A clique is so close to a good thing:

“A small group of people, with shared interests or other features in common, who spend time together . . . ”

It’s a recipe for connection, for power, for transformation. Except:

“. . . and do not readily allow others to join them.”

A clique is a community whose connections are, at their most innocuous, misapplied. Malicious cliques can be brutal.

I don’t think you can rid your youth group or your church of cliques, so don’t try. Don’t try to shame them out of existence, either; shared judgment only reinforces unhealthy connection. Instead, what if we taught cliques that critical skill they’re missing? What if we taught cliques how to invite others in?

I’m not stupid, so I know it’s not simply a matter of learning. Cliques refuse to allow outsiders in not because they don’t know how to but because they don’t want to. It’s a problem of will, not education.

But are will and education so far apart?

Certain decisions feel like a trade off between order and life. Pets are a good case in point.

When my daughter was three, my wife suggested we get a hamster. We had no pets, and pets are good for kids. I did not want a hamster. All I could conceive of was mess and smell and noise, and for two years that’s exactly what we got.

Then it was a cat. In the pet store one day when daughter was five, the cat adoption lady placed this six week old kitten in her lap, and that was that. Daughter’s lap is still where that cat spends most of its time. Meanwhile, cat litter, hairballs, vomit, urine, hair, scratched furniture . . .

Adding a second cat didn’t help.

And now a dog. He’s been her since September, and he was all my doing. House training is proving challenging, though. It’s a mess.

Living things make mess and disrupt order. I’ve reached the limit of the order I can sacrifice to those things.

Where’s yours limit?

I’m into evaluation. At the end of my Confirmation talks and the related discussion guides I’m designing, I make sure to leave time for two questions:

1. What about this was helpful for you?
2. What about this could have been more helpful?

It helps to hear affirmation, not only for the dopamine boost but also to know that, yes, we can do that again next time. It works.

Of course, it also helps to hear critique. “Don’t leave us in the large group the whole time. It’s easier for us to interact when we’re in smaller groups.” Got it. Next time I’ll design that part differently.

The thing is, I’m a junkie for negative feedback. I want to tinker and fix, and I begin, proceed, and end with the presumption that my work is flawed and needs revision. I will dedicate hours to addressing one piece of critical feedback while ignoring two or three positive assessments. You do this too. We’re afraid that accepting the “good job” without some qualification will make us complacent, or, worse, arrogant.

That’s probably not a good long term learning strategy, because the positive feedback teaches us just as much as the negative. If persisting in error is stupid, so is altering success.

Ask if it works. If “yes,” trust the user, the student, the reader. She’s not lying. He’s not being “nice.” Accept that you did something well and do it again.

This Sunday I’m talking to our Confirmation class about the doctrine of Creation. It is essentially the module I made for this last year, although I added an emphasis here and there to respond to the questions this group of students is actually asking.

The question I always want to be asking with Confirmation curricula is: does it clarify faith? It’s not exactly a goal to persuade. It’s more a goal to clarify claims, to highlight confusions, remove obstacles, and welcome doubt; 13 year-old atheism doesn’t bother me at all, as long as the God they’re saying doesn’t exist is actually the one their church worships.

I faced him only once, when I was 12. He was only 11. He struck me out. He struck us all out. He was a man among boys, and his name was uttered in the dugout with awe and fear.

Halladay.

When he was drafted out of high school I remembered that at-bat, how quickly it was over and how glad I was for it to be over, the terror his fastball inspired, though it only ever went straight and down the middle. Still, I didn’t dare swing.

I next saw him in a big league uniform, and it was then that I started to boast of my brief encounter with him, our shared home town and little league progeny. When he became an All Star, when he pitched a perfect game, when he threw a no-hitter in a playoff game–“I knew that guy.” It wasn’t entirely true, of course. I didn’t know him, and were I to show up at some out of town stadium to meet him he surely wouldn’t know me.

Still, it’s the kind of marginal association you share with friends and co-workers because you hope that it imparts to you some significance, some importance. Proximity to greatness only means that you happened to be someplace, not that you did anything worth remembering. But some days that feels like a lot.

I saw him again yesterday, this time in the report of his death, at 40. His two-seater airplane crashed in Tampa Bay.

Last night I watched his career highlight videos for what felt like a long time. I re-read the feature Tom Verducci wrote for Sports Illustrated about him in 2010, about how he almost failed, almost quit, but then worked his way back. The news networks reporting his accident showed images from his Twitter page, and I felt some irrational guilt for not following it.

And now, today, I find myself saying it again: “I knew that guy.”

Churches. Synagogues. Mosques.

Elementary schools. High schools. Middle schools. Universities. Community Colleges.

Movies. Concerts. Malls. Restaurants. Nightclubs.

Post Offices. Military bases. Campaign rallies.

Offices.

No public space in America is safe. All of the above have been targeted by perpetrators of mass shootings.

An active shooter scenario plays in my mind almost every time I lead worship. I locate all the exits. I imagine the quickest unimpeded route to various spots in the sanctuary where a shooter may be taking aim. I have been doing this for nearly a decade. I’ve shared it with some of my colleagues, who confide they do the same thing.

I also do it in movie theaters.

My neighbor, when we walk our respective 4th and 6th graders to school, stands at the school entrance until his son is inside the doors. He says he’s been doing that since Sandy Hook. He has a scenario too.

With each new incident, our imaginary scenarios lurch closer to a when and further from an if. The people in charge of America’s gathering spaces must now add active shooter drills to their fire drills and tornado drills as basic disaster preparedness.

But mass shootings aren’t tornadoes. They persist because of choices, not weather.

More mass shootings are no doubt in store for us because we keep choosing to permit individuals to own almost any kind of gun instead of choosing to protect movie-going, worshiping, learning, working populace from showers of bullets.

Because if you are not permitted to own a military-style assault rifle, are you really free?

Mass shootings happen because of mental health issues in the shooters, and because of ideology, be it racist, terrorist, homophobic, or anti-government, and because of personal vendettas and grievances. The mix of propellants is unique to each incident.

And yet every incident involves at least one gun. Some are handguns, some are rifles, some are shotguns, some are assault rifles. Most guns used in mass shootings are obtained legally, some are enhanced by illegal accessories. But they are all guns. There simply is not another tool that an individual can use to inflict such mass casualty. It’s what assault rifles are manufactured to do and what conventional guns can easily be made to do.

And still the gun, the only common denominator in every mass shooting, enjoys intense sympathy, even reverence, among a powerful enough segment of America to prevent any meaningful restrictions on their acquisition. Indeed, the two decade death march that started at Columbine and has now processed through Virginia Tech, Aurora, Orlando, Newtown, Charleston, San Bernardino, Las Vegas, Sutherland Springs, and many, many more public locales, seems only to have intensified guns’ protection. Gun control feels less likely now than it ever has.

Lord, have mercy.

 

 

I’m figuring out that Work/Life balance is not something that can be given to me, either by my work or my life. I have to make it. I have to work for Work/Life balance.

On the Work side, I have to make the best possible use of planning and preparation time. If I’m in the office and not in a meeting, I need to be making progress on designated projects. I need to be doing Deep Work.

I need to be working at Home, too. Not working on work, but working on Home. The kind of leisure time that I associate with the Home side of this ledger simply does not arrive if I have not done some work to make space for it. This is why much of my day “off” is given to preparing meals and doing laundry, because if those things aren’t done the rest of the week will be badly out of balance.

The takeaway here is that Home and leisure are not the same thing.

Yesterday all of our 6th-12th graders joined in the worship service instead of holding their regularly-scheduled youth group programs during that hour. We committed to doing this on the first Sunday of each month from September to May, because we believe our youth need to experience corporate Lord’s Day worship, and if our youth gatherings happen at the same time as worship, well, you see the problem (we tried youth-only worship services once a month for awhile, but that proved both theologically fraught and programatically unsatisfying to everyone–youth, leaders, and staff).

We still did our unstructured social gathering time for all youth prior to the worship service yesterday. As they left it for the sanctuary, some students slipped out of sight. Others complained about having to go to worship, which is “boring.” Still others simply stated their intention to leave.

There are two camps fighting it out in my head over this. One is the Take-Your-Medicine camp, which plants its flag on the importance of youth participating in the grown up church community, doing the things their parents do, including participating in–and leading–weekly worship. Two youth were among the worship leaders.

The Take-Your-Medicine camp insists on the formative force of the prayer of confession, the Scripture read and preached, the benediction, and all the rest of it. Our worship is proudly traditional, but vibrant and engaging. The music consists of hymns and classical anthems, but you won’t experience those things with the force they have here. And the preaching? It seems a sin for a teenager to spend 30 or so Sundays a year for seven years in our congregation and not hear the kind of preaching that goes on. That would be deprivation, pure and simple.

So the Take-Your-Mediciners shout to grumpy teens, “Worship is good for you!”

The camp that answers back is the Relevance camp. It wants more than anything for teenagers to experience church as critical and life-giving RIGHT NOW, and it is most certain that sitting them in a pew for the one hour a week we have them is a terrible waste of opportunity. Instead, the Relevance camp wants youth interacting with their peers and adult leaders, forming the kind of nourishing relationships that uniquely grow at church. It wants them discussing the Bible and contemporary events, not just listening to someone read it and tell them what it means and how it applies.

The Relevance camp is willing to permit youth in worship for special occasions like Confirmation and Youth Sunday services where students lead the entire thing. Otherwise, it hollers for sweeping substantive changes to the liturgy (“liturgy?!”) to make it more interactive and appealing to young people.

The battle rages on. The Take-Your-Medicine camp takes a hill when the 9th grader reading Scripture kills it and I can see the congregation totally keyed in. The Relevance camp retakes the hill as I watch three students giggle and whisper through the sermon.

A colleague has a new baby at home, and he’s describing through bloodshot eyes the maddening resistance infants put up to all routine and schedule. I need to stop meeting every description of an episode involving his son with one from my own experience, now nine years old, but parenting a newborn is one of those things you endure that make you believe you have something of value to share with the world.

Mine comes down to this: the routine and the schedule that you so desperately miss and that you would pay any price to establish is nothing compared to the one your new family situation may ultimately give you. Almost nothing about the way I spend my time at home and the things I do fulfills the expectations I had for what my life would be like with a kid. It’s so much better.

A succession of routines produced the one we inhabit now. They were all delightful and deficient in their own ways, as is this one, which, I know, is but a truck stop on the parenting highway. God willing, there’s miles and miles of road to come that will demand more changes in habit, more overcoming of hangups, the acquisition of more know-how.

The thing I keep reflecting on, listening to my colleague, is how much I enjoy doing things that parenting forced me to learn. The easiest example is cooking. I’m not a great cook, but I enjoy it, all of it. I enjoy the meal planning and the grocery shopping and the roasting and the grilling and the Instant Pot-ing. It was a chore, but thriving as a two-career family with a kid required me to take ownership of it. Turns out it’s the element of our little family life I enjoy the most.

Parenting isn’t the only thing that forces this kind of learning-to-love-it. Practically every change is an opportunity to get good at something we never had to do before. Resisting it in the name of keeping things the way they were is short sighted. Your future self asks you to consider that.

A parent of one of the high schoolers from my church texted me a photo on Halloween night. It was of her son and four of his peers from the church youth group, all dressed up as a “bluegrass band.” There were hats, overalls, bandanas, jugs, and spoons. They’s said they were doing this, but I hadn’t taken them at their word.

I smiled, because teenagers deciding to do something silly together is fun. Also, these youth don’t live close to one another; they invested time and forethought into a common project they all cared about, not one that was assigned.

My smile broadened as I recalled the long van ride to North Carolina last July during which three students entertained themselves for hours with a sprawling description of a fictional bluegrass band, including instruments, names, and, of course, outfits. Phone-less for 10 hours, this is what they did instead of Snapchat. Now, three months later, they’ve actually brought it to life.

Talking to a parent the following day, I smiled all over again to hear how she and her husband (whose son is in the band) spent trick-or-treating time with the other band parents. They hadn’t met each other before. They had a lovely dinner.

This is the story of the Church Youth Bluegrass Band.