February 7, 2010

Adam:  Good morning. I’m Adam Cave. This week is a special week at CPC. Not only do we have the privilege of welcoming Rabbi Jonathan and Cantor Paul from Temple Beth Israel, but today we’re taking part in the biggest youth-led food drive in the country. The Souper Bowl of–

[Rocky enters waving a bulletin insert and banging a pot, yelling: “Here it is! Here it is!”]

Adam: Uh, Pastor Rocky, here what is? I was in the middle of an announcement about the Sou–

Rocky: —the Super Bowl. Right. I know. Here it is.

Adam: What do you mean, “Here it is?” Here what is?

Rocky: The Super Bowl. I mean, look at this thing: it’s shiny, tough, durable, has a logo on the front. Heck, it even has a cape. If there’s a more super bowl out there, I sure haven’t seen it.

Adam: Oh wow. Pastor Rocky, the Souper Bowl I’m talking about isn’t just a bowl with a cape–it’s a nation-wide fundraiser led by youth. It collects money to help the hungry right here in our own communities. What’s super about it is that was started by a single Presbyterian youth group in South Carolina 20 years ago, and yet last year it collected over ten million dollars to feed the hungry.

Rocky: Ten million dollars! That’s a super amount of money. You’d need a super-duper bowl to hold all that. Where does it all go?

Adam: Every dollar raised goes directly into local communities. For example, everything that we collect here this morning will go to the Beta Center food pantry in Pomona.

Rocky: Ahh, now I get it. Okay, so, after church, everybody needs to climb into our super bus and take our super bowl full of money to the Beta Center!

Adam: Aye aye aye! What seminary did you go to? No, that’s what the bowls are for! That’s what makes them super! Not the cape! After worship, a bunch of us will stand at the back of the church with the bowls, and people can put their donations into them. Theeeeennn, we’ll give it to the Beta Center.

Rocky: Of course! Well, then, since this bowl doesn’t need a cape to be super, I guess I’ll take it off and use it for something else.

Adam: Pastor Rocky.

Rocky: What?

Adam: Leave the cape.

Rocky: Really?

Adam: Yeah, it’s a nice touch.

[both exit]

February 6, 2011

Rocky: Good morning and welcome to Claremont Presbyterian Field, the site of the 2011 Souper Bowl of Caring! Alongside Adam Cave I’m Rocky Supinger, and we are anticipating a real slug-fest this morning, as two perennial powerhouses–The Claremont Presbyterians and The Hunger– square off against one another for the umpteenth time. Adam Cave, this is a storied rivalry, isn’t it?

Adam: It absolutely is, Rocky. In fact, the 2011 Souper Bowl of Caring is at least the 11th meeting between these two teams going back to the year 2000. And you don’t have to remind Hunger that The Claremont Presbyterians have got the better end of these battles the last few years. Their game plan really revolves around getting the most out of their generosity . Since 2008, the amount of money raised by the Presbyterians on Souper Bowl Sunday has increased; their 2010 total was an all-time high for them: $720. You can be sure they’ll be looking to top that today.

Rocky: I’m sure they will. And yet Hunger isn’t backing down, is it?

Adam: No it isn’t. The Los Angeles times reported in October that the poverty rate in the Inland Empire rose from 11.8% in 2007 to over 15% in 2009. Among residents of LA County that number now stands at 16.1%. Requests for emergency food aid were up an average of 24% in cities across the country last year, and those cities reported a 17% increase in the pounds of food they gave away.

Rocky: Wow. If anything, Adam, Hunger seems to be gathering strength from year-to-year. But the Claremont Presbyterians have an important weapon on their team, don’t they?

Adam: Yeah, the Presbyterians utilize a versatile weapon in their attack on Hunger: the Inland Valley Hope Partners or, as its fans call it, “IVHP.” IVHP is the total hunger-fighting package: it maintains food banks in Claremont, Pomona, San Dimas, and Ontario, where families in need can receive a five day supply of food once every 30 days.

The Presbyterians use IVHP in a number of formations: regular mission giving, weekly food donations to the red wheelbarrow in the narthex–several of the Presbyterians even volunteer their own time at IVHP’s food banks.

Rocky: But today, you expect the Presbyterians to go early and often to IVHP with a trademark move–the soup kettle.

Adam: Rocky this move is unstoppable. There’s no defense for it. As they head out the back of the sanctuary today, watch for the Presbyterians to go deep . . . into their pockets and purses and score over and over again with direct deposits into the large soup kettles that youth will be holding. Every single one of those donations goes directly to IVHP.  

Rocky: No doubt,  IVHP is a star, and the Claremont Presbyterians know it. Watch and you’ll see them waving their IVHP lunch sacks in the air, which were handed out out the door today. (I said “Waving their IVHP lunch sacks in the air!). When they eave here today, the Presbyterians will take those bags with them as a reminder that their struggle on behalf of the hungry in the Inland Valley is an every day battle.

Adam: Well it looks like the teams are ready. As always, this promises to be a hard fought battle. Hunger may have got most of the headlines this season, but if what we’ve seen from the Claremont Presbyterians the last few years is any indication, Hunger will have its hands full. Game on!

Some parts of ministry work are design: sermon preparation, planning a youth gathering, making a meeting agenda. These pieces require creative thought. They demand a minimum of undisturbed time.

Other parts of ministry work are not design. Submitting receipts. Updating rosters.

There are things I enjoy about both the design and the non-design parts of ministry work. There are things I dread about both of them too. The ratio of each that I’m doing at any given time is an important signal, I’ve learned.

If I’m filling my to-do list with mostly non-design tasks, I’m tired and feeling ineffective. I want a checked-box induced energy boost.

I’m learning to treat more projects as design than not. The annual calendar, for example, needs a sensitivity to the range of experiences being offered, the space they have between one another, and the non-calendar forces affecting them. It’s design, not simply the plugging in of events on dates.

This week I need to design components for a worship service, a wedding, a discussion guide for Confirmation, and a junior high youth group gathering, and I’m all out of checked boxes.

The church I serve used to allot 30 minutes on Sunday mornings to bagels for youth. From 10:30-11:00, just before youth groups, a big box of Einstein Brothers would show up in the youth room, and 6th-12th graders would spend half an hour gnawing on plain and asiago dough while socializing.

Well, some socialized. Others sat in a corner by themselves. Still others took a bagel and left the room to be alone with their phone.

For that reason, and because of the mounting cost, we pulled the bagels when youth programming resumed in September. We’ve been hearing about it ever since. Youth and parents have lamented the loss of the unstructured social time, since most of students’ weeks are programmed full of school and related activities.

So we talked about it. And talked about it. Weekly. I got emails about it. The Youth Ministry Committee discussed it. But the bagels stayed gone.

Until last Sunday.

We’re bringing back bagels for a limited Advent run, but we’re tweaking it to address our concerns over cost and over the failure of unstructured social time to engage many youth. First, the cost. With the leadership of a parent, we set up and publicized a web link where parents could sponsor a week’s worth of bagels. Within 48 hours of sending the link out in our newsletter, every week of bagels had been paid for.

Second, groups get bagels to themselves–jr. high bagels in one room, sr. high bagels in another. They are a kind of “reception” time before the beginning of each youth group, and not an all-ages free-for-all. Also, since several of our students don’t do gluten, we added some fruit and granola bars for them.

We haven’t solved it, I don’t think. But we’re trying. It’s an experimental step toward being the hospitable, generous community we’re called to be.

Bagels are boring. But important elements of ministry and community building are hiding in the boring stuff. Ignore them at your peril.

 

 

 

How well is the thing you think is working actually working?

How do you know?

I use a meeting format in almost all of my gatherings with youth that ends with evaluation. I don’t always get to it (due to poor time management), but when I do there is usually something useful that gets shared. I usually ask two questions:

1. What about what we did here today was useful for you?
2. What about it would you change?

Yesterday during evaluation a student told me that she probably wouldn’t do the game next time. Surprising. Useful.

If we’re really curious about the effect our work is having on the people we’re doing it with, simply asking is a easy and surprisingly effective way of starting to find out.

I’m in this routine since September where each week I’m designing Sunday curriculum for two different youth gatherings. My colleague spent a couple of August weeks designing all of his for the whole year. I wish I had done that. Next year it won’t be as much of an issue, because I will have the material I made this year to work with.

Having something to work with feels like a great benefit. Having to create ex nihilo is challenging and rewarding and important, but set yourself up with too many of those projects at the same time and you’ll burn out.

And, of course, everything is a project. Cooking Thanksgiving dinner is a project, so store up material to work with this year by doing the turkey or experimenting with green beans, so that next year, or three years from now, when the whole thing unexpectedly falls to you, you’re not starting at zero.

Knowing what’s going on in the world is a project, too. Reading reliable news reporting on Syria or health care policy today gives you material to work with when one of those issues suddenly becomes urgent and everyone else is scrambling to learn about it.

Accept and seek out elective challenges when you don’t have to, so that when you do have to you’ve at least got something to work with.

I have no history with Young Life. I didn’t know about it as a teenager. I first started to hear the terms “Campaigners” and “Do life together” around the year 2000, while I was participating in a church full of the group’s volunteers.

In seminary I met some more Young Life volunteers, along with some alumni and even staff. I also learned the organization’s history as a mid-20th century evangelistic para-church operation, it’s “relational” and “Win the right to be heard” strategy.

Since then: books by Andrew Root and Mark Oestreicher have expanded my understanding of what Young Life has always been about; a youth ministry coaching cohort surrounded me with enthusiastic Young Life boosters; a story last year about a volunteer who quit over the organization’s ban on gay leaders caught my attention.

But in all that time I have had zero actual experience with any activity related to the organization. I am a pastor in a progressive church that belongs to a mainline denomination. My theological convictions differ significantly from those of the evangelical sub culture that Young Life represents. Evangelistic tactics like recruiting teens into clubs at their school where food and games set up talks about Jesus are simply not in my repertoire.

So when the new area director for Young Life emailed me and asked to meet, I nearly deleted the message without replying. Instead, I sat on it for two days. I remembered an invitation in 2010 to bring my church youth group to an evangelistic revival another church in town was hosting and how I had responded to that invitation with a superior note to the organizer about how we Presbyterians didn’t do that sort of thing; how he then replied with a curt, “I guess you’re too good for us”; how seeing that organizer around town for the next six years was never not awkward.

I replied that I would be happy to meet with the Young Life guy.

Sitting down with someone who represents something that gives you pause, something, even, about which you have values-based reservations, is not open-mindedness so much as grownup-ness and professionalism. Hiding behind what you’ve heard as an excuse to decline invitations made in good faith is a bad leadership strategy.

Also, John Vest is right: progressive youth ministry has to become more evangelistic.

So we met. He’s delightful and curious. He knows where my church is coming from, where we obviously disagree in our approach and values, and yet he’s eager to learn about our work with youth and the community. Our conversation made me want to be equally curious about him and his work with youth.

We’re having lunch in January. You know, to Do Life Together.

 

 

 

 

Opinion and commentary are easier to write than news and analysis. It looks the bold, courageous role: the man or woman with a take. Maureen Dowd. George Will. Jim Rome: “Have a take. Do not suck.”

But I can’t shake the feeling that the greater value for our time is provided by the reporters whose stock and trade is sources, facts, and analysis. That work feels far more difficult–more time intensive, more constrained, more risky, even.

I’ve started paying attention to the bylines in the news stories I read and to follow those writers on Twitter. It’s giving me a greater appreciation for the long body of work these reporters are producing and the amount of that work that must never make it to print.

Here’s three you could follow starting today:

Nobody knows more about health care policy than Sarah Kliff (Vox).

Nobody understands labor issues better than Noam Scheiber (The New York Times).

Nobody can explain the Syrian conflict better than Raja Abdulrahim (The Wall Street Journal).

Follow reporters on Twitter. Buy subscriptions to the papers that employ them.

 

 

I think this takedown of fictional journalist Rory Gilmore is pretty funny (“When you are interviewing a source, do not fall asleep as he’s talking to you”). I find it timely, given the furor du jour over fake news and the inability of large swaths of the populace to identify it.

[sidenote: it seems just as plausible that we are unwilling, not unable, to sniff out fictional reporting, so long as that reporting comports with the story we’re already telling ourselves about the world. But for today’s post, let’s focus on ability]

I used to have nasty altercations with a relative over articles she would post on Facebook that said positively D’Sousa-esque things about Barack Obama. My go-to response was to point out the unreliability of the source. World Net Daily and Christian Post are not conventional news gathering and reporting operations. The Presbyterian Layman is a sloppy advocacy tool. Reading a single story confirms those assertions.

Yet my family member’s response was routinely that my sources for information were just as biased. That my sources–public radio and a small sampling of daily newspapers–employed trained reporters who were bound by conventions of non-editorial journalism seemed completely lost in the argument.

This is how the “Lamestream media” attack has actually done the public a great disservice, by obscuring the razor sharp distinction between a news story and a piece of advocacy masquerading as news. I learned that distinction as a 10th grader, in a class called “Journalism.” The class was a prerequisite for joining the school paper. In today’s media environment, though, perhaps Journalism needs to be part of every school’s core curriculum.

That course would teach the most basic conventions of news reporting with the aim of cultivating media consumers who can recognize garbage. For example:

If a story lacks a byline, it’s not a news story. Anonymous content is almost always opinion.

If a story does not contain at least one quotation from a source who is either named or cited as unnamed for a plausible reason, it’s not news. News quotes sources.

If all of the quotations in a story are from the same source, or if they all support the same point of view, it’s not news. News reporters represent differing views of the events they’re covering. They talk to multiple people. All the time. That’s what they’re paid for.

There’s plenty more, but teaching just these three as starters would equip readers to detect with minimal difficulty pieces that are intentionally deceptive. That’s a start, right?

What is the most important thing your youth ministry does?

A parent asked me yesterday to prioritize for her student the various upcoming trips and retreats. Should he go on the ski retreat? Or the Jr. High retreat? Or the Confirmation retreat?

So I’m thinking about that. It’s challenging, because I don’t think of these things in terms of rank importance, but rather in terms of value for particular students for particular reasons. I’ve embraced a more-is-more kind of strategy that multiplies the opportunities for youth to go on trips and retreats, knowing that no student will go on all of them. Each one aims to be a unique experience of community and faith formation.

But I haven’t communicated that philosophy to parents, and so of course all the trips and retreats appear on the calendar as equally weighted.

I need to start narrating what these different opportunities are. It’s not enough to stick them on a calendar.