a convenience after awhile, a justification to not make new choices and embrace new commitments, because, well, look what you did.

I know some very mature, very spiritually healthy people, who have sketchy pasts but have moved through guilt about them to honest resolve; they’re more motivated by a vision of the future–a better them, a better world–than they are by some disgraced posture of lifelessness.

I want to be like those people.

Youth ministry involves stewarding relationships between teenagers. The youth I work with are enmeshed in multiple networks of relationships at the same time, including those in their family, at school, online social networks, and teammates. Their relationships with one another at church rarely overlap with their relationships in those other spheres.

So we have an opportunity to cultivate friendships that are grounded in a shared story and shared habits of worship and community. While we pray for all of our students’ relationships to be characterized my mutual concern, selflessness, and common commitment, we work to develop those characteristics when we’re together.

I think doing that requires a balance of emotional closeness and emotional distance. I’ve been at retreats with groups of youth who were downright frosty with one another, and I’ve been on mission trips with teens who couldn’t stand to be apart. Neither of those are good. In healthy relationships among teenagers at church, emotional closeness should never be an end in itself. Youth group and mission trips should bring them closer to one another and should bond them (if not there’s something wrong), but I fear that if closeness is not in service of something greater (Discipleship), it can be contorted into a force that doesn’t build faith but undermines it.

Yes, friends are friends forever. But the best friends work together toward something bigger than their friendship.

My first blog was a mess. Unfocused, indulgent, not very interesting to read: it was an outlet for a fear that maybe I should have been doing something else with my life than failing to turn around a dwindling congregation. It was desperate.

But it produced this, which I used the other day in a sermon and which has prompted a few hours worth of recollection and reflection since.

A blog is still as good a tool as you’ll find for building a body of work that will impact who knows who, including you.

 

Another parenting post.

We instituted some new guidelines in our house for Daughter’s use of the iPad and my old phone. She has to use them in open areas of the house, so she can’t take them into her room and close the door. This is because we heard some horror stories about kids Daughter’s age stumbling into awful content online. We also changed our wireless router configurations to use Open DNS as a web filter for our home network.

We informed her of these changes yesterday when she wanted to use the iPad to search how-to videos on YouTube Kids for a craft project she had thought up. Oh the tears.

Her objections took a surprising route, though. What started as, “Why do you have to watch everything I do?” became “Why can’t I be into things without you guys knowing about it?” which became “Why do you guys embarrass me by telling people about the things I like?”

So it’s only partly a tech issue. It’s also very much an individuation and privacy issue, where an eight year old wants to express an interest in things that are maybe a bit out of reach (Taylor Swift) and things that remain anchored in childhood (Shopkins) at the same time and is developing an acute self consciousness about her parents’ and her peers’ perceptions of her tastes.

It’s also not just a kid issue but also a parenting one in which Mom and Dad need to learn to respect a measure of hiddenness about Daughter’s life and not talk so openly to people she barely knows about her and her fascinations.

None of these issues were on our radar three days ago. The landscape changes quickly, so you need to keep up. That means learning new technical strategies but also spotting the things you need to get better at, the things you need to learn. I guess that process never stops.