They left you off their list. It’s a full list, full of smiling faces lauded for their skill in the thing you toil at day in and day out. The list says they’re good at it. Oh sure you’re good at it too, just not list good, just not “40 Under 40” good, not “10 Preachers You Should Know About” good. You’re good, though. Good enough.

Look, their list is stupid. It’s skews white and male and old. Take comfort in the observation that the people who pronounce upon talent value the same things today as they did half a century ago, and that’s not your era. You’re more 2020 than 1950. Also take comfort in the wry observation that nobody asked them; their list is an unbidden ego massage for the people everybody is already hyping.

But why take that comfort anyway? Who needs their list? Who needs any list? The work you do is not for anybody’s list. It’s for the people in the pews; theirs is the list you should care about.

Returning home from the library late yesterday morning I read what the neighbor children have been persistently scribbling in chalk on the sidewalk since the sun came out on Sunday.

“It’s not that I’m so smart. I just stay with it longer.”

BrainyQuote attributes a variation of it to Einstein. What kind of elementary school kid quotes Einstein in sidewalk chalk?

The “it’s” we’re up against are many and vexing. Stay with it.

 

Most of the students who do Confirmation at my church become Active Members by profession of faith at the end of the process. Good for them. And good for us; if Confirmation is meant to prepare young people to profess faith, then any 8th grader who does is a feather in our cap.

And yet . . .

None of us are satisfied with a youth ministry that checks a membership box in the 8th or 9th grade and leaves it at that. Confirmation is not an achievement for youth ministry. It is merely one marker among many of growth in faith and belonging to the covenant community.

In addition to the number of 8th graders who say “yes” at the end of Confirmation, we  need to care about how many 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th graders are saying “yes” in ways that aren’t met with a brunch and smiling families.

When a student comes to the end of Confirmation and decides not to make a profession of faith, not to become an Active Member of the church, I don’t get alarmed. There are three reasons for this.

First, if a Confirmation process is to have any integrity, then youth need to be able to say “no” and be respected for it. The process aims to prepare students to profess faith. If they don’t, it hasn’t been for naught. Integrating them into an adult experience of the faith community means we listen to them and permit them some agency, even if it’s agency to tell us no.

Second, Confirmation is an on ramp, not an exit. For every student. Just because someone is not able to claim the faith of the church for themselves does not mean they are not part of its life. I’ve known many adults in churches, regular attenders and contributors, who openly reject elements of the church’s theology. And one of the most engaged students I ever worked with was someone who declined to profess faith in Confirmation.

Finally, Confirmation is an invitation to profess faith, but not the last one. Mainline churches need to take a page from our evangelical sisters and brothers here, who routinely invite people to make faith commitments, over and over again. Youth need the opportunity to say “yes” to God held out for them repeatedly, whether they have said “yes” already or not. We do a disservice to youth and to the church if we allow a “no” or a “yes” at Confirmation to be the last word.

 

“People are saying” is a recipe for disaster. Whenever I hear it, I immediately want to know two things:

1. which people?
2. are they really saying that?

Not everyone can be counted on to broach questions, concerns, and grievances directly. It’s easier to grumble among peers. I’ve done it so many times.

When you’re the person being grumbled about, then: don’t wait for the unfiltered grumble. Go get it. Make phone calls. Reach out. Start conversations. Share information. Don’t accuse (“I heard you said . . . “). Be generous and thorough and transparent.

Whatever you do, don’t take action on the grumble.

Proclaiming the good news in word and deed,

taking part in the common life and worship of a congregation,

lifting one another up in prayer, mutual concern, and active support,

studying Scripture and the issues of Christian faith and life,

supporting the ministry of the church through the giving of money, time, and talents,

demonstrating a new quality of life within and through the church,

responding to God’s activity in the world through service to others,

living responsibly in the personal, family, vocational, political, cultural, and social, relationships of life,

working in the world for peace, justice, freedom, and human fulfillment,

caring for God’s creation,

participating in the governing responsibilities of the church, and

reviewing and evaluating regularly the integrity of one’s membership, and considering ways in which one’s participation in the worship and service of the church may be increased and made more meaningful.

This is how “the ministry of members” is described in the Presbyterian Church (USA) Book of Order. I say “described,” because whenever I share this with Confirmation youth, their eyes go wide. A moment of panic sets in and you can almost hear the screaming question in their heads, a church version of “Is this going to be on the test?!”

This is a description, not a prescription. This isn’t a checklist.

Also, it matters and you should take it seriously.

You are a member of the church already, I explain. If you were baptized as an infant, then you are a Baptized Member of the church. Confirmation invites you to profess faith for yourself and become an Active Member. The word “Active” trips some students up, because they’re plenty active already and they’re not exactly casting about for more time commitments.

Their question is most often reduced to this: can I be an Active Member and not come to church?

Yes.

Kind of.

Of the 12 descriptors of Active Membership above, only two of them really require you to come to church. It is difficult to take part in the common life and worship of a congregation if you’re not there, although live streamed worship services, emailed devotional guides, and even Bible studies conducted by video conference all open new possibilities. Participating in governance is probably the hardest to do remotely.

Still, the thing I want students to take away is that our conception of church membership has more to do with a quality of life in the world than it does with institutional attendance requirements.

That is much harder to measure, though.

The students I have been working with since 2008 are brilliant. They achieve things academically by the 8th grade that I never got to in high school. They spend weeks, even months, of their summer in Greece or Japan or Spain. They speak a second language. They don’t just join programs at school, they invent them. They volunteer (man do they volunteer). And all this while playing on a travel soccer team and competing in the Science Olympiad and winning debate tournaments.

There is an urgent driver of much of this achievement: the college application.

I can’t count the times a student or a parent has explained one of their activities in these terms. An 8th grader once told me, as I complimented her for volunteering at the community Fourth of July festival, that she was only doing it because her grade in math wasn’t very good, so she needed something on her college application to compensate. This student had yet to set foot in her high school.

Some students have shared that this urgency comes from their teachers. I’ve seen some come from parents. And plenty of it these youth place it upon themselves, as their peers all compete to position themselves for elite schools. There seems to me to be no greater animating force in the lives of the youth I work with than the strength of their college application.

So it should come as no surprise that youth decide about church activities through a college application filter. Mission trips are pursued or passed over on this criteria. Service projects are weighed in terms of service hour quotas. Even church leadership positions can be prized for their value to the application. None of these church activities are designed to promote improved college admissions, of course, but many of them can be used for that purpose.

Is that terrible? Is there a purer purpose behind the mission trip that is thwarted by the forward-looking motives of the 10th grader who signs up? Probably not. Still, I am resisting the obvious logic of surrendering to the rules of the college application in scheduling and designing church mission activities. That is a battle we simply won’t win. In fact, to fight that battle is to lose.

 

Signing up is not the same thing as enrolling. Enrolling takes time and thought. Signing up takes only the swipe of a pen or the click of a button.

Perhaps part of the solution to backing out is asking for more on the front end than signing up. Because if signing up is easy, then so is backing out. Enrolling is more involved. For that you have to show up, maybe stand in a line, put some skin in the game, be introduced to the other enrolees. Maybe the form is paper and not a website. Maybe you have to mail or carry it in. Maybe the deadline is fixed, not flexible.

For some things, sure, signing up is all you need. Sign people up for a pot luck or a shift at the fundraiser. That works, and Signup Genius is invaluable. But for a retreat? A mission trip? Those are bigger commitments. You want people enrolled more than simply signed up for those. Maybe it’s worth asking people to do a little bit more.

I have steadfastly maintained that church should be the thing that backs down in the lives of busy teenagers and that it is contrary to our purpose to get competitive with soccer and band camp in our youth ministry programming choices. Church participation really is an end in itself. Growing together in community–learning, serving, caring–is the point. You don’t advance that cause with a punitive attendance policy.

Youth will sign up for other things over church retreats and mission trips. I get that. I’m not mad about it. I’ll back down.

The instance that is harder to back down from, though, is the backing out. I’ve seen it happen more than once that the student who has already committed to the retreat gets invited to something else and so changes her mind and backs out.

What then?

Does backing down enable backing out?

I wonder which part of this story is your favorite part.

I wonder which part of this story is the most important part.

I wonder which where you are in this story, which part is about you.

I wonder if we could take any part of this story away and still have all the story we need.

These four “wondering questions” are the exclusive discussion prompts for most of the lessons in Godly Play, a curriculum of Bible lessons for young children that I taught to preschoolers almost every week for several years. They are so useful that I have employed them in multiple settings and diverse populations of youth and adults. I’m doing it again this weekend.

One of the most fulfilling worship leadership experiences I ever had was a service to introduce Godly Play to our congregation. The teachers and I told a story from Genesis in which the teachers moved around the chancel like the implements from the curriculum. Then the four of them preached, each one addressing one of the “wondering” prompts. You could do a lot worse than that for a sermon preparation guide.

I taught my last Godly Play lesson in 2015. Maybe I’ll return to it someday. In the meantime I’m using its wondering questions liberally.