The Last Six Words

My colleague and I sat down yesterday with a community organizer. She is the new leader of the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) organization that we have been involved in building for the past five years, and she is helping us to intentionally embrace the principles of IAF organizing for congregational life.

Listening is the foundation of this organizing philosophy. Listening for the sake of listening. Not listening for the sake of learning or listening for the sake of acting, but listening, first and foremost, for its own sake, because people deserve to be heard and both learning and acting are agendas that make it hard to hear.

The great gift that listening gives is the earnest gesture of interest in a person’s experience, perspective, and desires–their story. Most people amble through their days without this gift, to the great detriment of themselves, but also the world that is missing their story.

Our organizer talks about the “credential” that we look for in someone if they try to listen to us. The credential: what are you selling? What is your project? What use am I to you? Because we find it almost impossible to believe that a person is genuinely interested in us and our story simply because we are us and this is our story. There must be more.

We suggested talking with people in our congregation about their experience of work. We would explain, “We’re trying to better understand the issues people in our community are facing, and we’d like to hear your story.” Our organizer smiled and took a long pause before editing our pitch down to the last six words.

We’d like to hear your story.

In all of our wailing over church decline we are missing the great gift the church still has to offer to our culture today, a gift people badly, badly need. We can cultivate a sincere interest in peoples’ lives and provide spaces and invitations for them to share their stories. Nobody else is doing that. Nobody.

Imagine if people in your neighborhood recognized your church as the place that, more than anything, was eager to hear their story.

Who’s Afraid of Nextdoor.com?

Yesterday I spent an hour on the phone with someone who is working on two interesting things. She is hosting a gathering in her home every other week where people who don’t go to church–including children– share a meal and a simple liturgy.

She is also moderating the nextdoor.com page for her neighborhood, a page she created. She found that tool, noticed nobody else had organized her neighborhood, and set it up herself. Then she sent postcards to all her neighbors inviting them to a wine and cheese party in her front yard. Then she walked around her neighborhood inviting people face-to-face.

I had two reactions I she described these projects. First, I could totally organize my neighborhood on nextdoor.com. Second, there’s no way I’m doing that.

Fear is so close at hand. What if my neighbors don’ like me? What right do I have to take on a role like that? People will surely find this meddlesome. Fear, fear, fear.

Steven Pressfield says that fear is the best indicator that some work is worth doing.

One more thing. Look at nextdoor.com and tell me why it wouldn’t make sense for someone in your congregation to create the page for the church’s neighborhood and set about building connections with the neighbors that way.

Monday Morning Quarterback

Stuff I learned on Sunday.

Confirmation class was all about Jesus yesterday. What do we believe about Jesus? What do we say about Jesus? Here are the slides from our discussion:

This year’s group is mulit-age. There are adults and youth. Yesterday 3/4 of our youth weren’t there, so it was almost all adults. And for both the youth and the adults in the class, what the church claims about Jesus is easy: fully human. Fully God. Savior. Friend. Judge (okay, judge is not so easy). Got it. No problem.

The content of our Jesus claims is window dressing to the more acute tension we feel about making a claim–a public claim–at all. Most of our group expresses some variation of the view that personal beliefs are one thing, but to assert those beliefs as if they bear on other people is quite another thing, and we’re not very comfortable with that other thing.

I need to appreciate better what is at stake for people of faith at school and work, where there is significant pressure to keep your convictions to yourself. In one academic setting I heard about yesterday, there is aggressive antipathy toward any kind of religious faith. That’s not my world. My job makes people (mostly) tolerate and even expect a certain level of faith sharing from me.

Those of us in “progressive” churches are the heirs of a liberal Protestantism that exerted serious influence on public life in the 20th century toward inclusion, diversity, and the role of doubt in faith. We have largely accepted–if not promoted–the domestication of faith claims to the personal, private realm, where anything you wish to believe “for you” is fine so long as you don’t push that belief on others.

I think we have to help people push past that for two reasons. First, it’s not really how we act, because the expectation that one ought to keep their convictions to themselves is a conviction not kept to oneself. But more importantly, the youth and adults in my congregation are among the good guys, and with all the bad guys pulling the levers of political, cultural, and economic life these days, I want to embolden the good guys to share their Christian convictions in public.

How’s that for a public claim?

Sunday Game Plan

How we win the day.

Phase 1: care for congested kid by administering 10 ml of CVS Children’s Cold Medicine. Pain/fever reducer, expectorant, and–critically–nasal decongestant.

Phase 2: coffee. Regular Coffee

Phase 3: brag about wife’s Harry Potter wizard making project, conceived and executed in about 10 hours yesterday. Using over-sized chopsticks ($.99 per pair at the local Vietnamese grocery) cut by The Neighbor with his table saw to 13 and 1/2 inches, the definitive wizard wand length, she painted, handled, and shellacked (not shellacked) 20 of these beauties.

Phase 4: execute daily Claptrack post.

Phase 5: write Sunday Game Plan.

Phase 6: breakfast=Trader Joe’s quick cook steel cut oats.

Phase 7: shower, shave, dress.

Phase 8: don new black canvas Vans and try like Hell to pass them off as dress shoes at church.

Phase 9: sit in on Adult Education class on race, part two of a three part series. Here’s part one.

Phase 10: worship. It’s Jazz Sunday and the church’s 60th birthday celebration. Wife helpfully dropped 60 brightly colored plastic beads into a sandwich bag as a visual aid for for the Children’s Time. 60 is nothing.

IMG_20150208_063918~2

Phase 11: lead inter-generational confirmation class, knowing half the 9th graders are off at a debate tournament. We started last week with “Predestination and Other Oddities.” This week=”Who Is Jesus? Who Cares?”

Phase 12: lunch

Phase 13: grocery shopping. I’ve scrapped the super-detailed, meal-specific grocery list in favor of a list-free approach. Secure various meal components, mostly proteins and green veggies, then consult the cookbook for ways to use them.

Phase 14: attend Ash Wednesday planning session with youth. They’ve been working on this for a few weeks with their youth group leader, and all I know is that they’re planning on using this song in the service:

Phase 15: dinner?

Phase 16: read a chapter of Harry Potter And The Prisoner of Azkaban to daughter at bedtime. Getting to this is the day’s main goal.

Andrew Sullivan, Ezra Klein, And Megan McArdle vs. Seth Godin on Blogging

Reader Murphy posted a link in the comments to this post about journalism and data. It’s an essay by Megan McArdle lamenting Andrew Sullivan’s retirement that advances angst expressed by Ezra Klein (linked here) on that event that fingers social media as the culprit killing blogging.

Here’s a money quote from that essay:

But the problem with the old model of blogging is not just social media; it’s that blogging is exhausting. Two or three items a day doesn’t sound like a lot, but it takes a long time just to find something you want to write about. And the slowly dying ecosystem of other blogs makes it harder, because there’s no longer a conversation you can just easily hook into. Instead of plopping yourself down at a table where people are already talking, you have to wander through a room filled with people who are speaking to an audience through a megaphone and decide which of these oratorial topics might interest your own audience and a few thousand of their Facebook friends. It’s much lonelier, and consumes more energy, than it was in days of yore.

It’s hard to find something to write about. You can’t just hook into a running conversation. Who knows what your audience (and their social network) wants to read? It’s lonely.

Sullivan said this in the post announcing his retirement:

We’re a tiny team, already stretched beyond any sane life/work balance, with no financial backer, and a work ethic that might be alternately described as manic or masochistic. I’m not the only one exhausted and drained after years and years of intense, always-on-deadline work – not just editorially, but also these past two years in running a small business. We’re a very tight ship as we are, with a drained crew.

Making a career out of blogging seems impossible and, frankly, not worth attempting.

But blogging as a personal discipline that keeps you honest and supplements your other work? There’s nothing stopping us from doing that. You write about personal and professional learnings; you start conversations; you write for yourself first and then see if there’s an audience for what you’re writing. That has always been the harder work of blogging–of all writing.

Here’s Seth Godin’s approach to blogging:

I believe that everyone should write in public. Get a blog. Or use Squidoo or Tumblr or a microblogging site. Use an alias if you like. Turn off comments, certainly–you don’t need more criticism, you need more writing.

Do it every day. Every single day. Not a diary, not fiction, but analysis. Clear, crisp, honest writing about what you see in the world. Or want to see. Or teach (in writing). Tell us how to do something.

Go.

The Diner

Yesterday one of my two after-school youth groups met at a diner because Tuesday is the only afternoon they’re all available and Tuesday is when I take my daughter to ballet down the street from that diner. Nine of us loudly took up the booth along the back wall, gulping shakes and chili cheese fries and generally making an unholy ruckus.

The youth arrived before I did, and so they had time to explain to a woman with a teenager daughter at an adjacent table that they were a church youth group. Which is funny. Two of them come to our church.

When I sat down the woman approached me and asked which church we were from. I told her, but then qualified that “church youth group” designation in a stammering, egg-headed way that none of the youth would do. They don’t hesitate to identify themselves as a church group, so why should I?

The meaning people make out of the work the church puts out into the world isn’t up to the church. I’m repeatedly surprised by the meaning people impart to things that I dismiss as routine church programs. Maybe the church isn’t the best judge of its meaning to the world.

This Blog’s For You

Landon shared a post I wrote last Tuesday, and, as you can see, the blog traffic spiked dramatically. He is the Kingmaker of Presbyterian blogging. As you can also see, the traffic was back to normal the next day.

Screenshot 2015-02-03 at 5.22.20 AMSocial traffic (FB and Twitter shares) drives blog traffic, and anyone trying to build a blogging audience benefits from that kind of sharing. But I’m learning that it’s a mistake to write for the peaks in the graph instead of the valleys. The valleys are what blogging is about.

As Ezra Klein reflects in a mournful piece,

Links from other bloggers — the original currency of the blogosphere, and the one that drove its collaborative, conversational nature — just don’t deliver the numbers that Facebook does. But blogging is a conversation, and conversations don’t go viral. People share things their friends will understand, not things that you need to have read six other posts to understand.

Here’s my pledge: to write and share 100 times more for the valleys in the graph, the January 22nd audience, than for the peaks, the January 28th one. The latter’s exposure is exciting, but the conversation I want to have here needs fewer, more engaged participants.

Conversation: you know who shared that Kline quote with me? Landon. By link. In an email. Conversation, y’all.

Thank you reading. And sharing. But still reading. And commenting. And yet reading.

This blog’s for you.

Monday Morning Quarterback

Stuff I learned on Sunday

Teaching an adult class before worship and a youth class after worship=the perfect storm.

A Middle Eastern member of the church shared during the adult education class on race that he has to identify as “white” on the Census.

This Vox video on race works really well as a conversation starter:

When explaining the congregation’s 60th anniversary during the Children’s Time, be careful not to make 60 sound REALLY OLD.

When you ask children in church, “Guess who’s birthday it is next week,” one of them will most certainly answer, “Jesus?”

Taking the purple sparkle-eyed stuffed dolphin away from a child during the Children’s Time is not an effective way to draw attention to the story. Neither is giving it back.

You can safely stick your tongue out at members of the choir only once during the Anthem.

Most 9th graders think “predestination” has to do with GPS.

The Preschool Director works on Sunday.

The righteousness of ordering Subway for the youth Super Bowl party instead of pizza was always sure. Turns out it’s expedient too: the pre-game line in the pizza place is out the door, yet Subway is empty. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled (with sandwiches).

In light of burger ads featuring naked women and a trailer for an S&M themed movie during the youth Super Bowl party, next year’s event will be redesigned as a four hour prayer vigil for the soul of a nation.

Sweating the morally bankrupt ads during the youth Super Bowl party is a waste of energy, because most of the youth are playing a first person shooter video game in another room anyway.

If you’re satisfied there’s no way an 11th grader will shoot that can of silly string at you in the middle of someone else’s house, your satisfaction will not be rewarded.

The youth’s mother who refers to Missy Elliot as “my girl” is more badass than you thought.

Trader Joe’s is empty in the hour immediately following the Super Bowl. So that’s when they wipe down the produce shelves.

Reading the penultimate chapter of a Harry Potter book and then abruptly stopping is exactly the wrong way to get a six year old to sleep.