The cohort is the new small group. Seriously, what is NOT a cohort these days? From Doctor of Ministry programs to conferences to youth ministry training, everything seems to be a group of eight to ten people led by a designated facilitator pursuing defined learning objectives.

I like it.

I did a coaching cohort through the Youth Cartel a few years ago and found it rewarding. I continue to draw insights from it. Ever since, I have been interested in learning how to facilitate cohorts, and so I’m excited to be starting such a training today. Of course, it’s a cohort.

Some of the reading we were asked to do before the training focused on the prevalence of coaching in business executive circles, and one of the things many coachees shared in Harvard Business Review interviews is that, in choosing a coach, they don’t really care about certification. There is no standardized, accredited training for coaches. The people interviewed for HBR’s research said over and over again that two things matter more than that any technical certification: the coach’s experience and the chemistry they and their coachees have.

Have you employed a coach or been part of a coaching cohort? What made it effective for you?

You probably can’t just apply your routines, or even your convictions, from one church or workplace to another. Difference is cultural norms should be appreciated and studied, not glossed over.

This is a painful lesson to learn.

If something’s not working in the months following the transition, it’s not you. It’s the new place and all of its historical and logistical quirks; it’s not the same as the place you were before. Learning how things work here is going to take some time, and the only way you’re going to learn that is through failure and frustration. It’s not you.

But it is you if you don’t take heed. If you continue to persist as if the new place is as same as the old, don’t expect anything to actually work in the former. The nostalgia of what worked before, somewhere else, is pleasant enough, but it won’t drive the bus today.

Two news and analysis products I consume daily are “The Daily,” a brief podcast by The New York Times in which reporters talk about the stories they’re reporting and Vox’s YouTube channel. Both of them make prominent use of the phrase, “What you need to know.”

As in Michael Barbaro’s sign off, “Here’s what else you need to know today.”

As in Vox’s “What You Need To Know About The House Vote To Repeal Obamacare.”

It is the calling card of an explanatory mode of reporting and analysis, and I love it. It is brief, limited to verifiable facts. It is not commentary.

I’m tired of commentary.

I’m going to start using this phrase in my teaching and preaching.

As in, “Here’s what you need to know about the household code we find in I Peter chapter 2.”

As in, “Here’s what you need to know about the Trinity.”

But not just teaching and preaching.

“Here’s what you need to know about the summer mission trip.

“Here’s what you need to know about youth group this week.

“Here’s what you need to know about being a youth ministry volunteer.”

We can all explain better.

Helping people level up is never not rewarding. In youth ministry there are abundant ways this can happen.

Staff can be given new creative platforms. Volunteers can initiate projects or take on leadership. Youth can be invited to try on different roles: preacher, usher, organizer. Parents, too, can be helped by the church’s youth ministry to level up. Books (like this one I just got) and articles and thoughtful conversation prompts all help.

Of course, it’s hard to help staff, volunteers, youth, and parents level up if you’re not trying to do the same.

 

Sex is a subject that demands specificity of conviction in youth ministry. My experience of treating it during youth group meetings and even retreats has shown that informality and nuance are the opposite of helpful if what we want is to provide our students with reliable information and sound counsel about sexuality. A parent once reported to me that her son boiled down my youth retreat message to, “Premarital sex is okay as long as it’s fun.”

Not. Helpful.

This subject, perhaps more than any other, puts progressives’ in a bind. Many of us come from churches that treated sex with such importance and that surrounded it with so many rules and rituals that we and our peers could be forgiven for equating Christian discipleship with sexual “purity.” Abstinence pledges, courtship rituals, rules about never being alone together with someone of the opposite gender (these rituals always assumed heterosexuality): practices fit for traditional societies enjoyed wide adoption by my peers in late adolescence. One joker walked around campus with rubber bands around his wrists, which we would painfully snap every time he had sexual thoughts.

We know we don’t want that. We don’t want our discussion of sexuality and relationships with our students to carry more importance than it did for Jesus in the life of a disciple. Not that Jesus never talked about sex, just not a ton.

He did talk about it, though, and what he said was both conventional and demanding. Conventional in that Jesus was not turning over the tables of marriage-based sexual ethics, and yet demanding in that neither was he content to let the subject rest on conventions and traditions. Equating lustful looks with adultery gets right down to business, doesn’t it?

So progressives don’t want to ignore sex as a youth ministry topic either, which is the mistake I’m most guilty of making over the past decade.

What do we want then?

We want to host safe, honest, clear conversations with teenagers about sexuality that are developmentally informed while not feeling clinical and spiritually grounded without drowning the subject in individualistic, pious rigor. How hard could that be?

I’ve got high hopes for the Our Whole Lives training we’re hosting later this month, because everything I’ve heard about it says that it’s exactly what I want. My colleagues and I wanted this training, so we went out and got it. There are spaces still available, so if you can spare a few late May days in Chicago, I think it will be worth your while.

It might even be fun.

Several youth helped usher at Easter morning worship this year, and the response has been a little surprising. The grown-up ushers urgently want the youth back. The youth were way into it too; one of them wrote in her Confirmation statement of faith that ushering on Easter was the closing argument for the case that active church membership was for her.

It wasn’t my idea. The Head Usher twisted my arm. It was tit-for-tat, actually, because I asked him to help me with something on Palm Sunday, and he said, “If you’ll help me by getting some youth ushers to help with Easter morning.” Done.

They weren’t doing “regular” usher work, though, which at first perturbed me. Rather than guiding people to their pews, the young people were positioned at staircases and elevators to greet people and direct them to the sanctuary. They jumped in, no questions asked. I’ve found out two important things about that: 1) the ushers have wanted people in those non-sanctuary roles but haven’t had the bodies for it, and 2) the people at the staircases and elevators are flustered, late, and a little grouchy, so a smiling, confident teenager is just the thing for them.

We’re going to experiment with a regular rotation of youth ushers over the summer months, when the Sunday morning programming is on break. It’s a grown up role for which teenagers are well-suited. No. It’s more than that. Adolescents contribute particular value to this task as adolescents.

Ushering, you guys. Ushering.

 

This is fascinating. 

UB40 released “Red, Red Wine” in the U.S. in 1984 and it went . . . meh. They re-released the recording in 1988 and it blew up. What gives?

We’re not the only ones growing and changing as we do our work. So is the audience. So is the community we’re seeking to impact. If something doesn’t resonate today, that doesn’t mean that it never will. Maybe keeping so-so successes on the shelf for a few years and then dusting them off for another try isn’t a terrible strategy. Maybe the thing that didn’t really connect five years ago will today. Maybe the thing that fell flat yesterday will change the world in a decade.

Try again.

Of course, if we aren’t putting work out there today, then tomorrow we won’t have anything try again with.

I have leaned heavily on those nine words this week.

On Sunday I employed them to answer an 8th grader’s question about heaven.

“In life and in death we belong to God.”

This afternoon I intoned them at a funeral for a person who died with no living relatives, a person I never met and whose obituary was a single sentence. There were four people present: me, the Funeral Director, the Hearse driver, and a representative from the bank that handled the deceased’s affairs.

“In life and in death we belong to God.”

And tonight I cant them to myself at the news that a colleague and friend only a decade my senior has died.

“In life and in death we belong to God.”

For your faith, your work, your life, your death: commit those nine words to memory.

RIP Jeff Krehbiel

The reason some things don’t get done is that I don’t want them to get done. They’re scrawled in my Bullet JournalBullet Journal, page after page. I’ve voice-dictated them as Google Now reminders. I’ve tapped them into Evernote. They’re still not done.

There is no tool in the world, analog or digital, that can match my will for avoidance.

 

It has regularly happened in one of the churches I’ve served: a student completing Confirmation chooses not to make a profession of faith and so become an Active Member of the church. I’ve gone from stressing about this to not caring at all to caring enough about it to orchestrate the Confirmation so that 1) nobody is singled out for the decision they’re not making and 2) the congregation honors the decisions that are being made.

I’ve been telling kids all year that “getting confirmed” is not really a thing you do in a Presbyterian church, at least not in the same way as you would in a Catholic one. You make a profession of faith. That “confirms” the covenant God made with you in your baptism. But who is the subject of that verb? God? The church? The confirmand?

The trick hiding up my sleeve is that they’re all getting confirmed on Sunday. All of them, whether or not they have been received into Active Membership by the session in the previous hour, will come forward, kneel, and hear their name uttered in this prayer: “Defend, O Lord, your servant ___________ with your heavenly grace, that s/he may continue yours forever and daily increase in your Holy Spirit until s/he comes to your eternal kingdom.”

Only after that will we affirm our faith together as a congregation and hear the professions of those who are joining (baptizing one of them).

My conviction here is that the church is confirming something important for all of these young people whom it has nurtured since their baptisms. The church is confirming that all of them are a valuable part of the community.

I’m confirming something too. You don’t get, at 14 years of age, to tell the church to stop caring about you and praying for you. Well, you do. But we don’t have to listen.