Monday Morning Quarterback

Stuff I learned on Sunday.

Pilot Jay still snores like he did in high school. He’s crashed on my fold-out after a late-night landing. Who needs an alarm clock when you have this guy?

When you under-cook granola, it’s soggy. But when that sog consists of butter and sugar, who cares?

Pilot Jay does not like sweet soggy granola.

Apparently, telling police officers that you’re a pilot is a great way to get out of traffic tickets. Pilot Jay tells this to a 10th grader in Sunday school who immediately demands to know EXACTLY-HOW-THAT-WORKS.

The newest acolyte is a kid after my own heart. Moments before worship starts, this fourth grader says, “O.K., one more check, just to be sure: light the candles, hand the lighter to you, go to the podium . . .” She’s got this.

The candles don’t care about the acolyte’s checklist. They’re not lit by the end of the Introit, and the Call to Worship is happening without her. I should have bailed her out sooner.

The term “Mount of Olives” is hilarious to a five year-old.

When the preacher cracks an inside joke during the sermon, it’s much less fun when the butt of the joke isn’t in the room.

The answer to the question, “Why did Wife and Daughter suddenly disappear from worship?” is: because Daughter puked.

You can resist the Sunday school donuts before church, but never after. Never. After.

Daughter is just wiped from a week of dress rehearsals and performances. Doesn’t seem to be sick.

With the third kitchen chair broken, a plastic lawn chair must suffice for lunch with Wife and Pilot Jay at the dining room table.

My weight combined with a plastic lawn chair combined with a wood floor adds up to falling.

It’s fun to have Daughter school Pilot Jay on her favorite iPad games as he’s getting ready for a flight. He’s annoyed, but really polite about it.

Pilot Jay taught daughter to take a screen shot of the iPad. Goodbye memory.

Pilot Jay looks rad in his pilot getup, even though he doesn’t do the hat.

Aviator shades on an actual aviator look so much cooler.

In addition to 11 pm on a Saturday, 2 pm on a Sunday is a fantastic time to drive to the Orange County airport. Pilot Jay convinced Southern California’s reputation for bad traffic is a lie.

A Sound of Music sing-along at church is as much fun as it sounds.

I’m not the only one wearing that tubby German guy with the protruding chest hair T-shirt!

There are few sights more exciting than that of a Der Weinerschnitzel truck in the church parking lot.

My church is a amazing.

Spaceteam is a thing, and the Flexor Toggle must be set to 4. Now!

If you give Daughter a graham cracker snack before bedtime, she will break it into four equal parts which she will arrange on her vanity before ordering you to leave the room so she can eat them alone.

There’s a clergy couple edition of Monday Morning Quarterback!

Beans And Toast

Mark Bittman’s latest cookbook is really good because it cares more about helping you cook your own food than it does about showing off the author’s technical arsenal. The book is not meant for food critics or chefs, and it deliberately thumbs its nose at tenets of gastronomical gospel like mise en place. Here’s how one reviewer describes that move:

Bittman argues that mise en place, the time-honored approach of prepping ingredients ahead of time, is an obsolete concept in the contemporary, time-depleted kitchen. He believes those idle minutes waiting for water to boil, ovens to heat or vegetables to cook can better be spent chopping onions, grating cheese or mincing garlic. As such, “Fast” features recipes that ask people to prep as they cook, providing tight windows to complete the tasks. Aside from certain master recipes, such as those for stocks and beans, every dish here is engineered to take 45 minutes or less.

I love this book. It has prompted a couple of thoughts:

1. Before you can do something fast, you have to do it well. This is the fifth version of How To Cook Everything, and the first to focus on speed. There’s a bunch of basic teaching stuff at the beginning that aims to share the fundamentals of knife work and the like with the beginner. But beginners will still struggle, because if you don’t know how to chop an onion slowly, there’s no shortcut to doing it quickly (this is another version of the Godly Play idiom, “Know the rules well enough to break them effectively”).

2. Focus on outputs. Bittman has become concerned in his columns about the connection between obesity in America and the declining rates at which people cook their own food. So he’s trying to help more people cook at home. You don’t need sexy food pics to do that, so there aren’t any. You also don’t need a lot of “shoulds,” since the should he cares most about is already accomplished when you fire up the burner. Instead, the instructions are an innovative layering of cooking and food prep that is finished before you know it.

One more thing: I’ve had beans and toast from this book for lunch two days in a row. My mouth is happy.

Quitting from The Start

Seth Godin is fond of saying, “Just start,” and every time I hear him say it I’m inspired to go start something.

But I often quit.

This week I began taking fitness classes at a nearby gym, and I’m already sowing the seeds of my quitting. I quit running. I quit the Jillian Michaels DVDs. And I could quit this. I can feel it even now.

My quitting is the principled kind. There’s a flaw with the program. There’s a more responsible use for my time. Fitness is vanity. At last night’s class I asked the instructor how to make sure I’m taking the right classes throughout the week, since my availability fluctuates from week-to-week. Her look said, “Oh, you’re a quitter, aren’t you?”

I need to set short term goals with this and resist the urge to critique all of the little things that could, maybe, according to some other set of possibilities, be imperfect about it. When it comes to sticking it out, Perfect has been my enemy more times than I can count.

How much good work do we leave on the table because it’s not perfect and because we can’t see the end from the beginning? And how much of our quitting is a strategy for avoiding judgment: the sideways comment about the superior workout, the rolled eyes at another new beginning, the sneer?

God help us to recognize that for what it is and to keep at it. “Just start,” yes. Every day.

Compound Problems. Compound Advantages.

Because my meeting ran over time, I was a few minutes late getting my daughter to school and en route to her play rehearsal.

Because I was late getting my daughter to play rehearsal, I didn’t notice that her pants were wet until we were on the way.

Because her pants were wet, we needed to run home and get her changed.

Because we were going home and not to the theater, I was on Foothill Boulevard west of Dartmouth.

Because we were going home, I also decided to get the right shoes for her costume.

Because I decided to get the right shoes, I texted my wife (while driving–although via voice) for their location.

Because I was texting my wife, I wasn’t paying 100% of my attention to the road.

Because I wasn’t paying 100% attention to the road, I hit something.

Because I hit something, my tire started to make a funny noise.

Because my tire started making that woop-woop-woop noise, I checked it whilst my daughter was changing.

Because I checked it, I found a screw head protruding and heard the tell-tail hissing sound of a tire soon to be flat.

But . . .

Because it’s a high quality tire it wasn’t flat yet.

Because it wasn’t flat yet I had time to run my daughter to play practice before attending to it.

Because I have adequate credit, I am able to own a cell phone.

And because I own a smartphone, I could say “call Foothill 66 Automotive” into the phone while driving to the theater and be connected within seconds to the garage.

Because I got connected to the garage I was able to plead with a mechanic to wait 15 minutes before closing so he could fix my tire.

Because I have a bank account and debit card, I was able to pay the required cost of patching a punctured tire.

Because I was able to pay, the tire was repaired before the shop closed.

Because the tire was repaired, I was able to return home before 5:00.

Because I returned home in time, I was able to cook dinner before my wife got home.

Monday Morning Quarterback

Stuff I learned on Sunday

There was an altar call during worship at the youth retreat, and I was totally okay with it. That’s a change for me. Here’s how it went down.

The preacher was a woman from a Spanish-speaking Presbyterian church where altar calls must happen all the time. Her sermon built up to a time where she invited students (vaguely at first, but with increasing urgency) to “surrender” to God to “step forward,” and even to “kneel.” A couple of students, the ones from the preacher’s church, did exactly that. And it was fine. But you could tell the preacher was used to more of a response than this and was discouraged. She invited the music leader to come up and play some music while she reiterated the invitation a couple more times. He did, but nobody else moved. Finally, the preacher said “Amen,” docked the microphone, and sat down. The students looked around, then sat.

The music leader cleared his throat and looked apologetically at the preacher. “I’m sorry,” he said, “But I just need to add something here.” He noted that several students seemed to be confused about what they had been invited to, that many seemed to him to want to respond but nervous about how. So he carefully reissued the invitation in terms that teens from mostly white Presbyterian churches could understand.

“We Presbyterians like to live in our heads,” he explained. “We work from the inside out. But it also works the other way around. Taking physical steps can get our heart in a different place.” He told them he would play another song and that they had a “second chance” at taking a step of commitment to God by walking up to the front and allowing their peers and pastors to surround them and pray for them.

He’d hardly begun playing before students were moving. I stepped out of my seat to join another adult leader in receiving them. She knelt. I stood. We placed our hands on students’ shoulders. She whispered prayers for them. After a few minutes I noticed several students crowding behind me, so I turned around and offered to pray for them. Yes, they wanted that. The song ended and everybody sat back down without any air of awkwardness or embarrassment.

Time was when this would have rattled me and I would have participated very hesitantly as a careful observer and analyst rather than as a leader. I’ve got issues with alter calls from my childhood church and college evangelistic rallies where coercion and guilt reigned to everybody’s detriment. But this was careful and sensitive. I know the people who were leading it, and I trust them.

Also, youth need moments like this. Adults need moments like this, where we are invited to say “Yes” and to take a concrete physical step right now, right here, in response to God. This has been a major blind spot in my pastorate. Thanks to a group of friends and colleagues from diverse churches and the immovable youth retreat, something about that is changing.

Other yorocko youth retreat posts:

Ownership: The Annual Youth Retreat Post

The Ecstacy And The Agony of The Youth Retreat Revisited

The Ecstacy And The Agony of The Youth Retret

What Are Your Design Principles?

I’m geeking out this week, anticipating the arrival of Android’s operating system update on my phone. Simply called “L” (or “Lollipop”–Google names all of its OS versions on candy), this software update employs something called “material design” that is making tech writers woozy with praise. I. Can’t. Wait.

Android is a mobile computing platform onto which developers of software applications can build their tools. In order to build apps for the platform, however, you have to understand its “Design Principles.” I’ve been intrigued by the metaphor of church as  “platform” for a few years now, and I wonder if “Design Principles” aren’t a good way to think about ministry.

Google tells developers that, in Material Design, “Material is the metaphor. The fundamentals of light, surface, and movement are key to conveying how objects move, interact, and exist in space and in relation to each other. Realistic lighting shows seams, divides space, and indicates moving parts.” Whether you’re making a game or a calendar app, there’s the guideline.

It also wants “The foundational elements of print-based design—typography, grids, space, scale, color, and use of imagery—” to “guide visual treatments.” Whether your app takes pictures or reads email, there’s the guideline.

In Lollipop, “Motion respects and reinforces the user as the prime mover.” That guideline applies to everything a developer might build for Android.

What Design Principles do we have for ministries at our churches? Are there “foundational elements” that guide every prospective worship gathering, educational event, or community-building effort? Who do our activities (and non activities) reinforce as the “prime mover?” What is the unifying metaphor behind all of the ways we express our life of faith together?

What are the church’s Design Principles? Do they change or are they constant across time? Are they contextual or the same everywhere?

Work with Youth As Individuals, Not As A Group

It was the “youth” week to make a stewardship presentation in worship, and, given that I’m the Associate Pastor responsible for the “youth,” I needed to pull something together.

Let me skip to the end and work backward.

Two students and I presented a hoaky little song-and-dance that got the message across and made ’em laugh. I wrote the thing. The students just said “yes.”

One of the students said “yes” about two minutes beforehand, when I saw him in the front pew and pitched him on taking part. “It’s super simple,” I told him, and I wasn’t lying.

The other student agreed a few days before, by way of our Facebook group for youth. That was my main strategy: Facebook. I put up a message on Monday.

This Sunday: I need students to help me with a Sound of Music themed bit about giving and stewardship. I’m thinking something Do-Re-Mi ish during the Children’s Time. Who’s in?

First response: “which Sunday?”

Second response: “I’ll do it, but do I have to stand up in front of everybody?”

A day later I suggested a specific strategy:

How about this: check out the do-re-mi song and suggest things about CPC based on all the “do’s” “re’s” Mi’s” and everything else. For example: do–the church gives/for mission trips. Re–the light that fills our church . . . You get the idea. And you guys can do better than these. Fire away!

First response: “I’m not in.”

Ultimately, a single student was interested in participating and willing to make one suggestion. I wrote the rest, texted the student a reminder on Saturday, and brought it with me on Sunday.

The episode illustrates a truth about youth ministry today: it’s less and less working with groups of students and more and more working with individuals–identifying gifts in individuals and inviting them to share those gifts in specific ways.

Our church has no “youth group” to speak of. It has multiple groupings of students who come together for different purposes at different times and for varying durations. A project like this requires a youth worker to identify particular students who would a) enjoy it and b) be good at it, and then work with those students on it. When it’s done, they’re done.

It also requires a youth worker to use a better tool than Facebook for inviting students to share their gifts, but that’s another post.

BS: A Post for Chad Andrew Herring

Note: Chad Andrew Herring helped shape this blog post, but it’s not his fault if it’s garbage. 

Here’s a really great read from last week (salty language warning). It’s about Bill James, the pioneer of sabermetrics and Moneyball. Here’s the money quote:

Anything that happens, you can make up an explanation for why it happened.

Youth group attendance is down because kids are just so busy.

The Presbyterian church is in decline because of liberalism.

Preschool enrollment is tanking because the new preschool across town.

We are explanation makers. Our minds grasp at ways to account for the things happening to us, especially the unpleasant things. Almost all of those accounts are based on our own limited perception and “make sense” only as confirmations of 1) our ingrained biases and 2) our desperate hope that we’re not the cause of the problem.

Most of it fits Bill James’ description of BS–malarkey, balderdash, hooey. Not because we’re deceptive, dishonest people, but because we’re not all that interested in the truth and the demands it will make on us.

Bill James and the sabermetric community in baseball have a terrific tool for overcoming BS and offering interpretations of baseball events that are closer to the truth: data. A single baseball game produces enough data to choke a VORP. I know a guy who’s company employs people who watch every pitch of every game every day during a baseball season so they can compile all that data and sell it to teams. Data is anti-BS serum.

When employed properly (so mind the small sample size). Data must be interpreted by insightful people who are after the truth. We’ve all seen raw data bent into percentages and ratios that are baldly self-serving. Data+skilled interpretation=truth.

The church has access to data about church membership and about the makeup of our neighborhoods, and we should compile and interpret the heck out of it for the sake of a thriving gospel ministry. The most valuable source of data available to us is the lived lives of the people in our congregations and communities, and there is nothing stopping us from listening to them and then listening to them some more in order to understand as fully as we can what people are up against and how the church can help.

There’s no excuse for BS anymore.