The less said the better, yes. But less in terms of economy, not frequency. Let’s always have something to say about the work we’re doing–what needs to happen next; what we don’t know; what we want; what we fear.

My best excuse for having nothing to say is that it’s already been said, either by me or, worse, by someone else. I don’t want to be derivative. But I’m coming to think that if it’s a choice between deferring to what others have said and taking the opportunity, now, to say it for myself, I’m missing an opportunity if I choose the former.

Chad’s blog post on dueling executive orders in Missouri and Kansas, for example, draws on lots of sources who have said essentially the same thing. But it matters to me that Chad is the person saying it now. When Chad speaks, I listen.

So (gratuitous John Mayer warning here) say what you need to say.  We need you to say it.

Speech is not going away as a core competency of church leaders any time soon, but the more of this work I do the more I think the best speech is less speech.

Sermons can’t go beyond 20 minutes if they are to keep the congregation’s attention. That’s a challenge (and a gift) to preachers to use the best words available to convey the weight of the message concisely. Qualifications are a distraction. Illustrations better serve a purpose (Here’s a great example).

But also meetings: can we whittle down the action we’re here for to a clear nugget of compelling speech? Make a plan. Build a project. Say “yes” or “no.” That you know more about the subject than anyone else in the room does not, by itself, make you a helpful leader. That you can frame the subject clearly so that we can act on it does.

And blog posts. It’s funny, but I can read 750-1000 words on paper with no problem, but on a screen that seems oppressively long. So, you have my permission to stop reading any blog post after 300 words.

This one is 190 words, if you’re counting.

Sometimes they applaud.

Sometimes they nod in affirmation.

Sometimes they laugh.

Sometimes they don’t.

Sometimes they say, “Amen.”

Sometimes they nothing.

And sometimes the one in the very back pew presses his palms together in front of his face so that the tips of his index fingers kiss his forehead, and he bows.

Preach.

A friend recently described himself as a “Great Number Two guy.” He doesn’t want to be in charge. He wants to be part of a team with defined responsibilities, clear expectations, and secure compensation.

Don’t we all.

But posts like this one (if you’re not reading Jan every day you should be) have me convinced that Number Two guy is a leftover luxury from a disappearing era and that we all now have to be number ones.

Even those of us with jobs on a staff of which we’re not the head need to be number ones. We need to create new projects, own the outcomes, give our best work away, and invite collaboration whether it’s in our job description or not.

My friend Erik talks about the pastor’s “Side Hustle,” the work she does apart from her congregational call. I’m with him on that, for everyone, and not just those who aren’t in a full-time call situation.

The pastor’s Side Hustle is good for churches, too. My Side Hustle has become a mainstay of my congregation’s youth programming now. Don’t churches benefit when their pastors are off experimenting with funky little ministry projects?

The church needs us all to be Number One’s now.

The communities we want to nurture are based on hospitality, a welcome of strangers to reflect God’s welcome of everyone. Vitality of worship, depth of spirituality, community impact: all of these, I think, can flow from earnest hospitality exhaustively practiced.

A starting point for hospitality is an honest interest in the one being welcomed. This is so little practiced in the world. When was the last time you experienced the eager interest of someone who wasn’t selling something? Where are the spaces that are interested in you for you? Church communities should be those spaces.

Directions to the restrooms and easy-to-understand worship bulletins are prerequisites for hospitality, but the substance of the thing itself can be a curiosity about one another that leads us to mutual learning and growth. This involves observations as much as questions. “You seem to know a lot about X”; “Your work sounds fascinating”; “You just moved here? I’ll be that was an adventure.”

I just don’t think we experience the honest interest of our fellow human beings very much, and when we do it can wake us up to the movement of God in our life. When other people take an interest in some part of our story, we’re allowed to as well.

Churches should be the most interested places people encounter. Not, like, trying to act interest for the sake of appearing “nice”–no, actually interested, which will take some adjusting on our part and a willingness to receive what we’re inviting people to share.

If you’re trying to tell me about your experience and I’m offering theological precepts or Bible verses in response, then I’m not really hearing you. It is so much harder to receive another’s testimony than it is to give our own moral guidance.

When it comes to disputed questions and the complex issues of faith, I have been converted by testimony. Bible quotations and theological constructs like “natural order” and “general revelation” tucked cogently inside arguments, on the other hand, move me to defensiveness. They’re informative but not persuasive.

Informing your testimony with Scripture and theology is one thing. Using those things to hide from your experience and–worse–to avoid mine is another.

If you call me “arrogant” I will almost certainly shrivel up and melt away. It’s my trigger for self doubt and even shame. I’m not sure why, but nothing throws a wrench in my spokes the way that particular criticism does.

I know that now, which puts me in a much better position to do effective, meaningful work than when I didn’t know it and was only controlled by it. Now I undertake certain kinds of work prepared for that charge, and, if it comes, it doesn’t stop me the way it used to.

What criticism shuts you down? Be ready for it, and do the work you need to do.

It’s a post about persuasion and how to make friends in a disputed intellectual and moral landscape. And it is brief.

Something clicked for me on Friday as I took in all of the reactions to the decision, everybody’s Facebook profile pic turning rainbow, the angry posts from The Gospel Coalition shared by family members, liberal ridicule and conservative fury all scrolling along together, and what clicked was this:

I’m happy with the decision mostly because my friends are happy with it, and that posture finally feels like it contains as much integrity as a posture of dispassionate analysis, legal, Biblical, or otherwise.

My mind has rotated 180 degrees on these questions over the past decade, I now can see, because countless people pushing for normalization of same gender romantic relationships have warmly reached out to me and shared with me the virtue and character that constitutes their relationships and their argument, and they have invested in me as a person, generously, without I should profess allegiance to their cause.

I finally did profess allegiance to their cause, years after that allegiance had actually gone into effect.

On the other hand, so much of the opposition to recognizing same gender romantic relationships proceeds from a place of fear that must resist, resist, resist, and that has no energy left for hospitality, much less affection. It must characterize opponents in demeaning terms (somebody called the court’s decision a “puff piece”–a hundreds-of-pages-long product of legal argumentation a “puff piece?”). Listening to them, your first thought is not, “I’d like to hang out with those people.”

I’ve been hanging out with supporters of marriage equality for a little while now. The truth of my friends’ argument on this question stands up to theological and legal scrutiny without a doubt. It always has. And yet it is not their arguments alone that have so drastically shifted the public’s opinion on this question, but rather their character–their openness to others and their hospitality toward disputants.

It’s hard not to want to celebrate with them.

Beyond weekly Lord’s Day worship, can anything in congregational life be a routine anymore? Weekly Bible studies, the annual retreat, even monthly session meetings–all of the routine activities that made up congregational life in North America for generations feel like they have run out of gas.

Come to think of it, worship repeated in a routine way week after week isn’t exactly speeding along.

Is it time to start thinking of everything people in a church might do together as a project, something that aims to address a particular body of learning or a specific need in the community and that has a clear end date and that engages a defined community of people who are interested in it? Has the chapter ended wherein the world needed from the church a habitual way of routine life together, and are we in a time in which the world now needs a church whose life is marked by direct, effective projects that address concrete problems?

Here’s the trippy thing, though: social isolation is a major problem, and I don’t see how that gets better without some routines of people connecting with one another to build positive, trusting, reciprocal relationships.

So how do you make relationship building a project?