That new thing we’ve been waiting for is going to change things for the better, but parts of that change are going to be uncomfortable. We should be prepared for that so that we don’t misinterpret discomfort to mean something is wrong or that the change was a mistake.

If it’s not a little uncomfortable, can it really be growth?

Let’s not confuse talking about the work with the work.

To be sure, talking about the work is its own work, but it’s distinct from the work it talks about and secondary in importance. Getting this backwards can open a door to dishonesty about the work we’re actually doing, because we’ve come to care more for a story about the work than the work itself, and, in reality, that story ultimately comes to be about us.

Charlatans work backwards from publicity to impact.

There is no substitute for judgment. No algorithm can make all our choices for us, whether those choices are consumer choices, like which phone to buy or where to go on our next vacation, or whether they are public choices, such as how to vote in the next election. Quizzes and ranked lists and expert reviews are only a click away for practically every choice we might make, and yet our judgment remains the most valuable resource we have for making any choice.

The good news here is that our judgment can be improved. People who have good judgment haven’t always. Rather, they’ve learned from experience, taken reputable advice, and interrogated their choices for self-delusion. They have strengthened their judgment, and so can we.

This is the value of participating in communities that make decisions together, the collective exercise of judgment. On too large a scale this just feels like politics with one clear winner and several clear losers. There’s collective judgment in that, but it feels abstract, and we can too easily distance ourselves from outcomes we didn’t vote for. But at a smaller scale–say, a congregational scale–we are required to throw in with people whose judgment is different than ours and to mine their judgment for wisdom, even if we disagree with it.

Communities of judgment focus on details. The most important judgments we make are not about big ideas and seismic events, turning points and moments of crisis. The judgments that have the greatest impact are the day-to-day decisions we make about the people and the places we care about.

Do not credit appeals to the agency of nameless plural entities. “They” do not exist. “They” is an abstraction deployed to rally emotion and allegiance when facts are unclear.

Likewise, do not speak in these abstractions, neither of “The Culture” or “The World,” “the Left” or “The Right.” Address instead this person, that party, her speech, his article.

If we insist on addressing people in their specific observable words and acts, and if we demand our interlocutors do the same, we create valuable space for truth to show itself and do its work.

I told my brother to stop sending me videos of individuals opining directly into a camera, because of all the human distortions social media had admitted into our common life, the lone individual spouting an opinion to unbounded audience may be the worst.

Human communication flourishes in a context of relationship and shared space and time. The phone-filmed confessional video has none of those things. Yet it conveys urgent emotion and parodies an actual human connection. It admits no conditions to its understanding but wraps itself in a pernicious kind of moral certainty. As a vehicle of communication it inherently suspect.

Worse still, these videos are designed to excite the grievances and biases of their audience, which is eager to receive them and share them, often without even watching them to the end. They pose as earnest thought sharing, but, at bottom, they are thoroughly disingenuous.

It doesn’t matter if the author is telling me how I should treat myself or who I should vote for–the deficiency is the same.

I’m more interested in what you think. So call me and tell me instead of sending me video of what someone else thinks.

You have to choose–and you have to choose often–whether you’re going to feed the gnawing anxiety of what we don’t yet know from the day-and-night buffet of speculation and framing and “this narrative that says” whatever someone says it says.

Jerusalem Demsas wrote yesterday about the urgent need for sensible people to “refuse to play the game of abstractions” in the wake of a public assassination. She urged people to

Reject the pull to detach from the concrete into larger themes about social media or guns or political violence or “what it all means.” Repel the impulse to pop off about how the right shot first, about how a left-wing activist called [Charlie] Kirk a Nazi, about how Republicans made this inevitable because they refused to pass gun legislation, or about how it’s unfair that Kirk is receiving adulation in the wake of his death when others get so little. All of that is worse than useless.

I found that advice comforting, so I shared it on Facebook, something I almost never do. By the end of the day I wished I hadn’t. A former college classmate chided me because the excerpt I quoted left out the word “assassinated.” She sarcastically thanked me for “nodding to this tragedy.” My dad ALL CAPS yelled at me to SAY HIS NAME. Even a good friend left a comment complaining that Demsas’s advice failed to mention the murder of Melissa and Mark Hortman, a Democratic lawmaker and her husband, last June.

Basically, everyone who commented did the very thing I felt inspired by the essay to not do. I left a final comment, “I give up,” and then shut everything down.

Today I read this by Jeff Sharlet, which sounds like it rhymes with Demsas’s plea to foreswear abstraction:

I’m not a judge, a philosopher, so I can’t really preach to you the pursuit of justice in the abstract. Just a writer—my work is perception and description, the collection and curation and contemplation of detail. That I can recommend, because I believe these are verbs from which justice grows.

This is what I want to pursue right now: perception, description, detail, verbs, justice.

Everything else feels self-serving.

Tonight churches will ring out with candle-lit renditions of “Silent Night” and recitations of good news of great joy for all people announced to shepherds. There will be pageants: young Marys and Josephs staring awkwardly at a doll baby Jesus as magi and angels tussle for position. Still, in bitter cold; still, with Covid cases ticking back up; still, the war on Christmas winning; still, tonight churches host a story everyone still needs to hear–about a baby laid in a manger because there was no room in the inn, because God wants that badly to be God with us.

We know who God is because of what God has done. The story narrates action and it communicates essence and identity. That God is loving and gracious and merciful–we know these attributes through actions, not simply as philosophical propositions. God is as God does, thanks be to God.

We are as we do as well. The good news is that meaningful engagement with the world, as individuals and as churches, need not wait until we have discovered our identity. The engagement makes the identity. The waiting, too, makes an identity, a different identity from the one that acts. “Be not afraid.” “Go.” This is what the story would have us do, and in so doing these are the people we become.

Some challenges a church will face demand a comprehensive plan assembled by carefully chosen and representative teams of leaders with distinct and credible points of view who deliberate for an appreciable amount of time before making recommendations for action. Pastor Nominating Committees work like this. So do long range planning teams and task forces. As church leaders, we need to know how to support and lead these kinds of processes.

But not every challenge the church faces requires such a step-by-step approach. Some kinds of challenges are looking for targeted interventions by leaders who are acting on hunches and paying careful attention to what happens. I know a church musician who has transitioned her church’s hymnody and choral music so that roughly half of the selections are from contemporary global composers and authors; she addressed the challenge of the disconnect between the church’s predominantly white European and American musical heritage and the multicultural, multiracial community the church longs to become by picking a meaningful spot for an intervention.

She could have assembled a committee to review every musical selection over the past 12 months and conduct surveys with congregation members to learn their musical preferences. She could have hired a consultant. Those steps may well have been beneficial. But the benefit of the targeted, almost stealthy, intervention she made instead has been undeniable.

I sense that church leaders need to be growing in our capacity to lead both of these approaches, which requires that we develop our instincts for discerning which challenges require a committee and which don’t.

The next three days of ministry:

Conduct a one-to-one meeting with a congregant (for my doctoral project)

Record videos for a YouTube series.

Preside over a memorial service.

Officiate a wedding.

Lead a youth group.

Host a live recording of a podcast.

Half of these things would not have been on a list like this three years ago, because decisions and circumstances have led to some new things, and the community I’m in ministry with supports all of them.

What a gift.

If I write it in an email and then describe it in the calendar invitation, put it on the website and also announce it at the meeting, and people still don’t get it, I haven’t done my work.

We haven’t communicated when we have fed the input into the machine. We’ve communicated when we’ve been heard and understood. Ignored maybe, but heard.

It’s tempting to blame the receivers for not paying close enough attention or for being distracted. But we knew that about them before we sent the message.