When I was a new pastor, I tried to finish my weekly sermon by Thursday. I took Friday as a day off, and the importance of not working on my off day had been impressed upon me with some rigor by professors and mentors, so I diligently worked Monday thru Thursday to complete the Sunday sermon.

It worked great. Except that the sermons weren’t very good.

I thought about this yesterday as I listened to the chapter in Adam Grant’s Originals called “Fools Rush In.” Grant makes the case that procrastinating can lead to better work. He uses the example of Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream Speech” at the march on Washington, which he only began writing days before delivery and that he didn’t complete until that very morning.

I gave up on trying to finish my sermons on Thursdays, because I kept finding that ideas and insights about it had a stubborn habit of waiting to occur to me until Friday or Saturday. With some guilt, I started what has continued to be my practice: waiting until Saturday night to finish my sermons.

Not waiting until Saturday to work on them, mind. Procrastinating until Saturday night to put the sermon together is only effective for me if I’ve been diligent throughout the week taking it apart. I liken it to an assembly project. I need to work deliberately to take all the pieces out of the box and spread them out on a table. This is hours worth of reading and analysis and note-taking. By Saturday night I’m simply putting together what all the pieces I’ve found seem to want to be.

It’s less “productive” than finishing on Thursday, but the end product is always better.

There’s a critique of productivity in here, too. Grant uses the phrase “productive mediocrity” to describe habits of starting early, working efficiently, and always meeting deadlines, in order to get as much done as possible. He’s arguing that being less productive in the service of making better stuff is a worthwhile trade off.

 

I’m reading The Seventh Sense by Joshua Cooper Ramo. I can’t remember who recommended it, but I made it my test run in ordering a book through the inter-library loan system through the Chicago Public Library. It arrived two weeks ago. Someone else has already requested it, so my time with it is running out. Hence the actual reading.

So there’s a handy distinction in here between tactical, operational, and strategic levels of action. This post is an adoption of those levels for youth ministry.

Ramo says tactical is the most practical. “It’s the choice to use machine guns instead of tanks to secure a street in Kabul, for instance, or to buy up gold for a central bank or to allow high-frequency stock trading.”

In youth ministry, tactical decisions are daily and weekly choices about communication and curriculum. Do we send a weekly digital newsletter? Do we do our mission trip sign ups online only or also with paper forms? Do we use “Never Have I Ever” as a warmup exercise yet again?

It’s the most practical, yet the tactical level of action is the one I fret the most about.

The operational level is the one “where decisions are made about just how various levers of power might best be moved. Should we send bombers to set back Iran’s nuclear program or rely on cyberattacks? Will tax dollars fix aging highways faster than tolls?” In a great phrase, the operational level is where the “bolt tightening for revolutionary change occurs.”

Do we have a weekly youth group and when will it meet? Do jr. high students have their own mission trip, or do they come with the sr. highs? Do we schedule regular feedback sessions with parents? How do we organize and support volunteers?

These seem like some of the operational questions youth ministries deal with. They’re more about infrastructure. I enjoy this level. It’s where you can most easily experiment with things that feel significant.

Finally, there is the strategic dimension. “Here, overall design is considered and implemented.

“Strategy imagines how whole structures such as nations or corporations [or congregations] might be directed in the service of the most ambitious goals.”

 

This is where your scope and sequence plan lives, at the strategic level. Are you marching through a year of discussions on lectionary texts, or are you focusing on issues of social justice?

Just what are the ambitious goals driving your youth ministry? Youth’s integration in the worship and service of the adult congregation? Intimacy with the Biblical narrative? The formation of a tight-knit community of teenagers?

Strategy, operations, and tactics work together. Youth ministry work that fails to focus on any one of these three will suffer. But it feels like the biggest payoff comes from investing in the strategic level first.

Here’s a post I wrote for the Progressive Youth Ministry blog last week. It was a riff on something I’d heard in an audiobook I was listening to after being seized with guilt for not reading enough.

The payoff was immediate. An early chapter gave me a subject for the blog post, and I went with it. I should have finished the chapter, though, because it’s not until the end that the author reveals he’s made up the subject entirely.

It’s better if our learning is evenly paced and doesn’t come in fits of anxiety, either because we’re facing a deadline or simply because we become acutely aware of everything we don’t know. Hastily acquired learning is unreliable.

Seth Godin writes about “weasel words,” subtle pieces of speech that allow you to wiggle out of commitments and to over-promise. People who use them damage trust and aren’t worth working with. 

It seems to me that it’s just as weasely to under-promise than to over promise and to drive down peoples’ expectations for our work so that later, if we were ineffective or timing wasn’t right or whatever, we can say we never guaranteed success. “I don’t really expect anyone to participate.” Even, “Let’s just see what happens.”

This isn’t the same as proposing small-scale experiments that are intentionally designed to attract only a few. This is securing the budget or the volunteers for something while strategically downplaying expectations. There’s a difference. 

If we propose a mission trip for 20 students, we should do our homework so that we can say “20” with conviction, and not “We’ll take whoever signs up.” Let’s not weasel out of accountability before we’ve even started. 

Weasel words can both over-promise and under-promise. 

Here’s a staple of my youth ministry philosophy: there needs to be clearly differentiated roles for adults who work with youth in church, and those roles should change and grow over time. 

This is a staple of my philosophy, yet it’s not something I’ve put a stake in the ground about. I should do that. 

In many contexts, being a youth ministry volunteer has for a long time meant that you come to the youth group. Then, when the youth go on retreats or do service projects or throw a lock in or lead in worship or travel to mission trips, you do those too. This makes youth work a contest of stamina, and it necessarily cuts out people who either can’t commit to a weekly youth group meeting or who can only commit to youth group and none of the other things. 

What if instead the lock in volunteers were invited to do only that? They’re welcome to come to youth group, of course, but we’re inviting them first and foremost to help make the lock in amazing. I’ve actually got three volunteers lined up for a junior high lock in later this month, and none of them are weekly leaders. 

We had two leaders on our mission trip last summer who were recruited from the congregation and who had never before a) volunteered with the youth ministry or b) participated in a youth mission trip. Their perspectivec and contributions were invaluable (so were those of the weekly volunteer who was leading his 23rd youth mission trip).

If a goal of youth ministry is to pack the stands with adults who know our church’s teenagers, then we should multiply the ways adults can interact with youth. A new youth event on the calendar should be an opportunity to invite a new crop of adults to lead it. 

By all means be professional. Volunteer applications, background checks, and abuse prevention proecedures are a must for every adult who works with youth in any capacity. Let’s swell the progress of church grown ups who work with youth with a posture of constant invitation. 

I missed a deadline for a blog post. I submitted the wrong personnel evaluation form. I gave our mission trip host incorrect dates. I charged next year’s ski retreat on this year’s budget. 

A bunch of mistakes showed themselves on the same day. Still, I lose no sleep. The blog post is coming this morning, the evaluation form was corrected, there are exciting mission trip alternatives, and the accountants fix bigger missteps than mine all the time. 

Working with professionals is mistake insurance, especially if their influence causes you to level up, so that, over time, you make fewer and fewer mistakes. 

A fun little subplot of the Presidential race has been whether Donald Trump will appear for the second and third debates with Hillary Clinton, owing to the fact that the debate is not a useful tool for advancing his kind of candidacy. Eight days after the first debate, though, I wonder if Mrs. Clinton isn’t the one who should skip them from now on. 

I’ve had a couple of troubling conversations with people who watched the debate last week and who came away with the impression that both candidates acted like children. These are people who fall easily into the “Are-These-My-Only-Two-Choices?” camp, cold on Clinton and afraid of Trump. I’m not in that camp. I arrived some time ago at an enthusiastic embrace of Mrs. Clinton’s candidacy, and so what I saw with her and Mr. Trump on the same stage was that only he acted like a child, while she behaved like a professional, composed adult. Confirmation bias, I know. But also this. 

Still, my undecided friends perceived both as childish. 

A rough theory: if you engage with a childish person in public, some of their childish behavior will cling to you. Though you take the high road, mud from your opponent’s jaunt on the low road will stain your pants suit. 

This is the danger of using other peoples’ weakness to sell our strength. We’re banking on a clear perceptible differentiation between their bluster and our poise, between their temper and our calm, between their half-baked ideas and our nuanced proposals. But maybe that’s not how it works. If we share the program, we share whatever it presents, even when it doesn’t come from us directly. 

I want to share the stage (and the meeting agenda, and the retreat program) with high class professional grade grown ups, simply because they make me look better by association, and the fear of sullying up the program is a strong motivator for improvement. Their work will reflect well on me. I don’t want my work to reflect poorly on them. Because it will. 

I invited our Confirmation students to share their questions about faith and related phenomena. Compiling their responses was illuminating. 

I grouped their questions into categories, because I can’t help myself. 

Jesus got more questions than anything else.

“Did Jesus plan to die?” 

“Did Jesus fight back when he was on the cross?”

“When is Christ coming back?”

“Did Jesus walk on water?”

The students’ questions about Jesus are all related to claims the faith makes about him and not about the claims Jesus makes about the kingdom of God in the gospels. I’ve had students scratch their heads over “Blessed are the meek” before, but not here. 

A close second was questions about the church. 

“What would happen if we didn’t go to church?”

“Why is church an hour long?”

“Why is church on Sundays?”

These are questions about the most basic elements of something these 8th graders have been made to do since they were children. They’re precisely the kind of questions Confirmation is for. Every one of them opens into a conversation about Christian theology and practice. 

This is what makes Confirmation fun. 

A blue stack of pages printed with a recent blog post walked into my office yesterday. The carrier confessed that he had meant to make one copy but mistakenly made 50. I was confused. “You printed this from my blog?” I asked. 

“No,” he answered. Holding up the white original he explained, “This was sitting on the counter next to the copier.”

Huh. I am not in the habit of printing out my blog posts and sprinkling them around the office. 

Write something. Share it. What happens with it after you hit “Publish” is out of your hands. 

***

I used my sports column in the college paper to criticize the rude and rowdy behavior of some male fans during women’s basketball games. A copy of that column got clipped and placed in the personal mailbox of those fans’ ringleader. Stares and whispers in the cafeteria arose instantly. I was confronted in the computer lab and my defense was shushed by the librarian. Somebody unloaded a fire extinguisher on my car. 

Write something. Share it. What happens with it after you hit “Publish” is out of your hands. 

A committee is a good vehicle for making policies and procedures. So I’m asking my Youth Ministry Committee to recommend some guidelines (cousins to policies, I know) to govern how adult staff and volunteers interact with youth using social media. 

The first draft was too rigid. It didn’t allow for adult-to-youth text messaging without the burdensome requirement to copy a parent on all communication. It also prohibited the sharing of anything but information between youth and adults in digital threads, making a problem of the simplest expression from a teenager like, “I hate homework.” So I did some revisions, and this is my crowdsourcing attempt to get feedback before I share it with the committee next week. 

Do these guidelines feel useful?

Adults should never interact with youth via Snapchat or any other platform which automatically deletes content shared by users. 

Adults should not initiate online connections with youth. This includes “friend” requests on Facebook or “follows” on Instagram or Twitter. 

If an adult is to accept a social media connection from one youth on any given platform, she should accept connection requests from all youth on that platform.

While youth are likely to openly share thoughts and feelings online, adults should take great care when expressing personal feelings to youth in digital communication. 

Absent a parent or legal guardian’s written consent, adults may not share any personal information pertaining to youth online. This includes things like the youth’s name, email address, or photographs. 

Here’s a link to the whole draft document, which includes a prefatory paragraph. 

Thanks for sharing feedback in the comments.