Monday Morning Quarterback

Stuff we learned on Sunday.

What does your community need musically and artistically for young people? What does your context already provide for children and youth in music and the arts?

The community I live in has a Community School of Music, abundant kids’ musical theater offerings, and an academy for music, voice, and dance. In addition, there’s a youth symphony, and private instrument-specific tutors are everywhere. There’s music–good music–for youth all over this place.

I recently asked a group of teenagers, though, what their town lacks for youth, and their answer was music. There’s no performance venue for teens. There’s no recording studio. There’s no place to go hear live music in you’re underage.

Yesterday our program staff discussed the future of our Director of Music for Children and Youth position, since we recently learned that our Director of five years will be moving on. “Director” in this case has traditionally meant of choirs, up to three at a time at one point in the church’s history.

But it has slowly ceased to mean that; children, their parents, and youth, have gradually stopped participating in the church’s choral programming. It has become more flexible in response, more experimental. Students conceived of an Ash Wednesday service, for example, that was structured around contemporary pop music (Bastille’s “Pompeii” and Ed Sheeran’s “I See Fire”). The Director helped the students clarify and perfect that conception so that they could carry it out well. And they did.

It seems to me that the resource our church can uniquely provide the community isn’t a choir director anymore. There are lots of those around. But kids and teens here don’t have access to musicians to take the artistic interests and aspirations of young people seriously and to accompany them in learning, playing, and performing.

Could this place be served by a musician who is an entry point and guide to the life of faith as expressed through music. A Musician in Residence? For Children and Youth?

Does this exist anywhere?

Sunday Game Plan

How we win the day.

Phase 1: sleep in.

Phase 2: enjoy the mistobox coffee I got Wife for Valentine’s Day. Leisurely like.

Phase 3: hit the Farmers’ Market

Phase 4: brunching

Phase 5: end vacation several hours early for an important meeting.

Phase 6: second important meeting scheduled for the last day of vacation.

Phase 7: avoid tweets and Facebook posts from the Oscars.

Phase 8: schedule fitness class for the morning.

Phase 9: Harry Potter, Goblet of Fire style.

For All To See

Writing publicly is a great way to keep yourself honest, because you will write things badly–or you will write bad things–for everyone to see. If you’re lucky, some readers will tell you where you’ve missed the mark. And then you get better.

I’ve spent much of life trying to avoid making mistakes or, at least, making the kinds of mistakes that only a few people will see. But I’ve been blogging five times a week for months now, and now I’ve started recording a podcast–both unrestrained public communication platforms. For what it’s worth, I’ve been preaching for a decade, and I have a public SoundCloud page with a dozen or so of my sermons on it.

I’m defaulting to public with the work I produce. When you do that, you make your mistakes in front of large crowds. Many in those crowds will be generous friends and colleagues and partners who will neither torch you nor flatter you but push you to improve, either because they care or because your work bears on their work too. Criticism of both those types is better than the silence that comes from keeping your work to yourself.

Make mistakes. In public. Then fix them. Apologize when you should. And keep at it. Improve.

For. All. To. See.

Progressive Youth Ministry Is Not Safe

Progressive Christians are kidding themselves in believing that their youth are somehow insulated from the influence of the more aggressive forms of conservative cultural Christianity (like this).

Teens’ disillusionment with Christianity will include its inclusive expressions too.

I know youth who have grown up in churches that have long welcomed LGBT persons into membership and leadership who nonetheless feel alienated from Christianity as an exclusive thing. These youth have been schooled in social justice in their Sunday school classes, and yet see the church as something that is at odds with their emerging sense of injustice in the world.

I wonder if our talk has come up short. I wonder if we’ve failed these youth in explaining how our church is different from the ones their friends go to, where you can’t be out and every word of the Bible is preached literally, while not demanding of them the kind of giving of themselves that characterizes Christian discipleship.

Faith, conservative or progressive, has to be lived in ways that stretch us to experience God’s heart for the poor and suffering and God’s thirst for justice in the world. Absent that, it won’t matter to anyone.

The Main Line

An experiment in news and analysis for Presbyterians

After a year and a half of negotiations with the Session of Crestwood Presbyterian Church (CPC) over its request to be dismissed to the Covenant Order of Evangelical Presbyterians (ECO), an Administrative Commission of the Presbytery of The James is recommending this weekend that the presbytery’s trustees–and not the AC–pursue agreement with the church regarding its property.

CPC is bringing a motion to the same meeting for its dismissal to ECO. Both reports are in the packet for the meeting.

What’s going on here?

There are three aspects of this that reflect changes in the denomination that are worth understanding.

The Tom and McGee cases are forcing presbyteries to consider property value, but what “consider” means is fuzzy.

What these two General Assembly Permanent Judicial Commission decisions have done almost immediately is make explicit the presbytery’s responsibility to “fulfill its fiduciary duty under the trust clause” and consider the value of property when dismissing churches to another denomination, as well as to consider each case on an individual basis (not applying a formula for all churches).

The AC for the Presbytery of The James clearly acted out of that duty when it proposed (not demanded) a settlement with CPC in excess of $5 million (later adjusted to $3.5 million). CPC is not disputing that appraisal.

CPC is instead disputing that the settlement terms should be dictated by the property value. Their motion reads, “Crestwood . . . could find no evidence nationally that dismissal settlements since the Tom decision have resulted in congregations paying amounts approaching the appraised value of church property.”

So the AC appraised the property accurately and proposed the church pay that amount to the presbytery upon its dismissal. CPC is disputing that the former necessitates the latter.

Churches seeking dismissal want to be treated identically. 

Despite the assertion of McGee that presbyteries cannot apply a uniform formula to all church dismissals, that’s what congregations want, regardless of size. CPC’s motion includes a chart showing the amounts that four churches previously dismissed by POJ were asked to pay. The highest amount is $400,000, which is probably why their counter offer to the AC is in that same amount. They’re characterizing the AC’s terms as “astronomical.” Their motion continues:

Seven of the approximately 450+ churches dismissed from the PC(USA) in the past 10+ years had settlement terms of $1 million or more, and only two churches – Menlo Park with 4,125 members and multiple sites in the San Francisco Bay Area, and Highland Park with 4,896 members in Dallas had settlements of greater than $2 million. These two mega-churches possess the financial resources to meet multi-million dollar terms; Crestwood does not.

The AC doubts CPC’s claim that the church lacks the financial resources to meet their proposed terms. But the comparison with other dismissals is the real problem. Their report to the presbytery describes their response to the Session’s counteroffer:

CPC continued to use ‘comparison’ as a metric, despite the AC’s prior explanation as to why comparisons with other settlement amounts was inherently flawed and unsound, and its statement that use of this factor was illegitimate in negotiations.

Neither what a presbytery has previously done nor what churches across the denomination have paid out in dismissal settlements can serve as a basis for determining the terms of a particular dismissal, according to the AC.

The old ways don’t always work. Neither do the new ones. 

This is the second case in a month in which a presbytery’s appointed process for dismissing churches failed. In January, The Presbytery of San Gabriel heard a recommendation from its Council that 18 months of work undertaken by a Pastoral Engagement Team per the presbytery’s Gracious Dismissal Policy be handed over to an Administrative Commission (that recommendation was postponed). This after their policy had been successfully implemented in four previous cases.

POJ has likewise dismissed four previous congregations with its “Guidelines for Churches Considering a Request to the Presbytery of the James to be Dismissed to another Denomination.” But CPC presents unique circumstances, including uncovered irregularities in membership reporting, the presbytery’s New Church Development Committee’s missional interest in the church’s location, and the unrestricted and fully saleable nature of undeveloped property owned by the congregation, in contrast to the Session’s assertions about restrictions placed on that property.

The AC is recommending that the presbytery’s trustees deal with all of these details, however, as their negotiations with the Session have stalled.

Trust is in the eye of the beholder

Both the San Gabriel case in January and the POJ case feature congregations casting doubt upon their presbyteries character. The final section of CPC’s motion is titled, “How presbytery exercises power will reveal its true character.”

This is despite both presbyteries’ documentation of misleading and inaccurate information provided by the congregations seeking dismissal regarding such things as their membership statistics and financial position.

Presbytery of The James will vote this Saturday, February 21st, on both the AC’s recommendations and CPC’s dismissal motion.

Grow Up (Or Don’t?)

In the past month I’ve had conversations with friends who are professors, pastors, and physicians, and who all feel crushed by the state of their work. My Godin-fueled optimism for the opportunities our era affords us to do our work in new ways hits a real barrier in these conversations, because people are up against serious and systemic constraints that can’t be overcome with an attitude adjustment.

The tension in all of their situations is between the desire to make change and the responsibility to endure difficulty for the sake of stability and providing for one’s family. My pastor friend calls it “Being a grownup.” She has tattoos that her congregants don’t know about, and she separates most of her interests and tastes from her pastoral work. She’s miserable, but, she says, this is part of being a grownup. Is she right?

Or take my professor friends. As tenure track positions fade into the professional sunset and colleges and universities employ more and more adjunct faculty as cheap labor, they’re scrambling all over the place trying to make a living by piecing together various temporary, adjunct appointments. There’s got to be a way to break out of that cycle and to do your work in a way that adds value to people, value they will pay you for, but I can’t imagine what that is. So my friends act as grown ups. They’re killing themselves to follow these new rules.

How much of doing meaningful work today amounts to working within the conditions set by your profession, or how much of it, in the “connection economy,” amounts to establishing your own conditions to make your work work for you?

Monday Morning Quarterback

Stuff I Learned on Sunday

It’s really hard to not think in programs. Whenever church folk talk about problems, we talk about programmatic solutions. Worship attendance is down; we need a program of phone calls and mailings. Tensions in the community over a contested bond issue; let’s host a program of discussions.

Maybe church folk aren’t unique in this, but we do it, do it, do it a lot.

It happened in the adult Sunday school yesterday. For the past three weeks we have been exploring race relations at our church’s, from its founding in 1955 to today, when we share our campus with Hispanic and Indonesian congregations. Still, we’re a mostly white church in a mostly white community (see slides below), so we’re exploring what might need to change.

Our solutions? Programs:

A pulpit exchange with non-anglo churches; a series of visits to local racial/ethnic congregations; invitations to those churches to worship with us.

My colleague said, “We need to build relationships, not start new programs,” and hands shot up all over the room to suggest . . . programs.

But what else is there, really? I mean as frustrating as it is to recognize the elements of a program in all of these suggestions (publicity, event planning, volunteer recruitment), how else does a group of committed people change something? Do they just take it upon themselves to visit those racial/ethnic churches and not tell anyone what they’re doing?

What is the alternative to programming? Relationships? But doesn’t building new relationships take some intention and some planning? Doesn’t that kind of make it a program?

Sunday Game Plan

How We Win The Day

Phase 1: coffee. Two cups. At least.

Phase 2: review the sermon preview video I posted yesterday while finishing the sermon to make sure the sermon is actually about what I said it was going to be about.

Phase 3: finish plans for confirmation class.

Phase 4: put on new dress shirt and (reversible) tie.

Phase 5: get to the church before anyone else and practice sermon with my Chromebook in the pulpit.

Phase 6: make sure the adult education class is all set. No worries, since the Head of Staff is leading today.

Phase 7: recruit some unsuspecting child to acolyte, since I never heard back from the parents of the one scheduled.

Phase 8: WORSHIP THE LORD.

Phase 9: Preacher nap.

Phase 10: read Harry Potter with daughter.

Phase 11: help youth plan Ash Wednesday worship.

Phase 12: begin vacation!

R-E-S-P-E-C-T The Teenagers

I met up with some 9th graders at a diner this week. They arrived before I did, and when I slid into the booth one of them told me under her breath that the waitress had given them the stink eye when they came in. There were six of them.

“No she didn’t.”

“Yes she did.” We dropped it.

But then one of them didn’t get the iced tea she ordered. She told me she hadn’t got it, and I said, “So tell the waitress, not me” (one of my hidden agendas in meeting youth at a diner is to join them in a space where they have to interact with adults–as adults). So she raised her hand. Like a 9th grader.

After several minutes of hand raising, she complained to me that the waitress kept looking at her but not coming over. I said I’m sure the waitress hadn’t seen her yet, but I started watching. A few more minutes and no response. Finally, I decided to get involved, and I raised my own hand. The waitress came right over.

Now, there are much bigger problems one can face than being ignored at a diner, and there are very good reasons for restaurant staff to feel intense irritation with teenagers in their place of work. They’re loud. They don’t spend much money. They sure as Hell don’t tip. As an 11th grader explained to me the next day, “I’m ordering french fries, and I’m sitting here for 45 minutes. But I have a girlfriend, so you can’t make me leave!”

Still, it’s an ugly experience for young people in adult society, glared at or simply ignored.

I would love for my church to be a manifestation of adult society that welcomes teenagers, that sees them and validates them. Teens–all teens: not just the ones we’ve baptized and taught in Sunday school–should get the message from us that they’re wanted and important for no other reason than that they’re there and they’re them. You know, the way we try to treat adults.

We’re good about this in some ways and less good in others. Clearly the kids who drop by the church after school feel welcomed, and they know there’s at least one adult there who likes them for them.

But we also have this sign on the property that says, “Thou Shalt Not Skateboard.” It’s an insurance thing, I know. But I hate it. We’re supposed to chase off skateboarders whenever we see them, but I’ve been completely non-compliant with that expectation for seven years. Once, I approached a skateboarder on our campus just to introduce myself, but the moment I said “Hello” he grabbed his board and fled, clearly assuming the worst about my intentions. The sign had done its work. Kind of.

Let’s look for ways to welcome our community’s teenagers and treat them like important grown ups.