Yesterday I opened my sermon with a recommendation. Go listen to the current season of the podcast Startup. It’s about church planting, and it is thought provoking and troubling and inspiring–even if you’ve never been part of a church plant or imagine you will be. Seriously, the experience of this little church plant in Philadelphia and its leaders are so relevant to church work in general that it is well worth your time. Also, it’s just a really well done production. Kudos to Eric Mennel and crew.

I listened to the new episode on Saturday, on my way home from officiating a wedding, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the central question it raised: what if being a good entrepreneur makes you a bad Christian?

It’s a question that pans all the way out to almost every professional expression of the faith. What if the skills and habits of required to successfully run a church or a faith-based organization are actually inimical to the practice of the faith and to growth in the faith?

I don’t think that’s the case, in the end, lest I wouldn’t be in the profession I’m in. But boy am I thinking about it.

Anyway, go listen to Startup.

I watched a dear friend give a speech recently that she tried to deliver “from the heart.” She ended up saying things that were imprecise and unhelpful. She wishes she had written the speech down in advance.

Paper is not the enemy of the heart. I’m not sure where we got the idea that words spoken but not written carry greater authenticity than those penned in advance, but it’s not a useful idea. As if the unfiltered product of whatever is going on in our head and heart in the present moment is more meaningful than something we might devise with time and deliberation several moments–even days–in advance.

Writing it down in advance allows you to be spontaneous if the moment takes you. It is said by people who worked on the “I Have A Dream” speech with Martin Luther King, Jr. that none of the dream language was actually in the draft King had in front of him. It had been in earlier drafts, but he removed it. However, in the moment, somebody called out, “Tell ’em about the dream, Martin!” And off he went. I suspect having words on paper allowed the space for King to improvise.

Writing it down in advance is allowed.

What do you have to do?

Today?

This week?

This month?

This year?

In this job?

In this life?

It should trickle down, right? My big life aims should shape the work I’m doing. The impact I want to make in my work should drive my project list, which should shape my monthly calendar, which will structure my week, which will tell me what I need to work on today.

Of course it’s a luxury if it works like that. For many the world over, there is but one life aim: survive. Secure food and shelter for yourself and your family through whatever means of employment you can get. Today is all that matters, then–the hours I need to work to earn the money I need to put food on the table. That’s my impact.

If you get to decide what you want to work on, you have a tremendous, historically rare, gift. Use it well.

 

Ministry is project work. A project is a body of work that needs several steps to complete. So this Sunday’s sermon is a project. So is next month’s session docket. And the fall Confirmation retreat. Those of us in ministry settings need to be able to manage and effectively complete projects.

Yet not all projects are equal in terms of impact, are they? I had this thought last week as I was beating a path back and forth between the printer and my desk, trying to complete a project that mostly required documents and numbers and signatures. I attacked it. Meanwhile, on my list of projects, sit a couple of things that require a lot more than printing and signing, projects that need non-distracted thinking and writing, projects that demand a cold call and an ask. They sit there while I knock out the paper and printer projects. Getting those done makes me feel effective, though I know that the real impact will come from paying serious attention to the other projects, the ones I can’t call “done” so easily and that scare me to think about.

I guess what I’m noticing is that being effective in one kind of project can be a dangerous form of hiding from another, more demanding, kind of project.

Michele Margolis, from an op-ed in Saturday’s New York Times:

It’s not just that our religious beliefs affect our politics — it’s that our politics affect our religious choices. We don’t just take cues about politics from our pastors and priests; we take cues about religion from our politicians.

Viewing our politics through the lens of the gospel is what we should be doing, but Margolis makes me wonder if I haven’t been assuming that’s simpler than it really is.

Her forthcoming book, From Politics To The Pews: How Partisanship And Political Identity Shape The Religious Environment looks well worth a read.

And then Joe Drape, also in the New York Times, about one of my favorite things to fume about: youth soccer. It turns out the American version of youth soccer is thriving in pretty exclusive zip codes.

Currently, American households with more than $100,000 in annual income provide 35 percent of soccer players, according to the Sports & Fitness Industry Association, compared with 11 percent from households earning $25,000 or less.

That I have had such constant contact with the demands of soccer on the students I work with says something about where I have chosen to work.

That deadline stressing you out represents an obligation you must meet. If you fail, consequences will be real, maybe even severe. You are rehearsing them all in your head. You’re frozen by the fear of them.

A deadline is also an opportunity, though: to have done something. What if you looked forward to the day after the deadline instead of dreading the day of the deadline?

Does that get you unstuck, even just a little?

Several of us who attended my friend’s retirement from the Air Force last week remarked afterward that we learned more about his work in that 60 minute ceremony than any of us had gleaned over the previous 20 years, including–no joke–his wife.

I made several cautious inquiries about it during our infrequent visits over the years. They were all met with a response that was more “it’s not very interesting” than “I could tell you but then I’d have to kill you.” My friend’s a humble dude.

But it turns out he’s been working on cool stuff, like, space stuff. I’ve been hearing about things he’s working on in the news, I just didn’t know it.

What are you working on that nobody knows about? What cool project are you pursuing that’s not going to garner you any praise, or even recognition?

Maybe the things nobody knows about are the important things.

Maybe impostor syndrome gets worse the more you try to fight it on its terms. When you find yourself making those unfavorable comparisons between yourself and a peer, ask yourself: am I comparing my work to hers or my person? If the former, good; the challenge to make better stuff will hardly do us wrong.

If the latter, though . . .

Impostor syndrome is about you, not your work. It tells you that you don’t belong, that you are an interloper among the more highly qualified, more worthy. No amount of output will defeat it. Trying to overcome impostor syndrome with better work is like trying to douse a brush fire with a rake. It’s the wrong tool for the job.

Look, I don’t know the right tool. Therapy, probably. Some introspection. Good friends. Prayer. We’re all throwing whatever we have at this thing, right?

It’s important to understand what we’re up against first.

High school: I knew who my friends were, and I was deeply, irrationally committed to them and whatever time we could steal from family and responsibility to be together. The activity hardly mattered. Driving around our suburb was just as enjoyable as attacking a hill on mountain bikes as long as they were involved. We were motivated in whatever we did by a vision of one another as indispensable.

Of course that was short-sighted, as much of adolescent thinking and feeling is. Of course we were dispensable. 24 years have passed since we graduated, and we have practically, almost completely, dispensed with one another. New relationships and commitments have required space, and something had to give.

The disposal didn’t happen at once, but in stages. College was a stage, and so was world travel. Marriage, all of us suited up for photographs, was another stage, though it didn’t feel like it. New jobs, and, finally, kids–all stages in a gradual disposal from our lives of people who our teenage selves could not have imagined living without.

It’s healthy; there is something sad about adult relationships that live only to preserve an experience of youth. We have to dispose of the relationships we had as teenagers, because the people who made up those relationships are gone, or at least irrevocably changed by the accumulation of experience and interest and choice. Clinging to the friend of my youth makes of him a self-serving object and denies the reality of who he has become.

We have to start over.

I spent two days last week with one of my oldest friends. We’ve known each other since kindergarten. I have pictures of us in little league uniforms squinting and showing off trophies. He is in my most cherished memories of high school. And yet the time with him last week paraded one person after another, one demand after another, that has shaped his life in astounding ways, ways that I have been almost completely oblivious to the whole time. He is no longer the person goofing off in those memories. He is so much better. Continued friendship with him must account for and embrace the person he is now, not simply reminisce about the person he was then.

Friendship can reset at adulthood. It probably has to.

 

Short term mission trips present an opportunity to build relationships with partners and communities over time. You don’t have to go to a new place every year. “Where are we going this year?” is one of my least favorite things to hear students ask.

We just got back from our second consecutive week-long trip to Detroit with junior high (and some pre-junior high) youth. Detroit was brand new for a few of them, but for most it was not. For the bulk of leaders it was not. Everything we did during the week drew comparisons to the previous year’s trip, which got old (I was the biggest offender) but which also indicated a positive development. We were talking about what we were doing and who we were doing it with, not, as on the first trip, about the city and all its problems.

A leader asked me towards the end of the week if I noticed any improvement in the city since a year ago. I answered No. What the late Anthony Bourdain disparaged as “ruin porn” is still ever-present as you make your way around the city. It’s a very short window though, 12 months, and what you’re viewing through it, if you’re looking for visible signs of development or “turnaround,” is elusive. Looking for it from the outside is part of the problem. Because what looks like improvement and what permits a kind of self-congratulation on the part of tourists and well-meaning church groups is a gleaming new downtown casino, even though none of the church leaders we meet when we visit Detroit experience that kind of improvement as anything but predation upon the communities they’re serving.

Taking groups of youth to the same place year after year to work with the same people and the same leaders can help us train our eyes on the right kind of “improvement” in a place. That improvement is measured by how well your friends there are thriving more than by how much development is going on downtown.