We’re into the summer rhythm of ministry now. During June, July, and August, we trade many of the weekly gatherings that fill Sundays from September through May for less-frequent-but-longer gatherings. Sunday School for camp. Youth group for the mission trip.

The church I serve is experimenting this summer with weekly activities for youth for the first time since anyone can remember. We’re trying this on Sunday mornings and this during the week. Participation in June was very light, but it certainly seemed like the teens and adults who took part got something out of it. We’ll see.

I’m wondering about rhythm. We talk a lot (a lot a lot a lot) about how busy our people are today, and I’m starting to notice the way busyness is really nothing more than a rhythm of commitments. For busy teens, orchestra rehearsals and weekly traveling soccer tournaments give a rhythm to life. That’s healthy. It’s also shared, since most of these activities are team or group-based, and since the activities pace their parents’ lives too.

So where does gathering for worship and formation with peers in the church play in the rhythm of busy people? Is it something separate from all the other commitments, either more demanding or less so? Or is it part of the total rhythm of our lives, humming vibrantly alongside our commitments to work, family, and important causes?

And how much influence do church leaders have over the rhythm of our peoples’ lives?

A guy on our moving crew got fired before the move even started. From the moment the crew arrived and began the Herculean task of  wedging a 100 foot semi truck into a narrow, car-lined city avenue, this individual was announcing to all who would listen that he knew this would happen. He knew this neighborhood was going to be a problem, because he grew up here and went to school here, and he knows how small all the streets are. He knew it. His colleagues, me, every passing pedestrian: he made sure everyone knew just how much he knew.

Meanwhile, the driver of the truck was examining angles. His three other associates were giving directions. I was knocking on neighbors’ doors trying to find the owner of a white Audi SUV parked in the way. Even a passing neighbor took a picture of the car and uploaded it to the neighborhood Facebook page trying to find the owner. Everyone was contributing to a solution except the person who, to hear him tell it, knew the most about the problem.

Then he was on his boss’s phone. Then he was yelling, “This is bullsh**!” into his  boss’s phone. Then he was handing his boss’s phone back and saying goodbye to the rest of the crew. Then he was gone. I learned later in the day that he’d been fired for an incident that had occurred days before on another job.

I would never find relief in a person losing their job, but I take no joy in working with people who describe problems but don’t contribute to a fix.

 

 

Taking care of business isn’t always  rewarded. Sometimes you handle things on your end, turn paper work in on time, make reservations months in advance, and still there are complications. Not everybody takes care of business. Things get complicated. Comcast gets involved. 

You have to stick it out, right? Keep taking care of business like a pro and resist the urge to let things slide because, hey, this other guy is falling down on the job. 

Being the one who dots the I’s and crosses the T’s isn’t always appreciated, and it doesn’t always pay. But when it does it really does. And even when it doesn’t you’re still a pro, and that’s worth something. Always. 

Two years ago I proclaimed that I was abandoning the ban on cell phones during youth mission trips. Then last summer’s trip made me reconsider. Here’s a quote from that latter post:

In a word, it was gossip. Cell phones allow for unchecked gossip to spread like wildfire through cliques within a group completely outside the attention of the rest of the group or any of the adult leaders.

So this year, in a new church and with students I barely know, I proposed a complete ban on cell phones to our leadership team. The team is on board. No phones. As nuanced as I try to make my view of technology, and as resistant as I am to demonizing exaggerations of its impact, especially on teenagers, my experience last summer burned me badly. I could be overreacting. I’m willing to admit that.

Yet my last attempt at this taught me that leaving a teenager’s phone at home for a week is as difficult for some parents as it is for the teens. Almost all the kids we caught with phones two years ago reported that mom or dad instructed them to bring it. My colleague here used to work at a camp that disallowed cell phones, and she once saw a parent drop their son off and then covertly drive around the back of his cabin and hand him his phone through the car window.

Cell phones enable connection between teenagers and their parents and between teen peers, and I think connection is tremendously valuable. Yet the connection they enable with people back home is the connection they short circuit with the people with us on the van or in the church basement. We want to create the conditions on our mission trip for community to grow amidst face-to-face conversation, listening, even boredom.

Yes boredom. The Bored and Brilliant BOOT CAMP has me high on the prospect of boredom as a generative force. So along with the list of all the leaders’ cell phone numbers and all the phone numbers of all the places we will be during the week, along with the address of the blog we will be maintaining every day during the trip, we’re sending the BOOT CAMP link out to our teens and their parents before the trip so they can practice.

 

 

Thriving ministry is supported by talent. A huge part of the pastoral vocation is the finding, the calling forth, the enabling, and the cultivating of talent.

These days I’m relying heavily on a particular talent-finding strategy: the all call. I’m putting invitations in worship bulletins for anyone who’s interested to teach a youth class or come on a mission trip, or even just come learn about what our teenagers are doing. It’s a kind of magnet held up to the congregation to see who sticks.

The all call is not a sufficient strategy by itself, but when paired with a regular habit of one-on-one meetings and targeted invitations, it yields fruit.

Some people who respond to an all call will need to be directed to some narrowly defined roles, while still others will need some prodding to experiment with their own ideas. Some may even need redirected; I don’t actually have talent for some things I once thought I did. All this work is worth it, though, if it means we’re working with a crop of people who have that indispensable main ingredient that all talent needs to be effective: interest.

Are internet discussion boards worth anything? Do you learn new information by engaging with them? Does your perspective change? Do you make connections of value with people?

I lamented after a day’s worth of back-and-forth on a message board that I don’t have the energy anymore for it anymore, not for the obviously irritating stuff like name-calling and ALL CAPS, but also not even for the not-so-irritating nuanced arguments and reasoned opinions. All of it makes me tired and leaves me frustrated. What energy I have feels better spent working on projects with people. If there’s an internet discussion board for that, I’d love to know about it.

Am I being lazy? Is there good work being done in some of these threads and I’m too cranky to see it?

When I was an aspiring sports writer in college I loved reading columnists like Bob Ryan and Jay Mariotti and Joe Posnanski for their incendiary verbiage. I envied the sharp brevity and the fearlessness of their opinion writing. I took a few stabs at the style in my sports college for the college paper, and, not surprisingly, came off more mean than informed. I didn’t persist.

To a young person full of self doubt, commentary feels powerful. Having a take wins you respect, and the force with which you assert it matters more than its substance (this is the appeal of Jim Rome among 20 and 30 something men).

But I think I’ve aged out of that passion for commentary. Now what I want to read is insight. I’m less interested now in what you think than in what you notice. Share your observations, please–about politics, sports, religion, culture, yourself–and explore those observations with context and analysis. There is a lot going on in the world, all at once, so there’s no shortage of subject matter.

The opinion column is too constraining for the world we now live in and the people we now are.

 

Please excuse this exercise in drawing a simple personal conclusion from a complex global development, but Brexit tells me that we, the most connected expression of humanity the globe has ever hosted, have crucial work to do to prevent us tearing away from one another.

It’s well worn by now, the observation that Globalization has lost its sheen, the gnawing awareness that human difference is a powerful motivator and won’t be overcome by Coke or Facebook. We can’t rely on structure alone to build community. We have to risk vulnerability in face-to-face encounters to bring about trusting, reciprocal relationships, friendships even.

Here’s what this means for me. I’m not doing enough if I’m only amassing Facebook friends and blog followers. I need to prioritize shared work with people who aren’t like me in real time. Lucky for me (and for you!), our era makes that easier than ever to arrange–send an email, tap out a text, even make a phone call. And yet no technology will make the human demands of that kind of work any easier, ever. I have to reach out and risk.

So, what can we work on together. I’m ready.

 

Conspiratorial thinking has a cousin called “Crisis Thinking.” The former exploits loose correlations between people and events to hide from meaningful work, while the latter uses those same correlations to justify feverish activity that is also, in the end, hiding from meaningful work.

Example: a church in my former presbytery wanted to overture the General Assembly in 2010 that discussion of changes to ordination standards to include openly gay men and women should cease until the church had made a thorough study of the relationship between that discussion and losses in congregational membership.

We should do two things when we feel like we’re facing a crisis. First, we should make sure that its’ not simply a crisis for us. That is, we should check our panic with peers and colleagues, especially ones who don’t look like us and live where we live. Losses in congregational membership across the PC(USA) feel like a crisis to those reared in a homogeneous denomination led mostly by white men, but those same losses feel very different (I imagine) to the women and racial and ethnic minorities who are now sharing leadership in a smaller church that used to exclude them when it was bigger.

Second, a perceived crisis is an opportunity to find the soul of our work. It is entirely possible that declining membership statistics, for example, point to a failure on our part to do work that matters, to forge authentic and caring connections with neighbors, to care for the poor, and to stand up for the truth. We shouldn’t dodge that possibility. It is entirely possible, though, that membership losses persist in the face of sustained soulful church leadership, and that crisis thinking will only prompt us to gut our work of its soul for the sake of something cosmetic and transitory.

The work of church leadership today is to make space for honest connection between strained and fearful people and between those people and God. Calling the conditions of the day a “Crisis” doesn’t change that.

“There’s something going on” is the slogan of conspiratorial thinking, which I now see is a very convenient tool for not taking any meaningful action to make life measurably better. Of course, the modus operandi of the conspiracy theorist is to loudly suggest causal relationships for even the loosest of correlations, whether they be between the President of the United States and terrorist attacks or between the five wealthiest people in the world, and that’s a lazy shortcut which allows the theorist to avoid the work involved to discover the real causes to real problems and then to propose and test real solutions.

Conspiratorial thinking is a form of hiding. Weak. Sauce.

We can fall into conspiratorial thinking in our work, too, stretching correlations into causes when church membership declines, when we get a bad performance review, when soccer wins out over youth group yet again. If our explanation for our own ineffectiveness is that “There’s something going on,” then we’re hiding from personal responsibility and from the underlying challenge of our vocation, which is to lead in times of change to bear witness to good news, even at the cost of our own life.

There’s nothing going on. But there is work to be done.