My Acer R11 Chromebook has been fixed and is due back to me today. Until then, I’m blogging on the Toshiba Chromebook II, which was my daily before *somebody spilled apple juice on the keyboard making the spacebarstick.

I cancelled my daily newspaper subscription this weekend. Since November I have been reading the Washington Post on my Kindle every day and experiencing a creeping malaise as a result.The news is mostly bad, sure, but that’s no problem; the Post’s writers are fantastic, and reading any one piece (like this one by Joel Achenback profiling a community in Ohio reeling from the opioid epidemic) is an enlightening and beneficial.

It’s more that my investment in better educating myself as a citizen by paying for daily, high quality, news reporting ( I also have digital subscriptions to the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times and a Kindle subscription to the Chicago Tribune) was not increasing satisfactory dividends. I expected daily paper reading to make me more fluent in the pressing issues of our day, like the Russian hack of our election and the fights for Aleppo and Mosul. It did that, I think. But it also made me write less, and I don’t like that.

 

I’ve felt this tension between intake and output repeatedly, enough that it now feels like a rule: the more I’m reading/watching/listening, the less I’m writing/connecting/creating.

I want to choose the back end of that equation every time.

 

I’m about to ship my Acer R11 Chromebook off for repair, so I’ll be off blogging for the next two weeks (one of which will be vacation). Before I go, though, here’s some quick 2016 blogging year in review stats.

Total 2016 page views: 17,683 (down from 23,518 in 2015, but higher than 2014) .

Most read post: Fun With Bible Mad Libs. This is a five-year-old post that keeps getting found. People must really be into Bible Mad Libs.

Most read actual post: Shannon Kershner’s Sermon On The Unjust Judge Is Important And You Should Listen To It. 

Most read actual actual post: An Open Letter To Chad Andrew Herring. 

The value of the day-to-day work of sharing something here is not reflected in the stats showing what is most seen. That is true every year, and not just of blogging.

Thank you for reading and sharing and commenting. Thank you for what you’re doing to make the world better and brighter. Here’s to 2017.

Rocky

The Ski Retreat.

The Jr. High Retreat.

Youth Sunday.

The summer Mission Trip(s).

They all need checklists. Checklists abound in my work these days. Not a to-do list or a recipe, a checklist is a collection of tasks needing to be completed or steps to be followed to ensure effectiveness: book the vans; submit registrations; pay the deposit; send out packing list.

Here’s my retreat checklist. What would you add?

Ezra Klein thinks the shortcoming in contemporary journalism is not quality writing but quality learning. He says, “We are too focused . . . on journalism as a universally applicable skill set. We do not demand enough subject issue knowledge from journalists” (skip to 69:35 here to listen to that).

He goes on to describe writing as the tip of the journalistic iceberg. There is a whole superstructure supporting it that nobody ever sees, made up of sources and bodies of knowledge.

The same is true of pastoral work, of course. Your sermon, your youth retreat plan, your hospital visit: they are all the tip of the iceberg. You are constantly adding to the part beneath the surface–new ideas, new interests, new questions, many not remotely theological or pastoral.

If we work on only the skill sets that people see, our work won’t be as hefty and interesting as it could be.

 

I should spend more time reading.

I should spend more time hand-writing letters.

I should spend more time with good music.

I should spend more time watching some of these amazing shows.

I should spend more time with my family.

I should spend more time with my friends.

I should spend more time praying.

I should spend more time blogging.

I should spend more time (any time, really) exercising.

Stop it.

More time isn’t coming.

Unless you are frittering your days away in slothful nothingness, your time is spent on what you value.

Good for you.

Audio writer, editor, and producer Alex Blumberg is discovering that, in order for Gimlet, his podcasting company, to be successful, he needs to do less writing, editing, and producing. He needs to spend most of his time developing writers, editors, and producers.

That’s a huge shift, not without emotional consequences (as you can hear here).

I’ve heard this called “equipping” or even “discipling” in church circles, and, for pastors, it feels like a very difficult shift to initiate, much less sustain. That clergy are the “professionals,” the people called to the preaching, teaching, and caring work of ministry, exerts a tremendous pull on many of us to do most of that work ourselves. This isn’t strictly bad. Contexts and people change, and we should always be learning. For that, there is no substitute for regular, face-to-face pastoral encounters.

I would hazard that many pastors never really establish development habits and mechanisms due to guilt. We default to leading every event ourselves not because we lack confidence in others to do it, but because we don’t know how to think of ourselves and our work if we’re not in front of the congregation or the youth group all the time. We feel like slackers.

That’s not healthy.

Who are the people you are developing for the work of your ministry? Are they staff? Volunteers? And how are you developing yourself?

 

Everything can’t be for everyone. Some people will have a scheduling conflict with the thing you’re planning. Others would participate if only there weren’t another thing they cared about more. Don’t be mad about that; the thing they care about more is important. But don’t not do the thing, either.

Being inclusive means not discriminating. It doesn’t mean waiting to do anything significant until every potential person can clear their schedule. Inclusion might require us to actually do more of the thing, to repeat it or offer it at multiple times, rather than doing it less so that fewer and fewer people can possibly be upset about conflicts.

There’s a sweet spot here made up of people who care enough about your thing to make it the conflict they have with other things. Design for them, even as you invite everyone.

I’m going to try and explain sin to 8th graders for Christmas.

#lumpofcoal

#santahasthesamelettersassatan

My beautiful Confirmation schedule is a mess, so I can’t spare a week of Christmas frivolity, which, I’m well aware, is a stance that requires its own confession. This part of the Brief Statement of Faith was supposed to get covered in November, but the parade of Autumnal weeks followed their own route, not the one I had carefully mapped. So here we are at Christmas, talking about sin.

It’s actually not the worst point of entry you could find. The message of the annunciation is that Jesus will save his people from their sins. The census that sends Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem to be registered is a helpful peek into structural sin as oppressive power. The slaughter of the innocents is the whole horror show. The reality of sin drives the Christmas story.

The main tool I’m using is a “10 Propositions” post by Kim Fabricius on the Faith and Theology blog, later published in a terrific little book. I used one of these posts to teach the resurrection, too. They need a heavy editing hand for teenagers (their intended audience is theologians and pastors), but my students have appeared to respond well to them.

Here’s the presentation I’ve put together for it, to which I am most open to comment.

 

I’m back home after three days with my professional development group. For three years now we’ve pegged a week in early December to gather for mutual support, encouragement, and growth. 75 minute conversations about particular cases each of us present are the scaffolding of our schedule (here’s the format we use for those–it’s super helpful).

We also eat good food and laugh a lot. Like, a lot.

***

Models are enticing. They look so perfect, and they make such promises. Three simple steps. Follow the process. Results guaranteed.

Of course, it’s not all the models’ fault. There’s a whole operation around presenting the model, smoothing out its blemishes, dangling it before a needy audience. Yes, the model is penultimate. It’s there to sell something else: a program. A lifestyle.

Of course I mean organizational models.

I asked my group this week for some models for conceiving of my work and my church and all the programs, hoping for book titles and church websites for me to consult, download, and apply.

Nope.

They said, “You’re the model.” More fully, they said, “What you’re doing is becoming a model, but only for you and only for now.”

We can compare all the models and choose one to define what we want to do: relational. Missional. Emergent. I’ve adopted all of them at one point or another. I’ve read the books, taking furious notes. I’ve subscribed to the blogs and the podcasts, and not for naught; I haven’t learned nothing.

There is a siren song in all of it, though, chanting that the work is merely dutiful application of other peoples’ methods, intoning zero accountability for failure, because you can simply blame the model and pick a new one.

The real work is much more difficult and more more interesting, and that is to do what we know and what we love where we are, trusting that the people who put us there weren’t mistaken, learning all we can–not about new models, but about our craft and our people.

 

 

How constructive is outrage for leadership?

Was Martin Luther King Jr. outraged? Was Gandhi? Dorothy Day? Jesus?

Certainly. But outraged is not the posture we associate with the change they made. No doubt, the injustices they fought were outrageous, and a bone-deep revulsion at them must have driven King and others to lead movements for change. Yet the face they put forward in that effort did not appear affronted or violated so much as resolved.

“This is an outrage!” means there is nowhere left to go, nothing left to discern. It signals the end of conversation and the beginning of opposition. Let it come to that if it must. But don’t confuse your outrage with effective resistance.

And proceed carefully; lead with outrage too often and people lose the ability to hear you. The people I want to follow don’t often proceed from outrage. It’s there, sure, but more as fuel than flame. I want to follow their clarity of vision and purpose, not their indignation, not their anger but their plans.