Daughter can’t get to sleep at night these days. She’s forever getting drinks of water and finding reasons to leave her room and come into her parents’. She’s scared. There’s something under her bed or in her closet, she just knows it.

“I put the bed together,” I say. “I know there’s nothing under there. It’s not big enough.”

“Yes it is.”

“Do you want me to check?”

“No!”

The same prohibition applies to the closet. I can’t check. I can’t turn the closet light on and open the door. And so she lays awake as long as possible, doing everything she can think of to not be in her room. This is a problem with an immunity to facts.

The monster under your bed, the monster beyond your border, the monster lurking in the public restroom: it can’t be vanquished with evidence and empirical data. It lives in our gut, not in our mind. The only thing that kills it is maturation.

 

 

If you write something and put it out there today, you may be doing your future self a favor. You are guaranteeing that, two years from now, you will have a body of work to look at. That’s worth something.

If you don’t write something and put it out there today, you are guaranteeing that you won’t get a phone call from a complete stranger two years from now telling you how the thing you wrote had an impact on them and their work.

The long tail. Drip. Drip. Drip. And all the rest of it.

What are you waiting for?

The teenagers I work with don’t need the church to structure social opportunities for them. This might have been a valuable aspect of youth ministry at one time–filling kids’ calendars with welcoming and healthy gatherings with their peers–but it doesn’t seem to be anymore. Youth seem to me to have more than enough positive social commitments between classmates, teammates, band mates, choir mates, and even neighbors.

We tried this. We made a calendar of weekly summer events to get youth together. A trip to the museum. A day at the beach. Free movies in the park. Participation has been almost null. Almost.

My conclusion: gathering their peers around them is not something most teenagers need the church to be doing for them.

Facilitating meaningful mission service is. A bunch of youth eagerly give a week of their summer to that. So is exploring faith. Sunday youth group is humming. Even full court recreation is a valuable contribution to teens’ lives that churches are making; see the demand for lock-ins.

Let’s all get together doesn’t seem all that compelling without a Why.

Is several small things better than one big thing?

I’ve been wondering about this with youth mission trips, ever since we took a group of 40 students from five churches to Ghost Ranch in 2014. As soon as that trip was over I proposed trying more than one trip but capping attendance on each one, because I had a hunch that smaller groups of youth cost less and can do more; it’s costly and difficult to transport more than 20 youth at a time, and the options for the work they can do seems to shrink as their numbers grow. Accommodating mission trip teams and finding meaningful things for them to do is work.

No doubt there is value in the large group experience. Youth interact with, build relationships with, and learn from a greater number of their peers. Plus, being a part of a great big group gives you a feeling that you’re part of something significant.

I’m increasingly curious about this. Is the value of a large group mission trip–say more than 20 people–enough to make the added cost and the loss of flexibility worth it?

Do I get to attend that meeting?

Will I be picked for that project?

Should I speak up here?

We know we’re growing up when these questions become:

Where is the meeting where the work I want to do is happening?

What is my project and who should I invite to collaborate?

What is the truth that is asking to be told here?

Maturity means progressively thinking less about things like standing and status and more about purpose and initiative.

I’ve assembled (and disassembled. And reassembled) a lot of children’s furniture in the last month. Enough assembly might make you think you’re building something. You’re not.

You didn’t design it. You didn’t build it. You didn’t even write the assembly instructions.

You’re the guy sweating over the instructions who keeps losing his grip on the included allen key and cursing the cheap plastic end caps for the bed slats that snap in half if you so much as look at them sideways.

No, assembly is not building.

Let’s build.

“Don’t create more work for people” is a useful motto when you work on a team. If you take care of your business and let your teammates take care of theirs, toes won’t get stepped on and you won’t get blamed when things outside your portfolio go wrong.

Maybe teams are more effective when their toes are a little banged up, though.

I find most new work to require–or, at least, to greatly benefit from–collaboration. Lone Rangers can handle an existing portfolio well enough, but when a new need or opportunity presents itself, the chances are greater that an effective solution will emerge from a team of folks working on it and not just one person.

Of course, if it doesn’t work, it’s harder to know who to blame.

Two things about this: if people collaborated, then at some level it worked, regardless of the outcome. Also, blame everyone, as long as by “blame” you mean assign responsibility for learning and growth.

Maybe we’re more valuable to one another when we stray from our silos and create more work for one another.

Step on my toes, please.

When you’ve been around the sun a couple of times with program work that repeats each year, you’ve already got your checklists and your calendars in place. The start of each new program iteration requires fine tuning, editing. Circumstances may dictate that you blow the whole thing up and start new, but even then you’ll still employ the arsenal of contacts and materials you’ve amassed, only in a different configuration.

But when it’s your first time around you have to get to build all those things from scratch. You design the calendar you want, recruit volunteers in your way, craft your curriculum. There’s a ton of creative freedom there.

Except it’s only new to you. Someone was doing this work before you (and well), and the infrastructure she built didn’t leave with her. Leave aside the burden of being compared to a predecessor; putting your own spin on work that others were doing before you means that people should be able to recognize what you’re doing as roughly the same thing as what was being done before. Year one feels like a terrible time to reboot.

For goodness’ sake don’t copy what you found in the files. Only don’t ignore it.

A man came to the church last Friday looking for a piece of cardboard to fashion a sign. I went to our mail room and removed the lid from a paper box and brought it to him. He pulled a bright red Sharpie from his pocket, but rather than uncap it and begin writing, he turned and handed it to me.

“I don’t spell so good,” he said. “You write it for me.” He dictated:

Please help. Vietnam vet. Looking for work. Anything helps. God bless.

The church fights to house men and women experiencing homelessness. It feeds and clothes them, listens to them with compassion and dignity, shelters them, and advocates for strategies and policies to house more people faster.

Also, on some days, the church makes signs.

Spend enough time in a church and you will hear and observe stark contradictions. In the span of three days last week people told me both that the church had let them down so that they would never return and that the church had sparked a conversion in their life.

The challenge for leaders in churches is to hear both of these accounts, and to hear them both critically. Things far outside the church’s control are operating in these moments, and if we take all the blame or all the praise we misunderstand who we are–what we are–and what our role is in peoples’ lives. The church hasn’t the power of itself to ruin or save peoples’ lives.

The church is neither all hero or all goat. At its best the church is an accompanist in moments like these, supporting a melody we’re not writing through major and minor chords, nudging it toward resolution, even transformation.