Time for a Refresh in San Antonio

It’s been a while since I have posted on this website. I am doing so because I have been discerning my new role as a Lead Pastor at the church I have served for 13 years. As I sit 9 months into that new role, I am trying to discern how to continue to lead my church forward into a more missional identity. It’s time for a refresh on this space and to reflect on ministry and social enterprise through a new lens for me.

5 years ago I helped initiate a conference at Seattle Pacific University that was the first conference that gathered church leaders and institutional Christian leaders to discuss the intersection of congregations and social enterprise work.

Because of the relationships that I formed at that event I was invited to be a very small part of the creation of a new conference called, “Neighborhood Economics”. This conference attempted to start in San Antonio, Texas when Covid hit. After that, I was unable to engage because of a multitude of transitions and need at my local church, Columbia Presbyterian.

Recently I began a process of handing off the non-profit social enterprise that I founded at CPC this year and so here I am. I am trying to figure out what it means for CPC to steward our resources and our missional imagination well.

Here is the goal of Neighborhood Economics:

They are seeking to help people of faith leverage their economic capital and social capital to create impact in the arenas of housing, entrepreneurship, and impact investing.

Here at this conference:

There are clergy, representatives of religious and non-religious foundations and trusts, denominational executives, and investors who manage billions in capital. It is an impressive group. One billionaire financial investor is here because his youth pastor once brought him on a mission trip. It changed him.

Here are the key topic areas the conference will cover:

-101 Sessions: These are for folks new to this work.

-Catalytic Capital

-Creating Assets

-Shared Ownership

-Entrepreneurship

-Subverting Redlining

-Congregations Engaging Faith and Finance

This is from the San Jose mission in San Antonio. More on this later!

So, here I am. Trying to figure out how to help my church re-imagine it missional role in its county and its neighborhoods. I am here because of the work that I have done, the work that I am discerning, and because I believe that my church has an obligation to deploy its gifts SUPERBLY in the name of living in to the Kingdom of God that is already and not yet fully among us.

Keep reading my posts if you want to follow the kind of things that I am learning. My goal is to bring this home (over time) and to bring some people back here next year.

-Pastor Matt

The Frog and "Why Not?!"- An Innovation Story

One of the key skills of anyone trying out a worthy ministry experiment (loosely defined as innovation) is to imagine what is both good and possible. Over the years of trying new experiments in my local church and listening to emerging practitioners I have found that often it is the people who adopt the mentality of “we could if” rather than “we can’t because” that are able to move themselves and their communities forward. The simple truth is that that history of innovation is littered with people who felt that there was something important to do. That sense of important work drove them to be creative in their thinking. When people are intrigued by a mission (godly or ungodly) they tend to get creative. This leads us to the story of The Frog.

In 1942 after the bombing of Pearl Harbor and multiple naval defeats to both the British and Navy fleets in the Pacific and across Malaysia, the United States needed a morale boost. Their plan was to try and launch a bombing raid on the city of Tokyo. The only problem was getting there. The Russians had told them they couldn’t land in Vladivostok. The Chinese had no free areas for American bombers to land in. They had considered flying out of India but the Himalayas and the Chinese landing situation prevented it. America only had a few carriers in the Pacific and it didn’t seem worth it to risk getting them too close to Japan to pull of a morale boosting mission.

Meanwhile in Norfolk, Virginia a sharp navy officer named Francis Stuart Low had an idea. Low had been watching American planes take off from a runway during military training operations and noticed their shadows passing over the outline of an aircraft carrier on the runway. The outline had been painted for training purposes as a target for trainees. Low, who had been nicknamed “Frog” began making mental leaps. As he saw the shadows and the outline he is reported to have thought, “Why not?!” Why couldn’t bomber planes, large though they are be launched off a carrier? Their shadows seemed to indicate that they were getting off the ground before they passed the end of the outline!

What came of his idea? What we know today as the “Doolittle Raid” over Tokyo. If you are unfamiliar with the story and its heroism, its worth reading about.

But, its another illustration (though admittedly a militaristic one) of what happens when someone loves what they do, believes it must be done, and is in a pressurized moment. The question, “Why not?!” might be the most important question to precede the idea that “We could if…”

When it comes to our gospel work, we must believe that our work matters. It is the single most important mission of our lives and it is one of peace. The question then becomes, do we care about it? If we do, then we must continue looking for moments where we can ask the question, “Why not?!” Our God is a creative God. Our God has seemingly engaged in a variety of what we might call (from a human point of view) innovations. Moments when elements and ideas that previously existed were combined in new ways to produce new demonstrations of the work and love of God for the world. And for those of us that have had those moments, you can feel the presence of the Holy Spirit in the midst of the intuitive leaps…the frog jumps that take place in those moments. I think we ought to imitate that kind of work. It’s true that we must ask all sorts of gospel questions before leaping about the goodness of the work and whether it diminishes the image of God in us and neighbor. But, the work of the church is worthy of both the intuitive leaps and the discernments that ought to go along with them.

Can we?

Why not?!

Introducing "The Ground Floor": A Youth Ministry Innovation Podcast

Over a year ago I was asked by Mark Oestreicher to create a youth ministry podcast on innovation. At the time it looked like I was about to have some windows of time open up. The didn’t! So after multiple staff transitions I have finally launched a small podcast (6-8 episodes a year)!

The real joy of this work is it gives me the chance (much like this blog has over the last 5 years) to think out loud. Only now, I can process what we are learning with friends more easily. There is an emerging network of folks engaging with social enterprise in the church in North America. I am hopeful that as that conversation begins to roll in earnest, that we might be able to see some new models for Youth Ministry in North America emerge as well.

This first episode is a bit of a shotgun affair, but it allowed me to collaborate and learn from my former student and current youth director, Nicholas Burton. Nicholas works at Bethany Church up in Seattle, Wa. and was willing to dive into the first expression of this adventure. I hope you can hear the joy in our voices as we share the story that got me thinking differently about innovation and YM.

In the coming months we will:

-Feature some youth ministry voices that you will know and recognize.

-Discuss who can learn to innovate! (hint: most anybody)

-Define what innovation is at an individual and team level

-Look at what factors make innovation possible in each person’s context

-Hear from regular youth ministry practitioners that are trying (and perhaps failing) to do things differently in their context.

Come along for the ride!!! Join us on the “Ground Floor” of Youth Ministry innovation. Click the Podcast tab on our homepage or the link below.

https://anchor.fm/groundfloor

This Too Shall Pass!!!!!!!!

Last night I had my first in person board meeting with my nonprofit board in a long time. That wasn’t all because of the virus, but we still hadn’t been able to meet in person for SO LONG! It was incredible. Not only are most of our our community programs restarting, but the story sharing about impact and our sense of gratitude that God has allowed us to even do this incredible work in our community was flowing. How have we even survived this past year as a ministry!?!? Our athletes are all back, we are doing life skills and mentoring on a local campus, our student housing is full, and we are mowing lawns and ruining landscaping trucks like crazy! Even though the pandemic isn’t over, it feels different this fall (good and bad).

I want to share a cool story with you. Hang in there, it’s worth it. 14 years ago (+/-) several students in my youth group were captivated by a unique band called, “OK Go”. The band never has done super well on albums, but has instead chosen to create beautiful music through online followings and LEGENDARY one take videos. They do their music videos live and in one continuous take and its the individual songs and videos that have created their following and a kind of sense of community rather than a pure fan and product type of relationship.

Their original video featured a bunch of treadmills and was incredible.

In any event, these church kids chose to figure out how to do their own version of the treadmill video and engage with the band online. Oddly enough the band was captivated with the connection and invited them to come on stage when they were in the area and perform their routine for the crowd. They did, and it was amazing. I wish I had that video. You would have thought these small town kids had landed on the moon!

Now, I listen to all sorts of music. But, when people ask me if I like listening to specifically Christian music I will often say not really. I do, but I find it tiresome many times. Instead I prefer to listen to all sorts of music and to find music that touches on gospel themes and theological ideas without knowing it. Especially I like music that captures the emotions of the gospel. Particularly, I most frequently look for songs that capture the resurrection emotions and the emotions of the Kingdom coming in full! I long for that morning when all things will finally be set right in this world of ours.

In 2010, OK GO released another song called, “This Too Shall Pass”. It achieved legendary online status because they did the whole video around a gigantic Rube Goldberg device. And again, they did it in one continuous take! It was nuts and beautiful and took them a ton of takes to get it right. I had forgotten about the band until my kid’s teacher shared the video as they were having to design a small Rube Goldberg device for a class project. I liked the song immediately because I recall that phrase (This Too Shall Pass) being used in my house growing up to spur us on when things were tough. The phrase isn’t biblical, but it is ancient. It may have come out of Persia. From there it made its way to my childhood home over several thousand years to probably be misappropriated by my suburban family.

As it turns out, the band struggled with making that video because it was so technical and their record label (EMI) didn’t want them to be able to embed the video code because it cut into revenue streams to allow their fans to so freely share it. The band’s online following was so infuriated that the band left EMI and formed their own label. They refused to let the beautiful video die though and State Farm Insurance stepped in to fund the project.

But here is where it gets cool.

Because the band had to release the song fairly quickly, they decided to do a stripped down lower production video. They filmed a marching band version of the song with a bunch of kids and the Notre Dame marching band in a field in Indiana! The result is beautiful and this is where my ears, my weary pandemic minister’s soul, and gospel music re-enter the picture.

Sometime during the second pandemic surge the band’s alternative version was re-released and through some evil algorithm it wandered into my feed. All I could think about when I listened to it was, “This is what the struggling moments just before redemption feel like.”

And so yesterday I caught a sniff in the wind that even though I was deeply stressed about fall startups and the overwhelming number of tasks before me as husband, Dad, minister, and executive director, something good was coming. I had a sense that the stone one the tomb of the last year and a half might be budging just a little bit. We were going to be able to do this work with schools and kids outside the church again. There are still a billion problems to solve.

And lo and behold, the low production video version of “This Too Shall Pass” popped up again on my YouTube recommendations yesterday before my board meeting and after a long few weeks.

I am not saying it was a divine algorithim, but it was.

The key lines in the song are:

1.) You Can’t Keep Letting It Getting You Down.

2.)You Can’t Keep Lugging That Weight Around.

3.)When the Morning Comes

4.) Let It Go, This Too Shall Pass

If those statements aren’t a thread of the moving gospel, I don’t know what it is.

So, as Fall begins and as we process all the grief and frustration of the last two years or so I invite you to watch a music video that points to something bigger. Something that points to what is to come ONE DAY.

Today, I beseech you with all my ministerial might to enjoy a marching bad. In a field. With a Xylophone. And please pray for students and teachers and counselors and medical workers and churches and non profits and businesses and even your enemies.

Here it is.

And then, go do something beautiful and good.

Until the morning comes!

-Pastor Matt-

Oh, and OK GO!…if you are reading this, thanks for lifting this man’s soul by making musical art.

Innovation Virtues: Courage

A few months back I wrote about the need to define innovation as an idea that actually hits the ground. The goal was to define as something different than creativity or invention. The question with all three (creativity, innovation, and invention) in my mind is what it takes to actually do them. I mean innovation is actually about the doing!

I thought it might be good to do a post every once in a while on the “virtues” of innovation. I spend a lot of time thinking about the virtues that the gospel calls me to cultivate in my life. I don’t spend a lot of time talking about them. Most of the people I have met that talk a lot about virtues I find to either be boringly dogmatic or remarkably hypocritical. That might sound harsh, but I have an inherent distrust about people that talk too much about virtues. Virtues are not something you televise, they are tools to self scrutinize and reflect. And to be honest, I remain fairly certain that if you push a virtue too far, it often becomes a vice.

So my innovation question is, “What are the virtues that are required to not only think of an idea, but to get it to ground? What are the virtues necessary for innovation?” The first virtue: Courage.

A few months ago I came across this quote from C.S. Lewis that I had not read before. I thought it was a great quote to describe some of the tension in Christian social enterprise and in innovation.

“Courage is not simply one of the virtues but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means at the highest point of reality.”

One of the things about innovating anything is that it requires people to do things a bit different. You have to learn outside your circle. You have to take a risk in piloting experiments. You have to fail periodically and not hide, but rather analyze why something didn’t work. In my social enterprise based world you have to have the courage to take financial and legal risks in starting a business. And of course (and this may be its own virtue) you have to have the courage to trust God.

Lately, youth ministry groups and others are starting to launch various kinds of social enterprise, innovation, and design tools. I am excited about this. Some of them seem to be pretty darn good. But, in my conversations with the designers that implement them and innovators on the ground it seems pretty clear that no tool in the world will help someone launch an innovation if they recipient lacks some essential courage. Even the small innovations require courage at times!

The reality is that in a world that only seems to value or believe in what can be seen, touched, etc., even more courage is needed to do anything. In a culture (my culture) in which your failure in material achievement actually functions as a kind of denial of your existence, failure does feel final and fatal. Failure becomes an inability to assert your identity and self actualize. This secular reality only ups the force of failure. So, to ask people to risk and innovate is a higher stakes game in the modern world.

Now, back to C.S. Lewis!

What I love about this quote is that it acknowledges that courage itself is an essential virtue to living out other virtues. When doing innovation work and social enterprise work there is always this tension between the business and the ministry. There is tension between whether the idea helps the Kingdom go forward or whether the innovative idea has become the main thing. You never want that, but it is a tension. Courage is needed at every turn. At every turn in innovation as you court failure and financial problems, or being fired, there is a temptation to retreat from all the virtues. In many ways, courage becomes the virtuous fulcrum on which all other virtues are tested. Lewis nails that.

So, take courage in whatever venue you find yourself. May you cultivate the virtue of courage as best you can so that you might find the boldness to live out all the virtues! And do all of it in such a way that the Kingdom of love, hope, peace, and joy moves forward!

A Student Gives Back! Wait, no...3 students!

Over the past 6 years my social enterprise based ministry has talked about the idea of students never really graduating from our program. Our hope is that previous students would find their mentoring relationships so compelling that they might stay in contact with their faith based mentors. We have considered this idea to be an important metric in our system. I donʻt love metrics in ministry, but I also think you need at least a couple to figure out whether you are accomplishing your mission!

As we have discussed that sort of value of having students stay in relationship, we have talked over the years about the idea that perhaps one day a student might even feel compelled to give back to the program. Wouldnʻt that be wonderful we thought if they came back as a mentor or as a donor!? I have never put much hope in that. For starters, the last two generations of students are hammered in terms of debt. What do they have left to give?! Likewise, their sense of obligation to institutions is not very strong. I donʻt think this is a moral/ethical problem as some people define it with my generation and the one after me. Itʻs just the result of their situation in life and how they view the world. In the end, I thought it would be more likely that we would hear back from them at say…year 10. This month three of them made me realize I donʻt know everything.

One student who had never been a part of the Forge but had learned about the importance of giving at our local church gave a $500 dollar donation to the Forge! They are fresh out of college! The only career advice or input I had ever given them was a reference letter and some input on internships while they were in college. We HAD once taken them to Mexico to build houses and that experience seemed to impact their sense of living out the love of Christ.

A second student, who we have worked with for several years wanted their mom to start working out at the weight program (Utmost Athletics) that is a part of the Forge. We registered their mom for the program which operates on a sliding scale pay system. You pay what you can afford at Utmost. This student was already paying for their sister. What showed up the next week? A $20 check for Mom. They are paying for their Mom to work out. This young adult is amazing. Blows my mind once a month, but I was nearly brought to tears by this one.

A third student, who had played baseball at the local junior college has ended their athletic career. They are now working toward being an electrician. Their faith is still forming, but God is at work. Last week they called to let us know that they would like to volunteer with our weight program as a volunteer strength coach. They had worked out with us while at the junior college. We had envisioned this sort of thing happening through the gym, but not during the same year our coaching development system was implemented! And not during the pandemic.

I donʻt know if I will ever have my act together enough as an executive director to the degree that we will have fabulous metrics in place as a ministry. What I do know is fruit of quality Kingdom work when I see it.

The Covid "Old Guy Dating Service"

So, last week I went out to a job site to get a bid going for one of our enterprises (Mowtown Teen Lawn Care- www.mowtownteenlawncare.com). And what I ended up witnessing was a blind date between two retired dudes who became fast friends. It was incredible. Let me explain.

I was accompanied to the bid by a 70 something friend who has served as an advisor for our lawn care company. This friend had worked for 30-40 years as a part of the forest service in the Pacific Northwest and when he retired he created a landscaping company that his son now owns. He helped me found the social enterprise that I now run and was on the team that hired me at my church. At least part of the reason that we became friends was because I had started my college days at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo as a forestry major. He is also kind of a visionary dude and he loves to pass on knowledge.

Now, the client that we were meeting to consult with was a black gentleman who grew up in Portland, Oregon and had also worked for decades in the forest service. This man and I have also had a great relationship. We initially hit it off in his backyard because he had worked in Washington D.C. and I was born there. My Catholic Italian godfather owned an important bakery there and I asked the client if he had heard of it. He almost fell over. He had eaten my godfather’s pastries at many of the events that his government office had hosted in D.C. It was a fun connection.

I have had my ups and downs with this client. My crew has left his gate open 3 times. He has been frustrated with our work at times. But, because of the bigger social purpose of what we do, he has refused to fire us. And we have deserved it at least a couple of times. One time, we left the gate open and someone stole the cushions off their patio furniture. Interestingly, it has been those conflicts that have produced the greatest fruit in our relationship. We have ended up with a running dialogue on race dynamics that we have chosen to frame as the pursuit of friendship and trust. It has been an incredible journey, especially during this time of racial tension in the United States. What is so fun about it is that I am probably 30-35 years younger than this friend.

So anyway, I had an inkling as I brought my landscaping buddy over to this man’s house that they would strike up a good conversation because they had both worked in forestry. I also suspected that they might actually know each other without knowing it.

And here is what happened.

We arrived at the house and made our introductions through our Covid masks outdoors. Immediately, the two friends started swapping stories and sharing about shared professional relationships and connection points. It was this incredible rolling dance of conversation. For about 35 minutes I simply stood there, seemingly without purpose, attempting to call us back to the “actual work” and just listened to these two retired dudes from very different corners of life (racial and otherwise) reminisce and find meaning and hope during a time of Covid based relational starvation. I stood their marveling and smiling when I began to realize what I was witnessing. The job wasn’t the job. The interaction was the job. I was witnessing two older guys who have been starved for relationship experiencing the joy of connection and connection to their own past vocational callings. Neither of these men had grown up in contexts that would suggest that forestry would be their callings. One had grown up in the plains states and had never seen a forest. The other had grown up in a predominately urban environment and had no exposure to the undeveloped outdoors.

It was a wonderful, beautiful, and tragic moment all at once to see the relational starvation and connection walking around that yard.

For months I have spent time thinking about the relational starvation of teenagers and young adults. I am, after all, a youth minister. We built our social enterprises as student programs around life skills and job skills for teens through employment. But, over the last few years we have realized that so much of what we do has unexpected impacts on adults as well. This was one of those wonderful moments and this one story I have shared hasn’t been an isolated incident. A number of times, backyard landscaping estimates have served as a kind of informal confessional, venting space, grief share, or pastoral care session.

At the Columbia Future Forge we refer to this common surprise as “the ministry within the ministry”. It’s a second level of care and transformation that unexpectedly springs forth from the first level. It’s the beautiful unintended consequences of the Kingdom of God unfolding in real time. It’s like you planted a mustard seed and a tulip farm sprung up!

Anyway, when I got home I told my wife, “Sometimes I feel like I am running a backyard dating service for retired folks.” And this is the beauty of social enterprise. It gets you into people’s relationship backyard in a way that little else does. It pops up and springs forth in the most unexpected ways. You think you are cultivating shrubs and business, but you are really cultivating the joy of the Kingdom of God.

Innovation, Invention, and Creativity

If you can’t get it to ground, it probably isn’t real.

It’s been pretty interesting over the last few years to see the rise of the innovation conversation in churches and particularly in youth ministry of late. Overall it’s a pretty encouraging sign to see the church trying to figure out how to do ministry more creatively. The problem is that inventing new things isn’t easy work.

See what we just did? We used three words interchangeably that actually aren’t really the same thing: Invention, Creativity, and Innovation.

This is part of the problem.

The vast majority of folks deploying innovation in ministry don’t seem to have done much actual reading OR innovation on the ground. I notice this particularly in the area of these three terms. I think it’s important to understand them and apply them well (and we can do it briefly, thank God!)

1. Creativity- Creativity, which I ground in who God is rather than human capacities, is the Spirit given gift to imagine things and envision things that are not or that are new combinations of things that are. Consider these unique dreams and thoughts.

2. Invention- Is the ability to develop something completely new that nobody has ever though of. I would also say that often invention has to do with creating and actual physical THING.

3. Innovation- Innovation is the ability to bring a creative idea or invention forward in such a way that it actually is lived out. Innovation, in my mind, is the real deal because it involves the USEFUL APPLICATION of something.

None of this may seem inherently theological, but it is to me. For instance, many seminaries divide their theology departments into Theology and Practical Theology. This is asinine. All theology is practical because all theology is ultimately lived out practically. It’s lived out in the models we create and in the churches and societies we build based on those beliefs. In fact, what would be the point of even doing theology if that wasn’t true?

And the same is true of our ideas. What would be the point of thinking creatively or developing something inventive if it was never used or applied in a practical way? Keep in mind that I am NOT suggesting that everything has to scale big to be an innovation. It doesn’t. It just has to exist and be implemented in a meaningful way. Somewhere. On the ground. Beyond the academy or conference podium.

And this line of thinking is true of God as well. Our God does not merely think salvation or conceive of it. Our God actively Covenants with humanity and disrupts our reality and history in real time. He doesn’t just bring ideas to ground, God comes to the actual ground.

So, I think we need to make sure that as the church begins to jump on the innovation bandwagon during Covid and beyond, that we actually step back and ask whether the people putting forward innovation have actually done the work on the ground and whether their ideas actually work! We need loads of examples and actual data and feedback loops. We need to start distinguishing between people and institutions that are thinking about innovation versus those that are doing it. Creativity and invention are not enough. The true measure of an idea or thing is whether it can live among the people effectively in a way that moves that demonstrates the Kingdom reality we are all caught up in.