It’s 11:30 on Thursday night and I’m up, tapping a blog post into my phone. Something isn’t right.

The Acer Chromebook that was at last delivered to replace the one I bought last June and subsequently sent for service four separate times has also died. Well, not died exactly. Yesterday morning, the screen suddenly developed an ominous shadow in the lower left corner, and I watched in horror as the shadow swallowed up the entire screen in a matter of seconds. Restarting the computer brought the screen back, but only for a moment before The Shadow returned and victimized the pixels again. 

I contacted customer service, eyes fully open. I was advised to send it in for repair and to pay all the packing and shipping myself. Nope. Not doing it. I’m not putting another cent into this or any Acer product.

11:38. I’ve read three chapters of Duck Season: Eating, Drinking, And Other Misadventures in Gascony–France’s Last Best Place, which I picked up at my local library yesterday. This is my new reading discipline: one book at a time from the library. I have a full queue. I don’t allow myself to place a hold on a book until I’ve finished the one I’ve already got checked out.

This one was in my queue because I met the author. His daughter is Baby Girl’s classmate. We met at a playdate in May, and over the course of some small talk he revealed that he was a food writer who had spent a year living in rural France and another year penning a book for Harper Collins about it. I added it to my chipublib.org “for later” shelf that very day. 

It’s good. He’s deft with adjectives like “ascetic,” and he describes duck fat in terms that make me want to pour it over cereal. It’s also pertinent to me that he’s telling a story about taking his kid away from her home and the second guessing such a move prompts. No amount of duck fat or crepes will silence those.

11:49. 10 more minutes and I could parrot a Michael Franti song. Another day, if I’m unlucky. Tonight I’ve said enough.

Sleep soundly.

More worship. That’s the third item on my Youth Group Wish List for the coming year.

Sunday mornings are complicated. There are worship services at 8:00, 9:30, and 11:00, children’s Sunday School during the latter two services, youth choir rehearsal at 10:00, and three youth programs–Jr. High, Confirmation, and Sr. High–all at 11:00. Church is not the only thing youth and their families are committed to on Sunday mornings, either.

I do not expect that students and their parents will spend both a youth group hour and a worship service hour at church every Sunday. So our youth group activity at 11:00 for several of the Sundays in the upcoming year will be to participate in the worship service.

And I mean participate. Students will be invited to serve as liturgists and ushers during those services, and everybody else will be together though not hidden in back.

Our youth are part of a congregation that worships in a stunning sanctuary with pretty incredible music and compelling preaching. That they would never experience that because they’re always in youth group at the same hour seems like a lost opportunity.

I want to spend more time with parents in the coming program year. I organized a couple of “parent meetings” last year that were well attended, lively, and helpful for me in starting to learn about our youth and their families. But it was not enough.

This year’s calendar has seven parent-specific pieces, although they’re not all get-to-know-you meetings (there are three of those). Several of them are service or learning activities designed for parents and youth to participate together.

I’ve heard it said that ministry with youth is ministry with parents. Item number two on my wishlist for the coming year, then, is to do more ministry with parents.

I want my church’s weekly Sunday morning youth groups to grow in the coming year towards being taught by church members. I want my work and the work of youth ministry staff to focus more on developing curriculum and enabling church members as teachers who are discipling young people.

A few things have to happen for this change to take place. For starters, curriculum resources have to be developed or acquired far enough in advance to teachers to get comfortable with them and plan adjustments as suit them. Writing up a Sunday session on Thursday won’t work anymore.

Also, time has to be committed to review teachers’ experience, to listen to where they feel they are thriving and where they feel stuck, and then to work toward growth, both for the teachers and for program design. It won’t do to heave a curriculum over the wall at teachers with a “Good luck!” in September and then wait for them to ask for help. We need to commit to a year’s worth of review gatherings now.

We’re a couple of months away from the start of youth groups, and I have a list of things I’m hoping for. This is just the first one.

We engage the new work of people whose old work worked for us. Acquire first, listen later. The new work doesn’t need to be like the old work, only connected to it.

I added these July 14 album releases to my library without hearing a note, based solely on my experience with the artists associated with them. The work you do today buys you a chance to be heard next year, or next decade.

Offa Rex, The Queen of Hearts

A collaboration between The Decemberists and Olivia Chaney that covers a bill of traditional folk songs, like “The Old Church Yard”:

Oh Wonder, Ultralife

Their gutsy project of uploading one song to Soundcloud a month for 12 months before releasing them all as an album back in 2015 made me a fan. This one is billed as a conventional album.

Waxahatchee, Out in The Storm

Waxahatchee is a Katie Crutchfield, a singer whose voice is like sandpaper–to an itch. I would listen to hear read the American Health Care Act.

Lo Tom, Lo Tom

I was never into Pedro The Lion, but frontman David Bazan’s solo albums have done a number on my attention. If he’s connected to it, I want to hear it. Lo Tom is a side project that involves former Pedro members.

Whose work will you engage based solely on what they’ve already done?

I can seize upon the flawed analogy to mock the entire argument, but what is that getting me, really? What does it do for my learning, for my influence and impact, for my growth as a person and as a leader, to stand in a dismissive posture over another’s earnest argument?

Being right is less important than being constructive.

The story about the fancy sandwich shop does not carry the weight that David Brooks wants it to, a fact the internet seized upon with vigor. I’m no Brooks booster; I read his column only haphazardly. But I read this one, and, even with the flimsy illustration, I took its central claim to heart: that “cultural signifiers” combine with structural advantages to privilege the educated, upper-middle-class in America. “How am I contributing to this problem?” I asked myself.

I asked a closed group of trusted friends in a private message thread, too, and I was spared their derision, even though some of them may have thought the question misguided. I doubt the same civil reception would have been granted by a broader, more public, social network. Which is why I share almost nothing to Facebook anymore. I have learned my lesson.

I fear we are creating an environment where the cost of being wrong is so high that fewer and fewer people even risk it. Instead, masses of people keep their opinions to themselves, certain of enlightened condemnation should their articulation falter in even one aspect.

David Brooks doesn’t need the help, sure. But it’s not just about the columnist. It’s also about readers with whom constructive, solution-oriented conversation might be had, if not for a snark-fueled social media pile on over a single illustration.

Be constructive. If you’re right, we’ll know it.

 

Meaningful work over the long haul demands adaptation. This is as true in ministry as it is in education as it is in journalism as it is in parenting as it is in on and on and on.

The trick is that adaptation is never strictly a technical process, but is loaded down with value judgments. This scene from “Moneyball” nails it. Adaptation is improvement to some and capitulation to others.

When you’re mulling an adaptation and that voice in your head is telling you, “You’re listening to the wrong people. You’re not gonna win,” hear it out. Then proceed.

 

I start all my youth events with name activities. I draw a lot of them from Stanley Pollack’s Moving Beyond Icebreakers. Being known by name is a basic experience people should have in church, and youth ministry provides a socially acceptable way to goof around while learning peoples’ names. This one is probably my favorite.

I struggle with adults though. My default introduction when I greet a grown up at church whose name I don’t know has become, “I’m sure you’ve told me your name, but I forgot it.” People are readily understanding, but you can only do that so many times before it becomes insulting. After awhile, you just quit asking, or you whisper to a colleague, “What’s that guy’s name again?!” Sometimes they don’t know either.

Just to say: learning and remembering peoples’ names is something I can get better at.

 

There were some baptisms in worship yesterday. Dolled up babies and beaming parents, camera clicking grandparents and neck-craning congregants in the 13th pew. It’s a great scene.

The babies inevitably fuss and cry, though, both during the baptism and the remainder of the service. That’s not a problem for me. I subscribe to the sentiment of one of my seminary professors who said she appreciates when babies cry during baptisms because it indicates that at least somebody appreciates the gravity of what’s happening.

I think the sound of fussing children is a great indicator of church vitality, and I feel generally that grown ups who are irritated by ill tempered children in public places like airplanes and churches need to relax.

But I realized during yesterday’s service that “It’s not a problem for me” is not entirely true. When the whines and protests of wriggly children ring out during worship, I  get tense. If I’m speaking when a it starts, I suddenly become conscious of my volume and my pace. If someone else is speaking, I scan the pews with my eyes to see if congregants are reacting. I exert every ounce of willpower I have to not look at the child.

The noise is not a problem for me. The problem is my awareness of the noise’s effect on other people, most critically the parents.

Most of the time, parents already feel embarrassed and self-conscious when their child makes noise during a service. They don’t need annoyed looks from other people. That sends the exact wrong signal about welcome and the place of children in church.

I once was part of a church that took the dramatic step of placing rocking chairs and blankets in the back of its small sanctuary, so that parents with infants wouldn’t be forced to leave the service if the infant got fussy. It was a great idea, but in practice it didn’t work. Whenever those chairs got used, people stared and rolled their eyes, even some of the people who championed the idea to begin with.

Babies crying in church is a problem for me. I admit it. I start to freak out internally that the parents are going to feel unwelcome. No doubt that comes across as a reaction to the baby.

I need to quit doing that.

Get out of your home community.

Initiate relationships with people whose lives are appreciably different from yours.

Do helpful work.

Make partnerships.

Repeat.

This is my process for a worthwhile short-term mission trip. The “Repeat” step means there is value in returning multiple times to the same place. There is a well-documented pull in planning mission trips to mix it up and expose students to a variety of places, a pull that is not without merit. But I’m at a point now where I am less interested in that particular pull than I am in another pull, the one that brings me back to the same place and the same partners more than once.

Going back multiple times to work with the same people in the same place forces the issue of what a mission trip is for. It’s not tourism. It’s not heroism. The weeds my students pulled and the brush they cleared from a church parking lot in East Detroit last week is growing back even now; I want them to see that. I want them to attack it with the same sense of purpose the second time as they did the first, because it’s no less helpful for the fact that they already did it.

The leaders my students worked with and learned from aren’t going anywhere either. I want to expose new youth to those leaders, and I want youth who have worked with them once to grow in their appreciation for those leaders’ challenges and contributions. That is second-level stuff. You have to go back for it to happen.

I have no concrete plans at the minute, but I am without a doubt starting next year’s planning with the conviction that going back to the place we just left is a valuable proposition.