Habits have a way of becoming accomplishments.

I have a friend who qualified for the Boulder Boulder without even trying. She cultivated the habit of running 10k races, and one of her race times happened to be good enough to qualify.

I have another friend who wrote a book without meaning to. He spent a decade preaching really thoughtful sermons on the topic of confirmation, and one day he realized he had a book on his hands.

Keep plugging away at that habit. One day you may look up and discover you’ve achieved something without even trying.

Also, you’ll have that habit.

Bonus.

Baccalaureate at the local high school is sponsored by the Interfaith Council in town. That means that a team of faith leaders work with senior class officers to hold auditions and then select speakers and performers for the service.

Imagine getting to work with a diverse group of teens on an event that showcases their convictions and their hopes, not to mention their considerable talents. It fills me up, you guys.

But it’s not enough. It’s a blasted shame that we meet most of these youth on their way out the door. Of course, I push the youth from my church to speak and to perform, but that shows all the more clearly that they’re part of a powerful community of their peers who have also been shaped by faith communities, a community dying for somebody to organize it for the good it’s capable of.

Here’s a proposal: a multi-faith campus organization sponsored by religious leaders in town that gives teens a platform to express their faith with their peers as well as to learn from the faiths of others. You could use Soul Pancake as a guide.

Why wouldn’t this be amazing?

I’m not interested in your take on Caitlyn Jenner. I’m not interested in your take on on ISIS. I’m not interested in your take on religion.

The take is ascendant. Everybody has one; my Facebook feed is full of peoples’ takes on Ted Cruz, LeBron James, The Pope, and everything or everyone else imaginable. My take is my opinion, grounded in my unique perspective, guided by my personal convictions, informed by TMZ–harmless, really, and yet utterly useless for constructive deliberation.

Instead of your take, share your angle. Relate your experience, please, and if that experience compels you to have a take, please please please inform that take with information from outside your personal experience. Please. That’s an angle, and that’s valuable.

We are awash in competing commentary. We need more angles.

Here’s a great example. 

Personal experience:

Law school is a very good way to solve the problem of being ineligible for a license to practice law. It is not a very good way to solve the “I don’t know what to do with my life” problem, or the “I am afraid that if I follow my true passion I will fail” problem, or the “I am desperate for other people’s approval” problem.

And analysis of information:

According to the American Bar Association, only 71 percent of 2014 law school graduates were able to obtain long-term, full-time employment as lawyers (defined as jobs that either required them to pass the bar, or preferred to hire candidates with JDs). That means that one in four law school graduates were either unemployed or were doing jobs they could have gotten without ever going to law school.

Presto. An angle (by the way, if you try to pass off other peoples’ takes as information, we will know).

Down with takes. Let’s have more angles.

I listen to every episode of Reply All, Startup, The Moment, and now, The Mystery Show. This is my podcast “A” list. If I miss an episode or two, I catch up before listening to new ones.

I have other podcasts in my feed. On Being. Homebrewed Christianity. Story Divine. This Every Day Holy. I listen to these a lot, although I permit myself to miss some episodes.

I listen mostly in my car, and I don’t have a long commute, so shorter podcasts are privileged over longer ones. Yet I have been known to sit in the church parking lot for 20 minutes or more finishing a fresh episode of Serial. I love both the narrative and the conversational form. I appreciate editing.

What are your favorite podcasts? What makes them so good?

Pastors need to know how to design and publish web pages.

Our church’s and ministries’ public face online can’t be the domain of techie volunteers or paid “web designers” anymore. This is too important for pastors to not get good at it. Facility with online publishing is to today’s church what mastery of print was to yesterday’s, but for a very different reason.

Yesterday’s church required print proficiency for the sake of internal mechanics: worship bulletins and newsletters and the like. We still spend a lot of time on these, and they’re still important.

But today’s church needs to master website publishing for the sake of its welcome. Bad church websites turn curious people away, and not because those curious people are shallow or have short attention spans. Rather, missing information, incomplete or hard-to-find information like worship times and the church address, insider jargon–these things are as damaging to a church’s image as a weed-covered lawn or collapsing sign.

We can learn web design with minimal effort. We may be doing it already. Our church contracted with a graphic artist to redesign our site last year, and I was flummoxed when she proposed that we migrate our web hosting to WordPress, the platform on which I have published this blog for five years. I was already practiced at the tool our paid artist was going to use.

Don’t misunderstand me. We need to work with graphic artists on our church websites, because they’re the ones who design things like this church logo, and I would love it if graphic artists came to see churches as really great communities in which to practice their craft:

But the publishing part we can learn. The tools are abundant, and we don’t have to study html or anything like that. The good tools aren’t free, but I think they’re worth what they cost.

Take this website I made using Squarespace. It’s a clean template, and a couple of sessions messing with it were enough to orient me with the basics of how it works. It’s not winning any Webbys, but it does what we need it to, and it looks good. And it will get better.

Why aren’t you in charge of your church’s website?

I wonder if you have to talk yourself into the work you want to do by way of talking the world into yourself as the person to do it.

I was trying to make some money as a freelance writer in-between church calls several years ago but had pitiful evidence to support that aspiration. I did enough to get a pitch accepted by a national magazine, and working on that story, telling sources that I WAS a freelance writer working on a story for THAT publication–they bought it. Furthermore, they treated me like I was a writer. They answered some of my questions and evaded others, just like I imagine they would to Rachel Held Evans.

They convinced me that I was what I was trying to be.

[disclosure: the story didn’t get published and my freelance writing career went nowhere. But that’s not the point, is it?]

When you put yourself forward as a person who aspires to do good work, I think people are eager to accommodate you as a professional, without you even asking. Yesterday I got asked to read a novel manuscript and consult with a church about their youth ministry, not things I’m casting about for opportunities to do but things I’m eager, now that I’ve been asked, to take on.

Act like the thing you want to be, because people need you to be it.

Yes, churches need to get out of their buildings and into their neighborhoods.

Yes, missional is better than attractional.

Yes, aging buildings with lots of deferred maintenance are a drag on church budgets.

But today a kid from the neighborhood who comes to a weekly youth group and whose family aren’t “members” of the church told me that he’d be sadder if our decrepit youth room burned down than if his house did.

So, yeah. There’s that.

The bargain of job security is this: do what you’re asked and you will be compensated–sufficiently if not handsomely–so that you can buy a house and a car, raise a family and see a doctor when you need. The best jobs go to the workers who do the best job at filling the role, performing the defined function(s).

The erosion of this job security in our time is chipping away at the compensation part of that bargain, but it is also eroding the other part, the do-what-you’re-asked part. There is more of a burden on people today, in a disrupted, declining, work economy, to identify what needs done and to put themselves forward as the ones to do it.

Obviously, this burden is also an opportunity.

An example:

A youth worker walked into a church and asked, “Do you guys have a youth group?”

“No,” came the answer. No budget for a youth worker=no youth program.

On to the next church to look for one of the last remaining youth worker jobs?

Nope.

“Well, you should have a youth group; there are loads of teens in this neighborhood. Let me start one for you.”

Not, “Will you hire me for a Youth Worker job?” but, “Let me hire you as the community I’m going to feed with my work.”

This extends even to the job you already have. If the community needs something other than what’s in your job description, why not propose something else? If your sense of giftedness and call has changed since you were hired, why not skip the search for a different job someplace else in favor of engaging the community you’re already in about changing how you feed it with The Thing You Do.

Man, that’s scary.

Church life is nuts. Like out-of-order, Jane-stop-this-crazy-thing nuts. Church leadership often feels like a merry-go-round that goes progressively faster (there goes Advent! Wait, was that Lent? Here comes Ordinary Ti–fundraiser for the mission trip! Sign up Sunday school teachers!)

Yet the thing that attracted me to pastoral ministry and made me think I might be called to it was the order of congregational life, the patterns, habits, and seasons that shape the life of a Christian community in a particular place. A brief stint in an intentional community after college stoked this fire, and a couple of years of single city living made me yearn to belong to a people and to be shaped by their way of life. “Practices” were a big deal.

Counting my time in seminary, I’m 14 years removed now from that discernment, and I see clearly now that the liturgically patterned life of an ordered church community is a mirage. Pastoral leadership is more about organizing events than it is presiding over a community’s routine of intentional practices.

Tell me if you experience this differently.

Perhaps the reality is better than the illusion, though. Might there be advantages to organizing church life around and orienting leadership toward the episodic as opposed to the “Ordinary?”

The community gathered for worship on this Lord’s Day is unique. In all likelihood, this community will not gather again with exactly this composition ever again. Today’s worship is an event that will not be repeated. Even as it sings God’s praises in communion with worship of God in every time and place, it remains isolated to this time and these place, and, critically, these particular people.

So when a worshiper shares with you that something you did made her “upset to be here,” you’d better listen. You can’t please everybody, yada yada yada, I know. And “upset” is a fine feeling to steer people toward in worship. But if something incidental to your preparation to lead worship upsets someone, then this unique, time-bound experience has been diminished.

So fix it.

Thank her for the courage it must take to confront a worship leader with a criticism, put it in your pocket, and resolve to prepare better next Sunday.

Either upset people on purpose or not at all.