I got to listen to some people gush over a retiring colleague yesterday, and now I think attending retirement celebrations must be a terrific learning opportunity.

Endorsements of a retirees best qualities and most enduring achievements are like a curriculum for someone with decades of work left in them. Take note of the generosity that earns repeated mention, and decide to be more generous. File away the unfiltered observation of his dependability, day in and day out. Decide against canceling that thing. Don’t fail to mark the effect, over the course of this person’s career, of all those things he was doing without recognition.

Be curious, then, about the absence in all these emotional speeches of the qualities you think are most prized for your work: innovation, creativity, leadership. Wonder–if you dare–if it’s possible to change the world by investing your best working years with a recurring decision to show up, to share, and to recognize as often and as publicly as you can the contributions of others.

And by all means have a cupcake. It’s a celebration.

I’m introducing myself to a room full of colleagues this morning by answering the question, “What’s saving your life right now?”

The Royals are winning again.

My spouse started a new job.

My daughter is in a really cool maker’s camp this week.

I have really supportive people.

I get to do work I love with talented, committed people.

None of those are my answer. I have an answer, don’t worry. But none of those candidates are it.

I have the fortune of work and relationships and commitments that amount to a life that doesn’t feel, most days, like it requires saving. I am tempting fate to acknowledge this, I know, and surely the days are coming (they’ve visited before) when life feels in desperate need of saving. But these are not those days, thanks be to God.

That’s not my answer either.

 

Not 24 hours after families started receiving our annual youth calendar in the mail did I start hearing about problems with it. In one particularly glaring oversight, I scheduled a summer mission trip to begin before school is out. Face, meet palm.

There are technical missteps that lead to mistakes like this, and those are easily fixed (be sure and consult the school district calendar). But my anxiety over calendar errors is symptomatic of a faulty understanding of what a calendar is and is useful for.

A calendar is never a finished product.

So the next time I do an annual calendar for youth, I’m going to release it in phases, beginning with a public beta. That first one will be watermarked. It will carry a note that it is provisional and unfinished. Only after that one’s been out there for several weeks will it become “The” calendar, and even then . . .

A calendar is always in beta, isn’t it? Opportunities present themselves sometimes weeks, not months, out from their dates. Busy people need to plan ahead, and the calendar needs to help them by getting the big dates right and leaving them alone. But there should also be some room for development in the calendar, even after its published.

A post mortem on our mostly ineffective summer experiments with youth programming produces some reliable culprits: teens are busy; families travel; new things take time to catch on. All of those explanations adequately account for why our calendar of weekly get togethers in the city and bizarre Sunday morning workshops generated such paltry participation.

But I’m grappling with another culprit: ease.

Maybe most of the youth I’m working with are simply not interested in things that are easy.

I thought about this yesterday after riding the morning train next to a 13 year old from the church who lives in my neighborhood. He was on his way to an acting class, and he was aiming to arrive an hour early. Later in the day he would get himself, again by train, to a three hour volleyball practice. He wouldn’t get home until around 8:00 that evening, and somewhere in his day’s schedule he also fits in an hour of swimming. Fall baseball practice is three days a week as well. All of this he does during his summer vacation, almost entirely on his own.

Each one of those activities challenges him mentally and physically, as does commuting on public transit by himself. He’s committed to them not in spite of their difficulty but because of it.

Churches must always always always maintain low commitment points of entry for teenagers, like relaxed youth group gatherings. Once we have that, though, I think we need to add things that are more demanding of teens as disciples.

So maybe the next experiment we attempt will be intense service experience or theology course.

 

[For those of you who were interested, here’s a link to a pdf of one of the children’s bulletins we’ve been designing this month.]

Today I want to share a thought that’s been gurgling the last several weeks. We tried a couple of experiments over the summer to stimulate unconventional youth participation, and concurrently we ran the summer thing youth are used to. The experiments floundered and the conventional thing thrived (well, the experiments didn’t totally flounder–youth participation was disappointing, but adult leaders emerged who otherwise wouldn’t have, so that’s a win). The experiments were low-cost, low-risk, low-time commitment. The conventional thing was a week-long mission trip, which is high–allthosethings.

So the conclusion I’m tempted to draw is this: these youth are better served right now by conventional programming that makes a high demand on their time and investment (lock-ins, mission trips, retreats), and less well served by things designed as easy points of entry (afternoons at the beach, meetups at the movie-in-the-park, Summer Sunday morning classes).

Yet no sooner does that thought escape my fingers than another one follows: that may be true of these youth, now, today, but that doesn’t mean we can stop experimenting with gatherings and service opportunities designed for youth who aren’t presently participating, either because they’re simply not here yet or because they are here and don’t relate to the youth ministry as it’s currently configured.

Can you double down on the approach your community is used to and commit to experimentation at the same time?

Yesterday I wrote about the children’s bulletins some of us collaborated on in August. Several people emailed to ask to see a sample, and so I’ll put one up as soon as I get a pdf made, hopefully by tomorrow.

There’s another collaboration with children’s ministry I’m working on, though, that I wanted to share and see if anyone has done something similar: a mission trip with both middle school youth and older elementary school kids, like 5th-8th graders.

The reason we want to try this is that both the Children’s Ministry person and I are interested in helping the church’s young people transition from children’s ministry to youth ministry. My added agenda is to put some of the responsibility for that transition on middle school youth.

It’s on our calendar for next summer, since I use calendar publishing as a personal challenge; once it’s on a public calendar you kind of have to do it. But neither my colleague or I have done it before. We’re thinking it needs to be close, like no more than a half day’s drive away, but that it shouldn’t be where we live. And we’re planning on a standard week-long mission trip schedule: travel Sunday, work Monday through Thursday, do something fun Friday, come home Saturday.

Anybody done this and have advice on it?

A few of us have been fooling around this month, while Sunday School is on hiatus, with worship bulletins for kids. It’s got all the same stuff as the standard bulletin, only with some prompts for kids added in: draw a picture here of what you think the Bible story might have looked like; what is something you’re thankful for this week; did anything in today’s service confuse you?

We’re adding in some activity sheets from Illustrated Children’s Ministry too.

I’ve learned a few things with this experiment.

1. Collaborating with people who do children’s ministry is fun.
2. Design is a big deal. We have a crack team of people who design our bulletins (and all the other church communication pieces), and they’re gooooood.
3. These are for kids. We thought originally that the activity sheets would work for younger children and the special bulletins would help youth, like maybe up to 8th grade, but that’s not turning out. Youth older than, say, 5th grade aren’t taking them. Which is fine. It reminds me of my previous experiment with acolytes in worship, where 3rd-5th graders were really into it, but interest tailed off after that.
4. The conversation prompts we thought were for middle schoolers are being taken up by children. The mother of a fourth grader told me on Sunday that her daughter kept asking her questions throughout the service, which she’s never done before.
5. Curiosity is its own goal. Getting kids to ask questions and wonder about things in worship is a win. We asked a question about baptism in the bulletin: “Were you baptized? Do you or your parents remember it?” A child came up to me after the service and asked, “What happens if you don’t get baptized?” The asking of that question means the bulletins are doing their job.

Sunday School starts up in September, and it runs at the same time as worship, so we won’t be doing these kids bulletins each week. But I think we’ve definitely hit upon a valuable tool for helping kids experience worship with their parents. That’s really all we were after.

I used to write these Monday Morning Quarterback posts that narrated Sundays (like this one). It was a fun way to process what was, for a season, a very demanding day full of unpredictable church and family responsibilities.

After a couple of years of writing it, though, Sunday got to be less demanding. I figured some things out on the church end and family stuff changed, mostly as my daughter got older. Writing Monday Morning Quarterback started to feel like a performance, like Sundays weren’t hectic and random enough on their own anymore; they needed some embellishment.

So now here is a Monday following a Sunday completely unworthy of a blog post. There was worship and our experimental kids and family bulletins. There was a youth leader confab that went just great. And there was an evening walk with Wife and Daughter (btw, it is the eve of Wife’s new job). That kind of day does not merit a time stamped recitation. It merits gratitude.

No, really. It’s awesome.

These people come together at least once a week to rehearse a good news story about sacrificial grace and ultimate redemption. They sing (who sings anymore?!). They pray–sometimes with one person speaking and everyone else listening; sometimes with everyone speaking at the same time; sometimes taking turns! They even partake together of the rarest of substances in the modern world: silence.

And all of that is just the hour they spend together on Sunday morning.

Then they tutor local kids. They feed hungry folks and make blankets for babies born at the nearby hospital. They visit one another in sickness, and even visit one another’s friends and families. Who does that?

I just want you to know how awesome your church is. If your budget can bear that half time youth ministry position filled by a seminary (or even college) student, please go for it. Don’t sweat the long term staffing strategy just now. Put it out there that your awesome church is looking for a part time youth leader for a one year position. Then don’t take just anyone. Insist on responsibility and maturity, because you deserve that. And then hand over the keys, but don’t get out of the car. Surround your person with support and encouragement. Volunteer for the lock-in.

Your awesome church is going to churn out some awesome leaders if you let it, because there simply is no work experience like church work experience. You have that going for you.

I just wanted you to know that.

(Hat tip to Trinity Presbyterian Church in Cherry Hill, New Jersey for handing me the keys for a year back in 2003. You taught me much.)

T’is the season for start-of-the-year mailings: calendars, flyers, letters, sign-up forms, consent forms. Watch the website. Watch your email. Watch your mailbox.

Yes, your actual mailbox.

I’m ready for a straight up analog experiment this fall. Every event announcement we post to our Facebook page and our website and a Constant Contact campaign is also going home to somebody’s mailbox. I’ve come to the end of the digital road; there’s not another platform I’m adopting to reach youth and their parents with information. Not Instagram, and absolutely not Snapchat. Okay, maybe Instagram?