Yesterday we had youth ushers and a youth Beadle in worship. The litany of confession was led by three youth. The Prayer for Illumination and Psalter reading: both led by youth.

They all crushed it.

Meanwhile, the first four pews on the pulpit side were full of youth.

We’ve been at this since October, scheduling all youth participation in the 11:00 worship service on the first Sunday of each month and recruiting student leaders for the service, and yesterday was as good as its been.

And the thought that occurred to me in the middle of it? It’s not enough.

Worship participation is important. Singing the hymns and praying the prayers are things youth do alongside adults–as adults. In congregations that have traditionally planned youth ministry at the same time as worship, figuring out ways to expose teenagers to the worshiping congregation feels critical.

But it’s not enough.

Discipleship is more than worship. If we orient youth ministry toward Sunday worship participation–even Sunday worship leadership–without also setting youth up to serve their neighbors, grow in faith, and deepen relationships with friends and strangers, we’re leaving a lot on the discipleship table.

I’m thrilled about our experiments to engage youth in corporate worship. There’s mroe of that to come. But I’m not satisfied.

It’s not enough.

The preaching at the NEXT Church conference this week was astounding. We heard from three preachers who were lively, engaging, and deeply thoughtful, which should surprise no one; the NEXT pulpit has been hosting fine homileticians since the movement’s inception.

Check out all the sermons below.

If the national gathering is taken as representative, then I think we can say two things about the kind of preaching driving the NEXT church.

1. NEXT preaching is performative. Every one of the sermons was delivered with careful attention to the details of presentation. Timing, pace, volume, movement: the sermons we saw this week embraced performance elements as integral to the gospel they proclaimed.
2. NEXT preaching is all about that narrative. Not the Lowry Loop. Not Plot and Moves. Not illustrations. Actual narrative. Stories–about ice cream cones and camping trips and vacations. I’m willing to bet that at least one of the preachers in Baltimore has participated in a Moth Story Slam. Storytelling has made its way into the heart of how NEXT Church preachers conceive of the preaching task.

NEXT is not proposing preaching modalities for the church. At least not directly. I think the preachers at the national gatherings embody the movement’s convictions, though, about what effective preaching looks and sounds like in our era.

What else do you notice?

A new friend asks, “Why don’t the multiple churches in my community, some of which don’t run any youth ministry activities, work together on community-wide youth ministry?”

My gut response is that they don’t because they don’t exist. Tina the part time Youth Director exists. Steve the retired dentist who teaches high school Bible study exists. Becca the Solo Pastor exists.

People can work together. But for that to happen, either Becca or Tina or Steve has to take the permission to call or email the other two and propose something they can say “yes” or “no” to.

Let’s try a weekly youth group together.

Let’s plan a retreat together.

Let’s organize a community service day together.

If they say “no,” then the answer to my new friend’s question is basically, “Because Tina/Steve/Becca didn’t want to.”

Or the answer might be, “They do.”

We kept setting up the junior high youth group room as a circle of chairs. We did this because we want to facilitate community and connection among our students, and because we don’t want youth group to feel like a school classroom.

We kept having trouble with the junior high youth group. Disruptions were constant. A small group of students simply could not stop talking to one another, talking over their peers, talking, talking, talking.

We changed the circle of chairs into a setup with tables, and though the talking did not stop, it was limited to the peers at the table, and it was directed to the activity we wanted the students working on.

The way a room is set up has a direct effect on the kind of community we can achieve in that space. And sometimes too much connection is a barrier to community.

The youth ministry calendar is full of things. Too full, really. Hardly a week goes by without a retreat, a lock-in, an event. We have created so many things for students, from 6th graders to high school seniors. “Multiple points of entry” is the word of the day.

But . . .

If a student doesn’t come to a thing, I don’t know them and I don’t have anything for them. No trusted adult mentors, no recreation, no contemplative space, no challenging conversation, no story. If he or she doesn’t show up to at least one of the things, they aren’t on my ministry radar.

It is becoming clear to me just how dependent my ministry is on people showing up to things. I think I’m okay with that; I make a lot of things–creative things, experimental things. Things happen on Sunday and over weekends and for a week in the summer. Things can be evaluated: how many participants? What cost? Whose story?

Things are not for everyone.

What is the thing for the student who won’t come to a thing, though?

Can you make a thing for students to experience at school today or at home this weekend, something that is for them and all their things, their family commitments and schoolwork, their dance recitals and hockey tournaments?

Of course you can. You’ve probably made that thing already. A blog, an Instagram account, a Lenten devotional over Skype. I’m glad you’re making that thing. I haven’t been.

 

Somebody flopped. You can watch it and rewatch it, if that’s what you’re into. They took the stage, stepped up to the mic, and totally failed. And now everybody is watching.

What does a diet of other people’s failures do for you health? I posit nothing. Actually, I believe it’s bad for your emotional, creative, and spiritual health to partake of all these morsels of humiliation.

Why not go find a video of someone doing something amazing, something beautiful, instead?

I stood in my church office yesterday and searched Spotify for songs about sex.

This is my job.

We’re leading Our Whole Lives with students this weekend, and the session about language has an activity where you listen to songs and read their lyrics, analyzing them for their messages about sexuality.

I wanted songs that were current and classic, from a range of genres, and that represented both hetero and homo sexuality. It’s one of the weirdest bits of work I’ve done.  Here’s what I came up with.

 

There’s also an activity about body image messages in advertising. You’re supposed to have students look at magazine ads, but our church is on Michigan Avenue, which is kind of a living breathing advertisement, so we’re going to take a walk to look for these messages. I made a Bingo-style game with things for students to look for:

“Now is the time to act. In the wake of tragedy, when emotions are at their most raw, when we are most horrified, is the time to attack the horror. Trust the rage. Trust the disgust. That reaction is the most reliable guide in deciding how to fix this. Once cooler heads prevail, then the people who died are simply names on a list and the country simply shrugs its shoulders–until the next time.”

I wrote that on April 18, 2007, after the shooting at Virginia Tech. Literally dozens of times since that posting, a man with firepower has killed multiple people on a school campus. The federal legislative response has been limited to a measure that improves access to mental health records for gun purchase background checks. Many states have actually passed laws to permit more guns on school campuses.

Yesterday it happened again.

We are nearly two decades removed from Columbine, the inaugural school shooting, and we have done practically nothing to make it less likely that an individual bent on murder might acquire the weaponry to carry it out.

What the hell is wrong with us?

 

 

 

This is an edited version of this post, written on Ash Wednesday, 2014. 

I am waiting in the church parking lot. Barbara and Bill are returning for the purse Barbara lost in the sanctuary. It was the focus of all our attention as Ash Wednesday worship was beginning, 10 increasingly frantic minutes of these two turning over pew cushions in search of the purse Barbara swears she had when she came in and then resolutely quitting the service to expand the search to the car, the restaurant, the house.

The purse showed itself innocently in a front pew shortly after the sanctuary had emptied. I put away the microphones, cleaned up the little dishes that had held our ashes (remembering to bring one home), turned out the lights, and then scooped up the purse and proceeded to the office, where I called Barbara at home. As soon as I announced myself into the phone, she gasped, “You have my purse! I’ll be there in 20 minutes!” She hung up instantly.

The night is warm and clear and quiet. This is no inconvenience. I am not irritated to be delayed getting home. I am grateful for an unscripted interlude to stare dumbly at passing cars and sing “Come And Fill Our Hearts” to the moon. When Barbara’s determined headlights breakup my reverie, I’m a little sad.

And now the apologetic tale of the purse, the evening’s steps retraced–from Target to Burger King to the church–all told with breathy regret for the disruption to the service. I earnestly assure them that it really had been no disruption at all. Really. Then I excuse myself, wishing the two relieved seekers a good night and climbing back into my car.

Barbara remembers about the ashes.

It is a simple reflex. I grab the smudgy dish on the passenger seat and appear in an instant at Barbara’s driver side window. She only sees me as she begins backing away. She rolls down her window and lowers her head in observation. “Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” Bill leans over from the passenger seat to receive his ashes as well.

And then it’s over. I circle back to my own driver side door and climb inside, calling “Goodnight” as I start the ignition. “You too,” Barbara answers. And then, “We love you.”

Another reflex: “I love you too.”

The cheapest smartphone costs less than $100. I bought one in 2015. It had one GB of RAM, ran on a 3G network, and was powered by Snapdragon 200 processor. The camera was 5 megapixels. I bought it unlocked for about $85 at Best Buy, because I was committed to breaking up with all of the addictive features of high-end smartphones, and also because spending a lot of money on a phone came to seem a terrible investment. I utterly smashed two of them in the same week in 2014. Even though I had insurance on them, the copay to replace one is $180. Two months after I got the second replacement I dropped it.

So I went cheap and basic. It was going to be a turning point in my relationship with digital communications technology.

Within six months I financed a new flagship phone from my carrier. I’ve had it for over two years and haven’t destroyed it.

I think if you’re going to break up with smartphones, you need to break up with smartphones, not try to use one that’s just really bad at being a smartphone. I spent all my time on the cheap one searching for the lightest launchers and the smallest apps so that the spartan capacity of the device wouldn’t be stressed. I couldn’t perform more than a single function at a time. Playing music was taxing. Watching video was impossible.

I wanted both the functionality of a high end phone and the moral satisfaction of a cheap one. You can’t have both. If you want to break up with your smartphone, do it. Get a Nokia 3310. If you’re going to use a smartphone, use a good one.

I took a good long look at a 3310 myself the other day. The urge to ditch all the RAM and processor cores comes at me in waves, at least once a year. Usually it dies for lack of genuine enthusiasm and a sort of self-loathing hopelessness. “I couldn’t live without my smartphone.”

This time, though, I killed the urge proactively. I can live without a smartphone. I’m living with it less and less all the time. I don’t need to remove the tool from my life completely to prove to myself that it hasn’t irrevocably corrupted me. I’m following Time Well Spent and The Center for Humane Tech. I’ve gone grayscale. My phone charges in the hallway at night. All the notifications are off. I don’t have Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram installed.

I can live without my Android phone, but specific things would be noticeably worse for me if I did. Making use of a tool’s value does not mean you are addicted to that tool. The value I would miss the most, the function that doused the flame of my latest dalliance with dumbphones, is Lyft. Living in the city and using public transit almost exclusively, the ability to hail a car in minutes from my phone is incredibly valuable. That my payment information is stored in the app and I can print an email receipt makes it better for me than a cab. Giving up a smartphone means giving up a very useful service. I don’t feel I need to do that.

I’m sure I’ll want to ditch it again soon, though.