If you’re the one who raises her hand to volunteer, you get to decide what the thing is going to be. Make Island Getaway the theme if you like. Charge admission. Serve salad instead of pizza. You volunteered, and so you’re the one investing the effort and staking your reputation.

But what did you volunteer for, really? Was it to complete a set of tasks and dutifully complete a project? Probably not. I think you volunteered to make connections. You’re the kind of person who seeks to add value to peoples’ lives and new skills and experiences to yours. That’s why you signed up. That’s why you said “Yes” when someone asked you to lead, for free, in your spare time.

Don’t hold it against those who didn’t raise their hands. They don’t get to complain about the end product, true; if they don’t like it they can be in charge next time. It doesn’t have to come to that though. You’re now in a position to create something that will make the hesitant commit. You’re going to make people wish they’d worked with you. And then, you’re going to invite them to again.

Making connections is what you do.

Maybe each Sunday is its own unique event that can’t depend on prior experience or future commitment to make sense and create an impact for participants. This week’s worship service, this week’s youth group gathering, may be the only one some people attend for a month, for a season. We’d better make it count.

Making it count is not about pyrotechnics and deep meaningful connections. It’s more about coherence. Series make less sense in this context. To begin each presentation with, “Remember last week . . . ” is tying one hand behind your back. You wouldn’t launch a weekend retreat that way, would you?

Retreats have always been powerful experiences, because the community gathered for it is unique and because the participants made an appreciable choice to forego other weekend options to be there.

Every Sunday is a retreat now.

Ministry is a march sometimes. There are entire seasons in which the strain of next week pulls at you before any relief for completing this week can be enjoyed.

Then, you keep putting one foot in front of the other. March on, and be grateful, at least, that the ground beneath you isn’t shifting and that it isn’t raining.

 

A wedding story. Rather, a wedding rehearsal story.

The groom is sweaty. The bride is giggly. Though they’re both older than me, they are perpetual movement. I’ve met them once, months ago, and throughout our appointment I recall that their hands were never not on one another.

We’re practicing the part in the service when the Bride and Groom ascend the chancel steps for the vows. She is to hand off her bouquet to the Maid of Honor, and they are to face one another and join hands to speak their vows. Our crack Wedding Coordinator always always always uses this part of the rehearsal to instruct the couple to look at one another as they speak, and not to turn their heads toward the officiant, so that the congregation can hear them.

“Don’t look at Rocky,” she tells them.

“Oh don’t worry,” the Bride quips. “He’s not even here.”

My eyes meet the Wedding Coordinator’s for an instant before she hastily looks away. I turn my gaze to the floor to recall, in this massive church, the phrase I’ve read in so many modern theology texts: Christendom is over.

When an Uber driver told me he wasn’t licensed to drive me and my colleague into the city, I thought it strange. Like, he doesn’t have a driver’s license? The admission came mere minutes after a pastor colleague in this western suburb shared with me that she knows many of the Uber drivers out here and that many of them drive without documents. Alright then. We got out of the car and he cancelled the ride. We called another one.

When the second driver wouldn’t take us into the city either we got suspicious. I asked him, “You mean you’re not able to because it’s an hour from here or you just don’t want to?” I told him he was the second driver to decline our trip and I was curious. He said, with kind of a guilty expression, “I’ll tell you what it is.” Then he whispered, so that my African American colleague standing two feet away couldn’t hear, “I don’t like to drive into the city. The last time I took someone there I ended up in the ghetto, like the hard core ghetto: the south side. I thought I was going to die.”

He cancelled the tip (“no charge,” he said, like he was being a prince) and darted away in his Honda Civic.”That’s pretty racist, right?” I asked my colleague. She looked at me like I was a 40 year old white man unaccustomed to being denied service in such a way.

“You think?” is all she said.

We decided to take a car to the train station instead and to ride the train into the city.

The third driver hurdled the median in her Prius to get to us.

“No fear, right?” I said to her in greeting. When we got into the car I took a flyer and told her our destination, sharing also that we were headed for the city and had been turned down by two previous drivers. “I’ll take you to the city,” she said, almost laughing. Score.

I changed the destination in the app, and she sped out of the parking lot toward the freeway. She wasted no time asking us what we were doing out here (attending a training for pastors) and then asking us what made us want to be pastors before telling us about some of her tattoos, her fiancee, her coming out story to her parents, and her career goals. She was smart, tough, and perceptibly kind.

Of course, we kicked around the forthcoming evening’s Presidential debate, too.

The point of this story is the Hillary Clinton was not the only woman I saw yesterday who stood up to the smallness of racist cowardice among men.

 

The sermon my colleague preached on Sunday was important. It was personal and public and difficult and . . . important.

I urge you to listen to it, either in the player below or by clicking this link. 18 minutes is not too long, but if you only have six, then click ahead to minute 12 and begin from there. It’s a fresh take on a well-known parable with a startling application.

I have been very fortunate to hear excellent preaching on a weekly basis as part of my job (!), from Karen Sapio and now from Shannon Kershner. You should be jealous.

Hacking is dumb. Stealing someone’s correspondence and sharing it with the world to embarrass them is the opposite of meaningful work. So is secretly taping someone’s private remarks only to post them online. Seriously. Get a real job.

But what if we behaved like everyone was watching all the time? Okay, not ALL the time; we should insist on privacy. But what if the words we spoke and the words we typed were guided by a public assumption?

“You are who you are when no one else is looking.” I don’t remember where I heard that, but it was years and years ago, and it has remained with me. Hear me again: privacy is a thing, betrayed confidences are a poison to public life, and hacking is D-U-M-B. But maybe an awareness of the new public and shareable nature of almost all discourse is an opportunity to ratchet up our integrity.

The next time I’m tempted to trash talk or gossip I will think twice. Not because some fool with a cell phone could post it to YouTube and not because my emails and texts could become blog fodder, but because “You are who you are when no one else is looking” was good ethical counsel before there were hackers.

Don’t blog about the election. Don’t blog about the election. Don’t blog about the election.

I’ve been fighting this prohibition for weeks. This blog is a space for me to think and engage in conversation about leadership and the church, and I fear nothing takes the knees out from under such a project as effectively as posts airing amateur political punditry. Nobody’s interested.

But the election and the media environment that is swirling around it consumes most of my discretionary attention these days. So I’m giving in and blogging about the election. I pledge to pursue the church leadership angle all the while.

So, take number one:

Sometimes somebody is wrong. Leaders stake their credibility on being unbiased and impartial, but sometimes somebody says or does something that has to be called out as simply wrong. The past several months of the Donald Trump presidential phenomenon have convinced me that sometimes objectivity is dangerous. Objectivity can reinforce the status quo and, in a great phrase from the Presbyterian Book of Order, bring “truth and falsehood upon a level.”

I heard a gutsy sermon to this effect yesterday that used the strongest moral language possible to denounce the language about women and girls that Donald Trump has introduced into this campaign and that a shocking number of his supporters refuse to condemn. It was a no-no: a political sermon. Yet the congregation was clearly stirred by it in a way that only a no-no could effect.

It was the right leadership move no in spite of its disregard for objectivity but because of it. I want my work to follow suit.

A staple of Getting Things Done is the Master Project List, that compilation of everything you’re working on that requires multiple steps to complete. Planning the junior high lock-in belongs on the Master Project List, because it requires multiple tasks: designing the flyer, recruiting volunteers, building the schedule, and so on.

I’ve maintained a Master Project List for about five years. Every time I start a new Bullet Journal, I port my Master Project List from my old one, leaving off all the projects that are checked off as complete, of course. And every time I perform that little ritual I panic at the small size of the ported list relative to the size of the one I’m leaving behind. It always makes me feel like I’m not doing enough, that I need to expand my project list.

That’s dumb for a couple of reasons. First, projects find you. Literally minutes after migrating my list yesterday I had somebody in my office pitching me on a new project to work on.

Second (and more obviously), more is not better. Effectiveness and impact can’t be measured in plates held aloft and kept spinning. Projects represent core objectives in your work, things like making connections with parents and training volunteers and curating teens’ engagement with scripture. Too many of those and you’re looking at a diluted set of strategies and objectives that has little chance of making an impact.

Less is more, I think.

 

Now that I have a healthy commute six days a week, I’m listening to a lot of audio on the train: Spotify, Audible, and, most of the time, podcasts (using Pocket Casts for Android). These are the shows in my rotation at present.

The Fivethiryeight Elections Podcast

Song Exploder

The Weeds Podcast

Revisionist History

StartUp

I talk about podcasts all the time. The people who have the misfortune to be in my presence with time to talk have endured illustration after illustration about the surprising awesomeness of broccoli and that time Brian Koppelman made Big Jay Oakerson cry and how tall Jake Gyllenhaall actually is. To me, it seems like the impact of a really good podcast episode can last for months.

And yet the episodes I blather on about the most were produced by shows that, while still in my feed, are not at the top of my rotation at the moment. And that’s what’s great about the medium. Podcasting allows you to put out content on a regular basis that many people may consume the very day you publish it, while many, many more won’t ever discover it for weeks and weeks. But when they do, it may impact them for long after. I just found out about Revisionist History, and it hasn’t aired a single episode since August.

Do yourself a favor and listen to a good podcast today. It could benefit you for days.