The people behind the Big Ideas in Youth Ministry Facebook page, Michelle Thomas Bush and Cliff Haddox, launched a podcast earlier this month, and after listening to its crisp launch, I’m excited to have it in my feed.

Oh, and my colleague Shelley Donaldson is the first guest.

Cliff, Michelle, and Shelley discuss the role of youth ministry in helping parents negotiate connection with their teens. I’m glad for that, because this is an aspect of ministry with students that has given me fits.

On mission trips, for example, when we ask students to leave phones at home, invariable some phones are spotted throughout the week, and the justification is always, “My parents wanted me to bring it.” My standard response is to grind my teeth. But I’ve been feeling lately that remaining resigned to frustration is not what’s expected of me. Further, it does nothing to accompany youth and their parents into some pretty important life and faith territory.

Parents struggle just as hard with a week of separation from their teenagers as the teenagers do. Whatever help I can provide with that struggle I want to provide.

Yet I don’t understand that struggle as thoroughly as I might, because I haven’t endured it. I’m not the parent of a teenager yet. I think I have some learning to do to adequately grasp 1) what that struggle is really about for parents and 2) what a given parent actually wants in terms of a connection to their emerging adolescent. I don’t quite feel like I have anything to teach them about that just yet.

The episode puts an important element of ministry with youth today on the table, and for that I’m grateful. Because this is a condition of contemporary life begging for some curious inquiry from the youth ministry community.

My Bullet Journal says I’ve almost done all the things I set out to do in October. That feels good.

My Bullet Journal is silent about whether those were the things I should have done though. That doesn’t feel good.

Somebody said that certain elements of my church’s Confirmation program used to be mandatory, and without even thinking I answered, “Mandatory? What’s that?” It was a bald admission of an operating assumption: students will participate because they want to or because their parents want them to, but not because I want them to. Certainly not because I say they have to.

I want this assumption challenged, so I will unpack a couple of particulars. First, I can’t make things mandatory in Confirmation because I don’t have a realistic consequence for noncompliance. What, would I tell a student she can’t make the profession of faith she wants to make because she missed an event? To do so would equate the authenticity of the profession with the student’s willingness to prioritize church programs above her many other commitments. Would we make such a demands of an adult? Would we tell the 48 year old mortgage broker that he can’t profess faith and join the church unless he comes on a weekend retreat?

Students choose church invitations over soccer and dance. They do. They just don’t make a show of having made that choice. I learned on our last Confirmation retreat because I asked, “What would you be doing if you weren’t here” that one of my students skipped an entire soccer tournament in favor of church. I’m convinced the value of that choice is greater because it was his (or his parents’), not mine.

This assumption admits a willingness to sacrifice participation from those who need a requirement to justify attendance in favor of the participation of those who want to come. It places a lesser value on compliance in attendance than it does on desire. The former might admit more members to the church, but the latter probably will admit more disciples.

What is your outrage getting you?

If it’s motivating you to change, both yourself and the world around you, in positive ways, then stick with it.

But use caution.

If you’re coveting outrage, if it’s draining you of sleep and making you twitchy for the next nugget of scandal, walk away. You don’t have the outrage, the outrage has you. It’s not doing anything constructive for you, and we need you constructive.

Outrage is fuel for change and highly flammable.

I have been working in mainline Protestant church youth ministry since 2008, and during that time I don’t think I have done much of anything to help young people cultivate a Christian piety*. That’s both bad and good.

First the good.

Piety can easily be equated with the whole of faith in a way that leads the believer to imagine herself in the driver’s seat of her relationship with God and of God’s working in her life. I don’t know how many times I heard, as a pious young adult, that if I didn’t pray regularly or correctly, didn’t spend daily time reading and meditating on the Scriptures, the God “couldn’t” work in my life. There are few things less Christian that the assertion that God’s intervention in our life depends upon the quality of our pious devotion. The gospels are pretty much the story of God’s apprehension of the impious. We call that grace.

Teaching young people to pray and study their Bible as a tool for achieving God’s favor is poisonous to their faith.

Also, the churches I’ve served have not been marked by open displays of personal piety among adult congregants, at least not the kind of displays I was taught as a young adult. The piety in mainline churches differs somewhat from the “daily walk” urged upon the faithful from the evangelical pulpits I’ve sat beneath. It has more to do with corporate worship participation–praying unison prayers and listening to the Word read and proclaimed–than private prayer and devotional reading, and instilling a piety in teenagers that is out-of-step with what the grown ups in their church actually do does only walls them off from adult participation in the congregation.

But the goodness of pious practices should not be overlooked, and I fear, both in my own discipleship and in my shepherding of teenagers, it mostly has been. Maybe as a nervous reaction to the overzealous piety of my own youth, or maybe out of laziness, or maybe even as an attempt to stand firm on the assertion of God’s initiative toward us, without our knowing anything of it or doing anything to earn it, but something has muted the insistence on personal piety.

What characterizes the piety of your congregation? How are young people being taught it?

*Here’s my shorthand definition of “piety”: personal practices that connect the claims of faith with one’s daily experience. In my own experience, daily prayer and Bible reading have been the most prominent elements of personal piety.

 

Halt And Catch Fire ended last week, and ever since I’ve been sad. It was made for the me, that show, with it’s 80’s/90’s cultural nostalgia and plot that steadfastly refused to allow any of its characters lasting happiness or success. You rooted for all of those characters, because they had huge ideas to do important work, and your heart broke each time one of those ideas ended in underestimate-the-competition or overlook-the-wrong-variable failure. I identified with the show so much that I made its theme my ringtone.

The quality of the stories we consume plays a significant role in the quality of the stories we can conceive and tell. So I’ve been cataloging my shows, the ones I have watched to the end and the ones I will.

Halt And Catch Fire

Deadwood

The Wire

The West Wing

The Leftovers

Les Revenants

The Walking Dead

Fear The Walking Dead

Mr. Robot

Game of Thrones

Stranger Things

The Americans

It’s a larger catalog than I thought I possessed, and there’s not a comedy to be found in there. Most of it is dark and complicated.

I’m not sure what to make of that.

There’s a new tab atop the page here called “Curriculum.” There are lessons there I’ve written for youth groups over the past year mostly, but in time I plan to add older pieces I’ve written. Sharing–showing your work–makes you better. It may even benefit the community of practitioners you’re a part of, in my case youth ministry.

It’s rough though.

The curriculum I’ve posted has simply been “published to the web” ala Google Docs, and it has not been thoroughly edited; it still reflects the context for which it was created. That stuff is easily adapted. I’ve tried to attribute sources for activities, though that’s not done in an academic way (“MBI” is Moving Beyond Icebreakers, for example).

Placing curriculum here is a very small experiment grease some collaborative wheels in the youth ministry community, particularly that part of the youth ministry community that does not like to rely exclusively on published curriculum or that enjoys creating its own, contextual, lessons. If that’s you, I wonder if you’re interested in sharing. I wonder what we could make out of our work together.

 

These sky-grey wet asphalt days are my favorite, when chimney fire displaces cut grass for a smell and I can retrieve my sweaters from the closet, when darkness puts a merciful end to daylight before dinner.

I live for the well lit warmth of inside spaces in the winter.

I keep trying to converse with differing perspectives, and I keep failing at it. I was reading this blog for awhile, because a profile in The New Yorker and a new book made the author seem like someone who had some important things to say, things I was likely to disagree with. Disagree I did, but also shudder at the tone of contempt.

I’ve read this pastor’s blog off and on for the past eight years. He and I were presbytery colleagues before he led his church out of our denomination. Staying connected to his blog once seemed like a helpful way to maintain a relationship with a perspective on ministry and the gospel that is markedly different from the establishment mainline Protestant one I’m in most of the time. The tone there, too, is contemptuous of disagreement. It makes me feel like garbage.

I need to develop thicker skin for engaging with whip smart people who think me and mine are arrogant infidels who wish only to gratify ourselves the the strains of cultural accommodation and the death of the church. That’s not me, and it’s not the people I know. So why does that tone land? I can stop it.

I’m not giving up on listening to people I disagree with. The respectful, humble ones are the best. Those are in short supply, though, so I’m going to have to grapple with the contemptuous ones. I need all of you for emotional inoculation.

Most of the youth I work with are surrounded by caring adults who are eager to listen to them in the aftermath of a public tragedy like the mass shooting in Las Vegas. That is a good thing. I have often found that when I offer to talk to students about one of these incidents, even just to create space at youth group for them to process it, students don’t want to. They’ve done it already at school or at home, and they are eager for time to think about something else. Still, we leave the space just in case.

I wonder if the bigger opportunity isn’t to create space to explore things like violence and tragedy absent an immediate crisis and to equip youth to interpret these things theologically and to respond to them faithfully before they happen.