A couple of weeks ago a complete stranger called the church “Just to talk.” Yesterday he called again.
“Frustrated.”
“Overwhelmed.”
“I just keep pushing and it feels like everything is closing in on me.”
“I’m not getting anywhere.”
“I know what it is to be lonely.”
I’m Listening. “Mm Hmming” into the phone. Ultimately, praying.
I looked across my office at the chairs and imagined this as a pastoral counseling appointment, which, of course, it was.
Probably not the last.
Our wisdom, in so far as it ought to be deemed true and solid Wisdom, consists almost entirely of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves.
John Calvin
That online quiz promising to reveal Which City You Should Actually Live In or Which Game of Thrones Character You Are promises to show you something about yourself, and I can only posit from the ubiquity of those quizzes that folks are hungry for some knowledge of themselves. Real hungry.
Calvin held that self-knowledge is one part of “true and solid ‘Wisdom,'” the other part being God-knowledge. But he believed those two kinds of knowledge to be “Connected together by many ties” and that it is not easy to determine “Which of the two precedes and gives birth to the other.”
So does knowing What Type of Shark You Are reveal something about God? Or is it the other way ’round?
“Rooting for the Royals has always been a battle between wanting them to win and wanting to be right.”
Everybody knows about Moneyball and how the first guy through the wall always gets bloody. Billy Beane exists as a folk hero in my imagination, and I have often drifted off to sleep these past ten years to dreams that he would plop himself down in Kansas City and work for my Royals some of the movie-worthy magic he’s worked for the Oakland A’s.
In my hand as I’ve floated on these dreams has been an iPad lit up with some baseball blog excoriating the Royals for their stubborn refusal to embrace Beane’s Moneyball reason and their stupid loyalty to baseball conventions like “intangibles” and “grit.” For seven seasons now Royals fans have been treated to a vision of General Manager Dayton Moore’s “Process” and promised that patience would be rewarded with a winning franchise. “The Process,” among Royals fans, has been a squat thumb in the eye.
Only now they’ve posted consecutive winning seasons, each one better than the one before. Now they’ve made the postseason. Now they’ve won the American League Wild Card. Now they’ve beaten the Oakland A’s in the playoffs, but not just in the playoffs–six of the last eight times they’ve played. The Process has defeated Moneyball.
Not really. I still fantasize about Billy Beane running my team. He’s crazy smart, and he’s always going to be thinking one step ahead of the industry. The team the Royals just beat is a team full of players that had failed everywhere else they’d played. But they won in Oakland. Moneyball magic.
The Process seems to me a slight variation on Moneyball’s genius. Moneyball is known for its advanced metrics, for On Base Percentage and platoon splits, and The Process has no apparent interest in any of those things. But, at bottom, Moneyball is about exploiting market inefficiencies. It’s a way of seeing the world and your competition in it. Some things are not highly valued by your opponents and are therefore readily available to you. Collect enough of the same kind of devalued commodity and you’ve got something valuable. For the A’s of 2004 it was OBP. For the Royals of today it’s contact, even weak worm-burner contact.
The Royals strike out less than any other team. They also walk less than any other team and hit fewer home runs than any other team. They strike out so infrequently because they swing at lots of bad pitches and make lots of weak contact, which is also why they hit so few home runs.
That’s a recipe for futility. Only that team just beat the team with the most walks in baseball. And they did it with a hailstorm of weak ground balls. This is the Royals formula: chopper on the infield for a hit. Bunt the runner to second. Steal third. Score on another chopper on the infield. This team won a game last month by scoring two runs in the bottom of the ninth without hitting a ball out of the infield.
Are weak contact and stolen bases the new market inefficiencies in baseball? Is Dayton Moore the new Billy Beane? He seems to have built a successful organization around the kinds of commodities Moneyball loyalists disdain. It’s not the death of Moneyball, though. It’s the next chapter.
Communion is not the same thing as harmony. This is helpful to recall during the week that leads to World Communion Sunday.
Yesterday I spent 90 minutes planning World Communion Sunday worship with the Pastor of the Spanish speaking congregation that worships on our campus and an Elder from the Indonesian speaking church that also worships on our campus. Three churches. Three languages. Organized by three people. This thing’s going to be a mess.
But it will still be communion. Christ will still be present.
One of the worst executed communion services I ever experienced was at the close of our youth work camp last summer, where there was one crusty loaf and one chalice for over 100 worshipers. It took nearly 20 minutes. Adding a second station would have cut the time in half. It was still communion.
The institution of the communion meal was no smooth production either. One guy got up and left. People were confused. Jesus was distraught. There was no moving mood music or penetrating looks from an officiant earnestly pronouncing your name as she placed a bite-sized morsel into your trembling hand.
Still: Christ. Present. Communion.
Stuff I learned on Sunday
Why get up at 5:00 when you can get up at 6:00?
Why get up at 6:00 when you can get up at 7:00?
Why get up at 7:00 when your guilty conscience can drag you from bed at 6:30?
Head colds make worship much more interesting.
If you schedule two Sunday school classes for the same time, don’t cancel one; find a way to do them both.
High school debaters sometimes get sucked into a merciless torture chamber called a “weekend tournament.” Often, they never reappear.
Sometimes the Children’s Time is an exercise in stretching a metaphor. Water=greeting people=welcome our new Nursery Director. But water also=saying goodbye to people, which=farewell to the departing Nursery Director and also=commissioning people for a work trip=Jesuslovesyouamen.
If the Children’s Music Director has the flu, the Associate Pastor may spend the second hour of worship on the floor with children tapping out a rhythm to “Happy.”
If the rhythm sticks can’t be found, that can of markers will work just fine.
The apple juice is in the nursery.
When the 9:00 youth Sunday school hour is up, sometimes the volunteer teacher stays in the youth room and talks with students–throughout the worship hour.
Two members of my church are turning some heads with this blog.
If the president of a seminary is your guest preacher, you may get to take him to lunch.
If you think you’re taking the seminary president to lunch, he may actually be taking you to lunch.
The seminary president’s spouse used to direct this really cool college for preachers at the National Cathedral that doesn’t exist anymore.
If you take the seminary president to lunch, your colleague will take him to the airport. Division of labor.
The Royals host the A’s for the AL Wildcard on Tuesday. There’s a ticket with my name on it in KC, but I can’t get there to claim it.
Jillian Michaels is The Devil.
Sometimes, all Daughter will eat is beans.
You learn a lot less on Sunday when you’re not at youth group. Struggling to not text students.
The Homeland season 1 finale will keep you up past your bedtime.
“Who do you want your customers to become?” asks Michael Schrage in his new book, The Innovator’s Hypothesis.
Here comes that move where a churchy blogger swaps out the word “customer” in a business book for “person” in a church context.
My first thought is that the mainline expression of Christianity in North
America doesn’t have a vision for what it wants people to become. What it wants the world to become? Sure. People, though? Not so much.
Am I off here?
I have a youth ministry colleague who told me recently that there are students in her youth group who use marijuana, who have told her they use marijuana, and who are nonetheless high achieving students and respectful kids. She lives in a state that has legalized it.
During the conversation she shared a sense of angst about her students’ pot smoking. She doesn’t feel like she can condone it, but neither does she feel she needs to tell their parents and insist they stop (some of them shared that their parents know). I’m green enough to not have dealt with this, so I didn’t really know what to tell her.
So, on a scale of zero to 10, where zero is absolutely not a problem and 10 is call-in-the-feds, how big of a barrier to the aims of youth ministry is marijuana usage?
The Voice is back on, and I’m struck watching it by the choice we get to make between quality and spectacle. The Voice is about quality: celebrity coaches vying for the best singers; singers seeking coaches to make them better.
Voice producers omit the bad auditions–in fact, the show watches as if only good-to-great performers even get in front of the judges.The train wreck audition footage–a staple of American Idol–has no place, because that’s a cheap way to build an audience and contributes nothing to peoples’ lives.
I first noticed the choice being made between quality and spectacle while watching episodes of Top Chef and Hell’s Kitchen. The former is all about good chefs straining to be the best, while the latter is about a bunch of cooks being humiliated by a maniacal chef. Watching one of those shows amounts to an investment in a story about quality and the struggle to improve. Guess which one.
No matter our medium, the stories we tell can either connect people who are driven by quality and improvement, or they can provide carrion for the cultural vultures who feed on humiliation and mockery. Also, we get to choose which stories we want to consume.
I just want to be friends.
I just want to be consulted.
I just want to play meaningful games in September.
No you don’t. No you don’t. No you don’t.
If you have to qualify a desire with “just,” you’re kidding yourself. Because once you have the thing you “just” wanted, once the sparse conditions of your desire have been met, you want more. Meaningful September baseball games are hollow if you lose them, and being consulted is worthless if your ideas aren’t implemented.
Let’s be clear about what we want and aim–as far as it’s in our power–for that thing.
For the record, I want the Royals to win their division, win the American League, and then win the World Series. Anything less will be disappointing.
What I learned on Sunday
YoRocko! 