Category: Church

Six Things I Learned At A Supper Church

My colleague and I visited The Generous Table on Sunday afternoon, “a multi-generational gathering of people living out the Christian faith in South Orange County.” It’s an hour-long worship service in a living room followed by a meal, and it’s designed for people who don’t go to church.

Here’s what I learned.

This isn’t hard. 

Invite your neighbors. Open your door. Arrange some couches. Pick a Bible passage.

Seriously, what else is there to do?

Minda’s husband Aaron led an Bible story activity for the seven or so children who were there, and I’m confident that takes more planning than what the adults do.

This is really difficult.

There’s a huge mental barrier to be overcome in granting yourself the permission to do something like this, to invite neighbors into your house to say prayers, sing worship songs, and talk about the Bible. Over dinner, Minda got a bit emotional talking about that challenge. She knows the profile of leaders who start things like this: young, extroverted, dynamic. She’s rather introverted, a mother of four children, and she hasn’t even finished seminary. But she’s doing it.

The difficulty here is all internal. Which is why I found it easier to drive two hours to “experience” it than to just do it myself.

Music helps, and it doesn’t even have to be good

Aaron led one worship chorus on his guitar to get the gathering started, which put everybody at ease and created a worshipful atmosphere. Later, when I referred to Aaron as a “musician,” Minda chortled and called that the first time he’s been called such a thing.

Whatever. The music was good enough to do what it needed to do, and I was glad for it.

Stories, stories, stories

We read two whole chapters of Genesis, which is a longer Scripture reading than you’ll get away with in any of the churches I’ve ever been to. It feels more like a Bible study. Minda hears that a lot.

But it’s not a Bible study. Minda was prepared with some contextual and background insights, but the aim was clearly liturgical. The reflection on the story was framed around two simple questions: what did you like in the stories, and what raised questions for you?

The meal is huge

Everybody brings a dish to share. Tables get rearranged after the service, and wine is poured. The conversation flows easily while the kids play noisily in the living room. I had this thought: if you filmed what was happening here and played it back for someone–anyone–with the volume turned down, they would think it was a family gathering. More importantly, they would want to come.

It’s called “The Generous Table,” after all.

It’s meant for people who don’t go to church , but . . . 

There was one person among 20 there who doesn’t go to a church. I don’t think that’s a failure of The Generous Table’s mission, but rather a testament to the yearning that people steeped in church culture have to experience authentic and intimate gatherings like this. It was a weird week; roughly half of us were there to observe and, hopefully, copy what’s happening.

Gatherings like The Generous Table are a really healthy development in the American church landscape (particularly the mainline–i.e. Presbyterian–piece of that landscape), and I’m grateful I got to join one.

You, Inc.

Stephen Pressfield gushes a little bit in The War of Art about screenwriters who have incorporated themselves as companies, so that writing jobs come, for example, to “Joe Smitch, Inc.” instead of to Joe Smith himself. He thinks this is a terrific indicator that a writer has distanced her Self from her Work in a healthy way.

Your Self is you, the person you have to live with and look in the mirror every day, who’s contentment rests upon some brew of fulfilling work, financial security, health, and loving personal relationships. Your Work is your brand. It’s your Thing: what you show the world about the thing that you do.

So what is your brand? What is your Thing? Don’t say, “I’m a Pastor,” or “I’m a Writer,” or “I’m a Teacher.” Instead, describe the contribution to the world that your job title allows you to make but that you would still want to make if all the jobs with that title were gone tomorrow.

“I share the gospel.”

“I help people get healthy.”

“I make music.”

“I uncover the truth.”

Many of us are fortunate to have jobs with titles that permit us to do our Thing, but so many of the job titles that used to define for us who we are and what our Things is are either gone or disappearing that now seems a really good time for us to practice telling the world what our Thing is apart from a job title.

So, You Inc.: what’s your Thing?

Collaboration Is The Perfect Cover for Learning

In ministry, it’s important to have relationships with colleagues for support. A year into my present call, one of the associate pastors in town called several people she knew to put together an “accountability” group of pastors. We met monthly for a couple of years over lunch for no other reason than to share the victories and defeats of our work.

But it’s also important to have relationships with colleagues for learning. We need a network of peers (not all pastors!) with whom we work on projects, so that we can learn from them and they from us. This article wants you to think of that network as your new mentor.

I can’t tell you how much I have learned from people in this way. I’ve started inventing reasons to collaborate with people just so I can watch them work and incorporate their habits, expertise, and skills into my own work. Tapestry is the most obvious example, but there are more.

When my colleague suggested we rethink our early morning Easter worship service as a community outreach opportunity, I pitched the idea first to the owner of my gym, because he’s a mad entrepreneur who’s really good at community outreach. A partnership with him would allow me to watch him work.

Another one. We’re trying to incorporate some artwork into our Lenten worship series on The Stations of The Cross. It’s the perfect excuse to work with my photographer friend in town. I know that if I buy him a coffee and spell out the idea, he’ll go to work. Sure enough, the wheels are spinning and he’s presenting us with an idea next week.

Learning, getting better, enhancing your skill set and knowledge base: these are perfectly sound reasons to create working collaborations with people in your network, as sound as the stated purpose of the work itself.

Of course, if you don’t have a network, building one is as easy as a single email or phone call to someone who’s work you’ve noticed.

The Right(ish) Tool

The world is full of imperfect tools. If we insist on perfect tools as a condition for doing work, we will leave a lot of work on the table.

The podcast I’ve started is valuable to me, and it utilizes a bundle of flawed tools, namely online recording and editing software that must frustrate the ears off an audiophile. But it’s what I have, and it does what I need it to do. Plus, the work I put into it compensates for some of the tools’ flaws.

There are lots of tools available to churches to do lots of things, from discerning a new way forward to planning a vacation Bible school, and every single one of those tools is flawed. By all means, let’s make our own tools–better tools that are more responsive to our context, more theologically sound, more flexible.

But if the choice is between using an imperfect instrument and doing nothing. Please let’s use the imperfect instrument.

“We have this treasure in clay jars, so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us.” (2 Corinthians 4:7)

I’m Pro Project

Yesterday I met the director of an art gallery for adults with developmental abilities and discussed potential projects for the gallery and my church. I also spent 45 minutes on the phone with a friend at a church in Louisiana about a delegation from that church visiting us this summer and the projects we would work on. Then there were some emails about the Joke Night project a group of us at the church are working on, and some tweets with a potential MC.

Projects, Projects, Projects.

Is it just me, or does ministry these days feature more projects and fewer set pieces? Even the set pieces–worship, education, service–feel like projects: the seasonal worship series, the multi-week adult education class. Is this new, or has it always been like this? More importantly, is this a constructive development?

It feels constructive to me. For one thing, projects are far more amenable to team leadership than the set pieces. The Lenten worship series on The Stations of The Cross is something you can participate in without committing to joining the worship committee, so it’s easier to recruit a team of leaders well-suited to it.

The team changes, too. I’ve worked for several years on our community’s interfaith Baccalaureate worship service for high school graduates, and every year there’s a different team of us doing the work–including different graduates. It’s an engaging project because of the team.

Also, there’s a clear end date. Some projects last two weeks and others two years, but either way you know when it’s done.

And objectives are more clear with projects, aren’t they? What’s the objective of mission? That’s a long answer with lots of nuance and multiple caveats. But what’s the objective of our mission project in Peru? To support local churches installing water filtration systems in as many communities as possible.

I’m a fan of the master project list, a constantly updated compilation of all the projects you’re working on at a given time. More and more, I’m finding that if something’s not on my master project list, it’s not really a thing I’m doing.

Am I devaluing the set pieces here?

Monday Morning Quarterback

Stuff we learned on Sunday.

What does your community need musically and artistically for young people? What does your context already provide for children and youth in music and the arts?

The community I live in has a Community School of Music, abundant kids’ musical theater offerings, and an academy for music, voice, and dance. In addition, there’s a youth symphony, and private instrument-specific tutors are everywhere. There’s music–good music–for youth all over this place.

I recently asked a group of teenagers, though, what their town lacks for youth, and their answer was music. There’s no performance venue for teens. There’s no recording studio. There’s no place to go hear live music in you’re underage.

Yesterday our program staff discussed the future of our Director of Music for Children and Youth position, since we recently learned that our Director of five years will be moving on. “Director” in this case has traditionally meant of choirs, up to three at a time at one point in the church’s history.

But it has slowly ceased to mean that; children, their parents, and youth, have gradually stopped participating in the church’s choral programming. It has become more flexible in response, more experimental. Students conceived of an Ash Wednesday service, for example, that was structured around contemporary pop music (Bastille’s “Pompeii” and Ed Sheeran’s “I See Fire”). The Director helped the students clarify and perfect that conception so that they could carry it out well. And they did.

It seems to me that the resource our church can uniquely provide the community isn’t a choir director anymore. There are lots of those around. But kids and teens here don’t have access to musicians to take the artistic interests and aspirations of young people seriously and to accompany them in learning, playing, and performing.

Could this place be served by a musician who is an entry point and guide to the life of faith as expressed through music. A Musician in Residence? For Children and Youth?

Does this exist anywhere?

For All To See

Writing publicly is a great way to keep yourself honest, because you will write things badly–or you will write bad things–for everyone to see. If you’re lucky, some readers will tell you where you’ve missed the mark. And then you get better.

I’ve spent much of life trying to avoid making mistakes or, at least, making the kinds of mistakes that only a few people will see. But I’ve been blogging five times a week for months now, and now I’ve started recording a podcast–both unrestrained public communication platforms. For what it’s worth, I’ve been preaching for a decade, and I have a public SoundCloud page with a dozen or so of my sermons on it.

I’m defaulting to public with the work I produce. When you do that, you make your mistakes in front of large crowds. Many in those crowds will be generous friends and colleagues and partners who will neither torch you nor flatter you but push you to improve, either because they care or because your work bears on their work too. Criticism of both those types is better than the silence that comes from keeping your work to yourself.

Make mistakes. In public. Then fix them. Apologize when you should. And keep at it. Improve.

For. All. To. See.

Grow Up (Or Don’t?)

In the past month I’ve had conversations with friends who are professors, pastors, and physicians, and who all feel crushed by the state of their work. My Godin-fueled optimism for the opportunities our era affords us to do our work in new ways hits a real barrier in these conversations, because people are up against serious and systemic constraints that can’t be overcome with an attitude adjustment.

The tension in all of their situations is between the desire to make change and the responsibility to endure difficulty for the sake of stability and providing for one’s family. My pastor friend calls it “Being a grownup.” She has tattoos that her congregants don’t know about, and she separates most of her interests and tastes from her pastoral work. She’s miserable, but, she says, this is part of being a grownup. Is she right?

Or take my professor friends. As tenure track positions fade into the professional sunset and colleges and universities employ more and more adjunct faculty as cheap labor, they’re scrambling all over the place trying to make a living by piecing together various temporary, adjunct appointments. There’s got to be a way to break out of that cycle and to do your work in a way that adds value to people, value they will pay you for, but I can’t imagine what that is. So my friends act as grown ups. They’re killing themselves to follow these new rules.

How much of doing meaningful work today amounts to working within the conditions set by your profession, or how much of it, in the “connection economy,” amounts to establishing your own conditions to make your work work for you?

Who’s Afraid of Nextdoor.com?

Yesterday I spent an hour on the phone with someone who is working on two interesting things. She is hosting a gathering in her home every other week where people who don’t go to church–including children– share a meal and a simple liturgy.

She is also moderating the nextdoor.com page for her neighborhood, a page she created. She found that tool, noticed nobody else had organized her neighborhood, and set it up herself. Then she sent postcards to all her neighbors inviting them to a wine and cheese party in her front yard. Then she walked around her neighborhood inviting people face-to-face.

I had two reactions I she described these projects. First, I could totally organize my neighborhood on nextdoor.com. Second, there’s no way I’m doing that.

Fear is so close at hand. What if my neighbors don’ like me? What right do I have to take on a role like that? People will surely find this meddlesome. Fear, fear, fear.

Steven Pressfield says that fear is the best indicator that some work is worth doing.

One more thing. Look at nextdoor.com and tell me why it wouldn’t make sense for someone in your congregation to create the page for the church’s neighborhood and set about building connections with the neighbors that way.