We took our monthly committee meeting agenda down to the studs. The last 12 months have seen the gradual assembly of an infrastructure supported by reports of activity, both immediately past and upcoming, given mostly by staff, met mostly by nodding heads.

So last night we experimented with skipping the reports. I asked at the beginning for programs, events, or planning committee members wanted to hear about and discuss, and those got added to the agenda. Otherwise, we did a check-in, a warmup activity, a theoretical discussion about a particular element of our youth ministry work, and then two planning items.

The meeting still took as long, but there was much more interaction, and I came away with a useful list of actions that both staff and committee members resolved to take on specific projects. The reporting needs to happen in the future, perhaps as a single printed item, like we do with a financial report. But using committee members’ time to mostly listen to staff talk about programs needs to stop. Engaging them in planning and strategy is the way to go.

It only took me 12 months to figure that out.

Today marks one year since I began my present call. I wrote this on my first day.

This being the 366th day now, I can safely say nothing is as I thought it would be and everything is as I thought it would be. The strains and stretches I knew were coming came in spots I wasn’t looking for them, as did the joys and the thrills.

Maybe the takeaway is to enter transitions in a certain kind of posture, on the balls of your feet, and to prepare to hold that posture for longer than you think you’ll have to. Assume you know nothing, but act like you know enough. Don’t look at your phone those first few times you ride public transit. Head on a swivel, kid.

Maybe that’s a good posture to be in all the time anyway.

 

Architect of Donald Trump’s refugee ban, Stephen Miller, said this over the weekend in response to the eruption of resistance that ban has touched off since it was announced Friday:

“Any time you do anything hugely successful that challenges the failed orthodoxy, you’re going to see protests. In fact, if nobody’s disagreeing with what you’re doing, then you’re probably not doing anything that really matters in the scheme of things.”

If nobody’s disagreeing with what you’re doing, then you’re probably not doing anything that really matters.

Or, as I’ve said in this space before–quoting Andrew Macintosh from tech support on a classic episode of The West Wing–“If they’re shooting at you, you know you’re doing something right.”

Now might be a good time to say, “Maybe not always.”

You don’t always double down on 11. 

It’s not always true that if they’re shooting at you you’re doing something right or that disagreement is a sign that what you’re doing really matters.

Rules don’t always apply, do they? Even the rule about rules not always applying.

This morning I’m grateful for people who care for the men and women out on the cold January streets, the ones who listen to long stories and give money for bus passes and make phone calls to shelters.

I met one of those people last night.

Our church uses an answering service for after hours calls. One of the pastors is designated, a week at a time, as the answerer of those calls, and last night it was me. The woman I spoke with was trying to help someone she met downtown, who needed to get to a shelter, but then needed to get on a train to her family’s home in the suburbs, and then needed to find a shuttle . . .

She spent over an hour helping this stranger, eventually accompanying her to the train station, where the staff recognized her and got her on her regular train.

Throughout our conversation, I assumed the helpful person was a church member who had called the church for some guidance about how to help. Wrong. She was not. She called the church because the person she was helping gave her the church’s number and asked her to call.

By the time the answering service got to me and I got back to the caller, she had already done her good work. We spoke briefly about what it was like for her, the doubt you experience when you’re trying to help a stranger–am I doing enough? Am I really helping?–and the need for more people to be as willing to help.

I’m grateful for her and for all those who are out in the cold everyday helping those in need.

Note: in an attempt to get better at writing curriculum, I will be sharing pieces I write or compile here for the sake of feedback and sharing. Use anything here you like. Object to anything here you don’t like. 

This week’s Confirmation talk is about the Holy Spirit. My go-to for these talks has been Kim Fabricius’s delightful “10 Propositions” posts, but it took me about an hour of work on this one to conclude that his Holy Spirit installment is way too oriented toward academic theology to be useful for 8th graders. And so I started over, focusing much more foundationally on spirituality.

Here’s to showing your work. 

The jr high students are helping lead worship in three weeks, including writing some of the liturgy. So today is their second installment in a series about the basics of worship. Like the Confirmation piece I wrote this week, it was something else for awhile before it was this. I got some good curriculum-writing advice recently to stop trying to write everything from scratch and start employing elements from existing curricula, but I neither have nor could find anything for youth about the Reformed understanding of reading, hearing, and proclaiming Scripture in worship, so I kinda ditched that advice (although the last part is clearly not original).

The format I employed for this lesson owes to that recent advice, too. I’ve never used a Hook, Book, Look, Took template before, but I found it useful for this subject.

Here’s the link to that piece. 

Watch a tutorial for changing the day and date on your watch. Conclude yours is busted.

Compile email lists in Constant Contact.

Watch that TED Talk the really smart person you had lunch with yesterday recommended.

Sample the new album releases featured on Album Of The Year (promising finds: new Japandroids, Cloud Nothings, and Allison Crutchfield).

Install the update that just came through to your phone.

Write a blog post.

Don’t check Facebook. Don’t pick up a book yet. Even the coffee can wait.

4 AM is doing, not dithering, time.

It is wishful thinking to say, “I’ll bet he gets impeached.” It is wishful because it clings to  the hopeless expectation that the machinery of Congress, which is manned at present by a Republican majority that has, practically to a person, fallen gleefully in line, has any will to act against him. It does not. Furthermore, aside from public demonstrations of opposition like last weekend’s marches, Democrats and progressives have no executive or legislative–and soon no judicial–power to oppose whatever this new administration wants to do.

Nobody is coming to save us.

I can’t remember where I first heard the axiom, “Prepare for the worst; hope for the best,” but I’ve been recalling it often these past weeks. It is my response to wishful thinking.

I hope the agenda of repealing healthcare and building a border wall and freezing immigration from Arabic countries and torching the climate by dismantling regulatory agencies and green-lighting new oil drilling projects en masse–I hope all of that is thwarted. But I am preparing for it not to be.

I hope the President changes his posture towards the TV and print reporters whose job it is to hold the White House to account on behalf of the public. I hope he develops a respect for accuracy in public pronouncements. I hope he becomes less reckless with his language. But I am preparing myself for him not to.

How? How do you prepare for the worst in a time like this and not become consumed by outrage or, alternatively, completely detached and cynical?

My first step is to restrict my consumption of news to a daily newspaper subscription and some weekly and monthly magazines. Refreshing Vox.com hourly is going to kill me. This time demands perspective, and the blaring headlines on my Facebook feed about the latest executive order don’t have it. I can wait until tomorrow to read about it, when a reporter has had time to gather and quote some sources.

My second step is to prioritize elegance more than before in my sources of information and analysis. Breathless bullet points assume more veracity than they can deliver. This month’s Harpers is a great start. I need more sentences in my life like this one by Wesley Yang:

In lieu of the social-democratic provision of childcare and other services of domestic support, we have built a privatized, ad hoc system of subsidies based on loose border enforcement — in effect, the nation cutting a deal with itself at the expense of the life chances of its native-born working class.

It sounds weak–even to me–to call reading preparation. But the pit in my stomach that has grown since November 8th is trying to tell me something, and that is that I know nothing, and neither do all of the up-to-the-minute prognosticators jamming my Twitter and podcast feeds. The people who know the things we need to learn right now are taking days, weeks even, to reason it out clearly and express it beautifully.

Somebody you work with is leveling up on some things, speaking more in meetings and taking on projects voluntarily. This is good for you. It’s good for your church/organization. It’ll be made exponentially better if you notice their effort and reinforce it with an attentive word. 

Let’s reinforce someone’s levelling up today. 

Then let’s copy them. 

The connection you feel with another person or with a gaggle of persons when you join in some dishing on a different person is not the kind of connection you want. It feels good in the moment–you have something to offer: some experience with the dished-on, a take on their flaws and mistakes that gives you a place in the dishing proceedings.

But it’s no good. Dishing about people who aren’t there is gossip, and gossip is straight up destructive. All of our innocent disclaimers don’t change that. “I’m just saying” and “I’m sure she’s a great person, but . . . ” might make us feel less mean in the moment, but they’re utterly self-deceptive. We are engaging in garbage talk.

Let’s be people who make constructive contributions to the gaggle instead.

Last weekend was my fifth retreat in 11 months and my second in as many weeks. Here are five things I got out of it.

I got to see three of my youth ministry colleagues deliver keynote addresses that were compelling, personal, and creative.

I learned how to play Codenames.

I connected with a fellow youth pastor who’s in a Youth Ministry Coaching Program Cohort.

I picked up a new basketball game.

I experienced the practically unbounded joy of junior high youth.

These things are never without their strains, but the ledger almost always favors the benefits over the costs, for adults as much as for youth.

Once more to the retreat.