Five Things I Learned from My Christian Education 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.

Yesterday I wrote about my Head of Staff.

Today is for the Christian Education Director I’ve worked with here for nearly six years.

You’re The Ministry

Christian Education Director; Director of Ministry to Children And Families; Children’s Ministry Director–my colleague has been called all of those things and more at our church. Through all those title changes, though, she has done remarkably consistent work, which I think is because she puts her personality fully into that work. No matter her job title, her work bears her unmistakable mark. It’s work only she could do in the way she does it.

Stand Up for Kids

Even in a community that is outwardly friendly and welcoming of children, people can act in a way that privileges the sensitivities of adults (guilty as charged). The only way that changes is if someone calls it out and insists it be different. Someone on our staff team has done that, and it hasn’t been me.

Work in Secret

It was three years into our working relationship before I understood that my colleague had a habit of taking people who had visited the church out for coffee. That’s not, like, an official church or pastoral procedure. She was just doing it. So she had these insights, both into particular individuals as well as into a certain profile of church visitor, that she started interjecting into programming conversations. That’s when I knew, and started to copy her.

Say When You’re Struggling

The temptation to fake it in this work is strong indeed. But my colleague has shown me how to admit when you’re having a hard time with some aspect of ministry, whether that involves a particular skill, like managing personnel, or a more meta issue, like the challenge of balancing church work with other pursuits (my colleague has been earning her PhD while on our staff). Allow people to help you.

Work Like The Artist You Are

My colleague and I completed Godly Play training together in 2010 and then partnered to convert our congregation’s Sunday School for children 100% to Godly Play. She worked like mad at that. Particularly, she sweated the artistic details of how to tell Biblical stories to children from memory, not only herself, but also the new staff of volunteers we recruited to carry the program. Teaching those skills is an art form all its own, and she developed that far more thoroughly than I did, hosting quarterly “confabs” to work on skills and troubleshoot struggles. There again, I copied what she was doing.

I took this call eight years fully aware of the things I needed to learn in the area of Christian Education programming. I got lucky with the Christian Education Director I got to work with for most of my time here, because she knew a lot of those things already, but mostly because we got to learn a lot of them together.

Five Lessons I’ve Learned from My Head of Staff

From Seth Godin yesterday: “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.”

Today, the Head of Staff.

I’ve been fortunate to serve with the same Head of Staff for my entire time here. We’ve had a great working relationship. These are five lessons I’ve learned from her.

Listen first, speak later.

My colleague is a careful listener. She will offer substantive leadership to the question at hand, although perhaps not right now, in this particular conversation. She will say, “I need some time to think about this.” Then, the next time you talk about it, she will have a carefully refined conviction about it that is infinitely more valuable than if she’d forced some position in the moment, just to have something to say.

Keep it professional.

Two of the most active members of my youth ministry here are my Head of Staff’s kids, but that has never been awkward, because my HOS maintains a very clear distinction between her relationship with me as a staff member and an adult working with her kids. She asserts that distinction with her kids, too.

Let people laugh

I’ve laughed a lot these past eight years. The culture my HOS has cultivated allows for–encourages, even–levity. There are serious challenges involved in this work, but none of us feel overwhelmed by them; the boss smiles a lot and gives space for yahoos like me to crack jokes in staff meetings.

Do what you say you’re going to do

Dependability is priceless. I can’t recall a single instance in which my HOS has failed to follow through on something she committed to. Not one.

Assume the best about peoples’ competence, but yell if you must

I have grown here because my HOS has let me work on the things I think are important and has only very rarely questioned me on that front. And when she has, it has been more with curiosity than with judgment, and never with anxiety.

I’ve heard her yell twice, both times to great effect.

Don’t Trash Your Organizer

I’m a fan of the Bullet Journal. I’ve filled four Moleskines over the past three years with boxes, dots, and checkmarks on my way to getting more done than I was without it. It’s a useful planning system and a nice tool for looking back over what you’ve done. As much as any system, analog or digital, that I’ve used over the past decade to plan well so as to get important work done, this has worked.

But I’ve hardly picked it up for two weeks.

I’ve learned that, no matter the system, organizing for work takes emotional energy, and sometimes you just don’t have it.

Don’t panic. It will come back. And when it does, you’ll be glad for a tool you already know how to use. Just turn to the next page and start again.

See You Next Sunday

This coming Sunday is my last at the church I have served for eight years. Yesterday I leaned heavily on “See you next Sunday” when greeting people after worship.

“We’re going to miss you.”

“See you next Sunday.”

This Sunday, though, that defensive jig is up.

It’s presumptive anyway, right?

“See you next Sunday.” Says who? And why wait seven days?

Maybe it’s a gesture of defiance, a declaration of a certain kind of oracle that, in spite of everything that fights to tear at community from day-to-day, the random-tragic and the calculated alike, we WILL see you next Sunday. Come Hell or the AFC Championship game.

Whatever it is, I’ve said it for the last time here.

The Bro Code. Ugh.

A college student I know is of late enthralled with The Bro Code. It’s a website and a book by the fictional Barney Stinson of the TV sitcom “How I Met Your Mother.” But to hear my collegian friend speak of it, The Bro Code is a movement, a way of being that demands complete obedience.

“A Bro will answer the phone call of another bro at any time of day for any reason.”

“A Bro never tickles another bro.”

“If a Bro gets a dog, it must be at least as tall as his knee when fully grown.”

The Bro Code’s appeal to my friend feels like more than entertainment, and I expect that is true of most of the adolescent and post-adolescent guys who claim The Bro Code for themselves and who quote it over beers as a definitive moral guide.

That’s troubling to me, because The Bro code is 184 tenets of sexist, homophobic, fraternity-fueled stupidity. Its vision of masculinity is exceedingly shallow. It’s center of gravity is the responsibilities A Bro owes to his fellow Bros to help (or at least not hinder) them getting laid.

“Bros only comment on fellow a bellow bro’s fashion choice if that choice will affect the bro’s ability to get laid.”

“A bro may only ever stop another bro from hooking up with a girl if, and only if, he is 100% sure that said girl is in fact a dude.”

“A bro does not cock-block another bro for any reason.”

That this is the bar for masculine identity and performance that young men today might aspire to is utterly depressing.

I think my friend could see the disappointment in my face as he recited these maxims. Confused, he said, “What?”

“You are so much more than a bro,” is all I could tell him.

Please God let’s give the young men in our youth groups, churches, schools, and families a bigger, more daring vision of what it means to be a significant human being in the world than The Bro Code.

Why I’m Resolving To Say Hi To More People in The Grocery Store

Opportunities for connection present themselves every day, many days more than once. An acquaintance walking on the other side of the street; a co-worker at the opposite end of the frozen food aisle; a congregant walking, slowly, to the same place you’re hurriedly heading.

I’m in a rush. I’m not up for a conversation right now. I’m afraid they won’t recognize me and I’ll embarrass myself.

But these fleeting opportunities to make a connection, to share some positivity, even if just a smiling nod of the head, are worth the risk because they won’t come again. This moment right here is a rock for adding to the structure of human community. It has a particular shape and weight suited for just this moment. If I let it drop, it will stay there for good.

Us Is That (Even If We Don’t Know It)

Seth Godin wants leaders to ask, “Who Is Us?”

When our neighbors are asked who Us is, they will have an answer, and it may not be one that we like. But if we’re not backing up who we say We are with consistent actions, then we have no right to object.

Which is why complaints like this don’t hold a lot of water with me. If the things you’re doing lead people to describe you in ways that diverge from how you describe yourself, your self-description doesn’t get priority just because it’s yours. If people observe you to be mean and exclusive, you’re probably mean and exclusive.

Of course, we may like it too, the Us our neighbors say we are.

There’s a community of mostly agnostic ex-patriots in Baja, Mexico who call the Presbyterian Church (USA) “innovative” and “courageous” because a presbytery ordained one of these ex-pats as an “Evangelist” to their community, to grow in friendship with them and discern a common life together.

Us is that. Even if we don’t know it.

While serving my first church I met a man 20 years my senior who spoke to me with tears in his eyes about the cherished role our church had played in his family’s life. Were they church members? No. The children had attended our preschool 15 years earlier. Yet though they never attended a single worship service or church event, he knew who We were years after his kids were grown.

Us was that, though we didn’t know it.

The world knows who We are, even if we don’t.

Churches Have Time To Give

Douglas Rushkoff has a new piece up on Pacific Standard today. Here’s the money quote:

Looked at in terms of human value creation, the industrial economy appears to have been programmed to remove human beings from the value chain.

And this:

Once we’re no longer conflating the idea of “work” with that of “employment,” we are free to create value in ways unrecognized by the current growth-based market economy. We can teach, farm, feed, care for, and even entertain one another.

“Work” is more than “employment.” “Value” is a much better ideal to pursue than “growth.” That is as true for churches as it is for economies.

What if the question guiding our work, both as people and as congregations, is, “How do we add value to the community?” and not, “How do we get bigger and add more?”

Churches add value to their communities in some concrete ways and some abstract ways. They have public space for gatherings, which is valuable. They have leadership that, often, is among the most educated folks in town. Churches make things, like gardens and crafts and meals. All of these add value.

But so does time, which feels more abstract. Our neighbors are starved for time, not in the sense that they need more of it, but in the sense that they hunger to get more value–more connection, more joy, more impact–out of it. Churches create spaces where time is experienced differently. If our communities are not identifying our congregations as places that will give them time, we are missing an opportunity.

Make A Mess

This post is part of a series reflecting on Grounded, the new book by Diana Butler Bass. Read the other posts in the series here.

Again with this quote:

As we pay attention to rivers and seas, we might also discover God’s fluid presence with the water.

When I baptize people I make a mess. The chancel floor is wet even before any water has been lifted from the font, because I pour it in from as high a height as my right arm will allow. It cascades down and tumbles out. The front pew sitters should wear raincoats.

You can hear it, you can see it, and you know it’s water.

The baptized–infant and adult alike–end up dripping, because I want the water to be the story. I’m no respecter of baptismal garments. I’m not innovating with language, and I’m not inflecting my speech for earnestness or drama.

Hear the water. Watch the water. Feel the water.

This is what I’ve learned in church: you don’t need an ocean or a river to get hit with the presence of God in water.

A baptism in an ocean or a river, though? That’s something I want to do once before I’m done. Until then, I make rivers on the chancel.

Just When You Though It Was Safe To Go Back in The Water

This post is part of a series reflecting on Grounded, the new book by Diana Butler Bass. Read the other posts in the series here.

So here’s a provocative claim from Grounded:

As we pay attention to rivers and seas, we might also discover God’s fluid presence with the water.

Swimming off Coronado Beach in San Diego during the summer of 2009, I drifted too far from shore and struggled to make it back in. The tide got a bit nasty. Successive incoming waves tumbled me like a clothes dryer. Each time I surfaced for air, I was facing in a different direction and had to reorient myself to the shoreline. Exhausted, I gave myself over to the waves and let them toss me toward the beach. When my feet implausibly found the bottom and I could stand upright, a lifeguard with a small crowd ran at me with an expression that said, “What the hell is wrong with you?”

I didn’t get back in the water that day.

On a youth beach trip in 2012, I punched and head butted Orange County waves with a reckless crew of teenage boys. Then one of those waves picked me up and flung me to the ocean floor, where my elbows and face dug into the sand while my legs and feet followed the wave forward, bending my back to what I was sure was breaking (a Californian later enlightened me that I had been “crabbed”).

I didn’t get back in the water that day either.

Waiting for the return ferry from Santa Cruz Island in 2008, I donned some goggles and a snorkel and putted around the kelp beds next to the dock, marveling at the colorful fish. But I swam straight into the tangled kelp and had to thrash furiously for several seconds to free myself. Luckily no one saw.

God’s fluid presence is with the water.

“Fluid” contains so many things: a weighted pull, a mindless drift, a violent tossing. If God is with the waters, then the waters are not to be entered carelessly.