Sunday Game Plan

How we win the day.

Phase 1: care for congested kid by administering 10 ml of CVS Children’s Cold Medicine. Pain/fever reducer, expectorant, and–critically–nasal decongestant.

Phase 2: coffee. Regular Coffee

Phase 3: brag about wife’s Harry Potter wizard making project, conceived and executed in about 10 hours yesterday. Using over-sized chopsticks ($.99 per pair at the local Vietnamese grocery) cut by The Neighbor with his table saw to 13 and 1/2 inches, the definitive wizard wand length, she painted, handled, and shellacked (not shellacked) 20 of these beauties.

Phase 4: execute daily Claptrack post.

Phase 5: write Sunday Game Plan.

Phase 6: breakfast=Trader Joe’s quick cook steel cut oats.

Phase 7: shower, shave, dress.

Phase 8: don new black canvas Vans and try like Hell to pass them off as dress shoes at church.

Phase 9: sit in on Adult Education class on race, part two of a three part series. Here’s part one.

Phase 10: worship. It’s Jazz Sunday and the church’s 60th birthday celebration. Wife helpfully dropped 60 brightly colored plastic beads into a sandwich bag as a visual aid for for the Children’s Time. 60 is nothing.

Phase 11: lead inter-generational confirmation class, knowing half the 9th graders are off at a debate tournament. We started last week with “Predestination and Other Oddities.” This week=”Who Is Jesus? Who Cares?”

Phase 12: lunch

Phase 13: grocery shopping. I’ve scrapped the super-detailed, meal-specific grocery list in favor of a list-free approach. Secure various meal components, mostly proteins and green veggies, then consult the cookbook for ways to use them.

Phase 14: attend Ash Wednesday planning session with youth. They’ve been working on this for a few weeks with their youth group leader, and all I know is that they’re planning on using this song in the service:

Phase 15: dinner?

Phase 16: read a chapter of Harry Potter And The Prisoner of Azkaban to daughter at bedtime. Getting to this is the day’s main goal.

This Could Be The Start of Something Huge

Could these 10 seconds be the beginning of a yorocko podcast?

http://rsupinger.podomatic.com/entry/2015-02-07T14_39_14-08_00

Andrew Sullivan, Ezra Klein, And Megan McArdle vs. Seth Godin on Blogging

Reader Murphy posted a link in the comments to this post about journalism and data. It’s an essay by Megan McArdle lamenting Andrew Sullivan’s retirement that advances angst expressed by Ezra Klein (linked here) on that event that fingers social media as the culprit killing blogging.

Here’s a money quote from that essay:

But the problem with the old model of blogging is not just social media; it’s that blogging is exhausting. Two or three items a day doesn’t sound like a lot, but it takes a long time just to find something you want to write about. And the slowly dying ecosystem of other blogs makes it harder, because there’s no longer a conversation you can just easily hook into. Instead of plopping yourself down at a table where people are already talking, you have to wander through a room filled with people who are speaking to an audience through a megaphone and decide which of these oratorial topics might interest your own audience and a few thousand of their Facebook friends. It’s much lonelier, and consumes more energy, than it was in days of yore.

It’s hard to find something to write about. You can’t just hook into a running conversation. Who knows what your audience (and their social network) wants to read? It’s lonely.

Sullivan said this in the post announcing his retirement:

We’re a tiny team, already stretched beyond any sane life/work balance, with no financial backer, and a work ethic that might be alternately described as manic or masochistic. I’m not the only one exhausted and drained after years and years of intense, always-on-deadline work – not just editorially, but also these past two years in running a small business. We’re a very tight ship as we are, with a drained crew.

Making a career out of blogging seems impossible and, frankly, not worth attempting.

But blogging as a personal discipline that keeps you honest and supplements your other work? There’s nothing stopping us from doing that. You write about personal and professional learnings; you start conversations; you write for yourself first and then see if there’s an audience for what you’re writing. That has always been the harder work of blogging–of all writing.

Here’s Seth Godin’s approach to blogging:

I believe that everyone should write in public. Get a blog. Or use Squidoo or Tumblr or a microblogging site. Use an alias if you like. Turn off comments, certainly–you don’t need more criticism, you need more writing.

Do it every day. Every single day. Not a diary, not fiction, but analysis. Clear, crisp, honest writing about what you see in the world. Or want to see. Or teach (in writing). Tell us how to do something.

Go.

Sick Day

It happens about once a year that I have to stay home sick. Today’s the day.

This Blog’s For You

Landon shared a post I wrote last Tuesday, and, as you can see, the blog traffic spiked dramatically. He is the Kingmaker of Presbyterian blogging. As you can also see, the traffic was back to normal the next day.

Social traffic (FB and Twitter shares) drives blog traffic, and anyone trying to build a blogging audience benefits from that kind of sharing. But I’m learning that it’s a mistake to write for the peaks in the graph instead of the valleys. The valleys are what blogging is about.

As Ezra Klein reflects in a mournful piece,

Links from other bloggers — the original currency of the blogosphere, and the one that drove its collaborative, conversational nature — just don’t deliver the numbers that Facebook does. But blogging is a conversation, and conversations don’t go viral. People share things their friends will understand, not things that you need to have read six other posts to understand.

Here’s my pledge: to write and share 100 times more for the valleys in the graph, the January 22nd audience, than for the peaks, the January 28th one. The latter’s exposure is exciting, but the conversation I want to have here needs fewer, more engaged participants.

Conversation: you know who shared that Kline quote with me? Landon. By link. In an email. Conversation, y’all.

Thank you reading. And sharing. But still reading. And commenting. And yet reading.

This blog’s for you.

The Hazards of Love

I know people who have done big, amazing things for others, the kind of thing that forces you to question why you don’t do something similar and even if you could–risky, sacrificial things for people badly in need who well-meaning friends advise are not likely to be grateful, are, in fact, potentially dangerous. I know people who have gone as far as the imagination will allow to show love and compassion and hospitality and who have been rewarded for their feat with injury of the kind their well-meaning friends warned of and worse.

“It was the right thing to do,” they say to you after. “But we’ll never do it again.”

And it strikes you for the first time how both of things can be true at the same time.

Curious Church

I wonder if curiosity isn’t the muscle churches, church bodies, and their leaders need to strengthen more than any other these days. Not conviction. Not Daring. Not Caution.

Curiosity.

Curious churches want to find out what’s going on in the lives of their worshipers and in the community where they live and work. Curiosity drives them to listen and take note first, interpret and strategize later. And then, of course, interpret and share.

Curious church bodies like presbyteries investigate issues affecting their region and challenges facing their leaders. As investigation, this work is ongoing. If its driven by curiosity, it’s energizing in itself, but it also creates energy for advocacy, service, and more learning.

Curious leaders try out new skills and new sources of inspiration (like this new podcast). They want to find out what’s happening in the culture as much as in the neighborhood as much as their friends’ schools and workplaces. All of this will issue in work, but the first work is to seek out and to scratch the surface.

What are you curious about?

I Want Seth Godin on My Presbytery’s Nominating Committee

Our presbytery’s Committee on Representation and Nominations has a hunch that the work we’re doing is not the work the presbytery needs us to be doing if it is to have a vital future.

The work we’re doing now: filling slots on committees with names we already know well–people who are already involved in leadership.

The work that needs done: inviting church members to exercise leadership in the presbytery in ways they feel called, connecting them to other leaders, and empowering and equipping them to succeed.

As we talked around the gulf between these two bodies of work, I had in mind an invitation Seth Godin put on his blog earlier in the day: a 2 day seminar with him with to “create a posture of forward motion, a platform you can use to elevate your work, your company and your team.”

That’s what a presbytery’s nominating work could be about, right? Forward motion for its church’s leaders? A platform for leaders to elevate their work, their church’s work, and the work they feel called to do with others in the presbytery?

What kind of work goes on in your presbytery that cultivates and builds up leadership? Conferences? Retreats? Small groups?

We’re kicking around the idea of a leadership development cohort like this.

R-A-C-E

I spent 90 minutes with a congregant yesterday plotting an adult education unit on race. We’re pretty sure what we don’t want.

We don’t want people to say, “Ugh. Are we still talking about this?”

We don’t want white self-flagellation (my congregant is African-American).

We don’t want abstract theorizing about problems “out there.”

Instead, we want candid conversation about who we are as a congregation that both acknowledges the barriers to racial diversity our worship and fellowship erect but that also is grounded in the reality of who, really, is likely to participate in a Presbyterian church in a community that is 3/4 white.

We want a space where stories are shared: stories of struggle, stories of endurance, stories of faithfulness.

We want to raise awareness about the discrepancy between the racial composition of our community and the ones to our south and east.

We want to be transformed by the gospel:

There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.

And we want all that in three 45 minute increments.

As thought bait, watch this Vox video on race and tell me what you think.

A Blogger Looks at 2014

WordPress provides this really valuable year-end report. Here are some highlights.

First, a note of gratitude: blogging is about conversation. learning, and growth. Thanks to all of you for helping me learn and understand. As this calendar shows, I started posting five times a week roundabout September of this year, and I wish I’d made that move sooner. It’s mostly a personal discipline, and I hope it makes the blog more readable.

The most read and commented upon post of the year was the one about churches being the thing that needs to back off peoples’ schedules

This post about communion didn’t generate any conversation, but it got shared a lot.

My most active conversation partner here was Marci Glass. If I can write just a little bit like her I’m doing okay.

Here’s a picture of the other top commentators.

Click here to see the complete report.

Thanks for reading this year. Here’s to a thoughtful and challenging 2015!