When someone accuses you of caring more about this thing than that thing, the obvious response is, “Well, yes.” It’s an odd accusation to begin with. By alleging that you don’t care enough about their thing, your accuser is actually asserting that you care too much. You care too much about a thing they don’t care about as much, or at all.

I don’t think the challenge of leadership is to care equally about everything. Rather, we need to be deliberate and clear about articulating what we perceive to be the things most deserving of our urgent concern right now. We should be able to defend that perception, and we should feel free to say of other things, “We don’t care as much about that right now.”

 

“Early morning, April four
Shot rings out in the Memphis sky
Free at last, they took your life
They could not take your pride.”

Turnover is a fact of life on a church staff. We’ve witnessed it. We’ve managed it. We’ve caused it. It need not always be viewed negatively–desperate efforts to prevent people moving on can actually be harmful. Our church staff will probably never arrive at that state of stasis where everyone is in place forever, and we probably don’t want it to.

Churches should be places people want to work for a long time. That has been true of all the churches I’ve served, fortunately. My current congregation celebrates service anniversaries every month, and it is not unusual for people to eclipse 15, 20, even 30 years. That is a terrific sign of health, right?

Advancement within the church makes longevity possible and can work wonders, both for staff and for the congregation. I know people who have worked at the same church for over a decade and whose job there has changed and grown to meet emerging programming needs, as well as expanding skills and experience. What’s not great about that?

And yet lots of people will work at a church for five years or less and then move on. This is particularly common for people responsible for youth and children’s programming. This need not always be seen as a bad thing. Regular turnover in church programming roles can be a sign of health and vitality. Churches can intentionally develop staff with the expectation that they will outgrow their position, and then can bless and celebrate them when they get an opportunity somewhere else with a different, or bigger, role.

That won’t make it easy to watch them go, and it shouldn’t; churches are communities, and “roles” are people we love and care about. Blessing and celebrating involve grieving. A sad staff parting is probably a good sign, confirmation that we did good work together and could yet do more. That we’re choosing not to is both sad and promising at the same time.

For me, it matters a lot that churches invest heavily in developing the capacities of people on our staffs with the expectation that we may be developing them for something else, something we will never see.

Note: all of this to say that I’m saying goodbye to my church’s Senior High Coordinator this week. She was here before me and made my transition here easier in big and small ways. She has been personally generous and professionally excellent, and our staff will be diminished without her. What she is moving on to, though, is going to be amazing. I was introduced to one of her new colleagues last month who said to me, “Thanks for getting her ready of us.” I could only answer, “She was ready before I ever met her.”

Go with God, Shelley. 

He is risen!

Pick up the stray bulletins from the pews. Put away the sound equipment. Turn off the lights.

He is risen!

Get a start on next Sunday’s bulletin (it was due last week, but you forgot about it in your preparations for Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter).

He is risen!

Make a plan for what your family will eat this week. Get some laundry started. Clean the kitchen; it was overrun. And that trash! Take it out.

He is risen!

Get to work. Not in spite of the resurrection, but because of it.

I have been a pastor for 13 Good Fridays, and somehow today, my 14th, is the first Good Friday on which I will preach. How is this possible?

The church I served for the first three years of my ministry did an all-afternoon drop in Stations of The Cross meditation instead of a worship service on Good Friday. The second participated in an ecumenical community Good Friday observation where leadership rotated and the service rarely featured a sermon. I led the service here at my current church last year, but instead of preaching I told the entire passion story from John, which was so long that it didn’t leave time for a sermon.

It’s startling to realize that you’ve gone nearly a decade and a half into ordained ministry without directly preaching on the cross. I’ve preached on the cross, of course; references to it are scattered across years worth of preaching. But before today I have never taken the passion narrative as a main text for preaching all by itself.

I think this says something about me and the churches I’ve served. Sally Brown wrote a great book in which she diagnosed mainline preachers as somewhat allergic to the cross as a homiletical subject. We know our history, how Christian preachers before us have blessed violence and anti-Semitism in crucifixion sermons. We’ve heard the cross employed from pulpits to either imply or assert that victimization is God’s will for good people. We don’t want to repeat those mistakes, so we focus on telling the story or meditation. We fill Good Friday services with stirring music.

We must have something to say about this, though. I expect that whatever I say today will come up short, but, for me at least, it will be a start.

Last weekend’s retreat was at a YMCA camp north of the city. Most of our programming was camp programming, run by camp staff: team challenges, high ropes, climbing walls, scavenger hunts. It was perfect for the kind of retreat we were running, because some of the students were from the congregation, but many others were not, and practically none of them knew one another before the weekend.

It was also perfect because the YMCA is really good at recreation. I had planned to do some team building challenges of my own over the weekend, but after an hour with the camp staff I gave that up. They did the activities I had in mind but better, with better equipment and instructions from an expansive written guide.

I made no secret of my interest in that guide, and one of the staff disappeared into the office for a few minutes and returned with one in hand. “Here you go,” he said.

Score.

Here’s the last thing that was perfect about being at a YMCA camp, especially for a church youth retreat. The staff are all young adults, and some of them are college interns from places our students have never been, like Texas and Memphis. There are international flags hanging in the dining room representing all the countries that have sent staff to the camp. Being at this camp reminded me of my brief tenure with the Y after college and how international and young the organization is at its core. It’s a perfect partner for churches.

There were three hula hoops, but now there is one.

They hung from the edge of the orange storage tub, the one holding the board and card games. It was stacked on the blue tub holding all the balls and cones and frisbees, waiting in the front room of our cabin for the bus to arrive to take us back to Chicago after a two-day retreat, surrounded by duffels and pillows and sleeping bags. I hung them there myself. There were three.

But now there is only one, and the bus is here. Nobody knows what happened to the other two. They’re nowhere in the cabin. They’re not on the bus. They’re not on the ground anywhere. Two hula hoops up and freed themselves. It’s a mystery.

The fatigue and petty frustrations of a weekend with sixth and seventh graders overtakes me and my mind races with silent accusations and fantasies of punishments meted out to the scheming, the dishonest, the unrepentant. All is lost for humanity, for we are such a thing as steals plastic circular recreation equipment just for fun and then colludes with our fellows to keep the act hid.

Worse, we are such a thing as judges and condemns in wrath with no evidence, only worn out speculation, a thing that stands ready to sentence all suspects, that looks for testimony to prop up a punishment that’s already been decided.

God save us.

 

Policing speech is bullshit not something I love about working with teenagers. When somebody swears in youth group, I proffer the required, “Hey, let’s watch our language.” But my heart’s not in it. It feels like one of those things that we do to teenagers in church but not to adults, scolding them when they curse. Worse, calling out one student’s profanity sets a precedent that you have to maintain with everybody else. It’s exhausting.

No, I prefer a somewhat selective profanity patrolling strategy. Certain choice words and expressions earn an immediate rebuke, but many, many others get either gently chastised or flatly tolerated (sidenote: racist and sexist terminology, as well as slurs like “gay” and “retarded” are no-go’s in my youth group, but those feel like a category of speech distinct from profanity, one far easier to denounce).

I find it is simply easier on me as a leader to let some profanity slide.

It’s not about me, though, is it? It is about preventing offense to others in the community, especially those who lack the power or voice to respond to speech that offends them. If I wink at a certain level of profanity, then anyone who takes offense to it is left to themselves to oppose it. In a mixed-gender community of youth, especially early adolescents, this is more than a matter of individual sensitivities. Permitting a level of coarseness in the group’s speech exposes vulnerable people to continued offense.

I’m coming to think the cussing talk should happen early in youth group and should be quite specific in what words and expressions are forbidden and why. You can get as specific as the nastiness of the word’s referents, or you lean on slightly more elevated standards of decorum, but you should land somewhere. Don’t assume we’re all on the same page about what’s okay to say when we’re together and what isn’t. State the expectations clearly and uphold them.

Of course, this probably demands consequences for violations of those expectations. Otherwise you get a watch-your-mouth arms race that can’t end in anything constructive. I’ve had students use vulgarity to me personally over and over again for the sheer delight of watching my growing irritation. They knew I wasn’t going to do anything more than tell them to stop, only a little more forcefully each time.

Policing profanity in youth group sucks feels exhausting. But to build a community of mutuality and respect among students, it’s probably worth the effort.

I’m up before daybreak on a Saturday. We’re putting 12 jr. high students on a bus at 9:00 this morning to spend a weekend together–and with us three leaders–at a YMCA camp north of the city. It’s the seventh overnight event of the year. No big deal.

But it is a big deal because these students don’t know each other and these leaders have never led together. Eight students are from one program, four from another. The goal of the weekend is to be make new friends across the lines of school and neighborhood that have kept them from ever meeting, as well as to practice some cross-organizational collaboration.

I’m excited and nervous. I lead retreats all the time, and I have come to accept the role of being in charge of everything that goes wrong and everything that goes right. I’m not in charge this weekend. I’m one member of a leadership team of three. I know almost nothing about my other two leaders and they know the same about me. We know enough, though, because we know we want to work on this together. That’s not nothing.

Seth Godin likes to say that “This might not work” is the slogan of all meaningful projects. This morning in the dark I take comfort in that.

I’m thinking of organizing my annual report around only two headings:

What’s not working.

What’s working.

There are stories to be told underneath each heading, stories with numbers that show how many students attended (or didn’t), but those numbers don’t tell the whole story. There is growth and transformation in those stories, also missed opportunities and bumbled organization. Most importantly, there is learning in those stories, and that is what I want to forward in my assessment of how our work has gone.

Asking what we’re learning keeps us from getting too wrecked about what’s not working and too complacent about what is.