Two years ago I proclaimed that I was abandoning the ban on cell phones during youth mission trips. Then last summer’s trip made me reconsider. Here’s a quote from that latter post:

In a word, it was gossip. Cell phones allow for unchecked gossip to spread like wildfire through cliques within a group completely outside the attention of the rest of the group or any of the adult leaders.

So this year, in a new church and with students I barely know, I proposed a complete ban on cell phones to our leadership team. The team is on board. No phones. As nuanced as I try to make my view of technology, and as resistant as I am to demonizing exaggerations of its impact, especially on teenagers, my experience last summer burned me badly. I could be overreacting. I’m willing to admit that.

Yet my last attempt at this taught me that leaving a teenager’s phone at home for a week is as difficult for some parents as it is for the teens. Almost all the kids we caught with phones two years ago reported that mom or dad instructed them to bring it. My colleague here used to work at a camp that disallowed cell phones, and she once saw a parent drop their son off and then covertly drive around the back of his cabin and hand him his phone through the car window.

Cell phones enable connection between teenagers and their parents and between teen peers, and I think connection is tremendously valuable. Yet the connection they enable with people back home is the connection they short circuit with the people with us on the van or in the church basement. We want to create the conditions on our mission trip for community to grow amidst face-to-face conversation, listening, even boredom.

Yes boredom. The Bored and Brilliant BOOT CAMP has me high on the prospect of boredom as a generative force. So along with the list of all the leaders’ cell phone numbers and all the phone numbers of all the places we will be during the week, along with the address of the blog we will be maintaining every day during the trip, we’re sending the BOOT CAMP link out to our teens and their parents before the trip so they can practice.

 

 

Thriving ministry is supported by talent. A huge part of the pastoral vocation is the finding, the calling forth, the enabling, and the cultivating of talent.

These days I’m relying heavily on a particular talent-finding strategy: the all call. I’m putting invitations in worship bulletins for anyone who’s interested to teach a youth class or come on a mission trip, or even just come learn about what our teenagers are doing. It’s a kind of magnet held up to the congregation to see who sticks.

The all call is not a sufficient strategy by itself, but when paired with a regular habit of one-on-one meetings and targeted invitations, it yields fruit.

Some people who respond to an all call will need to be directed to some narrowly defined roles, while still others will need some prodding to experiment with their own ideas. Some may even need redirected; I don’t actually have talent for some things I once thought I did. All this work is worth it, though, if it means we’re working with a crop of people who have that indispensable main ingredient that all talent needs to be effective: interest.

Are internet discussion boards worth anything? Do you learn new information by engaging with them? Does your perspective change? Do you make connections of value with people?

I lamented after a day’s worth of back-and-forth on a message board that I don’t have the energy anymore for it anymore, not for the obviously irritating stuff like name-calling and ALL CAPS, but also not even for the not-so-irritating nuanced arguments and reasoned opinions. All of it makes me tired and leaves me frustrated. What energy I have feels better spent working on projects with people. If there’s an internet discussion board for that, I’d love to know about it.

Am I being lazy? Is there good work being done in some of these threads and I’m too cranky to see it?

When I was an aspiring sports writer in college I loved reading columnists like Bob Ryan and Jay Mariotti and Joe Posnanski for their incendiary verbiage. I envied the sharp brevity and the fearlessness of their opinion writing. I took a few stabs at the style in my sports college for the college paper, and, not surprisingly, came off more mean than informed. I didn’t persist.

To a young person full of self doubt, commentary feels powerful. Having a take wins you respect, and the force with which you assert it matters more than its substance (this is the appeal of Jim Rome among 20 and 30 something men).

But I think I’ve aged out of that passion for commentary. Now what I want to read is insight. I’m less interested now in what you think than in what you notice. Share your observations, please–about politics, sports, religion, culture, yourself–and explore those observations with context and analysis. There is a lot going on in the world, all at once, so there’s no shortage of subject matter.

The opinion column is too constraining for the world we now live in and the people we now are.

 

Please excuse this exercise in drawing a simple personal conclusion from a complex global development, but Brexit tells me that we, the most connected expression of humanity the globe has ever hosted, have crucial work to do to prevent us tearing away from one another.

It’s well worn by now, the observation that Globalization has lost its sheen, the gnawing awareness that human difference is a powerful motivator and won’t be overcome by Coke or Facebook. We can’t rely on structure alone to build community. We have to risk vulnerability in face-to-face encounters to bring about trusting, reciprocal relationships, friendships even.

Here’s what this means for me. I’m not doing enough if I’m only amassing Facebook friends and blog followers. I need to prioritize shared work with people who aren’t like me in real time. Lucky for me (and for you!), our era makes that easier than ever to arrange–send an email, tap out a text, even make a phone call. And yet no technology will make the human demands of that kind of work any easier, ever. I have to reach out and risk.

So, what can we work on together. I’m ready.

 

Conspiratorial thinking has a cousin called “Crisis Thinking.” The former exploits loose correlations between people and events to hide from meaningful work, while the latter uses those same correlations to justify feverish activity that is also, in the end, hiding from meaningful work.

Example: a church in my former presbytery wanted to overture the General Assembly in 2010 that discussion of changes to ordination standards to include openly gay men and women should cease until the church had made a thorough study of the relationship between that discussion and losses in congregational membership.

We should do two things when we feel like we’re facing a crisis. First, we should make sure that its’ not simply a crisis for us. That is, we should check our panic with peers and colleagues, especially ones who don’t look like us and live where we live. Losses in congregational membership across the PC(USA) feel like a crisis to those reared in a homogeneous denomination led mostly by white men, but those same losses feel very different (I imagine) to the women and racial and ethnic minorities who are now sharing leadership in a smaller church that used to exclude them when it was bigger.

Second, a perceived crisis is an opportunity to find the soul of our work. It is entirely possible that declining membership statistics, for example, point to a failure on our part to do work that matters, to forge authentic and caring connections with neighbors, to care for the poor, and to stand up for the truth. We shouldn’t dodge that possibility. It is entirely possible, though, that membership losses persist in the face of sustained soulful church leadership, and that crisis thinking will only prompt us to gut our work of its soul for the sake of something cosmetic and transitory.

The work of church leadership today is to make space for honest connection between strained and fearful people and between those people and God. Calling the conditions of the day a “Crisis” doesn’t change that.

“There’s something going on” is the slogan of conspiratorial thinking, which I now see is a very convenient tool for not taking any meaningful action to make life measurably better. Of course, the modus operandi of the conspiracy theorist is to loudly suggest causal relationships for even the loosest of correlations, whether they be between the President of the United States and terrorist attacks or between the five wealthiest people in the world, and that’s a lazy shortcut which allows the theorist to avoid the work involved to discover the real causes to real problems and then to propose and test real solutions.

Conspiratorial thinking is a form of hiding. Weak. Sauce.

We can fall into conspiratorial thinking in our work, too, stretching correlations into causes when church membership declines, when we get a bad performance review, when soccer wins out over youth group yet again. If our explanation for our own ineffectiveness is that “There’s something going on,” then we’re hiding from personal responsibility and from the underlying challenge of our vocation, which is to lead in times of change to bear witness to good news, even at the cost of our own life.

There’s nothing going on. But there is work to be done.

 

The anxious feeling that you’re not pulling your weight amongst your colleagues might be wrong. It’s likely that you are, in fact, doing your fair share of the work, or that, even if you’re not, it’s only for a moment in which you need to attend to other things. In my experience, the people who fear they’re not carrying enough are. It’s the ones who complain about having to do too much who are keeping the team from really soaring.

So check yourself when you get twitchy because you suspect everyone else is doing more work, or better work, than you. Check yourself, and then give thanks that you’re working with people who take care of business. Seriously, if that feeling tells you anything it’s that these are the kinds of people you want to be working with.

 

 

Don’t cushion your words by telling us that they’re tough for you to say, because you’re either lying or shilling for sympathy, and neither makes us want to believe you.

The preacher says, “I have to say some difficult things about homosexuality”mere hours after the Orlando shootings, and what follows is a breezy sermon filled with adjectives like “disgusting” and “gross.” To watch him and his amateur Power Point, it’s the easiest thing this preacher has ever done. He’s clearly lying: there’s nothing difficult about this for him, and that makes him dangerous, because he’s worse than wrong (and ill informed and tasteless); he’s a liar, and we will never believe him.

Yet even if “This is hard for me to say” is authentic, it’s manipulative. You’re shifting the burden of your task as a truth-teller onto your audience, and that’s not fair. If you’re straining under the weight of words that must be said, we’ll see it. We will judge the words on their own merit, though, and not on the basis of our perception of your effort. If you make a show of your effort, forget it.

Don’t lie. Don’t manipulate. Say what you need to say. Trust us.

 

Packers from the moving company are on their way here this morning, and so everything is unplugged except the wifi router. Trash cans are all empty and clean. The place has an echo.

Whenever I move, the purging that comes with packing ignites a spark for simple living. “Why can’t we always live like this?” I wonder. Just a few pieces of furniture, loose items all neatly wedged into clear plastic boxes, roooooom to move around. It’s so, I don’t know, Zen?

Then I hear Meredith upstairs herding those loose items for the third consecutive day, and I realize I don’t have anywhere to place my coffee cup.