I had a phone company problem for seven months that I only just this week resolved. It wasn’t a complicated problem. Every person I spoke with at the company knew the fix, and they all assured me it was just about to be fixed. But month-after-month the issue persisted. I called the store so frequently that I was on a first name basis with every staff person there. I went through two store managers during this time. They both said all the right things on the phone. I started keeping notes of our conversations:

“I’m going to get that fixed for you.”

“Yeah, just give me a couple of days to resolve the issue.”

“I’m sorry this has taken so long. I’m going to take care of it.”

What finally solved the problem? I went to the store in person. I walked in on a Friday afternoon and introduced myself politely. Of course, the manager knew who I was right away. I didn’t even need to explain why I was there. He disappeared into the back to “check some emails” about the matter and returned two minutes later to report that it was fixed.

This is a company whose business is the most advanced communications technology the world has ever seen, and yet getting things done with them requires face-to-face, in person interaction.

That technology will always be useful.

 

Here’s to the kid.

Up at 6:00 on Sunday, on a train by 6:30. Starbucks reward in hand, she’s at church with her pastor dad by 7:15 because he thinks he has to lead worship at 8:00. He doesn’t though. He’s wrong.

She spends the 8:00 playing with the Bell Choir Director’s kid. The 9:30 hour she spends alone in her dad’s office with her phone–he’s in the junior high Sunday School class. When he returns he finds her sleeping on the office couch.

At 10:30 she goes to her own Sunday School for fourth and fifth graders, then immediately following she is dragged to a youth leader meeting where she is plied with pizza. She busies herself during talk of curriculum and scheduling by doing handstands against the wall.

At 1:00 her dad has to meet with a couple about their wedding, so she spends that hour, again, alone in his office with her phone. The battery dies. She reads.

She’ll get a boba tea for her cooperation and patience. That’s not near enough.

 

Church is a community. In particular it’s a covenant community: women and men of various ages commit to a shared life of worship and service, and they pledge their Sunday mornings and Tuesday nights and a week in July and a percentage of their paycheck to pay a staff and keep the roof on a building.

Sometimes this covenant community enjoys close personal relationships. The experience of deep friendship with high levels of personal sharing: this is what some people mean when they call the church a “community.” That can be enlivening and sustaining when you find it in church.

But I’ve been wondering lately how much community, for church, must involve these close personal friendships. Especially in a large church, especially in a church whose members are blessed with lots of these friendships with people outside of Sunday morning, say in their neighborhood or school or workplace, maybe community-as-intimate-friendships is the wrong lens.

I think a lot about this little book I read over a decade ago called The Search To Belong by Joseph Myers. His argument is that defaulting to intimacy is harmful. Insisting that the right way to belong to a church community is to have lots of intimate friendships there privileges one kind of experience of church over others and ignores the meaning that many people find in church whose involvement is more public and less intimate, say only on Sunday mornings. I think about that argument a lot.

I think about it in light of my interaction with a man whose family used to participate in our church preschool, years ago when his kids were little. They’re grown now, but as he’s telling me about those years he’s getting emotional. They came to a couple of worship services maybe and never joined, certainly never went to a potluck or a Bible study. Yet that church community was profoundly meaningful to him and his family.

Where it happens, close personal friendships strengthen the covenant community of church. But we should be careful to not equate the two.

I’m starting to see how investing in lots of one-on-one meetings with congregants can pay off over time in connections and insight. I hear threads emerging when I talk to people, and little pictures are coming into focus of folks struggling with and yearning for the same things.

It’s rewarding, though it doesn’t come with a programmatic set of instructions. Lots of people feel isolated from meaningful community. Great (not great); you had a hunch that was the case and now you’re hearing it firsthand from person after person. That’s an insight. The insight is not the application though.

So keep having the one-on-ones and keep listening for detail. Resist the urge to propose fixes. Try things. Experiment. But hold every experiment loosely and provisionally, always ready to tweak it in light of more learning from more one-on-ones.

This way of working is not step by step, right? It’s spade work. The stuff you can work with grows when you’re not looking.

 

There’s leading and there’s implementing, and the difference is about more than creativity or authorship.

You can lead something you didn’t create with purpose and integrity just as well as the project you conceived. Leading is about ownership. How much do you care about this event, this idea, this experiment–and how much have you staked on the outcome? If you care, I will follow you.

Just don’t implement. Someone else’s idea or yours: implementing is just following the steps that are supposed to get you a predetermined outcome. There’s no mystery in implementing and no curiosity.

Martin Luther King didn’t implement the civil rights movement. He led it.

 

I’ve never assaulted a woman, but my mother thought I came close once and boy did she let me have it. Here’s what happened:

It was a warm winter afternoon during my senior year of high school. There was lots of powdery Denver snow on the ground, and my girlfriend and I were making the short walk from the front door of my suburban home, where we had been doing homework together in the kitchen, down the narrow driveway to my dented up Datsun, parked on the street, adjacent to the front lawn. I was driving her home.

With my mother watching from the doorway, my girlfriend stealthily cupped a handful of snow and flung it at my head. I retaliated by wrapping my arms around her knees, lifting her off the ground, and–with her slight frame squealing in protest–dropping her in a pillowy mound of front lawn powder. We both laughed.

I helped her up, but as we brushed ourselves off, my mother called to me from the front door. There was anger in her voice.

When I got close enough that my girlfriend couldn’t hear her, my mother warned me in a low growl to never do that again. I was confused.

“What?”

“You overpowered her. You are much stronger than she is, and you used your strength against her while she was telling you ‘no.'”

I went red with shame. It was just some roughhousing in the snow. Yet in a moment I came to see myself and my adolescent strength in a terrible light, to imagine the terrible uses to which it might be put.

I’ve been wondering the last several days if more young boys don’t need such censoring from their mothers as I got on that winter day.

I’ve seen it happen more than once: you’re unhappy with how some youth ministry activity or event went–students seemed unfocused and disengaged, planning details fell apart, leadership was conflicted–and you resolve to never repeat it. Yet when asked, some students name that very activity or event as the most influential piece of their experience.

That’s why we ask for student feedback about everything we do. Everything.

The first mission trip I led was a disaster. The leader of the organization we worked with was unstable, and my leaders couldn’t tolerate her. Plan after plan failed. It was hot, and students were getting sick; someone got car sick all over the floorboards of the van. Someone with a nut allergy ate mole against a leader’s advice and required emergency Benadryl. It was a trip full of tears and vomit and mumbled grievances. I came home wondering if I was cut out for this kind of work.

That was nine years ago, and that trip remains the one I hear the most about from former students. In a good way. One of the students from that trip even decided on a year of church volunteer service after college and cited that trip as part of her motivation.

We’re not curating idyllic experiences here. When plans crumble and students struggle, that’s part of the point. Sometimes the things that go the worst are the things that have the biggest impact.

People quit.

I recruited 10 people for a professional development cohort. Nearly half of them quit before it even started.

We assembled a youth mission trip team and bought them all plane tickets. Then two of them quit.

I quit.

When I was 24, a year out of college and new in my job and apartment and breakup, I worshiped at a tiny Presbyterian church in my neighborhood where two college classmates also worshiped and where the hurtling-toward-retirement minister welcomed me eagerly into worship and committee leadership. Then a new friend invited me to his much bigger, much younger, much cooler church. I quit.

Years later I was ordained into the same presbytery as that small neighborhood church and the still-hurtling-toward-retirement minister became my colleague. I took him out to lunch and apologized for quitting. He was gracious beyond description. Years later still his church caught fire, and within weeks he was planning the renovation and rebuild. He didn’t quit.

We learn the virtue of perseverance early and often. Don’t quit. Keep at it. If at first you don’t succeed.

There is virtue lurking in how we handle others’ quitting too, though. We don’t have to shrug our shoulders in helplessness, yet neither are we required to rage and judge, as if we are entitled to others’ participation.

Maybe the virtue is in expecting some attrition and planning for more than we need.

 

Some youth ministry leaders respond to your very well planned and articulated annual leader recruitment effort, the worship bulletin blurb accompanied by a stirring-yet-whimsical appeal from the pulpit followed up with a one-on-one over coffee to discern their interests and gifts while presenting the rewards and challenges of leading youth. I love it when that happens.

Other youth ministry leaders jump in with only a few days’ notice. You need an additional leader for the weekend retreat. It’s Wednesday. You email all the parents. One replies: “I’ll go.” I love it when that happens.*

The leadership of your youth ministry is made up of multiyear veterans and newbies, parents and non, young adults and retirees. They all say”yes” to leading youth for different reasons and during different seasons of their life (some repeat that “yes” in multiple life stages). Some come to weekly youth group. Some go on retreats. Some lead mission trips. Without you.

But they all have an origin story. They all were either invited or they volunteered, out of a personal sense of calling to help young people or a desire just to be helpful. I think a healthy youth ministry has leaders with a variety of origin stories as well as a variety of interests and gifts.

 

*Of course, whether they come to leadership months or days ahead of your event, all leaders of youth get the child protection policy and turn in the background check authorization

 

Hulu hoops? Check.

Ball Jars? Check.

Jet Puff marshmallows? Check.

8″ knobby balls? Check.

Must be retreat season.