Yesterday my family was led around the Ranaissance Pleasure Faire by my daughter’s second grade schoolmate, who knows the place intimately, since her parents are both faire performers. Her dad spins yarn in the town square (he’s actually a computer coder) while her mom performs at various shows throughout the day (she’s actually a high school English teacher–that makes more sense).

This is what their family does Saturday and Sunday for seven consecutive weekends every year. This hot, dusty, slightly overdone mock-up of all things vaguely Elizabethan–so. many. corsets.–this is their thing. And these accented, always-slightly-bawdy, kilted and  robed performers–these are their people.

My daughter’s schoolmate recognizes everybody at the place, from the washing wenches to the queen. She rides the maypole carousel for free and walks through the “performers only” doors without hindrance. The booth-lined lanes might be her own cul-de-sac and the food court her kitchen. And she’s not the only one. I watched dozens of costumed kids carry on free of adult supervision throughout the day.

Is this the experience of community many people come to church looking for, where their kids are known by everyone and inhabit the space with an unencumbered sense of belonging? I’ve wondered before on this blog how churches love children, like, what are the particular things they do to care for and nurture young people. Maybe a troupe of Ren Fest performers could teach us a thing or two about this.

What struck me most was how thoroughly the kids participate in the community’s organizing ethos. They’re costumed like their parents, and they, too, speak in bad English accents. And when the queen processes along the roadway, even though they’re not part of the performance, the costumed kids all arrest their own play to pay attention. They aren’t making distinctions between their own roles and the one played by the court jester, i.e. Jerry the the accountant from San Dimas.

These kids are full participants in a subculture to which their parents are highly committed. Maybe that is a step further than what most people have in mind when they come to your Presbyterian or Methodist church. But there’s something undeniably beneficial about it for the kids.

On Wednesday I posted about climbing Everest barefoot finding an apartment in Chicago, and by the day’s end I had a lead on a place that far surpasses anything I’ve found so far. The chain of people that produced that development goes back years and spans three states.

I have this friend from college. He made a friend from Oklahoma after college, and years after they met the three of us worked on a magazine together. My friend’s friend became my magazine friend.

Then, two years ago, my college friend and I found ourselves gelling with four other pastors as part of a professional development group. Last year that group added my magazine friend, my college friend’s Oklahoma friend.

You with me so far?

My magazine friend reads this blog. She saw Wednesday’s post. It turns out my magazine friend has a church camp friend who lives in Chicago and who, on Wednesday afternoon, shared this on Facebook, which my magazine friend promptly sent to me:

Hey Ever’body, The apartment upstairs is opening at the end of June. It’s a three bedroom with an enclosed porch and a garage. It is also in the Waters School district for any of you with kids. And just a block from the Rockwell Brown Line stop. Oh, and pets welcome (encouraged as far as Julie, The Boy, and I are concerned. If you’re interested, message me or Julie Burton Lewis, and we’ll give you further details.

I read that wasting time in the San Francisco airport and immediately replied to my magazine friend, who made a quick Messenger introduction and off we went. Within minutes I had the building owner’s email address, and before an hour was up I had arranged a phone call with him for the next morning.

We spoke. It sounds great. I’m hopeful, for the first time since this search began.

The whole thing makes me marvel at the relationships that tie us all together and the power those relationships have to make our lives better.

 

There’s so much talent in churches. Listening and looking for it, blessing it, and connecting it to other talent to shape the ministry of the church–that’s the way forward now. Nilofer Merchant says, “The Social Era is ultimately about the way connected individuals form an ensemble and create value together.”

I’m fond of team language, yet “ensemble” feels even better to me. An ensemble can improvise.

Youth ministry depends on the engagement of adults working together. Do youth directors invite congregants into a value-creating ensemble, though, or are we more in the habit of pleading with volunteers to execute tasks we’ve already decided make up the muscle of youth programming: teaching Sunday school; leading a small group; chaperoning a lock-in.

Organizing an ensemble that creates value for teenagers and the church may issue in programming that is filled with all those same tasks, and that’s fine; the tasks aren’t the point. Collaborative value-creation is the point.

We’re going to experiment with some ensemble forming this summer by inviting literally anyone from the congregation to propose a Sunday morning course for teenagers during June and July. The ensemble of folks we gather might produce things as diverse as a book reading group, a knitting circle, an improv troupe, a prayer team, or even a running squad. Whatever we make, we’ll make it as an ensemble.

Bring on the noise.

If you’re invited to an event that feels bigger than you, where you’re the only bloke in a room of heavy hitters not in a suit and where your contribution to the goings on feels negligible, it’s not. You can still add value.

You can connect with new people. That’s good for everyone. We need more connections.

You can be curious and listen intently. It’s valuable for folks to feel heard.

You can express gratitude. The world is short on gratitude.

Those things add value right now.

But there’s a long game too, and you’ll be adding value to that in time as a result of your attendance at this shindig. This invitation is an investment in you that will pay dividends down the line, because your vision is expanding over wine and bacon-wrapped dates–your understanding of the work your people are doing; your imagination about the work you might do; your appreciation for the impact these kinds of investments have had on the heavy hitters, too.

You belong here. You just don’t know it yet.

 

This weekend was the Presbytery of Chicago’s Work of Love (AWOL) event for about 65 middle school youth, in which we learned about food insecurity, spent the night in a church, and then rode public transit to a community garden on Chicago’s south side, where we shoveled and raked and picked up trash in 30 degree weather.

I slept well last night.

An analogy for adolescent development occurred to me on the Red Line, as I urged a triad of squirrely seventh grade boys to pay attention to their surroundings and stop swinging from the hand straps. Early adolescence is a photograph with a blurry background but a clear foreground. Viewing it means focusing intently on the sole object in focus to the exclusion of everything else contained in the image. Development happens as the ability evolves to take in more of the photo and shift one’s focus from the foreground to the background and then back again.

Foreground: one’s immediate group of peers; the hand straps on the train; soda; Bible stories.

Background: the person addressing the group; the other riders on the train; dinner; the Biblical narrative.

It feels like the intensity of focus early teenagers have is an asset and not something to be disparaged until they grow out of it. But the challenge of working with adolescents still feels like nudging them toward adjusting their focus to take in more of what’s in the picture.

Oestreicher, I know you’re out there. Is this analogy helpful?

 

 

 

Another blog died today, suffocated by its author’s expectations for herself: the posts are uninspiring; they’re too confessional; she doesn’t enjoy blogging like she once did and isn’t reading enough to write well; her creativity needs other outlets.

Like the balance of most blogs ever created, this one’s brave observations went gently into the dark night of unhelpful standards for work that is worth doing.

R.I.P.

Inspiration is snake oil. There’s strength in vulnerability. Worthy work is not fun for long stretches of time. Writing well depends more on regular publishing than it does the right kind of reading. Creativity is something you find after the fact.

Blogging is building a body of work, and so I’m giving creativity and inspiration over to the artists, although I’m fairly certain they, too, will say that their songs and films and books and sculptures and poems and lesson plans and games are a body of work that feels shoddy more often than it feels worthy of publication. Yet the best ones keep at it.

The best blogging is off the mark for extended periods, and making it very, very often feels like drudgery that no reader with better things to do would enjoy. Yet when you review the body of work from those awful periods, aren’t you grateful to at least have something to show for your frustration?

Isn’t something is better than nothing?