A teenager can be known at church. That is the ecclesiastical home field advantage. Pray God our teenagers are known in their homes and among their peers, on their stages and playing fields, in their classrooms and online–the church champions teenagers being truly known everywhere and must never press its superiority in this regard.

But this is what church is fundamentally for. While school exists to teach and soccer to coach, church aims to become a human community of disciples who know one another and who, in knowing one another, know Christ, “the image of the invisible God.”

It is so true that church has lost its hold on the market of good-for-you children’s and youth’s activities. That’s no pity. An abundance of camps and tournaments is a beautiful problem to have. I’ve lived in places where church is the only game in town for young people, and those places are impoverished. Youth group is part of an ecosystem now. I’m fine with that.

So let’s do what we do best and play to our organizational strength: knowing one another. Let’s press our small groups, our mission trips, and our camping outings through the sieve of relationships to make them better. Let’s ask, “How can this trip to Haiti make this teenager better known by her peers and the adults in her church? How will she grow in knowledge of herself? How can the weekly youth group make known to the church the awkward seventh grader who sits alone in the corner? And what opportunities for teenagers to be known are we not exploiting? Worship? Leadership? Staff?

Teenagers who know they are known at church know also that they are known by God. They, too, can make that known to us.

Vlogbrothers is an exchange between siblings. Rounders was written by lifelong writing partners Brian Koppelman and David Levin. Buddies Joshua Malina and Hrishikesh Hirway make “The West Wing Weekly” podcast. These are some of my favorite collaborations.

Yet all of these collaborators do things on their own too: John Green writes books; Koppelman hosts a podcast; Malina acts in “Scandal” and Hirway hosts “Song Exploder.” So why the collaboration?

Maybe doing one thing doesn’t work as well as doing several things. Especially for creatives, working in isolation is but one vein available to you, one that carries distinct advantages , like un-challenged creative control, while collaborating is something else entirely. A collaboration runs on its own rules and permits a level of reach and depth not possible alone.

Why not do both? Extroverts like me defer to collaborating, even though I know how valuable making my own stuff is, so I look for solitary projects to complement all of the collaborating I want to be doing (this is why the YoRocko Podcast was so valuable). Likewise for the likes of Koppelman and Green, supplementing their own films and books with cooperative projects helps them grow.

You need to be collaborating and you need to be working alone. Simultaneously.

 

 

Currying the affinity of a new acquaintance by insulting a third party you assume they dislike is a terrible way to build a constructive relationship. I’ve totally done it though.

I’ve learned the lesson. Now, when I meet someone who’s in a hurry to pronounce judgment on someone else, I kind of shut down. How are we going to do good work together if the basis of our connection is the disparaged character and intentions of others?

Tell me who you like instead. I’ll totally return the favor.

Meredith gave me a book back in December called The First 90 Days: Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter, and I have made good use of it these past three months. In early February–when I started my new gig–I composed a 90 day plan and shared it with the Head of Staff. The great bulk of the plan was one-on-one meetings: with volunteers, with fellow staff, with presbytery colleagues, with parents, and with youth.

I owe the one-on-one meeting strategy to IAF-style community organizing. I’ve consumed an excess of coffee because of it, but the things I’ve learned about the people I’m working with and the talent that’s here are invaluable. I made a master list of people and just started sending out emails to set up meetings. People are gracious and accommodating.

[The population that has resisted my one-on-one meeting efforts has been the  youth. I have some work to do yet to learn how to connect with students as engaged in as many things as these students are.]

The goal of the first 90 days is to start contributing value to the organization as quickly as possible. In some situations, the value that is needed amounts to activity–start making decisions and moving pieces around. In others, careful listening and processing are more valuable than observable action. You have to determine which kind of situation you’re in before you start trying to be valuable.

Thanks for all the support and connection these past three months. YoRocko readers new and old have helped me get my feet beneath me in a slippery new venture. Here’s to the next 90 days.

Nobody practices youth ministry by themselves. Rather, nobody should; the image of the independent magnetic youth worker with a preternatural gift for relating to teenagers causes real harm to the craft. Those who work with youth groups also work with groupings of adults–parents, coaches, teachers, and, of course, volunteers. Youth ministry is only partly about youth.

It is also about this constellation of grown ups who are shaping teens’ lives. We get to inject some intention into that shaping with our volunteers and parents, which is why scheduling training and other volunteer enrichment events is so important. It’s also why listening to the parents of teens in our sphere matters so much.

The coaches and teachers almost seem like invisible adversaries to youth workers when our students’ weekends get swallowed up by tournaments and homework. It doesn’t have to be though. I used to play softball with a high school teacher who had one of our church’s youth in his biology class. Beyond bio, this teacher facilitated the formation of  a cohort of peers around a role playing game they were into. They played daily in his office over lunch. Likewise, last week I met a student at his squash lesson, and the chance to watch his coach taught me a thing or two. I’m glad to know that coach now.

Youth ministers attend to an ecosystem of care and influence at work in the lives of teenagers. We recognize our place in that ecosystem,  not disparaging the other parts, but looking for ways to partner and to bless. Youth ministry is as much about adults as it is youth.

Architecture. Knitting. Public Speaking. Feeding People. Hair Braiding.

The Youth Summer Bizarre is already gathering proposals for courses on all manner of subjects, including the ones listed above. We’re discovering talent and making connections.

Just last night I spoke with a high school student who is heading to France for a school trip in two weeks.

“Where in France are you going?”

“Strasbourg.”

“Oh, do you know So And So? She’s an usher for the morning worship service who used to live in Strasbourg. Now she gives architecture tours around town in French. She’s doing an English version for youth here this summer.”

Eyes widening. “No. I need to meet her.”

Yes you do. And you will.

It’s working.

I’m coming to view more and more of youth ministry as a constellation of relationships and activities for helping teenagers take account for where they are. This is a subtle shift away from a focus on who they are. Identity is slippery, especially in adolescence, and I am less confident every day in a person’s sense of themselves at 13 or 17 to serve as a dependable source for durable personal formation.

Coaxing along a young person’s sense of their location in the world might be a better approach for developing empathy, imagination, and, alas, even identity.

So where is a North American adolescent in 2016?

If I know her, she’s like in a particular congregation with a unique history and indispensable participants. My work is to nurture her sense of that place and those people.

A teenager in church also finds himself in  a Christian tradition. Catholic, Presbyterian, Evangelical–whatever expression of Christianity affords us our interactions with teens, our work is to help them see it for what it is, which means helping them take in other Christian traditions clearly too.

For that matter, your teenager is in a religion. This is not a solitary experience, as David Dark is reminding us in Life’s Too Short To Pretend You’re Not Religious, and yet are we doing enough to honor the religious context teenagers are living in when they come to youth group or sit through a sermon?

There are a bunch of other ways for conceiving of location with youth, but here’s just one more. Youth are in a culture. It is densely layered, this culture, and contains sub culture upon sub culture. Directing the focus of our students to where they’re standing, culturally, as North Americans, as teenagers, feels very important.