The pledge-based budget is a limited tool for getting things done. It can probably pay for what we got done last year, what groups like ours normally get done, but it’s not great when we want to get new things done. New projects probably need new money and new ways of getting it. 

When a church group launched a project to make 20 Mothers’ Day gift baskets for residents of a domestic violence shelter, they bought all the items themselves and were reimbursed out of a special mission fund. They then made worship announcements to invite contributions to pay back that special fund. They got it done. 

A group has built a mission partnership with Peruvian churches for five years without once putting it in the budget. They sell hamburgers on one Sunday and trinkets at an alternative gift market on another, and that pays a share of airfare to Lima at least once a year. It’s getting done. 

Several colleagues and I are building a regional youth ministry organization that can’t depend on our respective youth ministry budgets for funding. Students have to pay towards the costs of our retreats and mission trips. That’s a blunt funding instrument that limits participation by default to those who can pay. Or, in our case, it doesn’t limit participation and instead racks up a deficit. 

We need a strategy to support our new project. Sponsorship? Could we invite churches and mission committees and individuals to sponsor our projects in the coming year to enable broader participation from all students? 

If your church didn’t have its own youth involved, would it sponsor a project like this? 

How else do new projects find the new resources they need to get done?

“We declare to you . . . what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes” (1 John 1:1).

The things we have heard do not motivate us as much as the things we have seen. Seeing changes everything. Hearing that a football player hit his fiancee engenders indignation and a slap on the wrists. Seeing him do it sparks outrage and public disassociation. Seeing changes everything.

Leaders of faith communities must point to the violence and poverty and injustice at work in the world and invite people to observe it first hand. God observes peoples’ misery, and so must we. This is why we take people on mission trips, to see up close the kinds of realities we hear about from afar. I’ll never forget the stupefied silence of a group of high school students beholding the border wall in Nogales, Arizona. We’d been telling them about it for weeks. But when they saw it . . . 

And yet . . . 

Communities of faith must also be forces that hold the line on testimony. All manner of wickedness thrives where resistance depends upon visible proof. If a victim must furnish video evidence before her assailant is stopped she will not soon cease to be a victim. Courageous words of accusation and protest demand a hearing, and churches must continue to be places where victims’ voices are heard. 

Seeing changes everything, but let us not forget how to listen. 

 

The 9:00 adult Sunday school hour at my church wants to be expert-led and intellectual. I put participants in charge and asked them what they wanted. 

The high school youth group wants to be a laid back routine of checking in, playing, and talking. I scheduled service projects. 

No gathering does everything it could. Maybe the trick of leadership is paying attention to what a gathering wants to be and getting out of the way. If a gathering lacks something important for faith formation, add a new gathering. 

Maybe discipleship is a constellation of invitations to join distinct communities performing diverse works. Maybe there’s no single community doing it all.

Right there in the sidebar under Holla at Yorocko and above Yorocko Makes Movies.

If you’re a new reader, check out some old stuff you might have missed. If you’re a longtime reader, why not re-enjoy something you’ve already read?

 

I have without shame gobbled up Coca Cola’s #shareacoke marketing campaign. There was a day when I would heap scorn on such an acquiescence to corporate coercion. I may yet again. But I’m all in on this one. Here’s why.

#shareacoke is a platform for friendship. I am buying these named Coke bottles just so that I can post pictures of them to Facebook and tag all my friends with that name. It’s detrimental to my health, sure. But it’s an easy gesture of friendship that, while hardly earth-shattering, is better than the distance and isolation that reigns over much of modern life. 

If nothing else, the name of the bottle is bringing to mind people I haven’t thought about in ages and wouldn’t otherwise. Encountering their existence anew is worth being perceived as a brand sellout.

 

If they say you’re not listening, you’re not listening.

You can protest all you want. You can line up the evidence: the meetings they failed to attend, the surveys they stuck under a pile, the voicemails they neglected. You can assemble a dazzling exhibit of attempts you’ve made to listen that they have missed or flat-out snubbed, all while maintaining that you’re listening. 

But you’re not. 

Sometimes people burn through our energy and we have to stop listening to them. I think that’s okay. I think some people should be told they’ve lost the right to be heard in certain circles. Don’t assure these people you’re listening, because you’re not and you shouldn’t be. 

But I’m finding that more and more of my work is to understand how to listen to different people, and contemporary life is making it so that the pool of those who are easy to listen to is shrinking. Fewer people reply to emails and phone calls–even texts– ,and fewer still come to meetings to have their say. I spend more energy soliciting conversation than I ever did before, and the list of media I’m using to do it grows almost weekly. 

It’s exhausting, but the rewards are manifold. Not only is our work enriched by the listening, but we turn would-be adversaries into partners and disinterested observers into leaders. 

What’s your favorite listening strategy?

 

I spent a lot of time with this track back in 2000, when I was 24.

It came up on my iPod the other day, and I played the whole album through in a fit of nostalgia.

Richard Rohr thinks people need to “Learn from each stage [of growing up].” But he adds,”and yet you can’t completely throw out previous stages, as most people unfortunately do. In fact, a fully mature person appropriately draws upon all earlier stages.”

I met some of my best friends in my Sarah Harmer stage: my Best Man and the preacher at my ordination, for starters. My one bedroom apartment wasn’t in the basement, but the tap did drip all night, and one of the busted slats on the donated futon I used for a bed had to be propped up from underneath with a coffee mug.

I helped start a weekly meetup (before that’s what they were called) at a pub. I lived for an Emergent church (before that’s what they were called) even as I snobbishly judged it for its sophisticated cultural posture and insisted on a more Old Time Religion. I endured a breakup with my college girlfriend, met someone else, then got back together with the college girlfriend (our 12th wedding anniversary was two weeks ago). I decided to go to seminary, though with a mocking dismissal of the pastorate.

I was insufferable. I was broke. I was miserable. I was deliriously happy.

I’ve spent the last couple of days probing my memories of that stage of life looking for things to draw upon for the challenges and opportunities of this one.

Here’s another piece of the memory elixir.