Experiments are a public service, as much in ministry as in epidemiology. We can’t all be testing new approaches to solving critical problems; some of us have to keep the trains running. So if you’re in a position and of the inclination to tinker and dabble try things out, we need you now more than ever. We need to know what you’re trying and what you’re finding.

We need you to share what you’re learning.

It’s time to start planning for summer ministry online. This feels like more than a continuation of the weekly Zoom sessions we’ve grown comfortable with since mid-March. This feels like a unit, a cohort, goals and objectives.

Thus far I’ve been maintaining. It’s time to start planning.

Taking a public benefit is not a question of merit or comparable need. You shouldn’t have to earn it by suffering more than most, and you shouldn’t have to justify it by trying your damndest to not need it anymore. It’s not only for you. That’s what makes it public.

Thinking about public benefits as given by government to needy individuals ignores two important realities. “Government,” when it comes to spending, is everyone; you’ve been contributing to public benefits by paying taxes. Second, the “public” is the beneficiary of things like unemployment insurance as much as it is the benefactor. Preventing people from going hungry saves governments money over time.

Some people may need the benefit more than you, and they’re going to get it. For all of our benefit, you should still take it too.

I read this New Yorker essay about food composting in Korea in early March, and my imagination was stoked. I’d done composting before, with my neighbor Barbara, when the two of us planted a garden between our apartments. We used a trash can that I drilled a bunch of holes in.

But since moving to Chicago all my food waste has gone into the trash. I hadn’t thought that much about it until this paragraph in the essay snapped my head to attention:

Organic waste doesn’t just stink when it’s sent to landfills; it becomes a climate poison. Yes, we’ve been schooled again and again in the importance of recycling—by friends, by pious enemies, even by “wall-e.” But the recycling of organics is arguably more important than that of plastics, metal, or paper. Composting transforms raw organic waste into a humus-like substance that enriches soil and enhances carbon capture. In landfills, starved of oxygen, decomposing organics release methane, a greenhouse gas whose warming effects, in the long run, are fifty-six times those of CO₂. The United States has greater landfill emissions than any other country, the equivalent of thirty-seven million cars on the road each year.

I’m not set up to compost in my second floor apartment, and I wouldn’t know what to do with any compost I cultivated. But a quick search for composting services in Chicago turned up Collective Resource, an organization that delivers an empty five gallon bucket to your door and returns a week later to pick it up, filled with your food waste.

I signed up.

Then the world shut down.

Over the past five weeks, the thought has recurred to me that paying for a composting service is unwise, non-essential, even frivolous. It’s not going to feed my family today or next month, and the $10 I’m spending every week on it could buy, I don’t know, a stockpile of toilet paper or something useful. It could be donated. To feed people.

I keep answering that thought with the conviction that this is actually the perfect time to invest in future-focused projects like composting. Because if we’ll do it during a crisis we’ll do it when the crisis abates. And if we don’t do it, the next crisis will be even worse.

I’ve had three interactions with retired Presbyterian ministers in the past seven days, only one of whom I actually know personally, and I spent a good bit of time talking about a fourth one in my Sunday sermon. I’m reminded that the ranks of retired clergy are full of some of the most decent people you’ll ever meet.

Thanks be to God for them.

Recreation has moved online, like everything else. Playmeo, a service I’ve subscribed to for about a year and a half , added a “virtual” tab to its searchable database of icebreakers and team-building games last week, which proposes simple adaptations for several of its activities to make them work over Zoom. Meanwhile, its founder and CEO, Mark Collard, has been busy hosting webinars about how to play on Zoom (without drinking). Two weeks ago The Youth Cartel made a “Mobile Games for Youth” packet available for free on its website. I’ve found these efforts immediately valuable.

Because fun is not intuitive in this context. The need to stay attentive and connective to the people we care about it urgent, and I think most of us in ministry feel like we know how to do that, even if it means learning a new tool. But the longer this goes on, the more that urgency will recede, and the more we will need to bring something of value to our work beyond immediate presence and attention. One of those things is fun, especially for youth ministry. Personally, I don’t know how to have fun on a video call with students, so I’m grateful for resources like the ones above to get me started.

What are you using in your ministry that is just for fun?

 

 

 

 

Not in two weeks, or even two months, but more like three, six, or nine months from now–what’s next then? Zoom youth groups and committee meetings will have to evolve from their current utility as stopgap into events designed specifically for the the platform hosting them. Can we imgaine planning a year’s worth of ministry online? We’d probably better.

It might not be all bad. Some healthy differentiation might be possible between, say, a Zoom gathering for over 20 teenagers mostly to check in and stay connected and one with less than half that number facilitated by a small group leader for Bible study. Or what about the aynchronous content we’ve hastily posted to YouTube? What does a months-long strategy for that need to look like? What are those videos even for?

This moment has taken a lot away from ministry, but it is giving some things back too. There are biases in these technologies we can turn to our advantage in serving the people we care about.

 

Change, pivot, leap, adapt, risk. The moment calls for it, demands it even.

Yet I wonder, down the road a ways, which decisions to stay, hold, stand, steady, and preserve we will be glad we made too.

Junior high kids stay in place in the frame and stare intently at the camera, raise their hand to read or answer a question, and are breezily compliant. Of course. They can’t kick one another under the table or make a joke to the person next to them.

High schoolers recline in their rooms and fill their video with the blue and green lighting flashing on their ceiling and walls. They are more reluctant to raise a hand than their younger counterparts and look a measure or two less interested in what’s going on. But they’re there, together, and they keep coming back.

The college students are the most unruly. Delighted to see and be seen, they never stop replacing their background with some digital creation of their own, usually a photo from their roll, often one they have photoshopped in some clever way. They are riveted to one another’s performances.

They are delightful and instructive in their own way, all of them. I’m trying to learn from them.

I don’t want to read another editorial. I don’t want to watch another uplifting video. I don’t want to take part in another social media “challenge.”

There’s work to do, though I don’t really want to do that either. I don’t want to organize enrichment activities for my child. I don’t want to cook or clean. I don’t want to go for a walk. I don’t want to watch a movie. I don’t want to Zoom.

I’m doing these things, of course. We all are. Only, the moment is requiring performance minus interest. That’s good, though it doesn’t feel good; doing what is required but not desired is a way of performing some of humanity’s more durable–and valuable–functions: service, sacrifice, learning.

God be with you today.