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.

Before we Innovate...

One of the things that I get excited about is the fact that youth ministry circles are starting to finally seriously engage with the topic of innovation. It is much needed and way overdue. Our leaders are tired. Our models are worn. Twitter is full of self marketing and youth ministry products that are a kind of economic ecclesial echo chamber of…stuff. And most importantly we are not producing missional adult disciples of Jesus Christ who are participating in the unfolding of God’s Kingdom in the world.

So, yeah. It’s time for change.

So, it IS exciting to see what is in the wind. But, I also have some concerns.

I have been invited to participate in about 8 different Christian social enterprise/innovation events around the U.S. over the last few years. Most of them have not been related to youth ministry. My biggest concern when innovation, or innovation through Christian enterprise comes up, is that generally speaking we do a terrible job of grounding the goal of innovation in our theology. I was thinking about this again in an acute way over the last few days while simultaneously reading several books on innovation. I started developing some critical questions that I think we need to answer before any individual or org sets out to innovate.

1. Why are we innovating?- It is a most basic principle of design thinking that you design with the end in mind. We need to thoroughly explain to the church in North America WHY it needs to innovate. I have been serving in churches for 20 years and the majority of them are often clueless about the shifting ground under their feet. Give them a bit of data and rationale. You don’t need to overwhelm them, you do need to equip and educate about what is shifting.

2. Is God an Innovator?- This is a REALLY important theological question. What makes an innovator? Does God demonstrate those attributes beyond just the act of Creation? Folks need to develop a STOUT theological framework for innovation. If the orgs and programs we create are to reflect the life and movement into the world of the Christ, then we will need conceptual and scriptural grounding. And it will have to be way more than a wink, a nod, and a proof text.

3. Who are we innovating for?- Are we innovating for youth groups or churches themselves? The students within them? Are we innovating for those outside the church? Are we innovating with the least of these in mind? Are we innovating with a lens toward racial biases? It seems highly likely to me that innovation will simply conform to the regular pattern of the church’s neglect of those outside its boundaries. So, we had better think that through. We don’t want to end up simply with a new kind of more functional church or youth group that is growing/producing the wrong things!

4. What is required for innovation?- This is a critical question as well that has individual, communal, and institutional dynamics. We need to recognize that while anyone CAN innovate, innovation often springs out of practices, experiences, and ecologies fueled by the Spirit of God. And like all GOOD things in God’s world it is going to cost something in terms of blood sweat and tears to pull it off. Have we counted the cost of doing this work?

5. Who is doing the innovation?- I have been struck on a number of occasions about the degree to which innovation takes a secular humanistic point of view and assumes the best of human beings or human designed innovation processes. We have to ground all innovation in who God is rather than who we are. It is God who is innovating, not us. Period. End of story. (Philippians 2:13) To ground any creative or innovative activity in our activity is to court danger. Need I remind us that church leaders are reportedly more likely to be narcissistic than in other professions?!?! Need I remind us that most congregations have no thoughtful systems of accountability that intentionally limit power and authority?!? And do we need any reminding that American Christians tend to prefer powerful figures who are charismatic to restrained and wise ones?!?! Any process of innovation must involve safe guards and critical self-exploration at MULTIPLE levels.

6. What is the innovation process?- A number of the gatherings that I have attended have seemed to ground innovation in some assumptions that never get named. (Big thanks to my friend Andy Root for naming this for me at 4:30 this morning!) If we borrow an innovation process from say, Google, what assumptions does that process make about humans, the marketplace, the pace of transformation in human lives, and the God’s world itself? The key part about a process is that in terms of practical theology, it is our process that reveals more about what we actually believe about God than what we claim to believe. The process and programs we design are the most powerful testimonies to what we REALLY think God is like. What does our process say about God, our neighbor, and God’s world?

This is just a start. But, I think these are some critically important questions for Innovation.

A Flammable Ecology

There is no question that this Covid thing has been a beast. And it still is. But, even in the midst of that challenge I have been struck by the amazing ministry that is going on and how thankful I am that we have developed the ministries that we have. Our gym and landscape operations are still floating and a new online school partnership has begun. It’s incredible fruit in a time that sometimes has felt rotten.

This past week I was reading (again) the student ministry book, “The Godbearing Life” by Kenda Dean. In the 4th chapter she wades into the story of Moses and the burning bush as an image to describe us joining the Holy Spirit’s work in the lives of students. The idea is that we are and kind of flammable bush waiting to catch Holy fire as ministers and simultaneously we are a bit like Moses who needs to be on the lookout for students who are ready to catch fire. Kenda has a kind of hopeful and expectant lens when she approaches her gospel work. The Holy Spirit is always about to do something! Will we miss it!? She plays with this image over and over again. The bush, the fire, the one journeying through life. It’s one of the best youth ministry books that is out there.

At the end of the chapter she describes the church, the youth worker, the student’s family, and maybe a couple of other things as a kind of “flammable ecology” and it floored me when I read it. I have been trying to describe (for the last few years) what I see happening inside our ministries. Some students simply come to our church. Some simply come for a job. Some come for life skills or for drones. But, it’s when a student navigates several of the systems simultaneously that we seem to see the most gospel transformation. It’s often the student who showed up because a teacher made them, and then they decide they like one of the trainings, and then they need a job, and then they really enjoy their mentor, and then they go to the local college, and then they need help with a vehicle, and then they need affordable housing and a weight program. And then… And then…

It’s all of those things together that are what I call…the juice.

It’s when several symbiotic and interdependent ministries overlap that something combustible happens.

Kenda Dean’s term nails it. It’s a kind of flammable ecosystem in which a species of kid within the system often is forming symbiotic relationships with different elements of the network…and sometimes simultaneously. Adults are also shaped within this system as well though. We are training them in ministry (not well yet!) so that they can serve with excellence. And as they catch fire and grow many of them long to remain in the ecosystem for community or to help others take a similar journey. It’s a kind of interdependence or healthy symbiosis. Likewise the leadership of our different ministries have begun to cross-polinate in unexpected ways. Ideas are shared (practical and theological) and blended over time re-shaping the whole system. When we started this ministry we were all about the life skills and jobs. Now, those remain important, but we would say that human transformation is the overall goal. We know that happens through a variety of means in our emerging ecosystem.

I have been watching this happening for probably the last two years and couldn’t figure out how to name what I saw happening. It’s both theological and environmental. This appeals to me as a theologian pastor who was once both a history major and a forestry major. I have begun playing with ideas like mutualism, commenalism, parasitism, and predation as useful terms to describe what is happening in this ministry. The flammability that is here reminds me of a kind of Pyrophitic plants that require fire to germinate their seeds. Somehow, God seems to be working like that in ministry as well as ecologically. It’s a flammable ecology.

Transformation, Transmogrification, or Transfiguration?

One of the things that has happened over the 5 years we have been running our Forge program is that we have gradually gathered around some values that matter to us. Values are often something people tend to confuse with ideals. Many people in the churches that I have worked in have tended to think of values as something along the lines of aspirations. They think about their church or organization and think about what they would like it to be one day. Values aren’t that.

Values are ideas and ethics that already exist within your organization. They are reflexive tendencies that shape the way you shape your programs and relationships within your community/organization. Along with your mission and vision, when clear, values tend to shape what you and your fellow supporters see as inside and outside the scope of who you are. They aren’t so much who you are or what you do, as they are the way you do what you do together. And I don’t think you can just sit down and write them down one day. They tend to emerge from the life of an organization/ministry over time. They emerge from actually doing what you do. I tend to find that we have tripped over a value when we make statements like, “That isn’t who we want to be.” Or, “That feels more like the way we want to go about doing this work.”

Well, it feels like in the last 1.5 years some clear values have started to emerge for our Forge ministry. We have lived enough life together to begin to name some of those values. Perhaps the most key value for us is that we believe that all human transformation happens at the pace of human relationships.

Our ministry has realized over time that our community has plenty of programs. We have lots and lots of places that kids can get services for different kinds of things. We have lots of places in our community where people can get better at things (sports, music, tech, etc.) And while programs do a lot of good, students are often left with the sense that they are a commodity in someone else’s self actualization. What I mean is that each coach, teacher, and minister wants to know that what they do each day as they get out of bed matters. I want to know that my youth ministry matters. The unfortunate side effect of this desire for me to feel like I have meaning is that it creates a temptation to want to make an impact on things and people. This can often reduce teenagers to cogs in our own personal quest for meaning. This is why a music teacher is offended when a kid in my church chooses in my chooses a humanitarian aid trip over music camp and questions her commitment to music. This is why a swim coach lets an athlete know, the moment they get out of the pool (after swimming a record time) that it wasn’t nearly their best. Christians are not (ideally) in the program business or even in the get to heaven business. At our core, we are in the rescue and transformation business.

When I think of why God exists in human relationship with people it is all about a giant, eons long, painstaking, and long suffering RESCUE OPERATION. The whole project of God on our behalf is an effort on the part of God to rescue and restore us. It is not about getting us to somewhere and apparently it isn’t about getting us right or perfect. If that were the case, none of us would be welcome in this project. So, what is it about? It’s about a God who wants to rescue us from ourselves.

So, the question then becomes how are humans rescued? How is it that we come to be changed and shaped? And what does it look like for us to imitate the shape and form of that rescue operation in our own ministries?

Well, I think Christian ministries can take 3 forms.

1. Transmogrification Ministries

2. Transformation Ministries

3. Transfiguration Ministries

The first form of ministry that often happens in many places in our world, not least of which is the church, is transmogrification. My oldest child reads Calvin and Hobbes on a regular basis and one of my favorite cartoons is when Calvin makes a “Transmogrifier” out of a cardboard box. I had always thought it was a made up kid word until I looked it up. It turns out to be transmogrified means to be transformed, but in a kind of humorous, ridiculous, or bizarre way.

Many of our ministries, because they desire to make an impact, can turn people into odd Christian caricatures. They function as bizarre transmogrifiers. You have seen folks like this. People whose ministries or programs so desperately want to demonstrate transformation that they almost force it on people. The people become walking televangelists for this or that. They become so awkward that you begin to wonder if they believe their own story of transformation, or whether is it simply a kind of incantational mantra meant to hypnotize. Transmogrification is the sort of ministry where a quality ministry ideal goes into the machine and something along the lines of a Chinese knockoff product comes out. See below. It looks like what you wanted, but it really isn’t.

Many Christian ministries produce people like this. Partially this happens because their ministry ideals are so desperately high. Partially this happens because they believe that their ministries exist to “produce” people at all…sometimes even on a mass scale. These are not the ministries we want to create.

A second healthier version of Christian ministry is working for positive human transformation. This is the kind of work that takes hours and hours of relational time. It is the sort of ministry that is patient, loving, and long suffering. It does not exist to make me feel better or more charitable. It does not exist to give one a sense of accomplishment or meaning. It exists to benefit the other person. It does not treat them as an object to be transformed. It honors their agency and autonomy. I don’t believe these relationships are truly co-equal, but they should be highly mutual. In good transformational ministry both parties are transformed!

This sort of transformation requires another human being to engage. To push this back into the realm of the obviously theological, this is why God enters into the world. Human transformation cannot be accomplished, apparently, without flesh on flesh. Sacrifices must be made in order for transformation to happen. Somebody somewhere is going to have to give something up and lay something (probably themselves) down for the sake of the other. Blood. Sweat. Tears. They are going to have to enter into our suffering rather than simply offering empathy and sympathy.

The simple truth (and it’s become one of our Forge values) is that human transformation requires human relationship. It’s not a program or a machine. This is why God must break into the world. We cannot expect human beings to pray a prayer or take a class and see transformation. We cannot expect to see a neighborhood or community transformed only because a rec center was built. Until human beings are willing to invest in human beings true transformation will never happen. It is long, slow, grinding work that is NEVER finished. No human being ever reaches a finish line because we are never completed creations of God.

But, the true jazz of human work and the gospel is transfiguration work. Transfiguration implies a kind of exalting or lifting up. One might say that transformational work leads to transfiguration. Transfigurational ministry happens when the countenance and spirit of a person to is lifted to a new summit. It’s byproducts are hope and joy. Utimately, gospel work is about transfiguration. It’s about painstaking transformations, slow positive human erosions and constructions supported by the scaffolding and spires of dozens of caring human beings, that eventually elevate another person to LIFE. Irenaeus was once purported to have said that “the glory of God was a human being fully alive.” Transfiguration is when we see someone come to life and the radiance and resonance of that moment is profound. So, how do we go about transfigurational ministry?

We don’t.

My experience in ministry tells me that transfiguration happens through God alone. Heck, I am not even sure I am really capable of transformation! I know we can’t produce transfiguration. But, the divine moment when you look at a student or human and recognize that something is completely transformed, is beyond our creative capacities. It is the exclusive product of divine action. It is wonderfully beyond our control and measurement. It emerges from unexpected places and unexpected moments and shocks us. It violates our sense of what we once thought was possible. Transformation is uncommon because it takes so much work, time, and energy. Transfiguration is miraculous because it is impossible until it happens.

In the ministries I run, we value doing the right ministry, the right way, at the right pace. We think that transformation is often something that happens over years and perhaps even over generations. It is work that is difficult and requires mutual relationship. It is not possible without the Spirit. It does not produce a Christian caricature, but the real McCoy that only God can see and draw out of each one of us. Every once in a while we see a true transfiguration and we give thanks and plod on.

It’s a wonderful calling.

Windshield Conversations...

I have written several posts about how one of the biggest surprises about how we have tried to do youth ministry and social enterprise at my church (other than how hard it is!) is the impact I think it is having on adults. I have felt that doing a mentoring and business based model of youth ministry has drawn out the gifts of numerous adults in my church who probably would not have had anything to do with youth ministry previously. This sense has been affirmed over the last few weeks in particular.

A few weeks back I was in a parking lot in my truck when one of my mentors called. They wanted to clarify a few things about their student and also check in on their paperwork status. While I was trying to make it into my next appointment I found myself getting the chance to do what I enjoy most: Coaching someone in how to do ministry with teenagers. But, really I was coaching them in how to do ministry with their fellow human being. We talked about listening well and about the unique personality of their particular assigned student. We talked about what to do if any particular crisis issue came up and we revisited our abuse prevention protocols. I also assured them that I was just a phone call away.

The best part about the conversation was that this adult had no business doing ministry with teenagers, and I don't mean because of relative age. I have always used older adults more than younger ones in youth ministry. Age is somewhat irrelevant. What I mean is that this particular adult, while a WONDERFUL human being, just doesn't strike you as somebody you would expect to be hanging out with a teenager. They would be one of the last sort of folks I might recruit for a number of the normal elements that make up a youth ministry. This of course is probably more of an indictment of youth ministry than it is a characterization of the individual. The fact that our models couldn't accommodate the gifts and talents of this individual is egregiously bad. When it comes to youth ministry the hand has often been saying to the foot, "I don't need you."

And then this experience with this one adult seemed to repeat itself another three times in the next week.

What had happened in part was that in the 4th year of our program we doubled in size. We now have 23 students in the program and that has meant pulling from a wider crop of adults from our church and beyond for the first time. During the first three years we mostly had adults that had a good deal of experience with teens from our ministry community. They entered the program with a certain sense of confidence and veterancy in what they were doing. But, this year is requiring more encouragement, coaching, and listening. And it's a ton of fun. In many ways, I feel like I am doing exactly what I ought to be doing most of the time.

When we built the initial landscaping company, one of the things we talked about was "windshield time". We meant that while we were driving around we wanted to take advantage of conversations that would happen along the road with students. But, as it turns out adults need windshield time too. They want to help students. They want to do ministry. But, they just need somebody as a kind of reflective backstop. It's funny at times because I am coaching people who are nearly twice my age. In a lot of ways their nervousness reminds me of my experiences of doing hospital chaplaincy in my early 20's. I remember vividly feeling like I didn't know what to say, what to do, or whether I was going to really screw somebody up through ignorance and the sugary additive of good intentions. It's not a fun feeling, but it is a necessary stage of ministry.

This is what my adult mentors are learning.

1. Most of life's problems are not solvable by human beings. They are knots that are just too hard to untangle. This is partially why relationship with God is so powerful. God does the work we cannot. And while that can make us feel futile at times as servants of our neighbors it's also kind of a relief to know that we don't have to solve problems.

2. Ministry and service to one's neighbor always involve getting involved in someone's mess. When you really engage ministry you find out how most of our forms of service are actually designed to keep us distant from the recipient. We serve at arm's length in most contexts. it's safer that way. Real face to face ministry in which you actually have to just listen and walk with somebody through their crap is often messy. You are invited into the story of a neighbor and that is inherently risky. It might cost you some sleep, some money, time, and probably part of your heart.

3. You don't know your neighbor or their experience until you know them. When you engage ministry you quickly find that you don't have clue about other people's experiences. Most of what we live on in life are assumptions about others from a safe distance. Ministry has a way of disrupting our stereotypes and assumptions about people from the outside because it invites you into the inside of their lives. You end up in conversations, homes, and at tables that teach us just how ignorant we are. It's embarrassing and awkward, but it's good work and it is never finished. You are never done learning about the folks to which you minister.

4. Good listening is the best skill you have. People often get frustrated with how church folk and others will offer all kinds of platitudes to people in crisis ("God doesn't give you more than you can handle."). Often they do this because platitudes actually kind of work...when you keep your distance from your neighbor. They make you feel that you have helped your neighbor when in fact they mostly have just reinforced your distance from them. It's only actual ministry that exposes them for what they are: manure. Actual ministry, wading into the life of my neighbor reveals that reflective listening is the best, and often the only, balm we have. Good listening and good questions are the first tool in a pretty limited actual ministry tool bag.

In any event, these conversations have been fun. It's nice to be doing what you are supposed to be doing. It's nice to invite others into the holy mess that God invited me into some years ago.

Glimpses of Glory #1

For the record.  Our truck is not nearly as shiny as this one.

What can a dump truck, snow, and bricks teach us about Christian ministry? Something maybe.

Some weeks ago I brought my girls with me to complete a large landscaping job in which we were building a stone retaining wall.  The job was finished and there were about 150 extra bricks that needed to be loaded into a large dump truck and hauled back to Home Depot. When my girls and I got to the top of the ridge in our neigborhood we found that while it had not snowed at our house, it had snowed a couple of inches up there! It was also a good deal colder. As a good Dad, I of course had not anticipated this and brought no work gloves for my girls, 5 and 8 or for me.

Over the next couple of hours I patiently helped them help me load each brick onto pallets in the truck. I stood up on the back end looking down at them as they handed up each brick covered in snow. I felt badly looking at their pink little hands, but I also knew that this was a really good character building experience for them. At one point a couple of older boys bicycled by with gloves on. My oldest could hear them complaining about how cold it was and that they needed to stop and warm up. At one point she looked up and said, "You know at school, the boys always talk about girls being 'fancy'. Sometimes I think boys can by pretty 'fancy' too." I couldn't help but laugh. While my girls were cold, they were learning the borders and testing the margins of their mental and physical toughness through work. All children need to do this. We talked about sometimes needing to focus on the task at hand when things get difficult, that when things get difficult you sometimes have to just keep moving forward until the job is done. I believe these things. But, it was their in their looking up during and after the work that I was most struck.

One of the hopes in pursuing Kingdom work (and specifically youth work) through the vehicle of social enterprise is that as we pursue it we think reflectively about the theology that does or does not undergird what we are doing. In the past I have tried to write on theological frameworks for Christian Social Enterprise and the other day I ran into one of these ideas while in church. There was a connection point between the experience with that dump truck and what I was hearing.

At least part of what we are doing in youth ministry through social enterprise is giving students glimpses of glory.

     In his lecture/sermon on "The Weight of Glory", C.S. Lewis draws an analogy to children and parent while he is trying to define glory as "fame or good report". Lewis is careful to say that glory, on the human side at least, is actually our need for the recognition of God. What we often pursue is fame or good report from our fellow human beings as some kind of substitute for this divine embrace. But, his point is that we are wired to seek recognition from God. A kind of divine approval and blessing.

     All of us long to hear from some final authority the words that we see in Matthew 25, "Well done good and faithful servant." In Matthew 3 we also find that the Son of God, after being baptized receives praise from on high. "And a voice from heaven said, 'This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased." Again in Matthew 17 we see in the Transfiguration that the Father again is well pleased with the Son.  The point of all this, and its one that I think I agree with, is that as human beings we long to receive the praise of God. Shoot, apparently even God needs the praise of God! We are in some sense wired for it. But, the trick is that in order for us to believe in that God who delights in us and hope for its future day of fullness, we need to experiences glimpses of glory here and now. That is to say that it is often human beings, our neighbors and perhaps most importantly our parents, who provide that foretaste as we live this side of God's Kingdom. We need somebody, sometimes anybody to tell us, "Well done, I am proud of you!"

     Lewis says that in this way we are rather like children. Anyone that has children can verify that there is nothing they long for more than to earn (honest and genuine!) praise from their parents. They long to hear that they have worked hard and done well.  This is what I ran into with my own girls.  At several stages of the work, while they hardly complained, they did seek out my approval. They clearly wanted to know that they were doing a good job at the task at hand. This dynamic continued after the fact as well. Tucking one of them in at night I told them that I was proud that they had worked so hard and toughed it out.  They wanted to hear what every human being wants to hear from some higher authority, "Well done you hard worker! You are doing great! Keep at it! I am proud of you! I often try to offer them this praise apart from the tasks they perform, but I also want them to be able to honestly assess when they have worked hard and done well. And all of this of course is exactly what Lewis is driving at. We are all looking up in some sense. I think Lewis is exactly right about this impulse to receive glory from the one who made us and it is an important theological pillar that supports all the intergenerational ministry and youth ministry that my church is working on. We are engaged in Christian Social Enterprise through mentoring because it gives us an opportunity to add an adult, or perhaps the first adult, to the lives of local teenagers that need to catch a glimpse of glory.

    Part of what we do when we do ministry is we provide glimpses or foretastes, or inivitations to glory, for those that we work with. We have an opportunity to help people believe and hope that somebody out there is interested in them precisely where they are. One of the reasons that we have created a program around intergenerational mentoring is because we believe that our mentors have much more to offer our students than professional experience. They have much more to offer than years of wisdom. Part of what they have to offer is a glimpse of the glory of God that we all long to hear and know in fullness one day. The voice that says to us, "Well done child! I am proud of you! How did you walk that road!?" In short, what we are providing is foretastes of glory, hints of divine love and approval. We are offering human beings opportunities to be caught in the tonal warmth and magnetic light of God's voice and gaze.

At the end of the day, the world is full of people with technical skills. It is full of people with soft skills. It does not have enough people with the ability to offer these divine glimpses.

My hope is that our program can continue to offer that.

A Fish Out of Water...

A couple of weeks ago I was invited to judge a graduate level social enterprise competition at Seattle Pacific University here in the Pacific Northwest.  The contest was a group based contest in which students pitched a social enterprise to an audience of business people with the idea of getting funding to launch. Each group begins with a quick 7 minuted pitch on their idea, their team, their impact, and their needed funding.  They are then evaluated through individual conversation with the judges.  It was a phenomenal experience and it was wonderful to be invited, though I did feel out of place at times being a judge of such a contest.

Most of the people in the room were true blue business folks. Some had worked for Disney and Microsoft. The woman next to me had left a lucrative tech career to found her own social enterprise creating special L.E.D. lights for children wanting to read during the night hours so that literacy rates would go up.  When it came time to introduce myself, part of me wanted to chuckle. I was the only person in the room who was in full time ordained ministry as far as I could tell. My social enterprise felt remarkably humble and my business experience felt absent.

I own a small landscaping company that employs about 6 people in my local community. It is paired with another mentoring program that imparts life skills and faith principles to a total of 12 teens from our area. We are unique in that we are building this model not apart from a church, but largely connected to one even though we are independent in terms of our legal structures. At times I only understood about 60% of the terminology being thrown around the room as I have no formal business training. My business is run off of my awareness of human nature, my experience of my father's businesses as a child, and a passion to make an impact.

But, this is my third social enterprise gathering that I have gone to and about the 5th venue that I have been to where I have discussed the intersection of faith and business. I am learning some important things I think about this world.

1. Passion- When we went around and asked each group about their particular idea or product, one of the first questions that I asked them was, "Tell me why you are passionate about this?" Launching any venture (social enterprise or not) is going to require some suffering and a whole lot of blood, sweat, and tears. What struck me was how few of them had prepared for that question. I regard passion for the idea at stake as critical.  Suffering is a central part of the Christian story and several of the students gave me remarkably corporate answers. One said, "Well I have worked in several non-profits and now I would like to start my own." There were two students in particular who had immediate connection to their idea and it was clear that they had some real drive to actually tackle the problem. Now I know that these were hypothetical projects, but I think that any church or school that is teaching entrepreneurship needs to be teaching its students some kind of spiritual formation process for discerning what it is they are willing to struggle for before they go launching something. Otherwise social enterprise will become just another career path. If the Christian story gives something to enterprise it's the notion of finding something so beloved that it is worth dying for. Christian Social Enterprise needs to connect to that story and harness that sort of passion for the good.

2. Graduate Students and Every Day Folks are Key- In several of the programs I have attneded I have been exposed to theology students, business undergrads, and everyday folks trying to launch. My experience has been that graduate students with life under their belts are best. Theology folks have tended to be very idealistic about their ideas and about human nature in the marketplace. The undergrads don't feel the sufficient fear of having to move out into the real world just yet. It's the everyday folks and the grad students seem to be most ready to launch. The everyday folks have had the time and lived experience to discern what their passions are. The grad students are at the last possible stage of education (more or less) and know they have to launch. Many of them also have had some career exposure prior to their degree. I was impressed at Seattle Pacific that their ideas seemed big, but doable. I think if we want to engage theological reflection with the business world, schools that have theology departments and graduate business departments will be key. Of course, they will need to work together and that may be quite a challenge.

3. Let's Not Forget the Ordinary- One of the things that has floored me at these kinds of competitions is that people always have these massive ideas about what to launch. Everything must massively scale! Everything must have massive impact! Everything must disrupt whole industries!  I have heard ideas for upcycling coffee grounds, recycling used diapers by the thousands of tons, solar projects for churches, etc. etc. etc. One of the things that I think gets missed in all of this desire to do good and "innovate" is just injecting the good into existing ordinary marketplaces. There is a very thin line between ME wanting to impact on a big scale and a kind narcissism and that is worth keeping in mind. We cannot underestimate our culture's love of humanistic self actualization.  The simplicity of the landscaping company that we run is that we have broken into an existing ordinary marketplace by offering customers an augmented service. All we do is excellent landscaping and make a social impact while we do it. I often hear frustration from the folks that host these events that not many of the folks that attend them actually launch! I think perhaps if we coached people on just disrupting ordinary local industries they might do so. Find something you are good at and offer it to the public with greater social value and people will prefer to buy your services over your competitor as long as the service is excellent and you can show them the impact in some way.

4. Be Patient and Consider the Good- One of my concerns for social enterprise programs is that they don't take the time to teach about the importance of time and immersion.  Too many of these programs are concerned with launching or creating a great idea!  The problem with that is that many people who innovate, tend to innovate in an area that they have immersed themselves in for some time. Either in a particular community or in a particular field of interest. Their innovation tends to be around the edges of some place that they have been embedded. To me, to focus on embedding is to live out the doctrine of the Incarnation.  When our primary goal is ideating and producing, it will tend to produce ideas that we are not fully connected to and that probably will not be as effective at serving the common good. We need to work on ideas that we know and care about in places that we know and care about. We need to fully consider the good of the idea we are working on rather than just whether it is a "good idea". I think that we can improve on this at most of our Christian social incubators and accelerators.

Why Christian Social Enterprise #5- Patient Incarnation vs. Impact

One of the theological strengths of rightly practiced Christianity is a kind of "patient incarnation". As I have been reading various books on social enterprise there is a heavy emphasis on measurable impacts.  And generally speaking this is a wonderful thing that the church could learn a great deal from. The vast majority of churches rarely get to a place where they can name their values let alone their vision. As a result they often don't know what to measure in terms of whether or not they are achieving their goals.  But, the desire to measure impact carries a certain burden with it that the church has a long history with.  The desire to make a measurable impact on anyone can lead us to turn them into a kind of commodity.  When we push too heavily toward measurable impacts we often end up seeing people, communities, and even whole countries as cogs in a plan that we (the benefactors) have developed.  That kind of agency can be tone deaf and often blind to what the object of its assistance would desire for themselves.  I would propose that Christianity offers a healthy alternative when one thinks about the life and ministry of Jesus.

In Christ, God is sent and comes into the world and there are multiple attributes of this self sending that are can redemptively temper the desire for "impact".

1. The Act of Being Sent- There is a remarkable kind of patience in the simple fact that God does not choose to do things instantaneously. Instead God chooses a methodology of social impact in which thousands of physical steps are taken, meals are eaten, breaths are taken, etc. In Jesus, impact is intimate.

2. The Act of Being Sent to a Particular Place- The fact that God's mission has a locus is worthy of attention. In coming into the world Christ does not enact change remotely on other places. He moves into a particular context and enacts his ministry relatively locally. He engages a finite language and culture.  In Jesus, impact is local.

3. God Honors Autonomy- Throughout his ministry Jesus is approached by others (Luke 9-14) and approaches others who claim they wish to engage what he offers, but then they back down. Jesus does not force his way into their lives or push them any further. In other words there is a kind of objective distance in his desire to impact the world. Jesus doesn't make sure he gets the win in every conversation. He is sovereign while maintaining the autonomy of the created creature who he loves. In Jesus, impact honors the autonomy of the other.

4. He is Sent to Individuals- A dramatic feature of Jesus' incarnational ministry is that he seems to heal people one at a time. His desire to impact the world and the lives of others is not superceded by mass impact. There is something intrinsically good about small batches of good work within the heart of God. In Jesus, impact is large, but primarily done on an individual scale.

5. He Often Listens- A hallmark of the way that God enters the world in Christ is that he asks lots of questions and listens. Many of Jesus' conversations see him asking questions of friends and enemies about what they want, their willingness to engage his way of life, and about how they understand God's teachings. These aren't exactly listening circles as Jesus clearly inhabits a prophetic role, but neither do we see Jesus only dictating to others. In Jesus, impact values the voice of the other.

6. He has an Eternal Timeline- Jesus clearly has an urgency about his mission, yet he is not obsessed with efficiency. The way that he scales things seems to take a long view of ministry even while he knows that ministry will be short lived. His concept of time seems to be more cyclical than linear. This produces a man who has an urgent mission yet goes about it rather patiently. In Jesus, impact must be patient.

One of the perplexing parts about Western culture is that it has been shaped by a religion that believes that we are eternal creatures, but it's concepts of time are remarkably finite. We are obsessed with impact as that is the pinnacle of Western self actualization. When you combine the desire for self actualization with the sense that time is scarce then you end up with a drive to maximize everything in the short term.  Time becomes a kind of measurable commodity that is therefore scarce. This way of thinking is dangerous to the heart of social enterprise because once you can commoditize time, it is a short walk down the hill to commoditizing people too.

The danger of desiring to make an impact on my neighbor is that it may cause me to diminish their own autonomy, will, and actual needs within my desire to self actualize.  Christians have a useful voice in the social enterprise world in that we have an incarnational story that pushes back on such a drive.  We also have a long black history of being participants in forcing "progress" on our neighbors. We need to keep this black history at the forefront of our colleauges' minds.  Social Enterprise needs a model that encourages us to be patient. We need to honor autonomy, listen well, and often work on an individual scale. As long as we temper our desire for impact with these virtues we should be able to serve the greater good.