I remember hearing a minister opine about the ubiquity of American flags in church sanctuaries following 9/11, that the inability of church leaders to resist that particular wave of patriotic sentiment was a consequence of the theology in place in their churches long before 9/11. I took her point to be not that flags in sanctuaries are good or bad, but that the decisions churches make in a crisis are determined, to a very large degree, by factors that predate the crisis.

It feels like the challenges facing churches in the wake of Covid were there before. They may not have been urgent (they may well have been), but they were there, hiding in plain sight. Ambivalence about worship attendance, confusion about staffing, and inconsistency in ministry design did not begin with stay-at-home orders. The conditions of Covid have amplified and accelerated challenges that needed our attention before.

Which makes me wonder: what concerns are waiting to reveal themselves in the next crisis?

The point of collaboration is not to work together, but to get something done that we care about. As an extrovert, I need to remember this, because I can mistake cooperation with other people for meaningful work. It can be meaningful, but probably not because of the cooperation but because of the thing we’re trying to accomplish.

Useful collaboration probably starts with the question: what do I want to do?

We don’t have as much control over who comes to church as we think we do. There are so many things people can choose to do with their Sunday mornings, and many of them feel really compelling. I remember an exchange I had with the mother of some church youth who explained their regular Sunday morning absence by insisting that, “Once a week we’re going to have breakfast together as a family, and sometimes that once is Sunday.” Who would argue with that?

In this light, the best strategies for church marketing and communication seem mostly to remove barriers to participation for those who have already decided in favor, rather than persuading those who are on the fence. Our website and our Facebook page and our email newsletter need to make information clear and easy to act upon: worship is at 10. Here is the address. Here is where to park. Here’s a video of what a service is like.

We can do that well. It’s not that hard. Then we can put the rest of our energy and intention on the experience people have once they’re there. The best outreach is wasted if people don’t find meaningful connection and purpose once they arrive.

When we find ourselves surprised by the maturity of teenagers, we should remember that we have been choosing to expect immaturity of them. Teenagers didn’t even exist as a distinct cultural entity until about the mid-20th century. Before then, adult roles and responsibilities were given to young people around the same time we let them sign up for Instagram today. But for 70 years or so now, American society has cordoned adolescents off from adult society in schools and activities restricted mostly to their peers, where it looks like they have a great deal of autonomy, but where their main responsibility is to get into college.

They are more mature than we give them credit for, but that credit-giving is a choice we keep making.

I spoke with a teenager this week who learned during the pandemic that he is “situationally funny,” by which he means that he’s more at ease in the side conversation and one-off remark than he is as the center of a group’s attention. Covid showed him that, because, in Zoom school, his conversational lane was closed.

So he opened that lane for himself with one-on-one phone and video calls with his friends. When the weather got nice enough, he and two peers made a habit of meeting up in a neighborhood park to talk about “whatever they want.” He formed a daily routine of playing with his neighbor’s new puppy after school.

Teenagers like this one have some things to teach adults about how to leverage technology to strengthen relationships, as well as how to sustain friendships the old fashioned way. I’m listening.

A teenager told me yesterday that she prefers in-person interactions with friends to Facetime or Snapchat or whatever, especially after a year of Zoom school. Her comment reminded me of the two teenagers a decade ago who explained their intensive online connection with one another to me as a workaround. They wanted to hang out together, but the absence of public spaces hospitable to teenagers without money made it very challenging; technology was the next best thing.

We were preventing teenagers from getting together in public long before Covid.

The first time I drove on a highway was nearly my last. It was during my only driving lesson with Mr. Taylor, the history teacher/boys basketball coach/driver’s ed. instructor whose persona was a combination of red-faced sideline screamer and feet-on-the-desk professor. As a driving instructor he was wholly the latter; he held an open newspaper in front of him in the passenger seat.

One of the few times he even spoke to me was to ask instruct, “Get over to the right here and let’s take the highway.”

“Oh, I’ve never driven on the highway before,” I corrected.

“Okay,” he said. “You will today.”

With images of the sideline screamer in mind, I switched on my blinker, checked my mirror, checked my blind spot, and then, with hands at 10 and 2, moved into the right lane on Iliff Avenue and proceeded to merge onto Interstate 225, southbound. The car suddenly jolted to a stop! I took my hands off the wheel in a desperate posture that said, “I didn’t do anything!” and looked at Mr. Taylor for vindication. He lowered his newspaper and, gesturing with his right hand to a bus that had only just cleared our front bumper after entering the on-ramp from the oncoming lane, said calmly, “If I hadn’t done that they would have been reading about us in tomorrow’s paper.”

He’d slammed on the passenger brake. I hadn’t even known there was a passenger brake.

There are a lot of challenges that make me wish for a passenger brake. No good: we’ve outgrown it.

A colleague shared some hard-earned learning about being, as she called it, “on a position.” That’s when you’re arguing for an outcome you’re emotionally attached to. We need to be conscious of the deep feelings we experience in some discussions. Emotion influences rationality. Rather, emotion is its own kind of rationality.

I took her point, but from a different starting point. I’m challenged often enough to get on a position to begin with. A certain academic ideal of thinking and debating prizes neutrality and objectivity so much that it discourages us from ever getting on a position at all, but rather encourages a kind of intellectual free agency and emotional detachment. Nobody does this in practice. The fight to remain neutral is itself driven by an emotional commitment.

Leaders need to say what we want without apologizing for wanting it. Only from that position can we truly be persuaded by what someone else wants.

I’m exercising regularly the past few weeks, and back to writing blog posts. But I’m reading less. And eating poorly. I was journaling a lot during the winter, but that habit gave way to warmer weather. I’m never getting all these things right at the same time.

Infinitely adding meaningful habits is impossible. We have to learn to drop some in favor of others during certain seasons; discerning what habits need nurturing right now is at least as important as straining at implementation.

This is probably true for church, too. Communication habits are more important in some seasons than others. The same goes for habits pertaining to experimentation and evaluation. Leaders need to decide which habits matter most now and make the case for them.

We can’t be good at everything we want to be good at all the time. We don’t have to be.

“Stupidity is oblivious to negative consequences; it falls into a pit. Gross stupidity invites negative consequences; it looks for a pit. There’s an element of willfulness to it: let the oceans rise, let the virus rage, you can’t scare me.” (Garret Keizer)

This quote is from an essay in last month’s issue of Harper’s. I read it the other day and haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. It’s a philosophical, even religious, reflection on stupidity. It cites Aristotle and Bonhoeffer. It tells the story of Andre Trocme, the Protestant parson who led his French village to harbor Jews from the Nazis (Trocme came to see that stupidity was a third force “seeking hegemony over this world,” in addition to good and evil). It’s a great read and I recommend it.

What I can’t stop thinking about is how reflexes for empathy and understanding can be in the service of stupidity. Ever since 2016, I have tried really hard to listen to points of view I don’t agree with and to understand the values that underlie them, but over and over again those efforts have been rewarded with increasing doses of unreality from some of the people I’m trying to understand. People aghast at the election of Trump were told to read “Hillbilly Elegy” so that they could better understand rural America. It skyrocketed in popularity and became a Netflix movie, and now its venture capitalist author is running for Senate and blaming America’s woes on “the childless left.”

“Only an act of liberation, not instruction, can overcome stupidity,” wrote Bonhoeffer. The people I used to try to persuade and then understand actually need liberated. So do I. We all need liberated from the powers of our time marching us into pits for their own ends.

Stupidity isn’t harmless, and opposing it isn’t elitist. Liberating our neighbors from stupidity is an act of kindness.