It’s true: this might not work. 

Or . . .

It might work. For now. Before it works a little less well, then still less, then not at all.

Now you have something that once worked but doesn’t anymore, which is a very different animal from the thing that never worked from the start.

The Youth Summer Bizarre never worked. Student’s summer schedules did not allow for enough regular participation, and my availability was not consistent enough to lead it. I’m fine with admitting it didn’t work.

Lots of other church components used to work but now don’t. That’s harder.

Worship attendance steadily declines. People stop participating in the Walk For The Hungry. The Young Parents group gradually dissipates. They worked until they didn’t. Nostalgia and a feeling of failure are all that’s left.

Some things need to be allowed to gracefully expire, but surely there are plenty that can be revived or tweaked or  re-calibrated. It won’t do to scrap everything that ceases to work.

It feels like a critical church leadership skill these days to play with the programs and rituals that aren’t working anymore to make them work again.

 

Cal Newport wants you to stop following your passion. Instead, he wants you get really good at something, which, he believes, will produce a passion for it.

I’m kind of with him.

I won’t restate his thesis here, only apply it to ministry settings. We speak of “calling” and “vocation” in church more than “passion.” This is not only for the ordained, but for everyone. In broad terms, this is fruitful. To experience oneself as called to faith, called to community, called to ministry, and to have that sense of calling validated by others who affirm it: that’s golden.

Calling and passion language gets thorny when we apply it to particular jobs, though.

A personal example: in 2008 I accepted an Associate Pastor for Youth Ministry job, even though I had never felt “called” to youth ministry. I did not attend seminary and pursue ordination out of a passion for working with teenagers. I felt called to ministry, to a life’s work of serving the church. The job allowed me to do that and to build knowledge and skills for ministry with a particular community within the church, youth (along with all the other programmatic learning that came with it).

After doing that job for eight years, I kinda feel called to youth ministry.

I wonder what would happen if those of us in ministry focused more on the kinds of knowledge and skills we need to build, and how we can add value to the church and the world with them, and less on particular “calls?”

I work with Shelley. Lucky me.

Here’s the money quote:

“What we don’t need are churches that pull people in with flashy lights and preach abstinence and call for sin-fixing. What we need are faithful communities that remind us that we have a responsibility to all of God’s creation, not just fellow Christians or only to God. We need churches that connect us to the Christians of old. We need active faith that address the needs of today’s world.”

Read the whole post here: I want to be part of an authentic church. — thetravellingtheologian

My Acer R11 Chromebook has been fixed and is due back to me today. Until then, I’m blogging on the Toshiba Chromebook II, which was my daily before *somebody spilled apple juice on the keyboard making the spacebarstick.

I cancelled my daily newspaper subscription this weekend. Since November I have been reading the Washington Post on my Kindle every day and experiencing a creeping malaise as a result.The news is mostly bad, sure, but that’s no problem; the Post’s writers are fantastic, and reading any one piece (like this one by Joel Achenback profiling a community in Ohio reeling from the opioid epidemic) is an enlightening and beneficial.

It’s more that my investment in better educating myself as a citizen by paying for daily, high quality, news reporting ( I also have digital subscriptions to the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times and a Kindle subscription to the Chicago Tribune) was not increasing satisfactory dividends. I expected daily paper reading to make me more fluent in the pressing issues of our day, like the Russian hack of our election and the fights for Aleppo and Mosul. It did that, I think. But it also made me write less, and I don’t like that.

 

I’ve felt this tension between intake and output repeatedly, enough that it now feels like a rule: the more I’m reading/watching/listening, the less I’m writing/connecting/creating.

I want to choose the back end of that equation every time.

 

I’m about to ship my Acer R11 Chromebook off for repair, so I’ll be off blogging for the next two weeks (one of which will be vacation). Before I go, though, here’s some quick 2016 blogging year in review stats.

Total 2016 page views: 17,683 (down from 23,518 in 2015, but higher than 2014) .

Most read post: Fun With Bible Mad Libs. This is a five-year-old post that keeps getting found. People must really be into Bible Mad Libs.

Most read actual post: Shannon Kershner’s Sermon On The Unjust Judge Is Important And You Should Listen To It. 

Most read actual actual post: An Open Letter To Chad Andrew Herring. 

The value of the day-to-day work of sharing something here is not reflected in the stats showing what is most seen. That is true every year, and not just of blogging.

Thank you for reading and sharing and commenting. Thank you for what you’re doing to make the world better and brighter. Here’s to 2017.

Rocky

The Ski Retreat.

The Jr. High Retreat.

Youth Sunday.

The summer Mission Trip(s).

They all need checklists. Checklists abound in my work these days. Not a to-do list or a recipe, a checklist is a collection of tasks needing to be completed or steps to be followed to ensure effectiveness: book the vans; submit registrations; pay the deposit; send out packing list.

Here’s my retreat checklist. What would you add?

Ezra Klein thinks the shortcoming in contemporary journalism is not quality writing but quality learning. He says, “We are too focused . . . on journalism as a universally applicable skill set. We do not demand enough subject issue knowledge from journalists” (skip to 69:35 here to listen to that).

He goes on to describe writing as the tip of the journalistic iceberg. There is a whole superstructure supporting it that nobody ever sees, made up of sources and bodies of knowledge.

The same is true of pastoral work, of course. Your sermon, your youth retreat plan, your hospital visit: they are all the tip of the iceberg. You are constantly adding to the part beneath the surface–new ideas, new interests, new questions, many not remotely theological or pastoral.

If we work on only the skill sets that people see, our work won’t be as hefty and interesting as it could be.

 

I should spend more time reading.

I should spend more time hand-writing letters.

I should spend more time with good music.

I should spend more time watching some of these amazing shows.

I should spend more time with my family.

I should spend more time with my friends.

I should spend more time praying.

I should spend more time blogging.

I should spend more time (any time, really) exercising.

Stop it.

More time isn’t coming.

Unless you are frittering your days away in slothful nothingness, your time is spent on what you value.

Good for you.

Audio writer, editor, and producer Alex Blumberg is discovering that, in order for Gimlet, his podcasting company, to be successful, he needs to do less writing, editing, and producing. He needs to spend most of his time developing writers, editors, and producers.

That’s a huge shift, not without emotional consequences (as you can hear here).

I’ve heard this called “equipping” or even “discipling” in church circles, and, for pastors, it feels like a very difficult shift to initiate, much less sustain. That clergy are the “professionals,” the people called to the preaching, teaching, and caring work of ministry, exerts a tremendous pull on many of us to do most of that work ourselves. This isn’t strictly bad. Contexts and people change, and we should always be learning. For that, there is no substitute for regular, face-to-face pastoral encounters.

I would hazard that many pastors never really establish development habits and mechanisms due to guilt. We default to leading every event ourselves not because we lack confidence in others to do it, but because we don’t know how to think of ourselves and our work if we’re not in front of the congregation or the youth group all the time. We feel like slackers.

That’s not healthy.

Who are the people you are developing for the work of your ministry? Are they staff? Volunteers? And how are you developing yourself?

 

Everything can’t be for everyone. Some people will have a scheduling conflict with the thing you’re planning. Others would participate if only there weren’t another thing they cared about more. Don’t be mad about that; the thing they care about more is important. But don’t not do the thing, either.

Being inclusive means not discriminating. It doesn’t mean waiting to do anything significant until every potential person can clear their schedule. Inclusion might require us to actually do more of the thing, to repeat it or offer it at multiple times, rather than doing it less so that fewer and fewer people can possibly be upset about conflicts.

There’s a sweet spot here made up of people who care enough about your thing to make it the conflict they have with other things. Design for them, even as you invite everyone.