Monday Morning Quarterback

Note: Monday Morning Quarterback is a weekly post reviewing Sunday, the busiest, most stressful, most gratifying day in the week of a pastor/parent/spouse/citizen

Song of The Day:

http://rd.io/x/QEq_K9BrFQ

3:04. Awake. Why?

3:30. Still awake. Why not? Spouse is awake too, and coughing. She’s watching American Idol. Conclude to take 4 year-old to church with me in the morning.

6:00. Alarm sounds. Snooze.

6:20. Alarm sounds again. Snooze again.

6:40. Alarm sounds a third time. Up, cursing the notion that the snooze alarm set at 20 minute increments instead of 10 makes for more a more rested awakening.

7:12. Spouse shuffles downstairs and asks if I can take 4 year-old to church with me. I’m way ahead of ya.

7:56. 4 year-old, eager to get to church and “help” me get ready, opts for a granola bar in the car for her breakfast. Happy for her churchy zeal, I acquiesce.

8:26. 4 year-old gives her stamp of approval to my plan for Children’s Time.

9:17. Play the “I Have A Dream Speech” for the high school Sunday School class, using my new portable bluetooth speaker.

9:43. Impressed with high school students’ recognition that, with respect to race in America, there’s still much work to do. For the Tickler File: a youth-led interracial worship service.

10:17. Trying not to appear desperate, race to the back of the sanctuary during the Passing of The Peace to greet a new family with a teenager. High five the Parish Associate on the way back to the chancel.

10:20. Children’s Time=Martin Luther King, Jr. + Moses + Ordination of Elders and Deacons=blank stares. Forgive me, Nancy Lammers Gross.

11:18. Community Life Team meeting in my office. 4 year-old and her playmate are pressing their faces against office sliding glass door. Grateful for her playmate’s dad, who is tracking their movements across the church while I’m in here.

11:41. Playmate’s dad interrupts meeting with an offer to take 4 year-old home for an afternoon play date. Yes please. Grateful, grateful, grateful.

12:53. Stop at the grocery store to get spouse some ice cream and lemons.

1:06. Hit Panera to get spouse French Onion Soup.

1:43. Lay down for rare Sunday afternoon nap.

1:47. Up. Who sleeps on Sunday afternoons anyway? Off to grocery store.

2:39. Grocery Store encounter with long-absent church member. Pause in the conversation, and I decline to ask the question we both know I want to ask. In a second, she’s gone. Alternately curse and congratulate myself for that bit of . . . restraint.

4:47. Digital media conversation with junior high students. Stunned by their accounts of teachers using cell phones and playing video games during class. Can this be true?

5:44. Playing Wii Just Dance to Nicki Minaj with junior high students. Impressed with their moves. Decide that this is not the time to teach them Safety Dance.

8:36. Cross the line in my impression of another youth leader.

8:38. High school student crosses the line in his impression of . . . me. I don’t whine like that!

8:48. Youth group game over. Have to be convinced by the other adult leader to skip the second game in favor of Bible study.

8:50. Commence 10 minute Bible study. Worst youth leader ever.

9:17. Stop at pharmacy to get Therflu for spouse. The flu medicine shelf resembles the Wal Mart electronics aisle on Black Friday. Only store brand flu remedy available. Yep, it’s flu season.

9:58. Go to bed.

10:12. Out of bed, warming leftovers and watching archive of AFC Championship game.

Tofu on the Facebook Pizza

I unfriended (Facebook) a family member in December over the poisonous speech of her friends in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. We’ve since re-friended (if that’s a thing), but the episode taught me something about social media and meaningful speech.

Here’s what happened:

Only hours after the shooting, the family member in question posted something to their Facebook wall that amounted to, “Don’t start talking about gun control. Guns don’t kill people . . . ” Now, no one learning the news from Connecticut was in any kind of emotional state to engage in rational conversation about it, yours truly included. I felt compelled to respond, though, so I hastily commented, “How can you defend guns right now? Seriously, how?”

The next several hours unleashed an increasingly abusive stream of comments directed at me. I was accused of insulting this family member. My Christian faith was questioned. I was told to “SHUT THE HELL UP!” All of this came from people I don’t know but who are part of my family member’s social network. As the thread of comments grew, I defended myself. Finally, though, I stopped, and I unfriended my family member. I wanted no part of this network of people.

If you insert yourself into controversial conversations on Facebook, people are going to attack you, probably with more vitriol than they would if you were in the same room. Everybody knows that. Something else has occurred to me as I’ve thought about this incident, though, and that is the notion of pizza. Facebook conversations are less like democratic exchanges of ideas and more like pizza parties.

When we share something on Facebook, whether we compose it ourselves or post it from another source, we’re offering a hot steamy pizza to our social network. Some of our friends will gobble it up, liking it and commenting, “Amen!” and “Thanks for sharing.” Others, though, won’t like it. And their comments effectively throw tofu on the pizza. And nobody likes tofu. Especially on pizza.

It’s as if I showed up to my family member’s pizza party, looked at what she was offering to her social network, and announced, “How can you eat that?!” and then tried to correct its flaws by adding healthier ingredients to it. That was a very unwelcome move to the vast majority of the network. It rendered people unable to assess the nutritional merit of the tofu I’d sprinkled on top of the pepperoni because they were so angry it was even there. I’d ruined their pizza.

I’m friends with my family member again. Only now, when she serves up one her contentious pizzas, I politely decline and move on. Her social network likes pizza that I think is unhealthy. My social network’s pizza tastes are different, and she wonders about them, “How can you eat that?!” But, for my part, I’m done trying to improve other peoples’ pizzas.

What Have I Done?! (Or, On Fooling My Daughter’s Developing Feedback Mechanisms)

Douglas Rushkoff’s latest piece for Edutopia says no iPads for kids under eight. Gulp.

In a piece titled “Young Kids And Technology at Home,” Rushkoff (who I recently interviewed for PLGRM Magazine) takes the metaphorical screen off the figurative tablet (and tv):

all screens may be different, but they’re still screens to young children. On a most rudimentary level, this means they either depict two-dimensional realities (like cell phone interfaces and sideways-shooter arcade games) or use their 2D displays to depict 3D realities, such as TV shows. No biggie — except for babies and toddlers, whose ability to understand and contend with 3D worlds is still in development. They don’t fully understand the rules of opaque objects (that’s why peekaboo behind a napkin poses endless fascination), so high quantities of time spent sitting in front of 2D screens may actually inhibit some of their 3D spatial awareness. That’s why so many pediatricians recommend that kids under the age of two probably shouldn’t watch any TV at all.

My daughter is approaching five, and she’s been manipulating 3D representations of reality on a 2D screen since she was three. On a five hour drive from Phoenix to Los Angeles last year, she played almost constantly and went berserk when the battery finally died. Since then we’ve improved her emotional connection to it; she understands that it’s in her long term interest to shut it off when we say so. Now when she asks to play it, she cranks up the charm and bats her eyes.

Her favorite apps by far are the dozen or so Toca Boca simulations of cooking and making clothes. I love these apps, and I quite proudly show them to people whenever the little one is playing them in a restaurant. Still, Brother Doug wants none of it:

Little kids play with balls, seesaws and slides as they develop their vestibular senses, and come to learn about the wonders of gravity. They move on to Frisbees, bikes and Hula Hoops as they explore angular momentum and harmonic motion. The weightless world of a digital game or virtual environment fascinates us for the way it defies the rules of the real world; until we are firmly anchored in the former reality, however, these new principles are not neurologically compatible with a developing sensory system. Up and down, light and dark control a whole lot more in human biology than we might like to think. Best not to fool these feedback mechanisms before they have a chance to come online in a developing child.

Have I been fooling my daughter’s feedback mechanisms? Those of you with young kids, how do you manage their interaction with digital stuff?

Making Paper Cranes: Feminism

Note: Making Paper Cranes is a weekly engagement with Mihee Kim Kort’s New book . . . uh, . . . Making Paper Cranes: Towards An Asian American Feminist Theology. Mihee handles complicated things gently. Also, she’s deadly in the low post.

I went to seminary with Mihee, and I was surprised to read this in her book: “I remember avoiding these [liberal] courses and viewing the [theology] department with a sort of desperate fascination.”

Huh.

Mihee recalls the warnings she received from the well-meaning elders of her home church, alerting her to the pagan dangers of “flaming leftist notions about women’s liberation.” I, too, received warnings like this, and nobody embodied leftism, feminism, and liberation more to me than Mihee.

Huh.

Now, I was a neophyte of the purest order, the product of Hellfire pentecostalism become hand-wringing evangelicalism become shoegazing emergence. The conventions of mainline protestantism were as foreign to me as haggis. So I had no reason not to assume that the Asian woman knocking people over in flag football games and striding confidently into theology lectures was a lefty feminist in Christian clothing.

It tickles me to read the chronicle of Mihee’s flirtation with feminism. Men from church stock such as produced me have a suspicion of feminism drilled into us early and thoroughly. Who knew women do too? And who knew that many Asian women are nurtured on a unique distaste for it? Mihee quotes Pandora Leong:

my experience suggests that within the subculture of Asian women, I am also fighting a cultural consciousness that favors a duty to society over the spirit of independence. Individualism may have been a Western male value, but at least it was a Western value. White feminists only had to democratize it; as an Asian feminist, I must introduce it. Asian society places a premium on social order and the advancement of the community.

For Mihee, Asian American feminism “must counter two levels of patriarch by giving voice to individual experience.”

Here’s what strikes me about this. So much of the discourse that pulses through “educated” cultural circles (including mainline denominational gatherings) takes aim at “individualism” as an insidious force that has eroded a communitarian sense of responsibility to one’s neighbor. Yet, Mihee is holding up an experience, shared by many Asian American women, in which that communitarian sense often muzzles the individual voice, to the detriment of one’s neighbor.

Ragging on individualism, then, is not enough. It seems those of us in the “dominant” culture need to be more clear about the kind of individualism we oppose, even while we look for ways to accompany our brothers and sisters who are working to cultivate a more holy individualism for their communities and, I daresay, for the church.

How do we do that?

New Music Tuesday: Live Acoustic Throwback Edition

Reader question: what album got you through college? Seminary or Grad School?

Also, what new releases should I be looking out for?

Album: Live Acoustic

Band: Guster

Label: Ocho Mule

Release Date: January 8, 2013

http://rd.io/x/QEq_K0Ir-rk

Normally, I wouldn’t get worked up about an album of live acoustic versions of songs I already knew and, in some cases, loved. But these songs make unique contributions. There’s no novelty in arrangement or vocalization (such as the irritating habit of inviting the audience to sing the chorus), only rich vocal harmonies and the addition of some simple strings. The recording of “Either Way” is as good of proof as there is:

http://rd.io/x/QEq_K0Ir-rg

I fell hard for Guster in 2003 while a seminary student. I listened to Keep It Together the whole academic year. Then, during my first year as a pastor, I would spend my morning commute pounding the steering wheel and stomping the floorboards singing along to “Happier” and “Two Points for Honesty.” They fell off my rader after that, though. It’s been almost 10 years.

http://rd.io/x/QEq_K0Ir-rU

Good to hear ya, boys.

Monday Morning Quarterback

Note: Monday Morning Quarterback is a weekly post reviewing Sunday, the busiest, most stressful, most gratifying day in the week of a pastor/parent/spouse/citizen

Song of the day:

6:13. Get out of ~~bed~~ couch as house guest opens the front door, thunking it against the latched security chain and cursing, on his way to Starbucks to finish the morning’s sermon (house guest is also the guest preacher for the day). Threaten to beat him senseless (house guest is also a close personal friend).

6:15. Fire up the computer to the cold reminder that the Broncos blew their playoff game the day before. Wonder: if losing in the divisional round is all the same, wasn’t it more fun with Tebow?

6:17. Decide I’m over football.

6:57. Put the finishing touches on the youth group outlines for later in the afternoon. High school outline consists only of “Check In (possibly by student),” “Game,” “Bible.” Oddly, calm.

7:33. House guest returns and we leave for church, I in a snazzy purple shirt and tie I got for Christmas. Also, my new tie pin.

8:12. Return home with house guest to retrieve his preaching robe. Carry it to the car like Mr. Bates. Insist on the correct pronunciation of “Valet” for the rest of the day.

9:04. Introduce house guest to adult Sunday School class, listing all of his credentials except his 13 year tenure as a church pastor. Next time . . .

9:13. Watch house guest lead class on the inclusion of LGBTQ people in the church. Savor the sudden realization that all is well: my friend is doing God’s work out in the open without fear.

9:48. Joke with Head of Staff that house guest packed three white stoles and needs help choosing one. She puts on hers, a white-with-green-patterned one she got in Jerusalem. Joke: “Good choice. Surely [house guest] doesn’t have one like that.”

9:52. Advise house guest to wear the white-with-red-patterned stole he got in Jerusalem.

9:58. Insist that the acolytes wear white cinctures instead of the green they’ve donned. For Heaven’s sake, it’s Baptism of The Lord.

10:16. Enlist house guest in Children’s Time, sliding baptismal font halfway across the chancel like an old couch. Tell kids we do “some things” with the font, then correct myself, “Well, we really only do one thing with it.” Decide to push it a step further: “youth group games notwithstanding.” Stop. Just stop.

10:42. Listen to house guest bring the Word.

12:34. Finish lunch as another football game is finishing. Note that earlier decision to be over football was foolish.

1:38. Text from student: “if someone were to throw the baptismal font and accidentally break it…how much would it cost to replace?” Resolve to can joking during Children’s Time. Delighted, though, that students were there and paying attention.

3:01. Bid goodbye to house guest. Make plan to stew in sadness for the rest of the afternoon.

3:30. Get to work on jar salads. Allow 4 year-old to assemble two of them (mom will get those ones). Vegetables chopped, dressing made, and 10 salads done in an hour. Clean up not so much.

4:43. Discover I’ve come to jr. high youth group without my lesson plan. Deputize staff volunteer to lead youth group.

4:53. Students share uniformly that their favorite thing about church is youth group and their least favorite thing about church is worship. Wonder what to do about that.

5:22. Marvel at the commitment and skill of youth group volunteers.

7:18. High School student announces, “It’s not littering if you don’t throw it!” Must write that down.

8:41. Lead lectio divina with Isaiah 43. Glory. Precious. Honor.

9:23. Back home, put 4 year-old in bed to loud protestations, listen to her scream for 37 minutes before falling asleep.

10:12. Decide I’m over football.

Top Chef: Youth Group Edition

Making Paper Cranes: Foreigner

” . . . for the most part I will use the phrase ‘Asian American,’ which will potentially include people of East Asia (China, Hong Kong, Japan, Mongolia, Korea, and Taiwan), Southeast Asia (Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam, and Malaysia), South Asia (Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka), and the Pacific Islands (Polynesia, Melanesia, and Micronesia), though not all stories will include all groups.”

“I choose to identify myself and this endeavor as ‘Asian American’ rather than as Korean American, though that is my specific ethnicity . . . I make this move intentionally to be as inclusive as possible, so I might address the basic issues that impact the group(s) of people who are lumped together in this category; how people in the United States view Koreans affects how they view those of Japanese, Chinese, Indian, and Vietnamese descent.”

The diversity of experience among “Asian Americans,” as Mihee deftly describes it, is staggering. As an Anglo American, I have almost no relationship to that diversity. Actually, that condition is only influenced by my own ethnicity, not conditioned by it, as the phrase “As an Anglo American” wishes to suggest. I’ve had opportunities. Doors have been open. Afraid, though, I’ve mostly stayed put and so stayed in the dark.

Last year I participated in the ordination of a Korean American pastor. The worship service was entirely in Korean; my English recitations were foreign. It felt so wrong to me that the experience was so novel and that, as a minister in a presbytery where almost half the churches worship in a non-English language, being the only mono-lingual person in the room jarred me.

Mihee’s identification of herself as “Asian American” for the purpose of inclusion makes this project more personal. It’s helping me to appreciate the wide array of Christians–Presbyterians at that– in my own patch of turf who share some aspect of what she’s describing.

Take just one aspect of that experience: being labelled a “foreigner.” “I have always endured the question of whether or not I am a foreigner,” Mihee writes, even though she was born and raised in the United States. There are remedies available to soothe the discomfort of that question, but they come at a cost.

The “model minority” myth, for example, flatters Asian Americans by marveling at their academic and business success, as well as their family values and deference to the rule of law. Yet in doing so the dominant culture merely praises what it values most about itself. And not everyone appreciates it, as many grieved white college applicants will attest. Here’s where that leads: “Asian Americans have become pawns, a ‘teacher’s pet’ community, a group resented for their success, who are also targets of violence and hatred by other groups, yet still not even accepted by the dominant culture.”

Keep talkin’ Mihee.

This is hard reading, mostly because I’m not sure what to do with what Mihee’s saying. Perhaps she will have some counsel to offer later. For now I’m grabbing on to her exposition of the way American media stereotypes Asians, an expositions that leans heavily on the work of Franklin Wu. This is something I can pay attention to and work on.

What about you?

New Music Tuesday: Indie Piano Pop Edition

Working along here to the sounds of The Mailboxes, a little Cleveland-based outfit I discovered yesterday in the New Releases tab on Rdio’s home page. “Red Flags” is the debut project of Jillian Spears, who funded it with Kickstarter. The first track on the record hooked me, and I’ve listened to it, like, six times over the last two days.

Here’s The Mailboxes Soundcloud page and their Last.fm entry.

It’s not all piano pounding, though. “Just As Long As You Care” is a ukulele ditty that proclaims, “I don’t care about money or material things/Just as long as you care about Jesus and me.” Nice.

So, ya like it?

Monday Morning Quarterback

Note: Monday Morning Quarterback is a weekly post reviewing Sunday, the busiest, most stressful, most gratifying day in the week of a pastor/parent/spouse/citizen

Song of the day:

6:00. Out of bed to look over the order of worship for the first time all week and put some thoughts together for Time with The Children. Instead, spend the time commenting on Landon’s blog. Brewed the last of the Klatch Roasters Flavored Christmas Blend. Christmas 2013 come soon!

9:00. Respond to Jr. High student’s suggestion of a “Nerf war” at youth group with, “Sure, sounds good.” Consider it worth entertaining overt gun violence for the sake of student leadership.

9:15. Sit in with the high school Sunday School class to learn that my presence makes the volunteer teacher nervous. Spend the rest of the day wondering if my newly shaved head transforms me into a menacing spectacle.

10:17. Introduce the guest musician during Time with The Children without warning him. He looks up from his last minute preparations flustered, obviously happy to be here.

10:36. Curse myself for giving away my worship bulletin to the acolyte. We’re singing off the inserts, music the guest musician has written himself. He notices my hands are empty and he lifts his hands from the keys to retrieve a song sheet from his Bible, peering over his glasses and offering it to me. Shuffle over to the piano. Retrieve it. “Thanks.” Tuck tail back under robe.

10:43. Nudge Parish Associate towards the piano to retrieve the next song sheet we don’t have. I had my turn.

10:52. Offer communion. “The cup of salvation.” The cup of salvation.” “The cup of salvation.” “The cup of salvation.” “The pup is dalmation.” “The cup of salvation.”

11:43. Family grocery store run. Wife peels away to get a B-12 shot. That’s a thing, right? Shots in the grocery store? Sure. Okay. I’ll get some peas.

1:27. Assemble four jar salads from ingredients wife has carefully selected, chopped, and arranged in a grid on the kitchen table. Woman of Valor!

2:17. Recline on the couch, dishes to clean yet, droopy-eyed, and mutter into a pink Disney Princess walkie-talkie: “This is daddy. Need a nap. Over.” Four year-old obliges, coming downstairs to retrieve the radio from my fake sleeping chest and covering me with a blanket. Burst with delight.

2:35. Text high school students about youth group: “I’m cool. Please think I’m cool. Please come to youth group tonight so I don’t feel like a useless stooge. Ha ha.” Or something like that.

4:53. Dive into the Digital Literacy and Citizenship lesson with junior high students. Screaming, yelling, arguing, dog-piling (translation=good lesson). And this video:

5:41. Cut junior high student leader loose to orchestrate his Nerf war. 17 minutes of set-up followed by three minutes of the war. Good activity. See you guys next week.

7:08. Atone for jar salads with two slices of pizza, six cookies, and a Coke. Youth group food will kill me.

7:34. Catch my breath. Riotous laughter with high school students and adult leaders. Note in the moment gratitude for this community of 10 or so people who genuinely like each other and who have only come together since September. Wonder how this happened.

8:41. Attempt to lead students in Lectio Divina reading of Isaiah 60. Watching one student sleep, open-mouthed, reclined on a couch through the whole exercise. Not watching the time. Parent arrives for pick up during last reading. Resolve to replace batteries in youth room wall clock.

9:02. Adult leader pats my shoulder and says, “That was good” on his way out the door. Esteem tank, full.

9:17. Cajole gas station attendant into turning on the air compressor for free. No cajoling needed; she’s happy to do it. People are basically good and kind. Squint at tire print for max PSI. Can’t see it. Use phone as light. Use phone to look it up. Dummy.

9:34. Watch highlights from day’s football games, recalling the days when I could actually watch them. Note prior self-pity over this arrangement mostly gone. Mostly.