Monday Morning Quarterback

The Christmas pageant at my church has been completely transformed since 2008, when I first came here. Then it was a children’s production, directed by a Children’s Music Director. Youth grudgingly participated, skulking down the center aisle as reluctant Josephs and Marys, a spectacle that, come to think of it, might have been completely appropriate.

Yesterday the congregation was treated to a second consecutive youth and children’s pageant entirely written by teenagers. It was thoughtful, funny, even irreverent. It featured an unforgettable mural sketched by one of the students (see above). Someone sang a parody of “Let It Go.”A kid shot silly string at the front row.

Women in the 80’s approached students afterwards in tears. Of joy.

A few things occur to me about where we’re at with this. First, teenagers writing and producing a pageant is not an inherently superior approach to the one in which a paid staff person marshals a bunch of children. This works now. In this place. With these youth. Years from now people may look back with nostalgia on this as how our pageant “used to be.” But who even knows if this approach will last even one more year? It was magic yesterday, and that’s enough.

And that magic came at a cost. There was plenty of tension and frustration during the writing and rehearsing. People are glad for it to be over, and that only signals to me that it was worthwhile and meaningful.

Youth were not on their own here; adults played very important roles in coaching and supporting the teens’ efforts, and the way we defined those roles is what I’m most curious about going forward. A paid “Artist in Residence” helped the youth with every aspect of the production. She deftly walked a thin line between honoring the teens’ vision and directing them. We wanted students to learn from her, and they clearly did.

For my part, getting to have a part in these students’ work was an honor, the weight of which only really hit me during the closing chorus of the production, when I couldn’t keep singing.Then I just took it in, took them in, immensely grateful for the time I’ve had with them.

You Say You Want A Revolution–Er, Institution?

This post is part of a series reflecting on Grounded, the new book by Diana Butler Bass. Read the other posts in the series here.

Grounded wants to document a “revolution” occurring in the world and the church. There are several threads to this revolution. One of them is the demise of institutions–including religious ones.

Butler-Bass takes it as a given that most peoples’ experience of institutional, organized religion these days is either bad or boring. There’s plenty of data to back that up. At the same time, religious belief remains widespread. “Spiritual-but-not-religious” is a well established self-descriptor for growing masses of North Americans who, when asked for their religious affiliation, report “None.”

So, “People believe, but they believe differently than they once did.” This amounts to a revolution, and our religious institutions are mostly on the wrong side of it.

I’ve gone back and forth in my conviction about institutions. I worked for awhile on a national initiative that wanted to rescue civic engagement for young adults and that drew heavily for inspiration on books like Bowling Alone and Loose Connections. I marched off to a big institutional flagship seminary in a fit of devotion to organized religion.

My devotion waned during my first decade as a pastor, though, for a couple of reasons. One, the people most committed to preserving church institutions for their own sake seemed to me to be the people doing it the most harm. And two, I read a lot of people like Diana Butler-Bass who were urging the church to get over its institutions and find new, “missional,” ways to connect to the “Nones” all around them.

But now I’m experiencing a renewed concern for strong religious institutions which has everything to do with exposure to broad-based relational community organizing. Community organizers organize institutions, not individuals. They are obviously committed to organized institutions–many of them religious–and they’re doing undeniably powerful things.

I don’t know if the church should assume that the world has moved on from religious institutions and run headlong into some ill-defined post institutional expression of church.

It’s also clear to me that doubling down on our institutions–from congregations to national denominations–is not getting us anywhere. Our neighbors are finding little compelling evidence that those institutions are worth their interest or commitment.

Where are you on this? If all of the structures of organized religion disappeared tomorrow, would that be an advance for faith? Or would it be the worst thing ever?

I’m Not Buying Bottom-Up Just Yet

This post is part of a series reflecting on Grounded, the new book by Diana Butler Bass. Read the other posts in the series here.

Grounded is an assertion of a revolution. It wants to show how contemporary spirituality in North America is leaving behind a top-down conception of the human/divine relationship, one in which God exists “up there” and we “down here” and which relies on Scripture and church authorities to show us how to avoid ending up “down down there.”

This assertion looks to the shifting institutional and community structures of modern life for reinforcement: “In the twenty-first-century world, top-down institutions and philosophies are weakening–and that includes top-down religions.”

She goes on:

At the same moment when massive global institutions seem to rule the world, there is an equally strong countermovement among regular people to claim personal agency in our own lives. We grow food in backyards. We brew beer. We weave cloth and knit blankets. We shop local. We create our own playlists. We tailor delivery of news and entertainment. In every arena, we customize and personalize our lives, creating material environments to make meaning, express a sense of uniqueness, and engage causes that matter to us and the world.

I’ve been hearing some version of that claim for at least 15 years, and I am far less enthusiastic about heralding it today than as a seminary student. I’m not sure it’s totally true.

For one thing, that “countermovement” very often feels like a lifestyle trend available mostly to college-educated white people (and I say that as one who, decked in flannel and covered in facial hair, has brewed beer and made my own deodorant). Agency-claiming may be the order of the day for some, but the vast majority of people across the globe are more crushed today than ever before by a very top-down mechanism that asserts its profit-making agency with ruthless force.

I’m not sure that consumer habits like shopping at Whole Foods and curating Spotify playlists constitute a meaningful shift in how we are interacting with the world and experiencing spirituality. My uncertainty about that has a lot to do with the very top-down corporations that are profiting from these bottom-up choices.

Take Uber, the ultimate bottom-up operation and the poster child for the new peer-driven networked reality. My friend calls it an oligarchy. A small group of people who created a tech product are amassing a fortune on the labor of millions of independent workers to whom the company owes no institutional commitment like health care or auto insurance.

The world Grounded is describing is very much one I want to live in. It’s just that I’m less inclined to see evidence of it in the things Butler-Bass points to.

What about you? Am I being overly negative? Is the world really shifting in this respect?

#TheStruggleIsReal (Or, My First Post on “Grounded”)

This is the first post in a series about Diana Butler Bass’s new book, Grounded: Finding God in The World–A Spiritual Revolution. I heard her talk about it last week at the Claremont School of Theology, and it just arrived this week courtesy of the Los Angeles County Library.

I blogged pretty obsessively about her last book, Christianity After Religion. You can check out those posts here.

Butler-Bass is a uniquely important voice on the mainline Protestant landscape; she is a church historian and a religious sociologist, but, most importantly, she is a disciple of Jesus trying to experience God in a maddening contemporary landscape. I hope blogging about Grounded creates space for constructive conversations about the things she’s grappling with.

The first claim that resonates with me is a personal one, and not historical or sociological. It’s worth quoting at length.

Much to my surprise, church has become a spiritual, even a theological struggle for me. I have found it increasingly difficult to sing hymns that celebrate a hierarchical heavenly realm, to recite creeds that feel disconnected from life, to pray liturgies that emphasize salvation through blood, to listen to sermons that preach an exclusive way to God, to participate in sacraments that exclude others, and to find myself confined to a hard pew in a building with now windows to the world outside. This has not happened because I am angry at the church or God. Rather, it has happened because I was moving around in the world and began to realize how beautifully God was everywhere.

I suspect some version of this struggle is shared by most congregants in mainline North American churches. I also suspect it’s shared by lots of those churches’ leaders.

Church is my vocation.I get to pick the hymns and creeds and to craft the prayers and sermons. Still, the leeway I have to bend the traditional language of worship to egalitarian and communitarian sensitivities only goes so far.

The struggle is a yearning for an experience of the beauty and the power of God in the day-to-day grind, including Sunday. Masculine pronouns aren’t the real problem.

Butler-Bass is about to drop the hammer on the western expression of a heaven-bound God mediated by a hierarchical church as out-of-touch and in dire need of revision.

They’re Not Judging You

It feels like people are judging you. They’re not.

I find myself in some church environments feeling judged and like a fraud. It mostly happens in churches that feel and sound like the ones I went to in my pre-Presbyterian early 20’s. It’s been over 15 years since I identified with the theological posture of churches where male pronouns for God predominate the singing and preaching and where the Bible is engaged more literally than imaginatively. I’ve had my mind changed on a lot of those elements.

Yet those kinds of churches shaped me in important ways. And whenever I have occasion to be in one again, I feel mostly at home. Except this feeling that the people around me, who are raising their hands and closing their eyes as we sing the latest Hillsong chorus, are judging me as a deficient Christian who has lapsed into Liberalism.

But they’re not. How could they be? They’re worshiping.

If it feels like they’re judging you, it might just be you. They’re probably doing bigger things.

A Homeless Woman Prayed for Me Today

A woman spends nights atop the concrete bench on our church patio sometimes, covered by a blanket and attended by a suitcase that holds all her possessions. She’s frequently in worship, and both our pastoral and our administrative staff have worked with her to find a housing solution, without success. We’ve run up against our limits in helping someone for whom housing is only one of a host of difficulties she’s battling.

This morning she’s in my local Starbucks. I greet her from the queue as she heads for the restroom, then, after I’m seated with my Christmas Blend, she stops by my table on her way out. She notices the eczema flaring up on my wrists and arms and asks about it. Self-conscious, embarrassed, I explain that I’ve dealt with it my whole life and that it gets worse in the winter. It’s no big deal.

Except that it is. Over the past three weeks I’ve spent who-knows-how-much on creams and lotions to calm this latest flare up. After writing this post I plan to check on refills for my steroid cream. It’s maddening. I’m losing sleep over it.

She offers to pray for me. I gladly thank her and turn back to my screen.

“Now,” she says, and without another word, she’s kneeling by my side and covers my wrists with her hands and praying for God to heal my eczema.

No one has ever done that for me before. Heck, I’ve never prayed about my eczema before.

I thank her as earnestly as I can as she heads for the door. Then she unexpectedly returns to my table to implore me to tell her what happens with my eczema. “You know what’s going to happen,” she says.

I don’t know how to share with her my hunch that a healing thing has already happened.

I’m Done Agreeing To Disagree About Assault Weapons

I’m struggling with what, if anything, to say about yesterday’s shooting here in California, that will be constructive.

Yeah, struggling.

Back in 2007, after the Virginia Tech shooting, I wrote on my old blog:

“Guns don’t kill people; people kill people.” What other industry, what other lobby, what other interest would be allowed to simply explain away the cause of killing so glibly without some kind of public outcry or legislative avalanche? What other product has to defend itself against the connection between itself and lots and lots of killing?

Nearly nine intervening years and–God help us–countless mass shootings later, we still don’t have satisfactory answers to those questions.

I belong to the Reformed branch of Protestant Christianity, which has always been characterized by a unashamed engagement in public life in pursuit of Biblically-inspired goals like care for the poor, justice, and equality, without the concurrent aim of imposing Christian mores on the society as a whole. The Reformed tradition has always seemed to me like a middle ground between withdrawal into a pietistic enclave and working for a “Christian” culture.

That’s context for this: allowing citizens to purchase assault rifles makes our public life less safe, and the insistence upon that right as inalienable is literally killing us. This is no longer a subject about which people of good will can disagree. If daily mass shootings are a price you’re willing to pay to ensure that citizens can purchase assault weapons unobstructed, you’re not a person of good will.

Seriously, an Assault Weapons Ban has to be a non-starter at this point. If you’re opposed to that, I don’t see what common ground we have. Agreeing to disagreeing is allowing more people to die. I won’t do it anymore.

Communion Is Better Than Community Is Better Than Affinity

I’ve suggested that affinity is not the same thing as community, that community is harder to build, and that therefore community is a better goal for youth ministry (indeed, for all ministry).

But there’s a theological dog not barking in those assertions. Church life holds forth an invitation to something greater than both community and affinity: communion.

Communion is unity that can’t be manufactured or organized or planned, because it’s a work of the Spirit. Liturgically, it happens around the table where one bread, one body, one cup are shared. But it’s happening in non-liturgical ways as well, as God knits men, women, and children together who have no business with one another–politically, culturally, racially, or economically.

We can build community. Only God can build communion.

But maybe by tending to the conditions that make for strong community we co-build communion with God.

Affinity or Community

Doublas Rushkoff made a prescient observation in an opinion piece about Donald Trump for Digital Trends yesterday, but instead of Trump it has me thinking about youth group. Here’s the observation:

Digital media, on the other hand, is all about choice and boundaries. We don’t have communities so much as affinity groups. We choose evermore specific sets of connections and feeds of information – and if we don’t, Facebook’s algorithms will do it for us. Your Google search is different than my Google search, because the company’s algorithms know how to parse what is different about our predilections.

I’ve been a big advocate of an “affinity-based” youth ministry approach over the past three years. My enthusiasm for it stems from my reading of Youth Ministry 3.0 and my interactions with the author, Mark Oestreicher, through of of his organization’s Youth Ministry Coaching Program cohorts.

One of Marko’s keen insights is that adolescent development has a lot more to do with finding affinity today than it did in previous iterations of youth culture, when you were either “in” or “out,” you belonged or you didn’t. Humans almost always seek out belonging, and that search is particularly urgent in adolescence. What’s important to note is that, in the Google and Facebook world Rushkoff is pointing to, “It’s easier to find a place to belong,” as Marko observes.

So I have focused a lot of my youth ministry efforts on working within groups where teens already have some affinity with one another. The best example is these weekly after school groups of youth who come as a group. They are one another’s people already, and they’re together when they’re not at church. At church, we do something different.

I’ve focused a lot less effort on building community among divergent affinity groups or among teenagers on the margins who don’t feel like there is a group for them. Rushkoff’s assessment stings a little bit and makes me want youth ministry to model a different way.

Affinity is not the same as community. Community is harder.

A Whole Meeting With No Phone

I borrowed Sherry Turkle’s latest book from the library last month and got about 2/3 of it read before I had to return it yesterday. It’s arguing that digital communication technologies inhibit the creativity that can only come from face-to-face, analog communication. It’s a long unpacking of Douglas Rushkoff’s insight that digital media are biased toward connecting people across great distances but biased against connecting people who are sharing the same space.

So I’m keeping my phone off the table at meetings and meals. Yesterday I sat in a project meeting for over two hours with five other people working, and I took my phone out only to check calendar dates relevant to our project.

I was more engaged in that meeting than I’m typically able to be. Of course, the urge to check or send an email occurred to me. Of course I considered tweeting something prescient someone had said. Of course Facebook and Messenger made frequent appearances in my consciousness.

But (mostly) I told them all “No,” and the benefit was clear to me. Creative possibilities got proposed, mulled over carefully, expanded, revised, adopted, and planned. It was interesting and it was fun. Those two hours of focused engagement fueled the rest of my day.

My laptop and phone are not the enemy of my work. Turkle is making a case, though, that in-person conversation is a stronger ally of our work by far, and that defaulting to electronic tools for communication is diminishing both our work and our enjoyment of doing it.

Not everybody’s buying it. Jonathan Franzen:

When she notes that Steve Jobs forbade tablets and smartphones at the dinner table and encouraged his family to talk about books and history, or when she cites Mozart, Kafka and Picasso on the value of undistracted solitude, she’s describing the habits of highly effective people.

After yesterday, though, I’m saying score one for Turkle.