Next week, I have the opportunity to speak at the Boost Conference. Boost is the premier conference for out-of-school time professionals and administrators. While not exactly youth ministry like we define it in our tribe, these are adults who are very similar to our tribe. They live, breathe, and love children and teenagers. In some circles they even refer to themselves as youth workers! (Yes, this tribe has TONS of Christians. I can’t wait.)

Here’s a description of my talk:

Engaging with the Faith-Based Community

Current trends in the faith-based subculture have faith-based organizations, including churches, looking for opportunities to serve the needs of the community. in this seminar, we will examine this trend, fill in some gaps of misinformation, address a shared past of difficulties, look at some current examples, and explore ground rules for positive engagement. When it comes to the children of our communities, we have a lot in common, including many shared values. let’s bridge some gaps and create a new story together.

I need your help

This seminar will be a lot better if I have some recent data and input from people currently involved vocationally in churches. I can speak to this topic in generalities and can point to data points from other research, but I’d love to have fresh data specifically for this talk.

I’d love it if 150 – 200 people currently employed by a church / parachurch would share their insights into this important topic.

Would you please take 15 minutes to complete this survey? 

Please help me reach my goal by sharing with other staff people you know.

And yes, I’ll be sure to share what I learn both from this survey and my time at Boost, right here on my blog.

To take the survey, click here

Editorial note: This is part 2 of a guest post from a local San Diego friend. (Part 1) I don’t normally offer guest posts, but this point-of-view is important. Church and youth leaders need to hear from men in their congregations like him. While this post is anonymous, I invite you to dialog with him through me.

I grew up reading comic books; it was an escape from the horrible living environment I was stuck in. I had a brother, 9 years older than me, who made me his punching bag; an ex-alcoholic father who switched his addiction to rage, and my mom who had to take a lot of abuse from my dad.

I was attracted to comic books because it clearly spelled out who was good and evil; the good guys won most of the time and what I liked at the end of the day was that they could conceal their identity. Superman became Clark Kent. Batman deftly changed into the billionaire, Bruce Wayne. Green Lantern willed himself back to being Hal Jordan. And poor Spiderman usually stumbled back into his apartment, collapsing onto the bed as Peter Parker.

Their secret identity brought them peace; they protected their loved ones by having it. They managed two distinct and separate lives. It’s something that sounded so great.

But when you have a secret identity, it is more painful than a bruise on your chest or cigarette burn on your arm.

When I was about 14 I realized something; I was attracted to the guys in my high school, not the girls. The realization is a lot to take in, especially around the time that AIDS had surfaced; people were scared; protests were hitting the streets. The words “faggot” and “homo” were en vogue.

I knew I was in trouble.

I managed to keep in secret until about 18 when I told my high school counselor. He sympathized and explain that there were other people out there like me. Once I got to college, my life would change.

It did. My first week at college I became a Christian.

And I was still gay.

In the college Christian group I was a part of, there were great people, but a large majority of them used the words homo, queer, and faggot. I was in some deep trouble.

I had to hide the fact that I was gay. I mean, who could I tell? And the pressure to date was nearly insurmountable.

I managed coming out to some friends, but the loneliness, the isolation was great. No one got it.

That was about 20 years ago.

Since then I’ve tried counseling for 7 years; it was helpful to unpack a lot of the abuse I took, but I still wasn’t attracted to women.

I had a girlfriend in seminary for a year and a half. I thought I could change and make it work.

I didn’t. I broke her heart.

I have mastered the ability to blend in with straight people; they rarely suspect I’m gay. In the Christian world, being gay is right up there with child molester.

You have to understand; I have had friends I’ve never been able to tell. They make the occasional gay joke or if they see two men who are clearly together, they have some kind of snide remark. And I’m sitting across from them.

Now, just so we’re clear: I’m celibate. I’m not planning on having a relationship. You might be thinking, “Oh, good. You’re one of us.” Afraid not. And so we don’t get into a political quagmire that this blog isn’t designed to function for, I won’t get into the reasons why.

The purpose of me spilling this story, the most painful one I have, is to say this.

We sit amongst you.

We are people struggling with being gay, afraid of what their closest family and friends would say. We laugh at your homo jokes and then we go in the bathroom and look in the mirror and hate what we see. We take a deep breath and we go back inside.

We tolerate churches designed around married couples, married conferences, and marriage sermons.

Most of use can’t come out. We risk losing the friendships we have so we’d rather dine on surface relationships, instead of having none.

We long for someone to understand, to get it. And one reason I don’t play the lottery (besides Dave Ramsey’s advice) is that I’ve already won it. I have friends that I’d take a bullet for, who know my true story and love me. It’s not that they don’t love me regardless because I’m not doing anything. I’m not at gay bars or trolling the internet looking for someone. I’m not sinning in my sexual behavior.

I came out to a friend of mine and he looked down at the table, sullen and said, “Everything must be really difficult for you.” We sat there in silence for awhile and I thought, he gets it.

The church will hug the man that just cheated his wife for a year and shun the struggling gay guy who hasn’t had sex in 10 years. Guaranteed. Easy money.

And I’d burn every earthly possession I have, empty my bank accounts, quit my job, and terminate every relationship I have for a pill to change over—in a heartbeat—I’d walk away from that pyre buck-naked, unemployed, broke, but straight.

But unlike my heroes of my youth, my secret identity clings to me and I am forced to hide from what is called to be most loving, compassionate place on the planet—the church.

So here’s what I ask: be kind to us. We are looking for friends that listen and have compassion on us. We are not looking for you to understand us completely, we just want to go through our day not feeling like monsters. We run the risk of losing the people we value by coming out, but we must weigh that against being fake and pretending we are straight.

I also ask that we cut out the gay-bashing talk; I get that it’s funny with your friends and it cuts to the quick, but I guarantee you’ve said it in front of us and we twist inside and mourn inside.

Be kind to us; we are broken and we need no more reminders.

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The last few years has seen the popularization of something I refer to as the Pastor Man Up Movement. (PMUP)

You hear things said, like “Pastor, if anyone is going to lead your church, it has to be you.” Or, “No one else in the church is called to lead more than you.” Or, “It’s time the pastors of the church took control from the committees.” It’s an interesting phenomenon. And it’s promoting a lot of abuse of power. Pastors read a blog or hear a PMUP message and run to the next meeting all full of testosterone instead of grace.

It’s dangerous to take the power that a pastor is given and then encourage that person to exert his will on a congregation.

It’s like storing a keg of black powder in a cigar bar. Eventually there will be an explosion.

In a healthy context there’s nothing wrong with this movement. It’s good for pastors and church staff to be leaders and to be reminded of their calling. That’s why we pay them. (Let’s not lose site of that fact. I know many people have been abused by the church, but there really are healthy churches out there.) When we hire pastors at our churches we should empower them to lead. I currently attend a church where the church staff are good leaders. They seek wise counsel, they are temperate, they consider the needs of the whole congregation in making decisions, they work hard to battle “what people want” vs “what the Bible is asking us to do.” I’ve never sensed that they are afraid to lead.

The problem is that it’s also become popular to hire staff members with little or no formal training. It’s not unusual for me to hear of people joining a church staff with not only no formal training at the undergraduate/graduate level– they’ve not even been an intern or been taught how to lead a church in an informal setting. They have zero training to enter the ministry. Literally, one week they are selling cars (or whatever) and the next week they have the title of pastor. Few other professions do this the way churches do. You wouldn’t hire a teacher to be a lawyer. Nor would you hire a vet to be a physician or a CPA to be a plumber. But in the church? It’s become en vogue to hire non-professionals.

[My suspicion is that those people who leave a profession to enter the ministry probably weren't that good at their profession in the first place. But it's quite an ego boost to go from being a CPA to an executive pastor! It's not like a mediocre CPA was going to make partner.]

PMUP + Untrained staff = Explosion waiting to happen

A couple of thoughts about this combination:

• When a senior pastor surrounds himself with untrained associates this should tell you something about the leader of the senior.
• There’s nothing wrong with being a strong leader. But if no one is following you of their own free will… you aren’t leading. You are a dictator. (Remember how things end for most dictators)
• When a church calls an untrained person to be their pastor, this should tell you something about the congregation.
• It makes me giggle when a bunch of dudes decide that they need to man-up. I grew up thinking that a real man took care of the people around him, not used his weight to get his way.
• Where in the Bible were deacons/overseers/elders told they should man up?
• When did the will of a congregation/voting become a bad thing?
• Sometimes it seems as though people are selling themselves and their vision instead of God’s vision. As a churchgoer, all I know if I’m stuck with the bill.
• If someone has to throw around their weight to make things happen, does that make them a leader worth following?
• The unspoken message every person knows in a church is that if the pastor can’t exert his will, the congregation runs the risk of the person quitting. (This isn’t “manning up.” It’s “taking my ball and going home.”)
• When did formal eduction/training as an entry point to ministry become a bad thing? And if churches are  going to hire untrained staff, why don’t they budget for properly training them?

Not my life story, hopefully.Photo by ttarasiuk via Flickr (Creative Commons)

Note: This post is a note written to myself. If you want to write yourself in on it, that’s cool. But this post is for me more than it is you.

Now fear the LORD and serve him with all faithfulness. Throw away the gods your forefathers worshiped beyond the River and in Egypt, and serve the LORD. Joshua 24:14

And he said to man, ‘The fear of the Lord—that is wisdom, and to shun evil is understanding.‘ Job 28:28

The LORD confides in those who fear him; he makes his covenant known to them. Psalm 25:14

For I am the LORD, your God, who takes hold of your right hand and says to you, Do not fear; I will help you. Isaiah 41:13

I’ve had enough of the fear talk.

If I listen to one more youth worker talk about feeling lead to do something but he isn’t sure the parents will go for it… I’ll scream.

Let me get this story correct.

Called by God to lead these kids, stirred by the Holy Spirit to go do something, and what stops you is fear of parents? A board? Dudes in suits? Getting fired?  Sure seems like you have some horrible, crappy, weak theology.

I can imagine Abraham having this argument with God. “Oh, you want me to leave everything and move my family… cool. Let me check with my wife first before I commit. And then I’ll need a realtor. And lemme check with my insurance guy to make sure it’s safe. Do I have to take my kids? If so, wow I don’t know. Are there good schools over there?”

Know what God would have done? He would have found someone else. And Abraham wouldn’t have been the father of a great nation.

Reckless vs. Fearless

I actually think a lot of people confuse these terms. They are not synonyms. You can lead a ministry and a life that is fearless without being reckless. That doesn’t mean you aren’t going to get in trouble… in fact, I can guarantee you that a fearless life will be dangerous. But being fearless doesn’t make you reckless. One lifestyle takes risks for the sake of taking risks while the other takes risks because they are convinced it is the right thing to do.

Fear this

SPOILER ALERT: Reading the New Testament all of the characters die in the end. OK, so there are two who aren’t really dead by the end of Revelation. Jesus gets killed (for you) and then comes to life again and is seen by a bunch of people before ascending into heaven. And John, who writes Revelation, isn’t quite dead yet when he writes the letter documenting the end of the world. But most people think he died in exile because he pissed off the Emperor of Rome.

So, if I have this right, [yup , checked my sources one more time] if you live a life like Jesus did or his disciples did… there’s a pretty good chance you should be on a trajectory where someone wants to take you out. And you probably won’t be very popular with the religious establishment. And that retirement party? Yeah, don’t plan that.

Where are all the men in the church?

I sit in church wondering the same thing.

Maybe they know deep down inside that they don’t want to hang out with a bunch of wimps? Maybe, JUST MAYBE, more men are looking at the God of the Bible and comparing it to the faith of the churches leaders and thinking: Nope. Not the right guys.

Photo by bipolarbear via Flickr (creative commons)

A few years ago I was talking to a senior pastor about youth ministry. In a moment of honesty he said something like this.

“I don’t get it. Tell me why you want to work with high school students your whole life. You’re qualified to be a senior pastor. You have all the qualities people look for in a senior pastor. And your teaching style moves high school students to a type of faith that most churches would love. Plus, you could be the boss and you’d make a lot more money. What don’t I see?”

The truth was that it took me by surprise because I’d never been asked that question. I’ve only been asked it’s annoying cousin, “When are you going to be a “real” pastor?”

Here’s a summary of what I told him:

• I love the process. In the 5-6 years that you have a student in your ministry you see them go from squirrelly middle schooler to mostly grown up.
• I love that adolescents are moldable. The reason you can teach them radical truths and they will respond is pretty amazing. You just don’t see many adults looking for truth to move them.
• I love the fun factor. When was the last time you’ve preached to adults and illustrated something by covering a kid in shaving cream or dunking for oreos in chocolate syrup. Like never. There’s a middle schooler in me that is highly amused by this kinesthetic goofy learning stuff. Adults just don’t go for it.
• I love that it doesn’t end unless you want it to. Seriously, this is a beautiful time of year. I love the longitudinal factor of youth ministry. And I love the fact that you can chose to continue investing in some students while having a perfectly good excuse to move them out of your life. You can’t do that as a senior pastor, can you?

How would you have answered this question?

Photo by CarbonNYC via Flickr (Creative Commons)

I want to encourage you to do a little civil disobedience within your church congregation.

Start bringing and leaving a canned food item to your church every time you go. Have every person in your family do it, too. Don’t make a spectacle of it. Just leave your cans in the foyer on the floor or on the counter in the bathroom. Sunday morning worship? Leave a can. Mom goes back later for a meeting? Leave a can. Your son goes for youth group? Leave a can.

Don’t ask permission. Just do it. The Bible tells you it is OK.

Eventually, someone on the church staff is going to say… “What’s up with all of these cans? And what do we do with them?”

I’ll tell you what they will do. Someone will put the cans in a box. And it’ll just sit there.

Imagine if 20% of your congregation got in the habit of doing this? Instant food pantry. It’s not a program. It’s dealing with a problem. Who keeps leaving all of these cans here!

See, I think you’ll join me in the understanding that a house of God should also be a place of refuge for the hungry. As we linger in this recession I can guarantee you there are hungry among every single congregation.

And my experience in working in churches for nearly a decade– every single one of them had random people who drop by every single day looking for food or money. And in nearly 10 years I can think of only a couple of times we had food on hand to give them.

Almost every time people come to the church looking for help and are turned away. This isn’t exactly Good News in the neighborhood, is it?

I believe God has hard-wired us in the knowledge that if we need help or need a place to run to, the church is there.

Sadly most congregations in America have gotten lazy. They think an annual clothing drive or food donation to a local pantry is the right answer.

“Ding-dong.” Every day the bell rings at the church. People come to them who are hungry. Don’t you want your church to be a place that gives them food? Wouldn’t you want your music pastor to overhear the secretary start to explain to someone that the church doesn’t keep food at the church but makes an annual donation to the food pantry in town… and says, “Wait a minute. The janitor found these cans. You can have them.”

Bam! Instant food program. The church didn’t spend a dollar. They didn’t have a meeting to discuss it. They didn’t hire a staff member to start it. It’s just a box (or closet) full of cans people mysteriously left at church.

Bring a can to church. Every time. Every person.

Problem solved.

Photo by Flickr user hoyasmeg (creative commons)

Seth Godin answers his own question:

What is the reason social media is so difficult for most organizations? It’s a process and not an event. Events are easier to manage, pay for and get excited about. Processes build results for the long haul. link

Why do pastors and other church leaders need a social media presence?

• The world is full of fakes. Because of the public sin of so many who lead large ministries, there is a general suspicion of all people in church leadership.
• The people in your congregation want to know if you are a fake. They show up, so on some level they believe in you. They are watching your life to validate what you say.
• The people in your community already think you are a fake. You need to prove them wrong.

If you need a biblical justification for investing your time and energy in social media, look no further than the incarnation of Jesus. John 1:14 says, “He came and dwelt among the people.” The way church is run today… pastors do not dwell among the people. They dwell among their flock and their offices. (2-3% of the population of your community is hardly “the people.”) Look at the example of all of the Apostles in the New Testament. They all dwelt among the people. Most of them worked vocationally in the cities they ministered in.

A public presence, 1 hour per week, preaching in front of an audience, is simply not enough of a presence to know if you are fake or not. The fact is, if that’s all people see of you than they know you must be fake.

“What if you found out that the principal had denied access to the gay/straight alliance because of some technicality… a rule the Christian club broke all the time? Would you take a stand for the gay/straight alliance? They have the right to meet at the school under the same rules that give the Christian group rights to meet.“ I asked this question to a senior pastor friend of mine over a cup of coffee. The conversation got to this point when he asked me why I was always standing up for the little guy. I told him that our role as Christian leaders was to help others seek justice to which he replied, “Well, some things deserve justice and equality while others don’t.”

And Christians wonder why some people hate them?

Let me share a few reasons why I think more Christian leaders don’t stand up to bullies:

1. They are wimps. Somewhere in all of our education we are taught to never fight the system, just to submit to the ruling authority, and smile at old ladies on Sunday mornings. I’ve met far too many church leaders whose only leadership skill is diplomacy. Diplomacy is great. But the desire to negotiate is worthless if no one takes you seriously. Just because you are a church leader doesn’t mean you have to be a pansy.

2. They have horrible theology. In the above discussion you see it played out. That church leader was only interested in standing up for the Christian group. No one else in the community matters to him because they don’t directly benefit him. (Directly, meaning he doesn’t see the connection between justice and church growth!) You know, Jesus and his disciples only ever stood up for the religious folks, right? Just ask the woman at the well and that woman about to be stoned when caught having sex.

3. They are afraid of their churches. Good Lord, imagine what would happen if the senior pastor actually stood up against injustice in his community! I mean, what would the board say? I mean… if I don’t do what they say I could lose my job! (See #1 & #2)

4. Their worldview is jacked up. I could ask the pastor above if he was an absolutist or a graded-absolutist and he’d swear oaths to Josh McDowell that he was walking the absolutist straight and narrow. But based on how he answered the question above you’d see that he’s really a relativist. (gasp) He’d stand up for the Christian groups right to meet at a local high school because he agrees with them. But because he doesn’t agree with gay/straight alliance, he wouldn’t. Relativism in action. So what’s good for one group isn’t good for another, right pastor?

5. Their priorities are out-of-order. The last cop-out I hear all the time is, “I’m so busy running the church.” Too many who work in churches are so worried about running the programs of the church that they forget their place in society. Think about it… most pastors make horrible neighbors. They are too busy to be a part of the community, they use their house as a meeting location, and they are preaching all the time that you should love your neighbor despite the fact that they don’t know their own neighbors names or love them one bit. It shocks me that the way evangelical churches operate that they are so out-of-balance with the community’s need.

I know these are generalizations. And I know that people think that if they can dismiss one single point with a specific example they can dismiss all that I’m saying. Please don’t lose the point of the post by disagreeing with a single generalization. The point is that if you want to be a Christian leader in your community, you don’t need the title of pastor. What you need to do is look deeply at what’s going on, expose injustices, speak out for the weak and poor among you, and stand up to bullies. Whether that’s a school board, a government official, a nasty neighbor, a gang, the big donor at church pulling the strings, or even some bullies picking on kids as they walk to school.

Jesus is a big fan of justice, are you?

A key component to the personal preference sin so prevalent in the United States evangelical church is a lack of respect for the word, longsuffering.

Now, there are plenty of proponents of the idea of short-suffering. In other words, if a church or ministry or job or anything in your life doesn’t meet your exacting specifications you need to bail on it immediately. Their argument is that life is too short to longsuffer and the church shouldn’t be patient enough to pay you while you longsuffer. They somehow tie personal preferences into integrity… so if you stick it out at a job or a church because you believe you need to stay, you are somehow violating your integrity because you are not working or attending that church with a 100% joyful heart. They deny that there is anything spiritual in enduring something unpleasant if there is a pleasant alternative.

An Example for Relationships

Friends, this lack of longsuffering as a spiritual discipline is also a major lie that has led to the elongation of adolescence in America. If you’ve done student ministry in the last decade you’ve seen it first hand. God gives Christians a single requirement for getting married, that person must be a believer in Jesus.

Yet, over and over, I see perfectly eligible men and women elongate singleness (and in many cases adolescent dependency on parents) because they don’t trust God beyond their personal preferences. They need someone a certain height, weight, and cultural background. They need someone driven towards certain goals or career aspirations, who want a certain number of children, and want to live in a certain location.

In fact, we’ve all seen our friends bend God’s single requirement for us in order to get what we want! So they will find “Mr. Right” and completely decimate their walk with Christ in the process only to later discover that he was “Mr. Wrong.” Or, they let their personal preferences get in the way of finding the man or woman God has made for them or allowing that relationship to get to the altar. It’s sad to see personal preferences get in the way of fulfillment in finding a spouse. Kristen and I have joked about this for a long time, but I think it is true. If we just randomly assigned people to one another based solely on “Do you love Jesus more than anything else” we think we could pair up about anyone. We are all imperfect. We are all unloveable. None of us are ideal. When we chose to love someone because they love Jesus… then you will experience what true love and romance really are. Surfacey stuff is ultimately just crap that won’t lead to happiness, anyway. Learning to love someone despite your own personal preferences is what leads to true love!

Those of us who have been married a few years know that long suffering and marriage go hand in hand. (Heard an Amen! coming from Kristen‘s direction when I wrote that.) In other words, if what you like about your spouse is that they meet your personal preferences, your marriage is doomed! Here’s a hint, the more you trust God that He provided a spouse who completes your weaknesses the happier you’ll be in marriage. (It’s about trusting God more than you trust yourself.) When I see couples whose sole connection is wrapped around a personal preference... I can only hope that their marriage will last beyond that. One of the most powerful and loving things a spouse can ever do for the other is to love you despite your inability to meet their personal preferences.

If we think of ourselves as the Bride of Christ, we immediately see the stupidity of personal preferences in the church dividing us. We, singular and corporately, are the Bride. In our towns there is a sole bride, not brides. And yet Jesus has to love us all how we want to be loved? Who is long suffering now? Who is having 2,000 communions on Sunday morning instead of one? Whose name is lifted up in a thousand styles instead of one?

I look at belonging to a church a lot like a marriage.

1. Let’s say, right now, you go to a church which is fine doctrinally but you hate the music. If this were a marriage would you leave? You would feel pretty childish telling a divorce attorney that you can’t stay married to your husband because he likes rap music. Now, country music, I’ll give you that… But no one would leave a spouse because of a musical preference. But people do it in church every day.

2. Let’s say you go to a church who killed a program you loved. If this were a marriage and your spouse changed date night from Wednesday to Sunday, would you leave him? I doubt it. But people leave churches for stupid stuff like that every day.

3. Let’s say you go to a church who mismanaged some money. If every marriage in America were in divorce court because of this, we’d be a in a heap of mess.

4. Let’s say you go to a church where you didn’t like the liturgy. Would you divorce a person because they didn’t read the same Bible translation as you?

5. One commenter said she couldn’t go to a church because she disagreed with how the church practiced communion. If that were a marriage and your spouse wanted “communion” in a way you didn’t like… you’d probably head to counseling before divorce court.

Think of all the personal preference reasons people leave a church! There are hundreds of them. Church leaders are going bald trying to figure out how to keep everyone happy instead of trying to lead people in worship! I’ve been in dozens of staff meetings where the leaders were more worried about keeping congregants pleased than taking the worship service a direction we felt God was calling it to. In other words, we repeatedly compromised our convictions for the High Holy Calling of the personal preference god so many worship on Sunday mornings.

What am I asking “the evangelical church” to do?

Time to cut to the chase. I’m not naive. I know that there are divisions in place today and it is silly to say we should all come together as a single body. I know it is insane to dream of a united church community who worships together on Sunday mornings, in Spirit and Truth, despite the fact that some like rock music and some like choir. I know it is impossible to dream of a church who worshiped together despite the fact that some are white or black or Hispanic. I know it is ludicrous to think that churches could bundle their buildings together for Kingdom work beyond the realm of what they want their buildings to be used for. I know it is preposterous to think that churches could start talking about reaching communities instead of birthing more baptists or presenting more Presbyterians. I know it is arrogant to think that one church leader should willfully submit his congregation to another. I know it is crazy to dream of one church in one city reaching the 95% of lost souls despite tiny doctrinal differences.

But my hope is that it can happen.

And I dream and think these things because followers of Jesus are overpowered with a silly, insane, impossible, ludicrous, preposterous, arrogant, and crazy love that comes from a Risen Savior. He came to unite. He came to break down barriers. And he wants us to long suffer with one another as an act of worship of Him.

That’s my hope. That’s my dream. And that’s what I think the evangelical church should be about in America.

I’m nailing this thesis to my wall. Thoughts?