Are Presbyteries Families?

The Presbyterian Church (USA) is entering a period of renegotiation, as congregations and presbyteries absorb the reality that both the New Form of Government and amendment 10-A may pass. A number of efforts are already underway to align congregations and presbyteries on the basis of theological agreement and not geography, a shift that will involve the creation of entirely new presbyteries. Presbyteries and church sessions, as well as a Middle Governing Bodies commission formed by the last General Assembly, are working on these things at the same time.

At the center of this renegotiation is the understanding of the purpose of church structures beyond the congregation, namely presbyteries, but also a denomination per se. And at the center of that conception are metaphors. The Ministers and Presbytery Executives who are urging this realignment are doing so with metaphors to describe presbyteries and the denomination. I want to examine those metaphors.

[[Excursis: the PC (USA) Book of Order doesn’t dally in metaphor when it comes to presbyteries: “Presbytery is a corporate expression of the church consisting of all the churches and Minsters of the Word and Sacrament within a certain district. The Presbytery is responsible for the mission and governance of the church throughout its geographical district.”

The proposed New Form of Government adds language about the imperative for congregations to “share with others both within and beyond the congregation the task of bearing witness to the lordship of Jesus Christ in the world.” Neither of these draw on anything metaphorical.]]

One metaphor being employed for presbyteries in an attempt to re-conceive their nature and purpose is the family. A colleague of mine writes:

The reason for doing something like this is to create circles of shared mission, shared theology, and trust within a diverse and fractured larger body. I’d compare this to the familial unit existing within a diverse nation. I like having a family with shared values. One of the reasons my wife and I got married was because of the values that we shared . . . We had certain shared values, which created trust and intimacy between us, and we teach those values to our children.

That congregations ought to experience trust and intimacy with one another as they share the tasks of ministry is undeniably important. But are family-style trust and intimacy enough to carry the load of that task? And are there aspects of family life that go unnoticed by this adoption of the metaphor? And does choosing to align with a presbytery with whom a congregation shares certain values mean that it believes the churches in its current presbytery don’t share those values? Isn’t choosing to leave one family for another divorce?

I would press my colleague to identify precisely those values that he doesn’t think we share. And I would ask him to consider that perhaps the parental role in the family is not the one that churches should occupy in the metaphor. If, as our denomination affirms, “Christ is the Head of the church,” then aren’t churches related to one another as siblings? Siblings may grow apart. They may have open conflict. One may even kill the other. But they can’t simply adopt different families.

The truism, “You can’t choose your family” ought to be remembered here. You can choose your friends, and that’s more in line with what people do when they choose to get married. In that case, it’s worth stating that the bonds of marriage aren’t negated because the values of one of the spouses changes. Families don’t always share the same values. They don’t stop being families because of that.

If congregations wish to align themselves with presbyteries with whom they imagine they share values not shared by their current presbyteries, then they are not joining a family but a circle of friends. Maybe friendship is a better metaphor for the kinds of connections we ought to seek within a denomination (it certainly bears fruit for these folks). I’m not sure. I feel strongly, though, that The Family is not as helpful as my colleague thinks

Youth Ministry as Karaoke: A New Culture of Learning, part 4

See the first three posts on A New Culture of Learning here, here, and here.

Collectives are made up of people who generally share values and beliefs about the world and their place in it, who value participation over belonging, and who engage in a set of shared practices. Thus collectives are plural and multiple. They also both form and disappear regularly around different ideas, events, or moments. Collectives . . . are both contextual and situated, particularly with regard to engaging in specific actions.

They are built and structured around participation and therefore carry a different sense of investment for those who engage in them. When, for example, a person sings a song onstage at a karaoke bar, he is doing it within a collective environment. In the karaoke bar participation is not only valued, it is the substance of the activity itself. The collective that forms as a result provides an opportunity to do certain things (agency) and a connection with other performers who are similarly situated (identity)–neither of which exists in the other two venues.

What is the substance of the activity we call “youth ministry?” Short answer: there isn’t any.

If Mark Oestreicher is right, then there’s no such thing as a “youth ministry” in any particular church. There are youth ministries: various efforts to connect young people, adults, and the world around them in vibrant expressions of faith. All those various activities have some substance to them, but the youth ministry of the church doesn’t. Trying to define it, name it, strategize around it will feel good and useful, but it won’t be. At least not to the youth we’re trying to work with.

I’m wrestling instead with the substance of my Sunday night high school youth group and my Tuesday afternoon junior high guys group and the work trip and the confirmation class and Maggie and her friends. Those are all different collectives. They are all built and structured around a different kind of participation. The agency and connection students get from those different collectives don’t really relate to each other. They don’t have to. And there’s no rule that says they have to live forever. These collective form and disappear around the students in them and the things the students are drawn to.

Yet here’s the trouble I’m having. If collectives are made up of people who generally share values about the world and their place in it, then those are two things that teenagers are notoriously bad at understanding. Most adolescents’ values conform pretty closely to those of their parents, and their sense of their place in the world changes constantly. These are things that the church is helping them figure out.

So let youth ministry be karaoke. Let a group of students who want the substance of their participation with one another in the church to be playing games have that experience. But guide them as well, so that they encounter values larger than the ones they were raised on and so that they can’t settle into an easy sense of their place in the world without being given some options their school and Mtv can’t give them.

Confirmation as Collective: A New Culture of Learning, part 3

See the first two posts in this series here and here.

Also, here’s a good review of the book by education policy expert Charles Kerchner.

Now, confirmation and the collective . . .

What if a confirmation class was a collective of self-directed learners? What if, instead of giving confirmands a series of lessons on the doctrines and practices that constitute Christianity, we unearthed some things about faith and church that these students had a personal stake in exploring and then guided their exploration?

If we did confirmation in the New Culture of Learning envisioned by John Seely Brown and Douglas Thomas then we would marry their internal motivation with an unlimited information source.

I feel sort of handcuffed about finding that internal motivation.

The unlimited information source, though, we have that. Youth can explore the full text of Scripture, all of our confessional documents, and an unlimited variety of Christian faith practices with online technology.

A YouTube search for “lectio divina,” for example, produces these results.

Here’s the full text of the Book of Confessions in searchable pdf form.

Oremus and Bible Gateway are easy-to-use, easy-to-search online Bible platforms.

Here’s a downloadable daily prayer podcast in mp3 format.

We could do this. Our task in guiding students in this process would be to help them see where their particular questions and insights fit into the overall canopy of the Reformed understanding and expression of Christian faith. There are several books and video curricula we can use for this.

Who’s with me?

What does this approach overlook? What could be limited about it?

The Collective: A New Culture of Learning pt. 2

In an earlier post, I introduced Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown’s book  A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change, asking how youth leaders actually get at the internal motivation that, married with access to an unlimited source of information, drives learning.

Here’s another key idea in the book: the collective.

“As the name implies, it is a collection of people, skills, and talent that produces a result greater than the sum of its parts. For our purposes . . . they are defined by an active engagement with the process of learning.

“A collective is very different from an ordinary community. Where communities can be passive . . . collectives cannot. In communities, people learn in order to belong. In a collective, people belong in order to learn. Communities derive their strength from creating a sense of belonging, while collectives derive theirs from participation.

“[Collectives] are content neutral platforms, waiting to be filled with interactions among participants.”

What if youth ministry were viewed in a particular context as a constellation of collectives? What if, instead of The Youth Group, where one Youth Leader was trying to expose all participants to Scripture study, service, spiritual practice, worship, community building, etc., you instead had a collective of students who were participating in service and a collective that was focused on Scripture study, and any number of youth collectives engaging any number of things?

A student could choose to participate in whichever collective appealed to her. She could form a collective of her peers around forms of participation that don’t yet exist at the church.

In our congregation this year, a particular student has gathered a collective of her peers around her to engage issues of hunger. She recruited them to raise money for and participate in a walk. She got them to do the 30 Hour Famine. What that collective does next I don’t know. But I’m sure they’re not done.

I like what the collective suggests. What are the limitations, though? Does this appeal to you as much as it does to me?

Evoking Motivation in Youth: A New Culture of Learning

Mizuko Ito tweeted about a book a while ago, and since her past work leads me to think she’s super smart and to be heeded when she praises a book, I bought it. A thoughtful post by Adam Copeland reminded me of it last week.

A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change by Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown is a terrific little read, deceptively difficult given its slim 115 page figure. Thomas is a Communications Professor at USC, where Brown is a visiting scholar.

The book succinctly describes the media landscape that students inhabit today. That landscape is characterized by constant change and “a massive information network that provides almost unlimited access and resources to learn about anything.” The new culture of learning in that environment needs to allow for “unlimited agency [for students] to build and experiment with things” within given boundaries and structures.

It’s a compelling case, and it raises a number of questions for those of us doing ministry with adolescents in churches. The first of those questions has to do with motivation.

Brown and Thomas narrate a number of stories that involve students learning in a way that takes advantage of the massive information network through a deeply personal motivation to learn something, practice something, explore something. So Sam, a nine year-old, learns computer programming by participating in an online Scratch community. Students in a college course about Massively Multiplayer Online Games hijack the lectures to dissect what’s actually happening as they play these games outside of class. A freelance hacker learns all kinds of programming by experimenting with his own programs and using Google to figure out how to improve them when they crash.

In each of these cases, the learner brings a deeply personal motivation to the task of learning. Therein lies my problem.

I don’t know what motivates the adolescents I work with here at the church. The ones who come to a weekly youth group do so why? What do they want to learn? What do they want to master? What do they want to change about themselves and the world? Those motivations are in there, but I’m afraid I don’t know how to get them out. Instead, I bring a curriculum on something I think is important for them to know.

How do those of us who lead students in church settings draw out what motivates them–not just what motivates them to come to church, but what motivates them in life–so that we can help them build and experiment with the massive information network at their disposal to be more faithful people?

It seems to me that the annual flip chart exercise about “what do you want to talk about” doesn’t go nearly far enough. I need some more concrete ways to hear and observe what’s driving my students.

Any ideas?

Rushkoff to Google: Don’t Give Up on The Humans

Douglas Rushkoff gave a Program or Be Programmed talk at Google last fall, and the video of it is on his blog. It’s embedded below, but I’ve extracted the juiciest quotes, which churchy commentary interspersed.

“Computers are essentially anything machines.”

“After I had played with Basic for the first time, I looked at the New York city streets and said, ‘Oh my gosh, this is a grid pattern not because cities grow up into grids but because someone in history decided to make this a grid. And for a 12 or 13 year old that’s a profound moment, and it’s a moment that most people don’t have very often, if at all.”

Likewise, the congregation, the presbytery, the synod, and any nationally organized religious denomination is there because people in history decided to make it that way. The Christian congregation is modeled on the post-temple Jewish synagogue, which was a response to a particular historical situation. The model for it isn’t in the Bible. And the further up the associational pyramid you go, the more abstract and theoretical the decisions have been that the structure should be that way. North American Christians should all recognize this and be able to spot the biases of the structures that frame their religious participation.

“When I say, ‘program or be programmed,’ I don’t mean it just as a metaphor.”

“You wouldn’t know what an operating system was if there was only one operating system.”

The same is true of religion, isn’t it? Or of any theological construct within a religious tradition? My recent anxiety over the encounter of the youth from my quasi-liberal church with evangelical camp culture illustrates this. I want my kids to recognize that the altar call is an operating system programmed with a certain bias, just like the hymns they sing on Sunday.

“This media is biased towards binary logic, which then leads to polar conversation, which then polarizes the political landscape.”

“I so don’t care about what technology is doing to us. I care about what we’re doing to one another through technology. Technology is not doing anything to you. It’s people that are doing things to you.”

Every theory of technology has a hidden doctrine of humanity.

“Everything in the digital space is basically a snap-to grid in one way or another. You’re here or you’re here.”

“Just because you have more choices doesn’t mean you have more agency. It just means you have a wider number of choices.”

“The fact that you can keep going forever means that it doesn’t actually work.”

This pertains to the economic model of making money by getting closer and closer in what you do to the actual making of money. Abstraction is lucrative. Aggregation is the new content creation. So why not aggregate the aggregators? The problem is that with each step you get further from the creation of any real value until you have a culture of people who no longer know how to create it. How do churches help Christians actually create value in the world and not just combine and distribute value they got somewhere else?

“The more anonymity is an aberrant behavior, the better off we are.”

“The biases of our technologies matter. Guns don’t kill people, people kill people, right? But guns are more biased towards killing than pillows.”

So what is the bias of the typical mainline protestant congregation? The top 15 megachurches in the United States have an 80% turnover rate. Scads of people come once or twice but don’t dig in for the long haul. That’s a bias toward occasional non-committal participation. What about your typical Methodist or Presbyterian church in anywhere, USA?

Jesus Was A Stat Head: A Post for Opening Day

“Fixate on the particular and you miss the big story.”

So says John Thorn, the official historian of Major League Baseball, in a Bleacher Report post about the damage that sabermetrics have done to baseball.

I’m not buying it, for baseball or religion

For the uninitiated, a brief summary: over the past 20 years, baseball has seen the rise of a kind of player valuation that is based less and less on the perceivable “tools” of players and more and more on a searching analysis of those players’ statistical records. This has applied equally to present-day players, future prospects, and past greats. It has been a move toward measurement and quantification, and its practitioners have spawned their own measurement tools in never-before-heard statistical categories like On Base Percentage (OBP) and Value Above Replacement Player (VORP).

The most accessible account of the embodiment of this trend is Michael Lewis’s excellent book Moneyball. Lewis dug into the story of Billy Beane, the General Manager of the Oakland Athletics, who used sabermetrics data to put together a string of low-budget winning teams in the early part of the last decade. Even for non-baseball fans, it’s a great read.

The debate that Moneyball popularized, the debate that Thorn is engaging, and the debate at the heart of sabermetrics is this: what has greater value? The things you can measure or the things you can’t? Is a player’s VORP a more useful evaluation tool a scout’s observation that he can flat-out hit?

Now to religion, particularly the mainline protestant Christian version. The scouts of the mainline church have been observing for decades that membership is declining, and they’ve offered their analysis: the church can’t hit the curve balls that postmodern culture is throwing. It has no theological arm strength. It’s leadership is out of touch with the players.

None of this is based on any actual data. Like the observation of a baseball scout, this way of evaluation the church depends entirely on what one can see, and its conclusions fit nicely with the scout’s well-established narrative of success and failure. And these have been the accepted answers to questions of the church’s decline.

But what if it’s been wrong all along? What if a new generation of church sabermetricians created new tools to measure what’s really going on?

Thankfully, that’s starting to happen. In my own denomination, a Research Services division has started publishing some great analytical work that casts serious doubt on the cigar stained conventional wisdom of the church’s scouts. It’s stated goal is to help the church make “fact based decisions,” which strikes me as almost poetically consistent with the aim of sabermetrics. Because it’s debatable whether a pitcher has control problems. But it’s a fact that over the last three seasons he’s walked 6.5 batters per nine innings. It’s debatable whether the church is dying and bad theology is the culprit. But it’s a fact that in 2009 the PC(USA) saw a rise in non-white candidates for ministry, increased Asian membership and leadership, and an increase in female pastors.

The scout calls it dead arm. The sabermetrician calls it a changing delivery.

What Thorn has wrong is the forced choice between the “big story” and the particular. When applied to faith, it’s decidedly anti-incarnational to poo-poo details in favor of a grand narrative. That instinct leads to a contempt for critical study of the Bible and to half-cocked evaluations of the church’s ailments.

The Big Story is made up of the particular, the stuff you can measure and track. Further, that story arises from those particulars; it can’t be forced upon them a priori.

Play Ball and go Royals!

The Ecstasy And The Agony of The Youth Retreat

We took our junior high and high school youth to a retreat last weekend put on by our denomination’s local camp and conference center. It was the first foray in a long while for our church into this camp’s programming–or any camp programming for that matter (more on that later).

Our students made really valuable connections with students from other churches in our area, which was encouraging. To me, that’s a huge part of why you do retreats like that in favor of retreating with only your church’s youth. Literally within minutes of arriving, some of our students were talking with complete strangers on their own initiative.

The volunteer staff were college students who led high-quality group games and facilitated small groups. I think the model of faith provided by these volunteer staff for the youth was very positive.

The setting was ideal: mountains, snow, sun. It made for an entire afternoon of sledding and making snowmen and snowball fights. And students came in from the snow to a big lodge with a fire burning. Recreation meets comfort meets community. It was fantastic, and our students seemed to have an overwhelmingly positive experience.

Yet . . .

Our students came from the most theologically progressive church represented, I’m sure, and the content of the retreat was notably out of step in tone and tune from what we’re nurturing them in back home. I’m not interested in a sustained critique, and I think readers of this blog will know what I mean when I describe guitar-led, male pronoun-dominated praise songs filled with images of divine Kingship, sacrifice, and blood alongside devotional talks pressing kids to make a decision for Jesus.

I wrestled all weekend with two things: first, I believe it’s a good thing for our youth to be exposed to Christians from across the theological and denominational spectrum. Neither the church nor the world is served by communities of Christians rearing their young in isolation from one another with their own branded God talk.

But how do we both include our youth in those gatherings while also taking an active role in shaping them so that our youth can actually recognize what’s being presented and not experience it as a foreign language? For what it’s worth, I used my evaluation form to volunteer to help plan the next one.

Second, my experience has indicated that Christian camps, even those of mainline Protestant denominations, are irreducibly tilted towards the evangelical experience of faith. Liberal churches, then, are more likely to abstain from the church-wide camp or retreat experience altogether than they are to engage with that culture.

I’m certainly missing something here, right?

In Response To Timothy Eldred (or The Elephant in The Mainline Youth Ministry Room)

In a typical post on a good youth ministry blog, Timothy Eldred drills down to the core of everything youth ministry is about:

There is only one objective for youth ministry – for the whole church in fact. That goal also defines the purpose of ministry clearly and concisely. It is synthesized with one dynamic word: discipleship. It is the last word Jesus spoke when he commissioned his faithful few. It was his number one priority and our number one failure.

Because I don’t agree with Timothy, I have a problem. Or he does.

A comprehensive analysis of “discipleship” as a lens for doing ministry–any ministry–is beyond the scope of any blog post. And it wouldn’t help. Because this problem is not for lack of analysis. Timothy’s analysis is sound, and his elevation of discipleship as the sole objective for the church is compelling. Youth ministries from Kalamazoo to Kenya are surely thriving with just such an understanding.

But I’m not in that boat, and neither is the church I serve. And this is the elephant in the mainline youth ministry room. Especially among those congregations on the left side of the theological spectrum, “discipleship” does not seem to appear as a useful way of describing the life of faith. There doesn’t seem to be a singular preferred alternative, in my experience, but the longer I steward the youth ministry of just such a congregation the more I feel the failure of “discipleship” to contribute anything to my work.

The grown ups in my students’ congregation don’t employ discipleship-speak. The preachers don’t use it. It doesn’t appear in the prayers and hymns on Sunday morning, either. It’s not in the vocabulary of the faith in which they are being reared. That’s not a critique. Discipleship’s absence is surely no accident. But it doesn’t change the shape of the problem.

Succinctly put, the problem is this: Timothy and I both care deeply about youth ministry, yet we would seem to be drilling for very different minerals, so to speak. I’ll propose some alternatives to discipleship in my context in a later post, but for now, does this seem like an accurate statement of a problem? Or am I imagining things?

 

 

 

 

 

My Church Killed Twitter? Personal vs. Institutional Use of Social Media

Is it better for pastors and churches to use social media institutionally or personally?

I set up a Facebook organization page for the youth ministry at my church several months ago, and it has attracted all of eight followers, most of whom are parents. Most of the content the page features is pushed from a Posterous blog I created to autopost content not only to Facebook but also to a Twitter account and a Flickr photo stream, all of which are “official” church youth ministry offerings.

I’m confident nobody uses those.

By contrast, when I use my personal Facebook page or Twitter account to narrate something going on in the youth ministry or the larger church, conversation reliably ensues.

Personally, I’m interested in people: what they think, what they’re doing, what they want to know. I’m much less interested in organizations. Yet pastors and youth leaders have well-advised instincts to make the things they’re involved in about the organization, the larger collective, and not about themselves. This is standard ministerial competence.

Social media are exposing that, at bottom, things that churches are doing are being done by people, and you can put those people on social map. And that’s okay. In fact, it may be a misuse of social media tools to employ them in the service of organizations instead of actual people.

One of the things from last year’s Theology After Google event that has stuck with me is Monica Coleman’s description of how she came to attend her present church. A friend connected her to the pastor through Facebook, and it was her interest in his theology and vision for the church that drew her to participate in the congregation. It was a person (it could just as easily been an elder or another member), not the organization.

So is it okay to scrap the “official” church Facebook page and instead cultivate the church’s relationship with the world through the personal social media presence of its leaders and members?