Architecture. Knitting. Public Speaking. Feeding People. Hair Braiding.

The Youth Summer Bizarre is already gathering proposals for courses on all manner of subjects, including the ones listed above. We’re discovering talent and making connections.

Just last night I spoke with a high school student who is heading to France for a school trip in two weeks.

“Where in France are you going?”

“Strasbourg.”

“Oh, do you know So And So? She’s an usher for the morning worship service who used to live in Strasbourg. Now she gives architecture tours around town in French. She’s doing an English version for youth here this summer.”

Eyes widening. “No. I need to meet her.”

Yes you do. And you will.

It’s working.

I’m coming to view more and more of youth ministry as a constellation of relationships and activities for helping teenagers take account for where they are. This is a subtle shift away from a focus on who they are. Identity is slippery, especially in adolescence, and I am less confident every day in a person’s sense of themselves at 13 or 17 to serve as a dependable source for durable personal formation.

Coaxing along a young person’s sense of their location in the world might be a better approach for developing empathy, imagination, and, alas, even identity.

So where is a North American adolescent in 2016?

If I know her, she’s like in a particular congregation with a unique history and indispensable participants. My work is to nurture her sense of that place and those people.

A teenager in church also finds himself in  a Christian tradition. Catholic, Presbyterian, Evangelical–whatever expression of Christianity affords us our interactions with teens, our work is to help them see it for what it is, which means helping them take in other Christian traditions clearly too.

For that matter, your teenager is in a religion. This is not a solitary experience, as David Dark is reminding us in Life’s Too Short To Pretend You’re Not Religious, and yet are we doing enough to honor the religious context teenagers are living in when they come to youth group or sit through a sermon?

There are a bunch of other ways for conceiving of location with youth, but here’s just one more. Youth are in a culture. It is densely layered, this culture, and contains sub culture upon sub culture. Directing the focus of our students to where they’re standing, culturally, as North Americans, as teenagers, feels very important.

There is more media content for a person to consume than there ever has been, and I spend most of my content consuming time feeling guilty for not consuming some other kind of content. Unless I’m reading.

There’s a content hierarchy my mind defaults to:

Books

Kindle books

Audio Books

Podcasts

Blogs

Television Shows and Movies

YouTube Videos

Unless I’m reading an actual bound book, I feel lazy. Yet books are what I use the least. My phone makes audio and blog content available for my commute, and I take full advantage. Podcasts and audio books and Feedly are my constant companions. If I’m feeling especially virtuous on the bus, I’ll read my Kindle. But I almost never sit down with a book.

Check that. I sit down and read from a book at the end of nearly every day, when I read for 30 minutes to my daughter. In the past 15 months I’ve read seven Harry Potters, three Lemony Snickets, and even a book by Salman Rushdie. Presently I’m reading the first Percy Jackson. Aloud. Every word of each of these books is read aloud.

All I’m saying is that if I didn’t have a seven year-old I would never read paper books.

The first 90 days in a new position feel like an opportune time to rig up some small experiments. Invite someone to run a brand new fundraiser. Throw a camping trip on the calendar. Propose some refurbishments.

I see two distinct advantages to experimenting quickly and aggressively. First, if even one of your experiments work, you and your new team get a little victory under your belt that will build some energy and cohesion.

Just as important, though, is your experiments’ failure. Since it’s small it doesn’t cost much to fail, and when it does you and your team can process some very valuable learning.

Perhaps it will never be easier to experiment than it is in the first few months. Your energy is high and your team doesn’t know you well enough yet to realize that you’re making it up as you go.

All ministry is making it up as we go. Embracing that reality with an ethos of experimentation is a lot more fun than laboring to project expertise.

I watched a teenager get annoyed yesterday because she was told to stop working. She’d been flipping pancakes for hours, experimenting with her technique, perfecting it, and she did not want to stop. She was in “flow,” and she resisted the instruction to stop.

What a great problem to have.

I’m growing wary of the “volunteer” label for the men and women who work with youth in our congregation. Technically correct, the designation feels limited to showing up, chaperoning, making sure nobody runs with scissors. Further, calling some adults “volunteers” creates a distinction between those folks and “staff,” a distinction that can easily perpetuate a practice of youth ministry that is dictated by professionals and fails to take full advantage of all the talent in the congregation.

That’s the term I’ve been employing more and more in place of “volunteer”: talent.

Teenagers in churches are surrounded by writers, video producers, actors, physicians, teachers, counselors, social workers, bankers, and a broad range of professionals (and retirees) in other fields. They’re swimming in a sea of talent. I want them to know that, and I want the talent to believe that the things they know and are interested in matter to the church’s teens. This is the desire behind our Summer Youth Bizarre idea–surfacing talent.

Maybe supplanting “volunteer” with “talent” is a tactical mistake though. Maybe supplement?

Volunteering is valuable. People have jobs. People have aging parents, kids, and sick friends. Showing up ain’t nothing.

Maybe a church needs multiple circles or tiers of adults who are working with youth: a talent tier, a volunteer tier, a staff tier, and even a governance tier.

 

 

Blogging from a Starbucks this morning, awaiting the arrival of a youth leader for an early morning get-to-know-you. Straight from here I will hop a bus down Michigan Avenue to see the Chamber Singers from Claremont High School song in this big choral festival. Because of Will.

Will invited me by text three days ago, which is weird because I’ve known Will for five years and never once traded texts with him. He’s in 12th grade now, and he’s that rare breed of high school student without a phone. Since 8th grade, he has suffered the ribbing of his friends at the after school youth group for this. Even as he’s led a couple of four piece rock bands, crushing Frontbottoms covers–their inaugural gig was one of my proudest youth worker experiences–he hasn’t been allowed this otherwise critical piece of adolescent socialization.

Will is resilient. He’s in Chamber Singers now, and part of a national competition, but only after two failed auditions. He kept at it. Now I get to watch him sing in Chicago.

Here’s to Will and to every young person who keeps after what they want, and who invite me to be there, even with a borrowed phone.