I’m Not A Role Model

I heard the term “role model” during my last week of work, and every time I heard it I felt uncomfortable. There’s nothing I’m trying harder not to be than a role model.

You can always tell when someone’s trying to be your role model. They’re overly certain of their convictions, and their actions are telegraphed with purposeful intent in a way that feels inauthentic. They’re trying to change you to be like them because they don’t like you the way you are. Nobody who has tried to be my role model ever was.

No, my role models are people who aren’t trying to be, who go about their work in a way I notice, though they don’t know I notice.

Oh. Oh, I get it now.

Make ’em Laugh: In Praise of Levity

For the final three minutes of my last appearance at youth group I was laughing so hard I couldn’t breathe. It was just the leaders who were left–students went home 30 minutes earlier–and one of them offered a strained description of some quotidian thing that another one couldn’t let pass without mimicking incredulously. Chuckles spread, and then six adults were gasping for air and crying with laughter.

It was a fitting close to my time with this community because so much of our work with junior high and high school students has been marked by laughter, both amongst ourselves as well as with those students. I’ve actually come to see laughter as part of our work: permitting it, stimulating it, giving ourselves over to it, even at the expense of our agenda.

It will be very difficult for me to work with people if I am not able to laugh with them. I won’t actually be able to do my best work if goofing off is forbidden.

I took a very serious class on a very serious subject taught by a very serious man in my last semester of seminary, but I sat next to a couple of guys with whom I was constantly tempted to crack jokes. I spent the semester embarrassed about my immaturity. But in a private conversation with the professor on the last day, he told me how much he appreciated the “levity” that marked our antics as well as our work.

I work to laugh and I laugh to work.

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

Treating teenagers with respect goes a long way.

Respect starts with appreciation and interest. Respect minus appreciation is obligation. Respect minus interest is politeness. People can feel the difference.

I’m not sure the teenagers I’ve worked with have a ton of adults in their lives who are permitted to appreciate them and be interested in them. Coaches, teachers, tutors, youth pastors–all of us have a stake in the performance of the teens we’re working with. If we’re not careful, those stakes can stifle appreciation and corrupt interest, so that students become means to our professional ends.

Here’s a test question: if a teenager can’t come to any of our classes, practices, rehearsals, or meetings, are we still actively interested in how they are experiencing the world? Are we working to make space for them to explore that? That space is invaluable, and none of us are very good at creating it ourselves.

A Good Goodbye Takes Work

The gift of a good goodbye is time and space.

Moments and hours to recall with gratitude the gifts that have passed between us.

Rooms and tables gathering a community of recollection that will tell stories.

That time and space doesn’t just exist, though. Someone has to set it aside and work to prepare it.

For my colleagues and friends who did that work for yesterday’s goodbyes, I am unspeakably grateful. You have given me a gift I can never repay, and you have taught me the importance of working for a good goodbye. I will hold myself to very high goodbye standards from now on.

A Pastor Guts His Library

I cleaned out my office. My library is down to eight Uhaul book boxes. Six of those boxes full of books went to the Goodwill. They contained volumes I considered essential 10 years ago, must have classics for any pastor worth her theological salt. Not in boxes but staying behind on one long office shelf–a donation to the church library–are sets of works I once badly coveted.

Part of this biblio-purge is driven by an impulse to pare down, lighten up, cling less authors and titles for my sense of identity and impact.

Another part of comes from an awareness of a drift in my interests since I moved into this office eight years ago. That awareness is most pointed with regard to all the “Missional Church” books I gave away. I clung desperately to those books in my first call, but looking at them today I have a definite sense that those volumes were a great deal of ink spilled on one big idea, a kind of theoretical hall of mirrors where each contributor reflected what all the others were already doing, only a little louder or longer. I got the idea. My work is based on it. I don’t need the books anymore.

Yet a third component of this move away from all these books arises from a reconsideration of the value of a theological library for my work as a pastor. I am uneasy about a move away from a library stocked with the Niebuhrs and the Barths I was weaned on in seminary, but less and less of the ministerial work I’m doing utilizes those texts. At all.

I’m drowning in text: magazine articles, blog posts, books, newspapers–all in both digital and analog form (I’m the guy who prints digital long form journalism to read on paper). This book dump is not about a Kindle. It’s a desire to possess only books with which I can imagine a lively engagement, between me and the books as well as between me and people with whom I want to discuss and share the books. If I couldn’t imagine running to my shelves for a book,. I didn’t keep it.

Five Things I Learned from A Preschool Director

From Seth Godin: “Every job candidate ought to be able to outline the five lessons learned from the leaders they’ve worked with previously. Those unwilling or unable to do so are not paying attention.”

I’ll take that challenge. I’m not a job candidate, but I’m about to start a new job, and I want to be both willing and able to outline five lessons I’ve learned from the leaders I’ve worked with in my job of the last eight years.

I’ve written about my Head of Staff and Christian Education Director.

Today: the Preschool Director.

For a pastor, working with a Preschool Director is super educational, because early childhood education is a field unto itself that most pastors know very little about. There are state licensing agencies and national accrediting organizations to navigate, a staff of 15-20 teachers to manage, books to keep, and marketing to conduct. It’s dizzying to watch.

Here are five things I’ve learned from our Preschool Director.

Care Out Loud

Our Preschool Director cares about her work and about her staff in a big, big way. She has them over to her house for a holiday party. She quietly puts her own money into supplies for classrooms. She listens to them and advocates for them. They notice, and their work in response makes our preschool better. Caring starts at the top.

Know Your Stuff

Early Childhood Education isn’t so unlike other fields in the amount of continual learning it requires to excel at it. My colleague knows every teacher-to-child ratio, every food allergy policy, every accreditation standard. When something changes in the field, she’s the first to know. That’s tremendously reassuring to parents, and it’s prevents a lot of distracting headaches. It helps that she teaches Early Childhood Education at a local community college.

Scale Appropriately

In order for our infant and toddler care to be as good as it can possibly be, our Preschool Director caps enrollment at a lower number than we can actually take. She’s learned that if we get as much out of the teacher-to-child ratio as possible, the quality of care will suffer. Staff will be less flexible. So the center actually is under-filled, but with a waiting list that expectant parents in town are increasingly eager to get on.

Invite Artists

One of the most effective developments in our curriculum in my colleague’s tenure has been enrichment programming run by artists from the community and not by preschool teachers. These have included painting, dancing, and singing. Parents don’t pay extra for these (we have some of those programs too), but the Director puts them in the operating budget. She invites artists to work with children, then pays them what their time is worth. It gets even better: her invitation to a local music teacher has led to our preschool being the only one certified by the Music Together program in town.

Be Generous

For almost four years now, my colleague has assisted with the weekly chapel time at our preschool because I asked her to. She only misses if she has a parent tour scheduled. It gives her a weekly chance to interact with the children her teachers are working with, so she gains valuable insight into her staff’s experience. Also, it helps the chapel leader (now the Christian Education Director) immensely. She knows things about working with children that we don’t. She teaches us.

Working alongside a rock star professional in an adjacent field makes you better. Here again, I’ve been lucky, and I’m grateful.

Five Things I Learned from My Christian Education Director

Yesterday I wrote about my Head of Staff.

Today is for the Christian Education Director I’ve worked with here for nearly six years.

You’re The Ministry

Christian Education Director; Director of Ministry to Children And Families; Children’s Ministry Director–my colleague has been called all of those things and more at our church. Through all those title changes, though, she has done remarkably consistent work, which I think is because she puts her personality fully into that work. No matter her job title, her work bears her unmistakable mark. It’s work only she could do in the way she does it.

Stand Up for Kids

Even in a community that is outwardly friendly and welcoming of children, people can act in a way that privileges the sensitivities of adults (guilty as charged). The only way that changes is if someone calls it out and insists it be different. Someone on our staff team has done that, and it hasn’t been me.

Work in Secret

It was three years into our working relationship before I understood that my colleague had a habit of taking people who had visited the church out for coffee. That’s not, like, an official church or pastoral procedure. She was just doing it. So she had these insights, both into particular individuals as well as into a certain profile of church visitor, that she started interjecting into programming conversations. That’s when I knew, and started to copy her.

Say When You’re Struggling

The temptation to fake it in this work is strong indeed. But my colleague has shown me how to admit when you’re having a hard time with some aspect of ministry, whether that involves a particular skill, like managing personnel, or a more meta issue, like the challenge of balancing church work with other pursuits (my colleague has been earning her PhD while on our staff). Allow people to help you.

Work Like The Artist You Are

My colleague and I completed Godly Play training together in 2010 and then partnered to convert our congregation’s Sunday School for children 100% to Godly Play. She worked like mad at that. Particularly, she sweated the artistic details of how to tell Biblical stories to children from memory, not only herself, but also the new staff of volunteers we recruited to carry the program. Teaching those skills is an art form all its own, and she developed that far more thoroughly than I did, hosting quarterly “confabs” to work on skills and troubleshoot struggles. There again, I copied what she was doing.

I took this call eight years fully aware of the things I needed to learn in the area of Christian Education programming. I got lucky with the Christian Education Director I got to work with for most of my time here, because she knew a lot of those things already, but mostly because we got to learn a lot of them together.

Five Lessons I’ve Learned from My Head of Staff

From Seth Godin yesterday: “Every job candidate ought to be able to outline the five lessons learned from the leaders they’ve worked with previously. Those unwilling or unable to do so are not paying attention.”

Today, the Head of Staff.

I’ve been fortunate to serve with the same Head of Staff for my entire time here. We’ve had a great working relationship. These are five lessons I’ve learned from her.

Listen first, speak later.

My colleague is a careful listener. She will offer substantive leadership to the question at hand, although perhaps not right now, in this particular conversation. She will say, “I need some time to think about this.” Then, the next time you talk about it, she will have a carefully refined conviction about it that is infinitely more valuable than if she’d forced some position in the moment, just to have something to say.

Keep it professional.

Two of the most active members of my youth ministry here are my Head of Staff’s kids, but that has never been awkward, because my HOS maintains a very clear distinction between her relationship with me as a staff member and an adult working with her kids. She asserts that distinction with her kids, too.

Let people laugh

I’ve laughed a lot these past eight years. The culture my HOS has cultivated allows for–encourages, even–levity. There are serious challenges involved in this work, but none of us feel overwhelmed by them; the boss smiles a lot and gives space for yahoos like me to crack jokes in staff meetings.

Do what you say you’re going to do

Dependability is priceless. I can’t recall a single instance in which my HOS has failed to follow through on something she committed to. Not one.

Assume the best about peoples’ competence, but yell if you must

I have grown here because my HOS has let me work on the things I think are important and has only very rarely questioned me on that front. And when she has, it has been more with curiosity than with judgment, and never with anxiety.

I’ve heard her yell twice, both times to great effect.

Don’t Trash Your Organizer

I’m a fan of the Bullet Journal. I’ve filled four Moleskines over the past three years with boxes, dots, and checkmarks on my way to getting more done than I was without it. It’s a useful planning system and a nice tool for looking back over what you’ve done. As much as any system, analog or digital, that I’ve used over the past decade to plan well so as to get important work done, this has worked.

But I’ve hardly picked it up for two weeks.

I’ve learned that, no matter the system, organizing for work takes emotional energy, and sometimes you just don’t have it.

Don’t panic. It will come back. And when it does, you’ll be glad for a tool you already know how to use. Just turn to the next page and start again.

See You Next Sunday

This coming Sunday is my last at the church I have served for eight years. Yesterday I leaned heavily on “See you next Sunday” when greeting people after worship.

“We’re going to miss you.”

“See you next Sunday.”

This Sunday, though, that defensive jig is up.

It’s presumptive anyway, right?

“See you next Sunday.” Says who? And why wait seven days?

Maybe it’s a gesture of defiance, a declaration of a certain kind of oracle that, in spite of everything that fights to tear at community from day-to-day, the random-tragic and the calculated alike, we WILL see you next Sunday. Come Hell or the AFC Championship game.

Whatever it is, I’ve said it for the last time here.