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.

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.

Youth Philanthropy Academy-Part 2 A Sunday Morning Revolution

So, as I had mentioned in an earlier post about a week ago I went to Princeton to help consult on what it would look like to implement a philanthropic initiative in the local church.  Princeton is utilizing a model provided by the non-profit, "Giving Point" in Atlanta, GA.  They are trying to see how a similar model might work in the local church.  The plan is to provide a week long academy experience that will help students with philanthropic ideas to execute on their vision.  I would like to explain what this looks like in my church.  The initiative below represents what I would call my second innovation in our youth ministry. The whole thing could go down in flames, but it is looking really promising. See what you think!?

About a year ago I decided that I was fed up with Sunday School as I knew it for our high school students. I had tried everything. We had done curriculums on justice. That was okay.  We tried organizing small groups, but the consistency of the student and leader attendance was low.  We had some luck with Confirmation and with Sexuality courses, but it was fleeting.  I was tired of helping students to think and live missionally only through doing a work service trip once a year. I started to wonder if we couldn't engage students more powerfully by empowering them to enact Kingdom justice instead of just learning about it.  So we started what we call, "The Project".

First, we gathered the students around learning and conversation.  I told the students that the objective was for them to develop an idea to serve the larger community and that in order to do it, we would need them to actively participate and lead.  We began reading excerpts of Robert Lupton's, "Toxic Charity" and watched the video series, "Poverty Inc."  Both of these look at how the church's ham fisted attempts at helping our neighbor have often done more harm than good.  In particular we focused in on Lupton's 6 principles of compassionate service.

Next, we looked in depth at the various charities in our communities to see if any of their missions grabbed the students' attention or hearts.  We also wanted to see if there were ways that we could adequately serve these organizations.  At this point we had about 8-12 students in the room (out of about 35 high schoolers at our church).  What we found is that while our students liked some of the organizations, often those organizations often did not have service opportunities that aligned with the schedules of our students or numbers.  We estimated that we would get 20-25 students to show up for a service project and most groups couldn't handle that number. Even if they could they could only do so occasionally and our students didn't want to do "hit and run" ministry. The kind  where we show up, work, and take off.

From there the students decided that since outside organizations didn't seem to fit our mission that we should look specifically at things that the church was already engaged in.  In the end they decided that they wanted to focus on our neighborhood middle school that we know as "Mac".  This process of learning and thinking took about 4 months and when summer hit we were forced to take a break simply due to our summer schedule at the church.

When the Fall came around we re-launched the whole thing with a video clip home to parents and a couple of emails.  We made scripture a priority and began each session with about 15 minutes of bible study related to mission and justice.  Then we dove in to an agenda.  Here is when things took off. I am just going to list these in bullet points.

1. Once students knew they were actually going to DO something and be in charge, they started to show up. 9:00 a.m. suddenly didn't seem so early. We now average about 18-20 students per week.

2. Adults got interested. I simply invited them to come and watch what we were doing. Pretty soon I was going out of town and they were helping to facilitate. We went from 1-2 showing up sporadically to 4 committed adults with another 2-3 engaged around the edges.  One of them just wandered in one Sunday because he had heard about what we were doing. Another one just hangs around before class starts because he is so interested.  We keep asking the question, "Who do we need in the room?" My goal is currently for the class to stop being a high school Sunday School and instead become "The Project". I see a place where adults and students work together to seek out God's justice.  I want this class to discern the missional calling for the WHOLE church and not just the youth group.  I think teenagers can do it with enough focus, prayer, and some adult encouragement.  My suspicion is that adults will continue to want to be a part of that.

3.  We did outreach. We have had the local school Community Coordinator in to speak with the students so that they can start to get a grasp on what is really going on at the school.  They plan to have others in the class over the next few weeks. Principals, counselors, and teachers.  It's kind of a weekly design thinking brainstorm.

4. We gave them roles. Together the students helped develop certain key officer roles that help the meetings go forward each week. They elected their peers and those peers set the agenda, manage the budget, take notes, do grunt work, and work the problem that is in front of us. The moment we elected officers I moved myself from the front of the room to the side and eventually to the back. They are in charge. Each week they learn important lessons about leading a group.  It's great. We didn't want it too formal and serious (since this is a youth ministry venture) so we developed better titles for each of their roles.

     A. Czar (This explains the hat above. I bought these for our fearless leaders!)

     B.  Vice Czar

     C.  Secretaries of Defense (Takes notes)

     D.  KGB (Adults that supervise and offer input as needed)

      E.  Queen of Coin (Treasurer)

      F.  The Peasants

5. We Threw Mud at the Wall. Once we had the location of our mission and started to look at the issues they were facing we told the students to Dream Big. We challenged them to answer the question, "How would you solve this host of problems if I gave you $100,000?"  I happen to believe that $100,000 is a very achievable number. The stuff they came up with was amazing! They tackled distribution problems, looked at solar solutions, and have even considered buying a laundro-mat and combine it with a tutoring center. I am telling you, this is the best stuff I have ever heard of and it is impressive to watch this.

Princeton's Youth and Philanthropy Academy- Part 1

This past week I was invited to attend a gathering at Princeton Theological Seminary for a really forward thinking initiative called the 'Youth and Philanthropy Academy'. Over the next couple of days I am going to do a few posts about that  "Y.P.A." initiative.  This first one will take a look at what the experience looked like and the next couple will look at some of its implications for  youth ministry at my local church.

YPA is a pilot program through Princeton Theological that is designed to help foster Kingdom thinking  and Kingdom action in students. Students are going to be encouraged to develop and execute on philanthropic ideas in their communities.    

The idea has come through a partnership with an organization called, "Giving Point".  Giving Point, which is centered in Atlanta, Georgia does this exact kind of work with teenagers from around the United States.  Their social media platform has over 10,000 teen followers. The most motivated of these are given coaching and adult help so that those students can bring their philanthropic ideas to life.  But, the burden of passion and forward movement always rests with the student. In this way, Giving Point encourages teens as empowered agents of change rather than as passive recipients of adult initiative.  Princeton is trying to see if they can create a version of that kind of program through the seminary.    

The basic plan is to bring about 15 students to Princeton for a week long summer session.  At this YPA experience, students will connect their ideas to their faith and come up with a plan to execute on that plan while collaborating with other students.  Here is what the overall framework will look like:

1. A student will apply to go to YPA.

2. Once selected they will fly to Princeton for the  Youth and Philanthropy Academy week.

3. At the camp they will receive coaching on how to communicate the idea they are passionate about persuasively and develop a year long plan on executing the idea.

4. From there they will be tasked with going back to their local church and assembling a group of teenagers and adults (maybe from within and from outside of the church) to help with the project.  These folks serve as participants and mentors along the way.

5.  Princeton will also provide some kind of funding incentive plan for the students. They are still working out how this might work. But, they might get $500 from Princeton if they can raise $500 of funds on their own.

6.  Last, if they are successful in executing on that year long plan and assembling that team of adults they will then be invited back to a kind of gala dinner in which they would pitch their idea to groups of folks who would fund the initiatives.  They are describing this as a kind of grace filled "Shark Tank".

Each day at the academy students will be given a group session, opportunities to work collaboratively, individual speech coaching, and time for reflection so that they can process what they are learning as well as what God might be saying through their experience.  All I can say at this point was that it was a really cool experience and that it is one of the most innovative things I have ever heard of in youth ministry. The group of people in attendance was from a pretty diverse set of backgrounds and Giving Point sent a couple of their representatives and two high school students who are actively working on projects. The students were amazing. I was blown away. There have been many students over the years that have impressed me. I have never met a student that has truly floored me. These two did. They had both high social intellegence and intellectual intelligence.  It was amazing. I plan on trying to send one or two of our students this Summer if we can.  More on how this impacts my local ministry in my next post.