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.

"Under the Table": A Conversation on the Job

One of the reasons (there were a ton of reasons) that I began this project of seeing if it was possible to do youth ministry through the medium of work/teen jobs was that I had a sense remodeling my own house that the conversations I was getting in were better than those I had on Sunday nights at youth group.  Regular youth group still has a very important place in my book as it ministers to other needs, but it was just easier to get into more meaty conversations about life while doing work.  Further, I had also found while paying students to work on my house that it was very easy to link those conversations to issues of faith and in doing so, faith becomes more real and therefore less abstract.  I encountered this again recently while working a job with one of my Mowtown students. If you are new to this blog or this conversation Mowtown is the particular small business that I have started to put teens to work and do ministry at the same time. Essentially I created my own social entrepreneurship or missional entrepreneurship (if you want to use churchy language) as a means to do more impactful ministry. 

I have also been asked many times along the way, "Isn't providing jobs for teenagers just its own form of therapeutic deism? How are you going to link Christian faith with this? This is a valid question and one that I spend a lot of time thinking about.  The last thing I want to do is create another ministry that simply makes money for its own sake or simply lives off of the church, but rather one that really makes little significant Kingdom impact in people's actual lives.  For those with that question, here is one bread crumb vignette from along the path of "A Youth Ministry that Works".

This summer, one of my students was forced by the necessity of family need to take a construction job under the table. This particular students was engaged in our church's volunteer summer internship, but had to pull out because of this job need.  Well, as we were headed out to our job site, we started to discuss the problems with being hired by someone "under the table." I explained to "Paul" that for every hour I hire him above board, I have to pay the government additional funds that help cover part of his social security, disability, unemployment, etc.  So, for every hour that he works under the table he is robbed of part of his retirement and he is robbed of recourse if he gets injured or is out of a job.  Furthermore, he was being baldly robbed since he was being paid significantly below our state's minimum wage.  All of this was news to him, but the connection points were huge!

For starters, his mother works multiple jobs under the table.  We had a long discussion about social security and his mom when she "retires".  He had NO CLUE as to how social security worked. I think this was actually a really scary conversation for him when he started to think about what it meant for his mom's present and future.  This lead us into a discussion about the political debate surrounding immigration which matters to him as a hispanic latino student. We even discussed a bit of economics. We talked about how I am at a competitive disadvantage as a business owner in terms of making a profit because of folks that hire under the table. They make more money off of his work than I do. In other words, both he and I are being robbed by the practice.  And what all of this finally lead to was a discussion about justice and God.  We talked about God's desire to set things in the world right and we discussed how we are a part of that. We talked about integrity in life and why doing things legally and above board are signs of loving our neighbor.

The revelation in this midst of all this conversation is simply that I was equipping a kid to see the world through more of a gospel lens in the most natural way possible. Most of my discussions about justice with my teenagers tend to be abstract. We end up talking about issues that seem more dramatic because they happen in the 3rd world or on a mission trip outside of our small city or someplace that seems like "over there." If we struggle with dichotomies between our Sunday life and our weekly job lives (and we surely do), we certainly also struggle with false dichotomies between mission work and justice issues in our back yard and seeming like things that happen "over there".  Conveniently this dichotomy allows our communities of faith to avoid dealing with our own first world poverty and the messiness of the personal politics involved. That kind of avoidance is of course its own justice issue. So much of what our churches need to talk about in order to convince teenagers and young adults that faith actually matters to real life are just these sorts of issues of justice and injustice.  There is almost an entire economy of issues that operate, in their own way, as "under the table" issues in our churches. They never really are engaged and this leaves our people with the sense that faith just doesn't matter out in the real world.  We don't know how to engage these issues from behind the pulpit as that feels like a kind of power play. Many ministers feel like preaching too heavy handedly about justice to their congregation limits dialogue and further bifurcates our congregations along political lines. I agree with this to an extent. But, to not find a medium for engaging these issues at all isn't acceptable. Here is the thing though, the inbreaking of the Kingdom won't be slowed. It will happen with us or without us. The church can engage a justice filled life or be left wondering where God went? He may in fact already be absent from some of the vacuous old time sanctuaries and suburban worship centers we already occupy.

This conversation was also the most real and natural discussion about integrity I have probably ever had with a student. Most of the discussions I heard about integrity in churches (mostly during my more evangelical college years) were cheapened by the fact that they tended to be had around moralistic issues like telling lies and human sexuality etc. etc. etc. You know the kind of thing I mean, "If you don't have integrity in the small stuff...." This is all well and good, but it only tends to appeal to the most structured personalities who by sheer function of their own personal anxiety levels and desire for control tend to do EVERYTHING by the book already. For the rest of us, life is a bit messier. When you can talk with a student about how a complete lack of integrity grinds up other human beings over time....that has power. That actually points to the import that a life of faith actually has.

I am learning a lot through this process of doing business as mission about my own blindness to certain issues. I am engaging students I never would have engaged before and our ministry probably would not have been able to sustain relationships with before. I am seeing the connection between my own faith and issues that I was aware of, but really had no personal connection to or visceral experience with in any previous phase of life.  This process has been a ton of work and stress, but so far it has been good gospel work.  I continue to see its usefulness to those it serves and to my own walk along the Jesus Way.