A group in our church is working through this tool for exploring a new worshiping community (“new worshiping community” is what we used to call “new church development”). It wants to ground any exploration of a new worshiping community in the identity of the people discerning it–their experience of God and the way they talk about who Jesus is for them–because those will be the foundation of whatever is being built. For many of us in mainlineish churches, this is a high, high hurdle right out of the gate.

Even with all of the requisite qualifications implied in the prepositional phrase “for me,” and even when taking every precaution to avoid being coercive, many of us get stuck trying to articulate our personal experience of God’s love and our sense of who Jesus is.

It is almost baked into the DNA of mainline American Christianity to take seriously the demands of a pluralistic environment and to respect the views of others by not pushing our private religious convictions in a public space. This is a great strength; mainline Christians are, as a rule, highly committed to activities like interfaith dialogue and community service for their own sake and without any expectation of conversion.

But I wonder if we haven’t set up a false choice between engaging the public sphere respectfully and talking about our faith. I wonder if we haven’t uncritically accepted a relegation of religion to the private sphere of our lives to the point that we simply don’t know how to talk about it outside the walls of our church–and very often not inside those walls either.

How do we fix this? Who do you know who does this well? How do you talk to people about Jesus when you’re not at church?

Or do you?

John Vest got to see Rob Bell last night. Adam Walker Cleaveland heard him at the National Youth Worker’s Convention. Chad Andrew Herring used Bell’s Nooma videos for youth groups.

Bell was a household name a couple of years ago after he published a book saying that “Love Wins” and everybody gets to go to Heaven, a book that saw him definitively ousted from the inner circle of evangelicalism. For a while there, everybody and their Associate Pastor had an opinion about Rob Bell.

This is not a post about Rob Bell, though. This is a post about skipping a phenomenon simply because it is a phenomenon and whether that’s a good or bad quality in a leader.

I never read a Rob Bell book. I never used Nooma. I’ve never been to one of his events, and I’ve never weighed in on the controversies that surround him. And that’s almost entirely because Bell attracted so much attention. I didn’t jump on board because the boat was already really full, and I fancy myself more of a kayak person.

It’s the same reason I never saw The Passion of The Christ when it was the talk of every church and every talk show.

I used to hold a superior kind of posture towards phenomena like these, as if I was occupied with more serious matters and couldn’t be bothered to read Harry Potter or get into The X-Files or start listening to Kanye West. But I wasn’t really.

I realize now it’s more about fear, fear that, having once experienced the thing that everybody is raging about, I’ll need to have an opinion about it, and the requirement to hold an opinion makes me nervous. People will ask what I think, and I better have an answer. Better to just skip the whole thing and feign distraction.

That’s just a chump move, right? I mean, people who want to lead meaningful communities can’t just opt out of the things that are on everybody’s minds, can they?

I got to talk to Mark Oestreicher of The Youth Cartel yesterday, and he reminded me what I love about ministry with adolescents: the beholding. Marko wants the church to relate to teenagers less as a problem to be solved and more as a wonder to behold.

He immerses himself as much as anyone I know in the literature on adolescent development, including the scientific stuff about brain development. That field of research is far from settled on some pretty important questions about teenagers’ decision making abilities, the propensity towards risk, and all those other quirks that make people in their teens so unique–and challenging.

The standard thesis for a generation has been that the teen brain is problematically malformed or underformed or not-yet-fully-formed. But a new generation of researchers are actually looking at the adolescent stage of human development as one full of wonder and advantages for thriving that we’ve been overlooking.

Behold then the teen. Behold the risk taking. Behold the drama. What gifts are there to make up for what all of our grown up, risk-managed institutions are lacking?

My daughter’s bestie went on vacation to Chicago and sent a postcard. It said, “I am in a big city you are great.” It arrived as I was on my way to collect Daughter from dance class, and I retrieved it from the mailbox along with the new issue of Harper’s and then slipped in inside the magazine’s pages.

We had returned home by the time I remembered it. “Oh, Bestie sent you a postcard!” I announced and strode across the room to retrieve it. But it wasn’t there. While Daughter stared blankly at me, I flipped through the magazine, held it by its spine and shook it, but nothing was in there. It had fallen out. I lost Daughter’s postcard from her best friend.

#dadfail.

I swallowed hard and admitted that I had lost it. I apologized. I told her what the postcard said. She smiled and said, “That’s okay.”

#daughterwin.

Then the postcard made a return appearance in our mailbox over the weekend. Some solid citizen must have found it on the ground and dropped it in a mailbox. It arrived–no joke now–while Bestie was at our house for a playdate.

Sometimes it just works. Even when it doesn’t.

Side hustle. Freelance project. Gig: the way pastors talk about our work is changing in ways that reflect the changes happening in the workforce our congregants are navigating. Long-term jobs are disappearing and many people are turning to Uber and Airbnb as a way to make money independently.

People like Seth Godin are preaching the opportunities hiding in those changes for workers who have ideas and can overcome their fear of failure or of not being picked. I’m convinced by that argument, and my work has changed appreciably in light of it.

But not everybody is buying it, at least not without some caveats. Hillary Clinton expressed concerns this week over traditional worker protections in an employment landscape where more and more of the tools a worker uses to make money for a company are paid for by the worker, and with no benefits to speak of. I’m concerned about that too.

What reservations ought pastors and churches to have about embracing this move toward independence in work? One comes to mind right away. The nature of an installed pastoral relationship has as much to do with the congregation as it does the pastor. It provides protections for the pastor (especially in a Presbyterian system, where congregations can’t simply fire their installed pastors but must ask the presbytery to dissolve the relationship), but it also protects the congregation too–pastors can’t just quit. The presbytery has to dissolve the relationship from our end as well.

Last Sunday the congregation I serve approved changes to my terms of call that make my role there 3/4 time, so that I can take on a 1/4 quarter time role doing new ministry development work with our presbytery. I know that causes anxiety for some, but mostly I’m hearing a sense of support and collaboration; the congregation feels like my new work is its work too (envy is an appropriate response here).

That’s the piece, I think, that is missing in the gig economy, some sense that my work not only matters to a community larger than myself but is also owned and claimed by it too.

I had a conversation with someone recently in which the person addressed me by name repeatedly. Every time he did it, I snapped to attention. I even started to feel self-conscious.

I was being called by name, and it changed the nature of our conversation. It changed me–from some vague entity on the other end of a chat line into a human being with a name.

Try this in your conversations today. At least once in every conversation, address the person you’re speaking to by name. See what it does for them.

I bet it will be good.

(h/t to Ashley Goff and God of The Sparrow)

One way that churches could make an immediate impact in their communities is to host spaces for young adults to gather and make connections. The mainline church in town used to do this; many of the people over 60 in my congregation talk about meeting their spouse at church, either at the Sunday morning service, at a Bible study, or, in the case of really forward thinking congregations, at a young adult group.

But the exodus of young adults from mainline congregational life has meant that a viable mechanism for post-college young adults to make positive connections with peers is gone. What would it take to build that again, but in a way that was truly for the young adults in the community and not for the congregation to fill in a missing demographic?

I got connected to a church full of young adults in my early 20’s, right after college, and it saved my life. It makes me sad now, as a pastor, to talk to young adults who are struggling to get connected to a peer group, whether they’re new to town or have returned to where they grew up. The challenge is the same.

It’s probably not healthy to try and make those connections for people. But could the local mainline congregation provide a kind of platform for motivated young adults to meet peers and make those connections themselves?

Churches are one of the few remaining places where you are likely to be known, even as a guest. Especially in those established community churches, your name may be familiar before you ever walk through the door, like it or not.

I spent yesterday morning working in our church’s urban garden with a young woman who had been introduced to me in worship just the day before by one of the congregation’s great community pillars (and chief social butterfly).

“This is Melinda Johnson (not her real name). Her grandparents were charter members here! Her dad was a teacher, yada yada yada. . . ” and she was off.

But talking to Melinda yesterday, she was a bit baffled by the introduction. She never even gave her last name, and yet our community pillar already knew it and knew her family history, even though Melinda had never met our community pillar before.

This feels like a holdover from a role established mainline churches used to play as community institutions where everybody knew your name simply because you lived in that neighborhood. Now it’s more your social network, and your social network may have nothing to do with where you actually live.

I wonder how much of that role was valuable and how much it suffocated people.

“It was pretty clever of you to handle a tricky sermon topic by getting people to handle it for you,” he said shaking my hand after worship. He was right. This one was tricky. “What should Christians do about the opportunity gap?” A thorny installment in our “Peoples’ Choice” summer sermon series.

I enlisted the the question’s owner to tell the congregation why he had asked that question, what stake he had in the answer. Then I enlisted one of our guests from Louisiana here for the week on a mission trip to talk about how the ministries of her church are bridging the opportunity gap. Then I put on the finishing touches.

The question did not get definitively answered. The approach was more descriptive, as my co-preachers shared stories of things they’ve seen and done to reach across the opportunity gap. A lot of what they described comes down to mentoring, so I pointed that out and shared a quote from Robert Putnam: “If America’s religious communities were to become seized of the immorality of the opportunity gap, mentoring is one of the ways they could make an immediate impact.”

Clever perhaps. But I hope, also, challenging in a way that my usual solo sermons are not.

My church doesn’t do weekly youth group in the summer. During the school year there are three weekly gatherings that youth can connect to, and two of them are right after school. But everything stops in the summer.

Well, not everything. Summer is for week-long gatherings like Work Week, VBS, Camp, and a Mission Trip. We used to plan monthly events like a hike and a beach trip, but summer school schedules have driven down attendance at those, and this summer we’ve planned zero such gatherings.

But last week I got one of the after school groups together to go bowling, and they seemed really happy to see each other. The daily interactions they’re able to have during the school year get suspended in the summer, and this bowling alley was their first chance to get together in about a month.

And it wasn’t a “Y’all come” youth event; it was for this particular community of kids.

I’m changing my thinking about summer youth programming a little bit. If we–our buildings and our staff–are the excuses that youth have for gathering together and growing in friendship, why would we take three months off precisely at the time when their other excuse for doing that (school) is gone?