Somebody asked if there is anything I’m working on that I enjoy completely and don’t feel compelled to analyze and critique and dissect. He observed the weirdness of writing tortured blog posts about VBS, for example, while working on VBS.

The short answer is no. If I’m working on it, I’m picking it apart, doubting it, and looking for ways to improve it.

The shortcoming there of course is that constant real time analysis is a convenient escape from the demands of whatever it is we’re working on, especially if what we’re working on isn’t going all that well. If only two teens are showing up for youth group, it’s comforting to mentally shift into analytical gear instead of engaging, 100 percent, with the less-than-amazing project you actually have.

Let’s evaluate our work and ask the hard questions in order to make it more effective. But let’s not jump to evaluation before the work is done. Maybe we can only do one thing at a time.

My job at VBS this week is to tell kids some of the “amazing, incredible, and totally true adventures” found in the Bible.

Actually, I’m leaving off the “totally true” part. What better way to ruin an adventure than to insist on its veracity? I don’t believe all of the Bible to be “totally true,” at least not in the sense that this curriculum wants kids to understand that term. Besides, what does “totally true” mean to children who are being treated to dramatized gimmicks like trying to create an iPad out of thin air (you know, the same way God created the world)?

My little editorial decision points up a quandry: progressive churches that run this summer programming staple must either invest scads of time and energy writing their own curriculum or else purchase one from an evangelical publisher like Group or Lifeway or Standard that almost certainly will need to be edited for both theological and pedagogical reasons (see iPad example above).

Don’t even ask about the denominational curriculum.

My church has chosen the latter. There is real value in a themed package with a narrative arc that incorporates music, crafts, games, and Bible stories, even if we never buy any of the little trinkets that go with it. And we don’t take the thing so seriously as to lose sleep over things kids will hardly notice, especially if we take the little time required to adapt it.

But we do wonder about alternatives. There’s a church nearby that runs a Peace Camp for kids in the summer, which they state clearly is not VBS. I’m intrigued.

Does your church do VBS? How are you negotiating the theology of most VBS curricula with your church’s posture?

Yesterday I watched a skilled pastor tell the story of Jesus calming the storm to children, and I learned something new after telling that very story to children more times than I can remember.

I should say here that I was trained to tell Bible stories to children in a very particular way, and I’ve been doing it this way with almost no variation for a decade: get in, tell the story, then get out. No introductory questions. No illustrations. No props. And for Heaven’s sake, no the-moral-of-the-story-is type summaries. Just tell the story.

All of this is because young children are concrete thinkers. Metaphors are confusing, and that prop you thought would really bring the point home to them won’t. They’ll remember the prop, but not what it signified. Biblical stories are more than sufficient material of themselves without the added garb of meaning-making toys.

Back to yesterday. The pastor told the story with a winsome paraphrase, and then simply added, “This story is showing me that Jesus takes care of us.” That simple sentence made me sit up in my pew, because it located the authority of the story’s meaning in the teller’s present tense experience as a learner, and not, as I’ve always done, in the privileged domain of adulthood or, worse, the pastor’s office.

Since we don’t have time for exploration and conversation about the story, I think Children’s Times in worship services really have to include some kind of the-moral-of-the-story-is conclusion, and I think this is the right way to do it. How many times have I told kids that a story meant something, though, and missed the opportunity that this pastor perfectly seized, the opportunity to position myself as a learner among them and thus normalize for them a dynamic kind of relationship to Bible stories rather than a static one, a relationship that grows and changes over the course of your whole life, rather than one in which you learn once and for all and then finish?

This is how to tell Bible stories to kids, then: get in, tell the story, share what it’s teaching YOU, then get out.

The reason to put yourself out there today goes beyond today.

Maybe what you have to say is timely and will resonate with lots of people in the moment.

But more likely than not, what you have to say today will occur to people days, weeks, even months from now, and it will help them. That’s why you should say it before it gets away, now, today.

And then again tomorrow.

(With thanks to Jan Edminson)

This is one if those staples of “traditional” worship that I almost never experienced in “contemporary” worship: the unison or responsive reading.

Sometimes it’s a prayer. Sometimes it’s a call to worship. It can also be a Scripture reading or an affirmation of faith.

It’s participatory, sure. Instead of a single leader up front talking, everybody talks. But it’s also scripted and can feel really lifeless, the printed, “Praise the Lord! ” intoned groggily as “PrstheLrd.”

It’s also the pinnacle of text-based worship, the coronation of words as queen of our liturgical court.

Somebody make the case for why responsive and unison readings are still the best expression of prayers and calls to worship for a contemporary worship environment.

It’s our fifth Middle School Mission Week, and I’m proud that some of the work sites we take our students to are the same ones we started with in 2011. I’m also proud that the basic structure of the thing still relies upon a team of youth leaders each tackling a piece of the project. I love watching my colleagues just kill it when it comes to leading youth in worship or showing them how to shovel gravel.

But God please help us to keep learning. A youth leader new to the project had some critical things to say about our organization today, and I found myself grateful. You, come to our planning retreat next September and share your experience with us in vivid detail. Then help us build this thing better. Please.

Five years is plenty of time for the thing that started out all loose and flexible and creative to get stuck. Learning from new voices will keep that from happening.

Is your church one important thing in its peoples’ lives, or is it the most important?

Which does it want to be?

I long ago quit fighting with Little League for church folks’ time, believing that time spent building up kids through team sports is a valuable expression of a Christian’s vocation to work for a better world. After all, what’s to say the church shouldn’t find ways to join folks in their Little League work?

Is that a Faustian bargain, though? Once we have elevated the value of practically every non-church commitment in our peoples’ lives, what unique value remains for the church ones? We don’t give trophies.

There’s a huge difference in how you plan and recruit for, say, a youth retreat, when you truly believe it is the most valuable way that a 10th grader could spend their weekend versus when you only think it’s one worthwhile thing they could be doing among many options, including, for example, a debate tournament.

Are we arguing for our church’s mission and worship as the most important thing on peoples’ schedules? If not, is it really because of an enlightened view of the plurality of commitments for modern people, or is it because we’re not sure it really is all that important?

What is “Ordinary?”

The constitution of the church I serve uses this word a lot:

“The installed pastor shall ordinarily moderate all meetings of the congregation.”

“The presbytery placing the call to the candidate for ministry shall ordinarily examine, ordain, and install the candidate.”

“The preaching of the Word shall ordinarily be done by a Teaching Elder.”

“When a child is being presented for Baptism, ordinarily the parent(s) or one(s) rightly exercising parental responsibility shall be an active member of the congregation.”

“Ordinarily” occurs over 50 times in the Presbyterian Book of Order. I like it. It’s a word that not only indicates the limits of what might be done, but, more importantly, asserts a wide range of possibility within what we “ordinarily” do.

I realize not everybody sees it that way. It’s often used as a stop sign on anything we might do at church that feels non-standard. It’s just as often used as a scapegoat, like we would be flourishing if only these pesky standards of “ordinary” weren’t in our way.

Maybe “Ordinarily” can function less as a gatekeeper type of term and more of an invitation: here’s what is ordinarily done. Play around with that and see what you can come up with.

“What can you do with “ordinarily?”