Two communications yesterday happened within two minutes of one another. The first was a phone call from a pediatrician specializing in adolescence who wished to explore with me how our ministry with youth might help young people in trauma, and the second was an email about shuffleboard. A congregant works for a shuffleboard rental company and wants to talk with me about youth events where we might hire him.
You never know what’s coming at you an any given day.
The summer Sundays are fast disappearing, and I’m spending my July weekdays designing event calendars and scope-and-sequence plans for youth groups that will start in about six weeks. It’s twelve years I’ve done this. The thing I’ve learned in that time is that you need these calendars and plans, badly, but you also need to not need them.
Without them it’s hard to plan, because these are not the only things you’re working on, and they’re not the only things youth and their families are planning for. It seems parents need these things earlier and earlier, and in fact the end of July feels late. But apart from the scheduling demands, you need a scope-and-sequence so that each week fits into a larger framework of activity–teaching, community building, service. Doing this year-to-year prevents a kind of default “We’re only ever do X” type of program.
And yet you need to not need these plans and calendars. A vibrant ministry is capable of spontaneity, not chained to a calendar. If students become energized around an idea in February, you need to be able to work with it, even if the plan was for something else.
“Know the rules well enough to break them effectively” is one of my favorite sayings. It works for plans too: make a clear enough calendar and plan that you can change it effectively.
On nights when Daughter wants to stay after cheer practice for open gym I get a front row seat to a carnival. Fully grown humans (most of them men) show up here after 9 pm on a Tuesday to jump and flip and spin and bounce their bodies off the springy blue gym floor. They’re all young, like early-to-mid 20’s, but their youth, to look at them, is the only thing they have in common–this is as racially diverse a gathering as you will find anywhere in the city at this hour.
What do these people do during the daytime? Do they have jobs? And what are they practicing for? They take turns performing individual moves, and they offer one another high fives and tips, but they’re not rehearsing anything together. They’re all on their own in here, and this is perhaps the only place in the city they can do this.
It’s stunning to watch. A younger version of me would feel inferior, like these taut, twisting frames were condemning mine as I sat slouching in the corner. But not anymore–at least not today. My life has progressed out of the phases in which you pursue solitary hobbies past 9:00 on a weeknight. Theirs will too, and some of them will be glad for the transition. But for now they have this seemingly unbounded freedom and flexibility, and I’m glad for that. I’m happy for them.
There was a group of students near the vending machines playing a game, and they responded to my approach in pursuit of a Diet Coke by becoming suddenly silent. Clearly they didn’t want me to hear what they were saying. It was awkward, but I let my hand linger over the button to see if I could learn anything. Then one of them blurted out, “We’re playing Cards Against Humanity!“
My heart sank. I could only mutter, “Well that’s unfortunate.”
“Why?” one of them asked, slightly indignant. I wasn’t expecting that. Their silence at my approach meant they knew an adult wouldn’t approve of their playing, at a church youth conference, a game dubbed to be “for horrible people.” I suppose it’s a fair question though.
“Because it’s really offensive,” is all I could answer. It was awkward again, and I couldn’t take it, so I took my Diet Coke and left them to the game I’d just insulted them for playing.
Leaving the vending machines, I felt the need of some justification for pouring cold holy water on some teenage fun. I’ve never actually played Cards Against Humanity, so I did a quick search for commentary that would support my judgmental intervention and found this useful description of the game play, which includes the unambiguous assessment:
It’s what mainstream white culture has done for generations and the framework which Cards Against Humanity deliberately provides is one that encourages it further. In an age of greater awareness, where more and more people push for social change, this game is winking at you and telling you it’s okay to indulge those backward prejudices. It’s just fun, it says. It’s ironic, it says. And for the white male designers of Cards Against Humanity, who are primarily selling it to white male players, a lot of these belittling, dehumanising concepts are just a bit of fun rather than real issues that affect them.
If you’re wondering if any of the kids I caught playing were non-white, they weren’t. This was a group of white teenagers who a few hours earlier had clapped and hooted during worship when the preacher charged them to take a faith-based stand against racism. Now here they were indulging a game in which racial prejudice is part of the setup. I was near despondent about it, not to mention embarrassed that I’d walked off and left the game in progress, not to mention disappointed that my ministry with teenagers has produced students who feel comfortable playing such a game.
I spotted the owner of the game about an hour later and asked him if he would please not bring the game out again. I muttered something about it going against the values of the conference, something that felt both judgy and weak at the same time. He politely agreed.
Too little too late.
The first time I spotted a rent-able motorized scooter on the massive midwestern campus serving as the venue for my denomination’s every-three-year youth conference last week, I thought, “Oh, kids are definitely going to want to ride those.” Check that. The thought was more, “Oh no! Kids are definitely going to want to ride those!”
The first time I spotted one of the event’s teenagers riding one of them it was actually two of the event’s teenagers, and both of them were from my church and thus my responsibility, and one of them was in a sling from a month-old broken clavicle. I thought–no, I don’t actually want to confess what I thought.
I shut down the scooter riding among my students. I gave two reasons. 1) there are no helmets, and 2) renting them involves waiving liability for injury, and, as one of my fellow leaders pointed out, minors can’t legally do that. I leaned more heavily on the first reason. For the remaining three days of the conference, my students had to watch their peers from other groups speed and weave down the street while they themselves trudged countless miles in sticky humid heat. Sometimes it stinks to have me as your youth leader.
By week’s end tales were being told of two conference attendees hospitalized from scooter accidents, one of them reportedly hit by a car but both of them okay. Still, sometimes it stinks to have me as your youth leader.
Some of the earliest posts I wrote on this blog were based on Jeff Jarvis’s book, What Would Google Do? and sought to apply its insights to the church. In particular, I was really excited about the idea, that, just as Google provided a platform for communities to do the things they cared about, churches ought to think of themselves in platform terms.
That was in 2010. A lot has changed. I no longer think that global technology corporations are the right metaphor for church life, and I’m embarrassed about my previous enthusiasm, because the intervening nine years have clearly demonstrated the central danger of platforms: ownership.
It felt forward-thinking then to suggest that congregations could conceive of their mission in terms of what communities wanted to use them for. My leading illustrations were scout troops and skateboarders, and I thought it worth exploring how a church might provide a meaningful platform to those communities as an expression of its own mission. What was missing in that idea was the importance of ownership, that when you offer a “platform” for something you have to be willing to own the outcome of that something. Being a platform can easily be seen to involve surrendering authorship and ownership of the work, and that’s a mistake.
In the worst case scenario, where the platform is used to someone’s injury, you can’t disassociate yourself. Google and Facebook are providing a platform for harm, and they are failing in their missions when they shrug their shoulders about the dangerous and hateful things people are doing with them. Clearly, churches can’t copy that.
But even in the best case scenario, we should care more about ownership, authorship, and creation. It feels to me now that collaboration is the better ideal. For a church to make something in partnership with a person or a community is a more fruitful ministry outcome than simply handing them a platform to do it themselves. It’s more creative and generative, and it allows us to build more dynamic relationships–ones based on reciprocity and that prize learning–than when we simply offer up our space.
Fred Craddock’s Luke commentary makes two urgent suggestions of preachers working on the parable of the Good Samaritan.
These two rules of Craddock’s for this particular story are a good rule for all interpretation, I think. Don’t distort the baddies, and don’t domesticate the goodies.
The first bulky, a red Christmas-themed padded envelope. Inside a knit shawl, green and blue and white. No note. But I know who it’s from. It’s from the woman in Ohio whose brother worshiped at my church during the last two years of his life. When he got sick and was hospitalized, she called the church and got me. She and I had long talks across his hospital bed, including one the day he died. She knows I have a daughter. The shawl is for her.
The other slim. I know what’s in it before I open it, because the return address is Lawrenceville, New Jersey. It’s the Moleskine I left behind on the mission trip last month. When I tear the package open the pen that was attached to the book where I left it on the floor tumbles out; I’d forgotten about the pen. I’m giddy with remembering it.
Among the laundry, running Daughter to theater camp, and dropping off donation items at the Salvation Army store, yesterday also included a goodbye to our neighbors, who sent their Mayflower truck off down the street and piled three kids into their minivan bound for San Francisco. He’s got the professional break of a lifetime, and I know the move is going to prove worth it.
He commented to me on the lawn that the professional part of this move is the easy part; he knows how to do it because he’s made a career of it. The personal and family part is the great unknown. I get that. There’s a feeling of being suspended between the terra firma you and your dear ones know well and a great possibility, either successful or disastrous, and the decision is already made. The truck just left.
“Lesser people than you have done this successfully,” I told him. And then I wondered what “successfully” means in such a context. It certainly can’t mean that everything about the new place is better than the old, or that nobody in the family (including you!) struggles once you arrive. I think it means allowing the things that are most important to you to change in ways you can’t control. Some of those changes will be confounding and others will be glorious, and maybe neither would have occurred without the move. Maybe “success” means taking them both and not measuring the move entirely by either one.
On about three separate occasions since the Advent of Google Photos, I have uploaded my entire extant photo library to that service. I’ve done this each time in the confidence that duplicate photos would not be imported.
How wrong I have been.
I stand before you today as a man with a Google Photos library that is an absolute wreck of duplicate (and sometimes triplicate and quadruplicate) pictures that are incorrectly timestamped. The hours I have spent working to rectify this–it’s embarrassing to admit.
I’m battling opposing negative possibilities. On the one hand, I could delete photos I take to be replications and be wrong, thereby wiping out the only copies that exist. I’ve protected against this by backing up the entire thing on an old iPod classic. But still, especially when the pictures feature people no longer living, my index finger trembles over the “delete” button. On the other hand, I could permit this photographic stew to simmer indefinitely, making a nostalgic sip of my photo timeline a bitter mouthful of memories not where they should be, and not where they should be, and NOT WHERE THEY SHOULD BE.
What is a photo for, anyway? For memory. And what is memory for? To re-live moments exactly as they happened, to prove to myself that, yes, I once had a full head of hair and that the 11 year-old who frequently rampages through my apartment could once be held in the palm of a single hand? No, memory’s best use is as a catalyst for present growth, a spur to keep becoming the person my favorite photos show me to be. That person is most often not in the picture, but has the attention focused on an object of admiration, awe, or devotion. Memory should expand those.
I think I am starting to prefer the risk of deletion to the risk of duplication. The photo is not the memory. The photo is not the person.
YoRocko! 