The night before we returned home from our most recent mission trip, I lay awake assembling a playlist for the next day’s six hour van ride.

Here’s what I ended up with.

It was a rousing success. For over three hours, students sang along, remarking how much they liked the playlist. A sixth grader asked how he could get it. Answer: come on the next mission trip.

I am glad to share with you the secret sauce.

Everything is upbeat. Nothing is offensive or embarrassing. Most of the songs are decades old.

The selections fall roughly into three categories:

1. Songs I like and think are fun for road trips but that are not widely known by middle schoolers (“101,” “You Don’t Treat Me No Good No More,” “Dreams”)
2. Songs the group had learned in the van the previous four days (“Don’t Shuffle Me Back,” “Odds Are”)
3. Songs I had caught people singing to themselves at some point on the trip (“Take On Me,” “You’ll Be Back,” “Elvira”)

That last one was key. I explicitly asked students for their favorite songs, and most couldn’t tell me. But when songs came on that I knew they knew because I had overheard them singing it, though they didn’t know I had heard them singing it, their faces lit up. It was super fun.

It’s a little frivolous, sure, but sing along music substantially enhances a long van ride with middle schoolers, both for them and for me.

Postscript:

The album Ladies And Gentlemen: Barenaked Ladies And The Persuasions served me very well on this trip. It was my default any time we were in the van. By the fourth day, kids were clamoring for “Don’t Shuffle Me Back” in particular when we went anywhere.

Often the things that feel most memorable on a mission trip are the things that weren’t on the schedule. There are few better experiences for young people (and adults) to develop patience and spontaneity as a mission trip. On this last one we:

• Organized an impromptu pizza and game night after our planned evening activity was rained out. This was on the last night of the trip, and the activity was one students had been looking forward to all week. Nobody complained.
• Split our group in two on a moment’s notice when a service site could only accommodate six of the 20 people who showed up. The decision about who would go where was made quickly and with minimal deliberation, and both groups had terrific experiences at their sites that morning.
• Enjoyed a brief Frostie stop when we were ahead of schedule for dinner. $.50 Frosties means the church invested a total of $9 and only the planning required to find the Wendy’s in Google Maps. Win.

Students and leaders should hear from the very beginning that we have no way of knowing everything that we will be doing on a mission trip, and that’s part of the fun. No doubt it’s part of the challenge, too; people invest time and energy into making schedules for these things, so it can be intensely frustrating when plans don’t work out. But, as much as sweating and praying, mission trips are for responding to changing circumstances to seize opportunities or to endure disappointment. Both are critical skills for faith and life.

Karl Barth’s dictum about reading the Bible and the newspaper at the same time and interpreting your newspaper from your Bible is one of the most frequently cited bits of preaching advice I’ve heard. From the first time I heard it, I took it to heart.

I used to think it meant that my sermons ought to be filled with allusions to contemporary events, and so they were. Often these allusions were in the form of a list–bullet pointed appeals to wars and oppressions, rapid fire asides referencing this or that outrage du jour. This felt relevant. Not that I was informing congregants about these events, but that I was providing a theological lens through which to view all the events they already knew about. It also made me appear in touch with the world (or so I hoped).

These lists and asides have largely disappeared from my sermons. Now it feels better to dwell at length upon news items. I don’t feel the need to demonstrate how much of the news I know anymore, but rather in preaching to choose carefully from the weekly buffet of tragedy and injustice (and some good news too!) and to do more than recite a headline. It also feels like appealing to the same issue more than once is beneficial. You can hardly “interpret” the happenings of the world in one pulpit session, just as a single news story is insufficient to understand the complexity of any given event.

Actually, given how much rapid fire reporting we are exposed to from so many sources and media, perhaps the newspaper is not the best companion to the Bible for our age. Maybe now it’s news magazines, with their long-form, analytical biases. Maybe interpreting magazines from the Bible is the challenge our era demands.

 

Ministry with youth is distinct from ministry with young adults. Youth ministry is about forming teenagers as disciples. It requires an understanding of the unique cognitive, physical, and emotional development happening in adolescence, and it relies on constructive relationships with teens’ parents and an appreciation for the institutions that shape teens’ day-to-day experience: family, school, the law, church.

None of this is true of young adults, people in their 20’s. Ministry with young adults is about forming the habits of discipleship among people for whom institutional constraints are disappearing, or, at least, changing dramatically. Post-school, post-nuclear family, post-youth group: young adulthood requires the navigation of a new set of institutions, like one’s job or marriage, albeit with a more fully developed cognitive, physical, and emotional toolkit.  Ministry with that cohort relies on quality relationships with them as individuals and in the context of their emerging communities, including, though not limited to, the church.

So youth and young adult ministries are distinct in their objectives, challenges, and opportunities. In a community of a certain size, you really need those ministries to be in different peoples’ portfolios for them to thrive.

And yet . . .

There is this continuity, isn’t there, between these two arenas of faith formation. Extended Adolescence has become a normative concept, and not in the pejorative sense. From that Atlantic essay linked above: “Far from a contributor to emotional immaturity, the trend toward an adolescence that extends into the mid-20s is an opportunity to create a lifelong brain-based advantage.”

Beyond developmental understanding, there is the continuity of mentorship. The church I serve has intentionally invited young adults into youth ministry leadership roles from the beginning (many of those young adult leaders are now in their 40’s and still at it). This is for two reasons: young adults represent the thing that adolescents are growing toward, so structuring contexts for teenagers to get to know 20 somethings gives them models and mentors of what faithfulness looks like as an early adult.

Secondly, youth ministry is a terrific lab for leadership development, one of the church’s best. Youth ministry staffs are brimming with young adults. The “Emergent” churches that sprang up as a cultural and intellectual alternative to late 20th century evangelicalism in North America and the UK were largely led by people in their 20’s and early 30’s who had cut their teeth in youth ministry organizations like Young Life and InterVarsity. Many of those emergent churches are still thriving. That’s not an accident.

It seems to me like, in the right setting and with the right leadership, there cold be some creative potential for hitching ministry with youth and with young adults together.

Is this happening anywhere?

 

Don’t say, “Stay tuned” if you don’t want people to hold you to what happens next.

First the good news: things ended in understanding. “We’re still friends,” is the report. “Just not BFFs.” There was a discussion, an airing of grievances.  There were tears. But in the end things were civil, not mean.

Now the bad news: the resolution was reached by way of the letter, delivered in the middle of the day, though, not the end, which allowed for the subsequent tearful back-and-forth. Baby Girl’s mother and I expressed our disappointment that that was the decision, and that’s the end of that.

I am hopeful, though, in my disappointment. Because she shared so much of this with us, and because she received our disapproval without defensively digging in, it feels like there will likely be a next time for this manner of discernment and deliberation. We will gladly take that, her mother and I, as a precious opportunity to listen and counsel as she makes her way towards more compassionate and responsible decisions.

No more pencils, no more books . . .

It’s the last day of school today. Baby Girl is taking a small stack of 1 X 1 cards I made for her with her address and her parents’ phone numbers and email addresses. She wants to give these to her friends to play over the summer. I’m like her agent.

There is also last day drama surrounding one of her friends whom several other of her friends feel does not treat them well and for whom a letter is being prepared, to deliver at the final bell, which states, “We don’t want to be your friend anymore because you don’t treat us very well.”

Hours have been spent on this matter at home the past three days–the recitations of the friend’s offenses is specific and narrated with great flair–with Baby Girl’s mother and I asking her to consider how that letter would make her feel if she received it and also affirming that she doesn’t have to remain friends with people who treat her badly. We’re asking questions, trying not to give orders but trying to make the case for permanence; the last day isn’t really the last day. There’s next year, maybe even a surprise summer encounter. Among ourselves, my wife and I are dreading a conversation with the mother, who we both like a lot, when her daughter comes home with some tear-stained Wide Ruled with our kids’ name on it. This is a test case in decision making for a nine year-old. It is as fraught as anything her parents will decide today.

Stay tuned.

Sharing accountability takes longer and demands more energy than heaping all of the accountability onto yourself does. Compared to gathering a team, clarifying objectives, and dividing up ownership of the work, swooping in the week before to make all the decisions yourself is easy. Actually, it’s a cop-out.

The commitment to sharing accountability in an organization is as hard for the person who wants all the accountability as it is for the person who wants none.

Those of us whose jobs and titles imply accountability need to make sharing it part of how we work, and that takes lots of advance intentional planning. It’s way more than deciding during the event to delegate a task. It’s inviting a partner to own a piece of the work from start to finish, and then following their lead in evaluating whether it worked.

*Thanks to Jessica Tate for these insights

This year’s high school graduates from the church I used to serve were in the third grade the year I met them.

My daughter was born that year. She is just now finishing . . . third grade.

This makes me think about her age and mine, of course, and it prompts all kinds of reminiscence about the past nine years. But I also wonder: who are the people in my daughter’s life now, today, beyond her family, who will care when she graduates from high school?

One of the graduates I’m thinking about was provided with special gluten free donuts every Sunday for six years by the couple who taught Sunday School to the youth. As much as anyone in his life, that couple is due some congratulations at his graduation.

This seems to me a big part of church: growing the ranks of adults who know about and care about young people who aren’t related to them.