Denouncing racism from the pulpit is not courageous in most places in contemporary America, at least no more courageous than denouncing greed or idolatry. Preaching a sermon that condemned the Alt Right and the KKK on Sunday was a routine homiletical task, something Saturday’s marches in Charlottesville demanded but not something that took a great deal of courage.

Honestly, should I have any reason to fear that, in a progressive church in downtown Chicago, condemning neo Nazis was going to cause controversy?

The courageous sermons required of us preachers today are the ones that address the racism that doesn’t march through the streets, the kind we’ve grown accustomed to and comfortable with, the ones on the lower two thirds of this chart.

An anti racism sermon this Sunday took basic sense, not courage.

Reworking your sermon on Saturday to speak to a weekend tragedy is stressful. Many of us have done it, some more than once. Usually, that stressful work is met by Sunday congregants who are grateful for a nimble preacher’s ability to speak to something they are struggling to make sense of.

Maybe sermons should not need to be totally reworked, though.

A colleague texted me on Saturday afternoon: “How’s that sermon coming in terms of Charlottesville?”

I responded without even thinking: “I was ready for it.” I hadn’t seen the news yet about a car driving through a crowd and killing a pedestrian, so shocking things were still developing that I didn’t feel completely prepared to address. But the sermon I had in hand was ready to speak to evil. The bulletins were already printed with, “Evil cannot achieve lasting form in a coherent, workable plan,” a quote from R.R. Reno’s terrific Genesis commentary, on the cover. The events lighting up my phone on Saturday just gave that evil a name.

The sermon wasn’t yet done, but neither did I feel it needed torn down and rebuilt.

I want to be an agile preacher. I want to produce sermons that are grounded in careful study of both the Word and the world and that can pivot to speak to the broad range of challenges my congregants are facing, only some of which are national tragedies. The more I preach, the more I like the idea I’ve heard attributed to John Wesley, that every preacher only ever preaches some variation on the same three sermons.

Yesterday’s was the one about the Christian response to evil, even before we all agreed on the evil we were talking about.

 

Anniversaries are only partly about marking time that has already passed and celebrating the (perhaps improbable) arrival of another annual marker of persistence.

Anniversaries are also about committing to the future. Again.

The future probably looks different from the vista of this anniversary than it did the last one. Maybe that last one was in a valley. What are we committing to between now and the next anniversary? What do we hope the next one looks like?

My wife and I celebrate our 15th wedding anniversary today. By this day next year we hope to be completely rid of student loans. It will be our first debt free anniversary.

Every anniversary is special, and 15 is multiple-of-five extra special. But we’ve got our sights set on 16, for sure.

 

The person who said the thing that so inspired you may no longer believe it. Their conviction–the one that set you on your present course–may have changed.

What then?

Is our certainty about our present course dependent upon some opinion, uttered in context, that we have fixed in time, even though the figure who shared it with us has very likely grown and changed since that time?

People change. Ideas should too.

The pathos of adolescence is the raw material of youth ministry. Teenagers feel differently than adults do–more immediately, more intensely, and without the moderating influence of experience and perspective. Their joy is more joyous and the despair more despondent. I know this. I have worked with youth in one capacity or another for almost 20 years. Also, I was one.

Some youth workers match the emotional pitch of teenagers with stunning precision. They seem to be up to their elbows in pathos and possessed of boundless energy. I am grateful for them, even as I recognize that I am not them.

I don’t really do pathos anymore.

Ministry with youth for those of us 20 years or more removed from the adolescent experience doesn’t have to be fueled by the same emotional identification with teenagers as it was earlier in our careers. Our declining gusto for the mountaintops and valleys of the teenage experience is an asset. The challenge for us is to own our age and perspective and not to somehow keep pathos alive. Teenagers need adults with some distance from the intensity of their experience as much as they need adults who can immediately relate to it.

Accompanying teenagers’ discernment of the good and the right is hard work. It takes the courage to lead them into uncomfortable spaces–physically, intellectually, spiritually–and the wisdom to put to them the discomfiting theological question. Being out front in this work means anticipating students’ challenges. It means attending to group dynamics. It means wrestling ambivalence and imprecision, often to a draw.

Youth formation is very difficult work.

None of us do this work alone. In addition to parents and volunteers, a healthy youth ministry connects students to a whole constellation of leaders: retreat speakers and small group leaders, mission partners, camp staff, neighboring pastors and religious leaders. Allowing those leaders to do their work with our students is uniquely challenging and uniquely critical.

Is my pastoral relationship with the 6th-12th graders in my congregation dependent on me as the perpetual speaker and leader? If so, that’s an easy way out. There is a harder body of work for youth ministry, and that is the cultivation of relationships with other adults who get to lead our students without our interference.

This. Is. Tough.

My students are at a youth conference this week, and almost every element of their experience is led by somebody who is not me. Worship, recreation, small group discussion: committed and talented people who love youth are in charge of it all. My job is simply to be with my students in it. It’s great for them. It’s challenging for me, not because I don’t like or don’t agree with the content, but rather because I depend too much on being in charge of everything.

Thanks be to God for a church full of people who are called to lead youth, who have led the students in my care this summer, from Chicago to Detroit to Cuba to North Carolina.

That dog-tired feeling that’s following you around may be about more than the hours you’re putting in. We measure our workload in quantity, and it is certainly true that early mornings and late nights take it out of you. But there’s a fatigue that comes from the quality of work you’re doing, too, and by quality I don’t just mean how good it is.

Work that aims for impact has to stretch our capabilities and deepen our knowledge base. Learning new information and skills, synthesizing novel insights and applying them in unproven ways: these are qualities of work that is exhausting, whether it takes up 60 hours a week or 20.

The good news is the insights and skills won’t always be new. Once you’ve got them, they’re yours to deploy, and deployment is easier than acquisition by far.

The better news is there’s always more to learn. Nobody is keeping you from straining after better all the time.

Is your fatigue due to the quantity of your workload or the quality?

Exit interviews are a great way to learn ways your work can be better. When people who have worked with you move on, always do an exit interview.

I spent yesterday morning in a succession of one-on-one sessions with our outgoing Urban Youth Mission staff, who, as I have said, are awesome. There wasn’t a lot of time allotted to each one, so we had to be direct: what worked for you and what didn’t?

I learned that enlisting congregation members to help support summer staff by inviting them to dinner on their nights off works. Big time. The housing mostly works. All the public transit works. The changes we made to this year’s schedule worked. Including a professional coach from the church community to work with staff individually and as a team works.

Not everything works well now, though. Giving the daily devotional leadership to summer staff didn’t really work, or at least it didn’t work as well as when I or another member of the church’s pastoral staff did that, as last year. “Keynote” addresses that are more facts than faith reflection aren’t really soaring either. The food situation can work better; constant complaints from youth about bland stir fry wear staff down.

Where is the fun in having nothing to improve? That’s why I love doing exit interviews.

Of course, you don’t have to wait until someone leaves to get better.

High quality leaders turn difficult situations into constructive opportunities for learning and growth. That’s one of the purposes of a youth mission trip, isn’t it, subjecting students to difficulty for the sake of transformation? Mission trip leadership is a balancing act between alleviating difficulty and allowing it, between allowing for just enough of the right kind of difficulty that participants will be challenged to change and permitting so much of it that the trip devolves into the Misery Olympics.

Of course, mission trip leadership is shared. On some trips, the Pastor or Youth Director is leading with a team of church member volunteers. On other trips, that team is leading with staff or volunteers from a partnering church or organization on site. In the latter case, your partner’s leadership skills matter a lot. A huge part of students’ experience is affected by it.

Which is why I’m so proud of the staff of the Urban Youth Mission program, the project of the church I serve that welcomes youth mission trips to Chicago all summer. We care about the quality of our staff almost more than anything else in our program, and we invest a lot into equipping them to manage that balancing act of challenge and security, not only with the youth who come, but also with the youth’s leaders. It’s a lot to ask of college students.

You can bet we ask about our staff on the evaluations we give to students and leaders before they return home. All summer long I’ve been reading assessments like, “exceptional” and “terrific” and “mature.”

I texted the program’s Director: “you knocked it out of the park with your staff.”

 

We were standing side by side in the kitchen as I loaded the dishwasher and she greedily handled her latest batch of slime, passing it from hand to hand and squeezing it between fingers with relish. She was breathless from lecturing me on the merits of “fluffy” versus “crunchy” slime. I was only half interested. That I was paying attention at all I signaled by delivering puns and jokes on the terms in her lecture.

At one point she stopped talking and held the green slime in one hand. “I give up,” she said.

“Give up what?”

“Trying to talk to you.”

Relief at first. I have heard more about slime and its component “activators” over the past month than a person can and keep sane. She has spent hours of her leisure time combining dish soap and saline solution and glue and food coloring, and then storing the product in ziplock bags. It’s a complete mess. I have cleaned slime from floors, tables, counter tops, and even refrigerator handles.

A reprieve, yes.

But then it registers as I finish filling the silverware tray that shes figured something out about her dad and that she doesn’t like it. These dad jokes and puns are a way to not engage, to deflect. She has never, in all her nine years, enjoyed silliness as much as I expect a child should. She finds it irritating instead.

Her mom didn’t like it either, when we were first dating. So I dialed it back and made every effort to project a more serious persona. It never occurred to me that I might have to do the same thing as a parent.