Review: “On Our Way” edited by Dorothy Bass & Susan Briehl
The new book, On Our Way: Christian Practices for Living a Whole Life sums up my best hopes for how young adults might live well in today’s world. Because of that, I found the book both delightful and tragic at the same time since it calls us to think deeply about how we are living today. Often, I found myself underlining a sentence and saying under my breath, “Yes…YES!…but that’s so hard.”
Edited by Dorothy Bass and Susan Briehl, On Our Way is a collection of essays responding to the deep hunger of a rising generation. The writers, 12 pastors, activists, professors, and other thoughtful-types clearly write from their hearts as they plumb the depths of scripture and tradition for good words on our contemporary world. The following summary statement provides the framework for the book:
To embrace a way of life abundant requires us to be attentive. No one can live this way in isolation from others: life abundant depends upon and arises within life together. It does not lead into a fantasy future or purely spiritual realm but into the real world. There, Christian practice these practices not for our own sake but for the good of all, and not by our own power or vision but in response to God, whose own grace and call provide this way of life.
Chapters include essays on Living as Community, Care for Creation, Singing Our Lives to God, Peacemaking and Nonviolence, Knowing and Loving Our Neighbors of Other Faiths, and more. My favorite was a chapter entitled “Making a Good Living” by Douglas Hicks in which he deals with materialism, money, and intentional living. He ends by cautioning, “Do not let anyone tell you that living a relatively simple lifestyle is an easy practice of faith. it is one of the most difficult.”
I began reading On Our Way because I thought it might help me in my work with young adults. It will. Greatly. But, a few chapters into it I realized I wasn’t reading only for work anymore. The book had begun speaking to me personally as well, helping me reflect on my own way of living in the world.
The one regret I have concerning On Our Way regards its cover not its contents. The understated cover doesn’t shout “Read me: I’m an awesome young adult ministry book!” nor are hip words like “missional,” “emergent,” “curate,” or even “vocation” splashed across the cover. Without a blurb from Brian McLaren on the back, I fear it might take its time getting into the hands of church leaders. And that’d be a shame.
That said, I have a high regard for the folks at Practicing Our Faith, and I trust their judgement. And, heck, the book’s quality should speak for itself. I highly recommend it for young adult groups, pastors, educators, and all who ask questions how to live well and live faithfully in our world today.
For video conversations with Dorothy Bass, the authors, and links to a corresponding DVD resources go here. They’re great too!
Young adults are amoral heathens, but what’s new?
This week’s Theology Pub, a gathering of 20/30-somethings The Project FM hosts at a local bar to talk about God and life, tackled the topic “Is my truth better than yours?” Though it came out a few days too late, David Brooks’ NY Times Op-Ed yesterday, “If it feels right” would have been great pre-reading.
Brooks builds his column on the work of Christian Smith and colleagues. Smith’s previous book, Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults has been on my wish list for some time. Now I’ll have to add his latest as well, Lost in Transition: The Dark Side of Emerging Adulthood.
In his column Brooks opines that young adults these days apparently lack the wherewithal to speak about moral issues. As someone who hosts conversations for young adults to speak about moral issues, two responses immediately come to mind. One: young adults who attend Theology Pub absolutely love speaking about moral issues. Two: we are not particularly well versed in how to speak about them.
I could blame this all on standardized testing in grade schools. I could complain about colleges requiring too few philosophy and ethics courses (grad schools too, for that matter). I could lambast parents for not passing along resources for taking on moral subjects. But I won’t.
What I will do, however, is refuse to blame young adults themselves for not having been given the resources to take on moral questions — it’s not their fault that faith communities, schools, and parents failed them. Let me repeat that: it doesn’t do us any good to blame 20 year-olds for not having the moral sensibilities we wish they had. (And Brooks, by the way, does well to refuse to do so — mostly.)
I look forward to reading Smith’s book, but I’ll do so uneasily. When I somehow find the time to pick it up, I’ll do so with this question at the forefront of my mind: Is it that young adults truly have fewer moral resources with which to deal with moral questions than previous generations, or is it that today’s questions are so much more complex that young adults need more skills and understanding to just tread water in our consumeristic pluralized technologically-advanced globalized world?
After all, it’s much easier to teach and theologize that “murder is wrong” than it is to discuss unmanned drone strikes in remote border areas of Afghanistan/Pakistan during an unfunded “war on terror” lasting over ten years.
image by Linden Laserna
Never Kill A Question
A Thoughtful Christian.com Post
The young adult emergent ministry I lead takes a different sort of approach to event planning than the approach of most congregations. From our inception, the bias of our leadership was not to jump to planning activities and events because, well, there’s plenty of churches in Fargo-Moorhead that lack young adults. “Why guess what young adults might want and guess wrong again?” our ministry’s board members figured.
So instead, using a community organizing approach, the ministry is committed to meeting with young adults and asking them what their values, needs, questions, and hopes are. Then, only when we know real live 20-30 somethings who aren’t currently connected to a faith community, we plan events.
Out of these conversations with young adults has come a consistent refrain: they want places where young adults can ask real questions about faith, forums that are open, supportive, open-minded, and don’t immediately jump to the “official” answer as if that solves all.
Out of these yearnings, we’ve developed Theology Pub, a bi-weekly discussion at a bar. In a society where sex, politics, and religion are still difficult to talk about (not just snicker about, but really disect) in diverse public settings, at Theology Pub we make a space for open discussions of faith and religion. With the help of a small group, I come up with the topic for the night and publicize it beforehand. I bring to the evening a discussion sheetfor everyone with some quotations on the topic, as well as some questions, and then whoever shows up goes to it. It’s heavenly to see.
I consistently get two comments from young adults about the events, one explicit and one implicit.
Explicitly, they really like the diversity of opinions of the folks who show up. This week, for example, we had several devout Roman Catholics, an Atheist, several Unitarian Universalists, a few Lutherans (including pastors), a Pentecostal, and several whose faith resisted any labels. The diversity of the group assures that there will be plenty of questions and disagreement. And we love it.
Implicitly, in my conversations with folks before and after Theology Pub, I find that they assume (and I’m going to say “rightly so” in most cases) that the institutional church down the block is not a place where they can go to find a forum to ask their questions. Few churches provide open spaces for theological dialogue. Events like Sunday School tend to be about teaching a specific lesson to a group of insiders rather than providing a space for outsiders to consider what they might believe.
Of course, this brings up the important question I ask myself daily: how do I balance providing an open space for questioning with teaching what the Lutheran Church (ELCA) believes?
I continue to wrestle with this one, in more ways than I can account for in a blog post. But I keep coming back to the point that having opportunities for faith-filled conversation, for places to ask tough questions, is a vital ministry in and of itself. Surely there’s room for more, but starting with the questions isn’t a bad place to start. After all, it’s where we meet many young adults.
A pastor friend passed along this powerful poem last week that beautifully describes our approach. May it bless you as it did me.
Never kill a question;
it is a fragile thing.
A good question deserves to live.
One doesn’t so much answer it as converse with it,
Or, better yet, one lives with it.
Great questions are the permanent
and blessed guests of the mind.
But the greatest questions of all are those which build bridges to the heart,
addressing the whole person.
No answer should be designed to kill the question.
When one is too dogmatic or too sure,
one shows disrespect for truth and the question that points toward it.
Beyond my answer there is always more,
more light waiting to break in,
and waves of inexhaustible meaning
ready to break against wisdom’s widening shore.
Wherever there is a question, LET IT LIVE!
-a poem by Gerhard Frost found in his book, “Bless My Growing”
image by Mauro Sakamoto
Reworking, Reconsidering, & Re-doing Young Adult Ministry
Also posted at Gathering Voices
I just got in from a lovely block party celebrating National Night Out Block Party Night. At the party several friendly folks asked, “So, what do you do?” I always hesitate a bit when I get that question these days. It’s complicated.
I see myself as part pastor, part faith based community organizer, part event planner, and part sojourner. To answer folks, “I’m starting a new church” is way too simplistic and misleading, since The Project F-M has never really conceived of itself as a traditional church — it’s in response (or reaction) to the traditional church, actually.
Last week I attended the ELCA Mission Developers Conference in Newark, NJ. The conference is held twice a year for new Mission Developers, to help orient them on how the ELCA does mission development (roughly equivalent to “church planting” in other denominations). The conference has a great value in connecting developers to learn from one another, and presenters set some theological framework for starting new faith communities. While much at the conference was plenty good stuff, I struggled at many points thinking, “But this just won’t work with young adults.”
I really appreciated Lara’s thoughtful post yesterday, “What Do We Do With Young Adults?” It gets at some of the contextual challenges of church for folks in their 20s and 30s. And it has me thinking, if I were king of the world and arranging a mission development conference focused on emerging young adult faith communities, what questions and issues would I be sure to tackle?
- Spiritual but not religious - this phrase is used by many of the young adults with whom I speak in one-to-ones. It’s a great phrase because it describes for so many their discomfort with the church. It’s really helpful. I like it. But it’s not particularly descriptive. I’d love to tackle, in a group setting that accepts this phrase as positive (or at least benign), all the facets of its meaning.
- What about the aversion to worship? A lot of the 20-30 somethings I chat with are very spiritual, think about faith often, seek community gatherings, but are really hesitant to be connected to anything called “worship.” I have my theories, but I’d love to hear what the experts think about this, and if it’s an across-the-board phenomenon.
- What’s the right balance between making space that’s open to everyone’s questions and making a space that communicates (broadly speaking) what the Church believes? Pretty self-explanatory. The folks I connect with really want a place to tackle tricky theological issues. But they want a place to ask questions, not be spoon-fed answers. I’d love to hear how other mission developers walk this line — or where they cross it.
- Please don’t emphasize congregational sustainability, stewardship, or looking like the model of churches that have existed for 100 years. This model of a church with 150 members, a 100K annual budget, and shiny building is just dandy for many, but it’s not the mindset of most young adult focused churches I know. The problem is that we know how to pull that traditional one off, but other models are trickier. Thinking outside the box is difficult, and I’d love the opportunity to honestly talk numbers with other emergent mission developers without the assumptions of traditional models.
- How can the unique gifts of young adults these days be put to use for new ways of ministry? I feel like much of the literature around young adults and the church these days is about how young adults are different than other generations. That’s great. It’s certainly true. But most of what I read gets stuck in explaining how, even though things are different, we don’t have to lament. Little I’ve read takes the approach of truly rejoicing in what this generation has to offer the church. How would our conversations look be different if we said, “God has blessed us with a generation that does not accept the B.S. of previous models. Hallelujah! Thanks be to God. Now what?”
If you were planning or going to attend a mission development conference on young adult ministry, what would you hope to tackle?
RunRevRun: Keeping Fit, Keeping Faith
A cool new website launched last week, RunRevRun.net. For some time pastors have used the hashtag #runrevrun on Twitter to comment on running, health, and exercise. Thanks to my buddy Adam Walker Cleaveland and some friends, #RunRevRun now has its own website.
When I began seminary, I hated running. Though I had grown up watching my father, a pastor, run several times a week I never took to it myself. In fact, running was definitely the part of my high school soccer training that I disliked the most. In seminary, after some cajoling (and on a night when certain beverages had been consumed), I did agree to join a group of friends on the Cooper River Bridge 10K during my second year of seminary. That 6.2 miles was the longest I had run, and though it was tough it wasn’t totally unenjoyable. We did the Hal Higdon beginner 10K training program together (which I recommend), and I definitely relished in the communal aspect of the training.
After surviving the 10K, I put my running shoes in the back of the closet. I was happy enough saying, “I ran a 10K” but I also was pretty certain running was not for me. I would not be a “running Rev.” Or so I thought.
Then I went on my yearlong internship as an Assistant Minister at a church in Scotland. I got into the regular schedule of a pastor — including the easy eating habits of cookies in people’s houses and quick not-so-healthy suppers before meetings — and, well, I got into the worst physical shape of my life. After only nine months of so of pastoral internship, I had put on more than ten pounds and just didn’t feel very fit at all. And so, I did the only thing I knew to do: I started running again.
I didn’t run any races in Scotland, but when I got back to the states I checked out the Atlanta race schedule and found dozens of options. A ran a few more 10Ks and eventually several half marathons and a marathon. After a year or so, I found I actually enjoyed running. I felt healthier because of it, more in touch with my body, even more connected to God.
I won’t bore you with any more running exploits in this post. (In fact, I don’t blog on running all that much actually.) But I do really recommend the RunRevRun.net site. Check it out, and “like” us on Facebook too. It looks to be a great community, and if you’d like to submit a post, there’s even a Contact option in the About section. RunRevRun: Keeping Fit, Keeping Faith!
Review: This Odd and Wondrous Calling
Most books, I read neither slow nor fast, enjoying the journey but anticipating the end without any remorse. Other books, I fly through, captivated by an adventuresome story or thrilling new ideas. This Odd and Wondrous Calling: The Public and Private Lives of Two Ministers, however, I read slowly, savoring each word, taking long breaks between chapters to rest in the experience. But, strangely, when I finally finished, I felt underwhelmed with the work as a whole. The journey was in luxury class, but the destination somehow failed to impress.
Most likely, the fault is more mine than the authors, for Martin B. Copenhaver and Lillian Daniel write a fine essay, tell a good joke, and reflect with the best of them. Both ministers in the United Church of Christ – Lillian Daniel of the younger female variety, Martin Copenhaver of the more-seasoned male type – the two authors string together twenty-eight essays reflecting on pastoral ministry. As a primer on the complexities, joys, and challenges of pastoral ministry, this book isby far the best I have come across. A how-to manual, it is not; a contemplative account of “the public and private lives” of two pastors, it most certainly is.
Most of essays read as reflections, careful considerations of the strange calling we pastors live into each day. For example, in the chapter entitled “Shaking Hands,” Copenhaver describes the gauntlet that a pastor faces when shaking hands at the church door following worship. After a thoroughly entertaining play-by-play of what goes through his head in those ninety seconds following worship, Copenhaver writes, “Through the years I have learned the historical and theological foundations of practically every word and gesture in the liturgy, but no one has ever explained to me why pastors stand in doorways and shake hands with worshipers following worship. I just know that you better do it.” So, Copenhaver reflects upon the ritual in which most every pastor participates each Sunday. The essay, which once appeared The Christian Century (as did others in the collection), is at the same time ruminative, fun, and helpful.
Each author surely could have published a book individually, but the collection stands better with its multiple perspectives. For instance, both Daniel and Copenhaver write of the experience of their spouses being the minister’s wife/husband, and their very different experiences remind the reader there is no one way to pastor (or be married to one). Similarly, Copenhaver writes of growing of as a “preacher’s kid” while Daniel writes of her journey from the Episcopal church of her youth to the UCC in which she currently serves. In, “I Was Looking for the Pastor, But You’ll Do” Daniel writes of her time trailblazing as the first female associate pastor at a church.
In a kind-spirited response to Barbara Brown Taylor’s book Leaving Church, Copenhaver closes the collection with “Staying in Church,” where he writes, “I also recognize that some of the reasons given for leaving are, with the slightest turn of the kaleidoscope, some of the same reasons I stay in pastoral ministry.” In fact, Copenhaver later takes on Taylor’s search for God in nature by writing that he prefers to search for God “among the quirky, flawed, and broken people” in the church.
If the chapters are knit closely together, it is by the common thread of tension that pastoral ministry provides. The authors take that thread and wrestle with it, enjoy it, ponder it until the tension eases and God’s peace remains. This is not to say the essays strive for a simple culmination, but that they tend to end closer to resolution than where they began. And that, I think, is what made me uncomfortable with the work as a whole.
At the end of the book, I wanted to ask the authors, “But what keeps you up at night? Don’t you ever just scream or lose your cool?” Even the stories of their mistakes end up leading to a pretty nugget of wisdom. Perhaps the fact that I’m a young pastor still working out the kinks of my call makes me a natural skeptic, but at times I wanted them simply to say, “Ok, we’ll be honest, this part of ministry isn’t a lesson, it’s just a liability.”
Even still, or perhaps because of this, the book is a wonder in itself. Beautifully written, thoughtfully put-together, honest and personal, I think this might just be the best reflection on pastoral ministry around. No matter how quickly you read it, it shouldn’t fail to entertain, even if it could leave you slightly uneasy.
Jell-O Confessions
Originally posted at Gathering Voices: Faith Conversations from TheThoughtfulChristian.com
Pastoral ministry is a funny thing. A few years ago, I never in my wildest dreams would have imagined myself pastor of a rural congregation 20 miles from Canada (I grew up in Florida!). But then we moved up here, I got connected to a great church, and now I really hate to leave. A number of circumstances conspired against me staying as long as we might have liked, and I preached my last sermon as pastor last Sunday. Transitions are tough. Goodbyes can be very sad.
It’s much too early to reflect fully on my ministry there, but it’s always the right time for bullet points. So, here’s my top twelve reflections on my first stab at pastoral ministry.
- mark the Bible readings carefully before you try to read them from the pulpit — lesson learned the hard way
- going the extra mile with pastoral care is always worth it
- Confirmation can be totally, completely, entirely, a rocking-fun experience. (We loved the re:form curriculum.)
- In Minnesota, when visiting someone in their home, you take your shoes off at the door. You do the same in Hawaii, but not Florida or Scotland.
- Breakfast at the Caribou Grill every wednesday nourishes much more than one’s body.
- More parishioners read your blog than you think.
- It’s really very hard to schedule time to read ministry books, magazines, and the like.
- Colleagues of one’s own denomination are fine, but ecuenical pastor colleagues from the local area are even better.
- You can put absolutely anything in a Jell-O salad. Anything.
- Many things run totally smoothly without the pastor doing a thing: e.g. Presbyterian Women, potlucks, annual traditions.
- Some things run totally rough without the pastor’s help: e.g. new traditions, turf battles, the batteries in the automatic flush urinal.
- Preaching every week is a great gift, but after ten weeks in a row or so, I needed a break.
Pastors out there, what did you/are you learning in your first parish? Have you come to appreciate the art form that is a Jell-O salad?
Additional Resources from www.TheThoughtfulChristian.com
- Best Advice: Wisdom on Ministry from 30 Leading Pastors and Preachers, edited by William J. Carl III
- A Guide to Preaching and Leading Worship, by William H. Willimon
- “Children in Worship,” (Adult Study)
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