Is The Truth Still Out There for Teenagers?

Kenda Creasy Dean wrote youth ministry books in the early 2000’s in which she heralded The X-Files’ Fox Mulder and Dana Scully as paradigms of discipleship for postmodern teens: insatiably curious and totally cool with mystery and ambiguity. Youth, she insisted, related to the enthusiasm for the unexplainable typified by the paranormal drama far more than the quest for logical certainty embodied by a lot of church life.

Dean’s “The-Truth-Is-Out-There” enthusiasm for the show actually made me a viewer; I had completely opted out of the phenomenon when the show was running and only started watching in 2008. I watched all nine seasons in under a year, and I thought Dean was totally right.

I also thought the X-Files’ mythology had more to offer than a philosophical posture. The story’s engine is a pair of investigators committed to unearthing the truth in the face of intensely motivated violent opposition from the forces of institutional authority. That feels even more timely to me now that when I first binge-watched the show and made its theme my ringtone.

The X-Files has relaunched, and I badly want it to have retained its dark conspiratorial posture, because I think that is the contribution we need now, in the day of government-poisoned water and police cover ups.

I’ve watched the first episode, and I’m not super enthused.

I wonder how Kenda Creasy Dean feels about it.

On Muffins (Or, Why Surprises Are Less Helpful Than Requests

To prepare for my move to Chicago this weekend I’m making muffins. Dozens of muffins are stacked in the freezer for Wife and Daughter to have for breakfast over the next several weeks. Cherry, strawberry, apple, banana nut, gingerbread–I’m practically changing my address to Drury Lane.

At first it was going to be chicken. Thumbing through the Pioneer Woman Cooks at the local Barnes And Noble on Saturday, I lingered for several minutes over the chapter on “Freezer Food,” where the author extols the virtues of pre-cooked chicken breasts for weeks’ worth of easy dinners. Right then I made my plan: cook scores of chicken breasts this week and secretly stash them in the freezer. Then spring the surprise from the Windy City.

But something made me flinch. If it were me, dinner every night would be the greatest energy drain, and so pre-cooked chicken would save the day. But it’s not me. So I divulged my plan and had my energies redirected to breakfast.

13 years of marriage have taught me to distrust the promise of the surprise and to prefer instead the beneficence of a concrete request.

Cat Lady And The Filing Cabinet

I’m standing in my living room. It’s a sunny Sunday afternoon in January, and I am bedecked in a Denver Broncos jersey. The AFC championship game is on. It is the third quarter, and the Broncos are ahead, but it is a defensive war-of-attrition type game, and I can’t relax. So I’m standing.

I don’t normally get to watch football games, since the Sunday afternoon schedule of a pastor with a seven year-old and overworked spouse is unpredictable and generally unfavorable to three-plus hours spent watching television. I’m in between jobs for two weeks, though, so this is that rare Sunday when hours stretch out in front of me like empty pages of a sketch book. Still, I’m standing, because standing makes me appear more at the ready to multitask, say fold laundry or fix my daughter’s toys.

There’s another reason I’m standing. A woman is supposed to come pick up a table and file cabinet I listed on the local freecycle site, and 40 minutes ago she called to say she was about 20 minutes away, so I’m pacing in front of the window watching for her, but with no idea what she–or her car–looks like. The table is as big as you’d expect a table to be. She’d better be in a truck.

I spy through the window a white PT Cruiser crawling down the street, and I’m sure this is her. I’m relieved she’s not lost, but I’m irritated she doesn’t have a truck. There’s no way a table fits in that little car, not to mention the two-drawer filing cabinet she also wants. These things have to go, though. They are high on the list of tasks I need to knock out this week to justify moving to another city for four months to begin a new job without my family. We make eye contact through my front window to confirm that we are, indeed, both looking for one another.

I know from the “I Love Cats” sticker on the back of the car and the array of empty boxes spilling from the windows that I’m dealing with a person who not only loves cats (duh), but who also trolls freecycling websites and rolls a car full of empty boxes. I simply want to get this transaction completed and return to the game.

She’s talkative, though, which is surprising for a box-carting cat lady. She’s actually brought the boxes for me, she says, as an exchange for the table and file cabinet. I remember now that I spoke of moving on the phone and make a mental note to stop sharing details of my life with strangers (blogging excepted). I get the boxes out of the cruiser and into my garage and then set to work on getting the table situated. The rear of the car is bigger than I though. It will definitely fit.

We get the table in (she is helping me lift it and quite strong), and then attempt the filing cabinet in the front passenger seat. No dice. The door won’t close. We try three or four different configurations, and all the while she’s telling me that her neighbors will be upset with her when she arrives home with these new items. Curious, I ask, “Why?”

“They’ve sort of adopted me since my husband died and they keep telling me I need to be getting rid of things, not acquiring them.”

I consider for a moment that I am enabling a grieving hoarder.

The job is done, though. She is precariously wedged in the driver’s seat between the filing cabinet and her door, smiling happily as she backs out of my driveway. As she speeds off down my street I spend a thought on the needs people carry around like broken down boxes and how it is so easy to trade one for another.

 

I’m Not A Role Model

I heard the term “role model” during my last week of work, and every time I heard it I felt uncomfortable. There’s nothing I’m trying harder not to be than a role model.

You can always tell when someone’s trying to be your role model. They’re overly certain of their convictions, and their actions are telegraphed with purposeful intent in a way that feels inauthentic. They’re trying to change you to be like them because they don’t like you the way you are. Nobody who has tried to be my role model ever was.

No, my role models are people who aren’t trying to be, who go about their work in a way I notice, though they don’t know I notice.

Oh. Oh, I get it now.

Make ’em Laugh: In Praise of Levity

For the final three minutes of my last appearance at youth group I was laughing so hard I couldn’t breathe. It was just the leaders who were left–students went home 30 minutes earlier–and one of them offered a strained description of some quotidian thing that another one couldn’t let pass without mimicking incredulously. Chuckles spread, and then six adults were gasping for air and crying with laughter.

It was a fitting close to my time with this community because so much of our work with junior high and high school students has been marked by laughter, both amongst ourselves as well as with those students. I’ve actually come to see laughter as part of our work: permitting it, stimulating it, giving ourselves over to it, even at the expense of our agenda.

It will be very difficult for me to work with people if I am not able to laugh with them. I won’t actually be able to do my best work if goofing off is forbidden.

I took a very serious class on a very serious subject taught by a very serious man in my last semester of seminary, but I sat next to a couple of guys with whom I was constantly tempted to crack jokes. I spent the semester embarrassed about my immaturity. But in a private conversation with the professor on the last day, he told me how much he appreciated the “levity” that marked our antics as well as our work.

I work to laugh and I laugh to work.

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

Treating teenagers with respect goes a long way.

Respect starts with appreciation and interest. Respect minus appreciation is obligation. Respect minus interest is politeness. People can feel the difference.

I’m not sure the teenagers I’ve worked with have a ton of adults in their lives who are permitted to appreciate them and be interested in them. Coaches, teachers, tutors, youth pastors–all of us have a stake in the performance of the teens we’re working with. If we’re not careful, those stakes can stifle appreciation and corrupt interest, so that students become means to our professional ends.

Here’s a test question: if a teenager can’t come to any of our classes, practices, rehearsals, or meetings, are we still actively interested in how they are experiencing the world? Are we working to make space for them to explore that? That space is invaluable, and none of us are very good at creating it ourselves.

A Good Goodbye Takes Work

The gift of a good goodbye is time and space.

Moments and hours to recall with gratitude the gifts that have passed between us.

Rooms and tables gathering a community of recollection that will tell stories.

That time and space doesn’t just exist, though. Someone has to set it aside and work to prepare it.

For my colleagues and friends who did that work for yesterday’s goodbyes, I am unspeakably grateful. You have given me a gift I can never repay, and you have taught me the importance of working for a good goodbye. I will hold myself to very high goodbye standards from now on.

 

A Pastor Guts His Library

I cleaned out my office. My library is down to eight Uhaul book boxes. Six of those boxes full of books went to the Goodwill. They contained volumes I considered essential 10 years ago, must have classics for any pastor worth her theological salt. Not in boxes but staying behind on one long office shelf–a donation to the church library–are sets of works I once badly coveted.

Part of this biblio-purge is driven by an impulse to pare down, lighten up, cling less authors and titles for my sense of identity and impact.

Another part of comes from an awareness of a drift in my interests since I moved into this office eight years ago. That awareness is most pointed with regard to all the “Missional Church” books I gave away. I clung desperately to those books in my first call, but looking at them today I have a definite sense that those volumes were a great deal of ink spilled on one big idea, a kind of theoretical hall of mirrors where each contributor reflected what all the others were already doing, only a little louder or longer. I got the idea. My work is based on it. I don’t need the books anymore.

Yet a third component of this move away from all these books arises from a reconsideration of the value of a theological library for my work as a pastor. I am uneasy about a move away from a library stocked with the Niebuhrs and the Barths I was weaned on in seminary, but less and less of the ministerial work I’m doing utilizes those texts. At all.

I’m drowning in text: magazine articles, blog posts, books, newspapers–all in both digital and analog form (I’m the guy who prints digital long form journalism to read on paper). This book dump is not about a Kindle. It’s a desire to possess only books with which I can imagine a lively engagement, between me and the books as well as between me and people with whom I want to discuss and share the books. If I couldn’t imagine running to my shelves for a book,. I didn’t keep it.

 

Five Things I Learned from A Preschool Director

From Seth Godin: “Every job candidate ought to be able to outline the five lessons learned from the leaders they’ve worked with previously. Those unwilling or unable to do so are not paying attention.”

I’ll take that challenge. I’m not a job candidate, but I’m about to start a new job, and I want to be both willing and able to outline five lessons I’ve learned from the leaders I’ve worked with in my job of the last eight years.

I’ve written about my Head of Staff and Christian Education Director.

Today: the Preschool Director.

For a pastor, working with a Preschool Director is super educational, because early childhood education is a field unto itself that most pastors know very little about. There are state licensing agencies and national accrediting organizations to navigate, a staff of 15-20 teachers to manage, books to keep, and marketing to conduct. It’s dizzying to watch.

 

Here are five things I’ve learned from our Preschool Director.

Care Out Loud

Our Preschool Director cares about her work and about her staff in a big, big way. She has them over to her house for a holiday party. She quietly puts her own money into supplies for classrooms. She listens to them and advocates for them. They notice, and their work in response makes our preschool better. Caring starts at the top.

Know Your Stuff

Early Childhood Education isn’t so unlike other fields in the amount of continual learning it requires to excel at it. My colleague knows every teacher-to-child ratio, every food allergy policy, every accreditation standard. When something changes in the field, she’s the first to know. That’s tremendously reassuring to parents, and it’s prevents a lot of distracting headaches. It helps that she teaches Early Childhood Education at a local community college.

Scale Appropriately

In order for our infant and toddler care to be as good as it can possibly be, our Preschool Director caps enrollment at a lower number than we can actually take. She’s learned that if we get as much out of the teacher-to-child ratio as possible, the quality of care will suffer. Staff will be less flexible. So the center actually is under-filled, but with a waiting list that expectant parents in town are increasingly eager to get on.

Invite Artists 

One of the most effective developments in our curriculum in my colleague’s tenure has been enrichment programming run by artists from the community and not by preschool teachers. These have included painting, dancing, and singing. Parents don’t pay extra for these (we have some of those programs too), but the Director puts them in the operating budget. She invites artists to work with children, then pays them what their time is worth. It gets even better: her invitation to a local music teacher has led to our preschool being the only one certified by the Music Together program in town.

Be Generous 

For almost four years now, my colleague has assisted with the weekly chapel time at our preschool because I asked her to. She only misses if she has a parent tour scheduled. It gives her a weekly chance to interact with the children her teachers are working with, so she gains valuable insight into her staff’s experience. Also, it helps the chapel leader (now the Christian Education Director) immensely. She knows things about working with children that we don’t. She teaches us.

Working alongside a rock star professional in an adjacent field makes you better. Here again, I’ve been lucky, and I’m grateful.