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Busy Youth and the Church

This month, our blog series is actually a vlog series – a video blog, that is! We’re calling it “The NEXT Few Minutes.” Over the next several weeks, we’ll share with you short, 2-3 minute videos from a variety of folks around the country with the hopes they spark your own imagination. We hope you’ll learn about some trends, ask questions, and think deeply about the practice of ministry in your own setting.

Rocky Supinger, associate pastor for youth at Fourth Presbyterian Church in Chicago, wonders how church can grow and shape Christian commitment among youth whose schedules are already packed. Is less more? Join the conversation by commenting on this blog post or on our Facebook/Twitter pages!

To see all of our videos in our “The NEXT Few Minutes” series, check out our playlist on Youtube.

How Will #nextchurch2015 Know If It Worked?

Thanks to Rocky Supinger for allowing us to cross-post his thoughts on the upcoming National Gathering. You can view the original post at his blog YoRocko!

By Rocky Supinger

NEXT Church is next week!

I’ve enjoyed blogging about past NEXT Church gatherings, for example, here, here, and here.

This week I’m sharing four questions I’m bringing with me to my favorite annual gathering of Presbyterians [full disclosure: I helped plan this one].

Here’s my first question:

Here’s my second question:

Here’s my third question:

And now my fourth question . . .

How will we know if NEXT Church 2015 was a success?

There will be over 600 people there. Is that success? There’s a program full of recognizable names–preachers, speakers, and workshop leaders who are considered “experts” at what they do. Is getting them success?

Maybe you only know if gatherings like this worked much later, when people who were there trace their transformation back to it as the moment they learned something new or started important relationships or made a vocational decision or encountered God’s grace. Maybe if enough people do that it worked on a church-wide scale.

Evaluations will tell you if your thing worked as a thing: was the food good? Did the content connect with peoples’ expectations and experience? Was your communication clear? But we want our thing to move the needle in ways that don’t show up on evaluations. How do we know if that’s happened/ing?


Rocky Srocky supinger (472x640)upinger is associate pastor of Claremont Presbyterian Church in Claremont, CA and co-director of this year’s NEXT Church National Gathering. Connect with him at his website, YoRocko!.

What Impact Will Young Adults Have on #nextchurch2015?

By Rocky Supinger

Thanks to Rocky Supinger for allowing us to cross-post his thoughts on the upcoming National Gathering. You can view the original post at his blog YoRocko!

NEXT Church is next week!

I’ve enjoyed blogging about past NEXT Church gatherings, for examplehere,here, and here.

This week I’m sharing four questions I’m bringing with me to my favorite annual gathering of Presbyterians [full disclosure: I helped plan this one].

Here’s my first question:

Here’s my second question:

Now my third question: what will be the impact of young adults?

The Mainline Protestant landscape is largely absent people in their 20’s, a fact that has been analyzed by multiple studies. The Presbyterian Church (USA) is not exempt from this reality, but it boasts a Young Adult Volunteer (YAV) program that each year commissions young adults to a year of service in a couple dozen sites in the U.S. and across the world. The PC(USA) is crawling with recent college graduates eager to impact the world, then. They’re just not in congregations.

NEXT Church national gatherings have featured young voices from the beginning, and I wonder if this one won’t do that to a greater extent than before. A Young Adult Volunteer is on the planning team and has already shaped much of what will happen. McCormick Theological Seminary’s innovative Center for Faith And Service will be on hand in the person of the incomparable Wayne Miesel, who has done more than anyone to shape the church’s thinking about ministry with young adults. One of the seven Ignite presentations will feature a trio of YAVs (see their pitch below).

Young adults–including those in seminary–will have lots of opportunity next week to connect, share, and even organize around their vision for the next embodiment of the Presbyterian Church.

There’s a YAV from my congregation coming next week at my insistence, so I’ve obviously got high hopes that NEXT Church 2015 will provide her and her peers with both an imaginative environment for discerning their place in the PC(USA) and a platform to constructively shape its future.


Rocky Srocky supinger (472x640)upinger is associate pastor of Claremont Presbyterian Church in Claremont, CA and co-director of this year’s NEXT Church National Gathering. Connect with him at his website, YoRocko!.

What Can Non-Pastors Do with #nextchurch2015?

By Rocky Supinger

Thanks to Rocky Supinger for allowing us to cross-post his thoughts on the upcoming National Gathering. You can view the original post at his blog YoRocko!

NEXT Church is next week!

I’ve enjoyed blogging about past NEXT Church gatherings, for example herehere, and here.

This week I’m sharing four questions I’m bringing with me to my favorite annual gathering of Presbyterians [full disclosure: I helped plan this one].

Here’s my first question:

And now my second question:

Will this gathering equip non-pastors to lead in the church?

There will be significant leadership at this event from educators, non-profit executives, and entrepreneurs. NEXT has always lifted up the importance of Ruling Elder leadership, ever since the first gathering in Indianapolis, when the late Cynthia Bolbach–herself a Ruling Elder and General Assembly Moderator–pointed out the overwhelming majority of Teaching Elders (pastors) in attendance.

Are we getting closer?

George Srour is a Ruling Elder from Indianapolis who will describe the organization he’s built that is constructing school all over Africa.

Anita Ford is an elementary school principal who will help explain how her school partnered with a church to create a children’s music program. Charles Kerchner,an academic who specializes in public education, will also be part of that presentation. Charles is one of five Ruling Elders coming from the congregation I serve.

Bill Habicht is a pastor, but he calls himself a “common good and social media conspirator,” and he spends a lot of time working with non-pastors to form things like art collectives and coffee shops.

It certainly feels like a opportunity more attuned to the particular leadership gifts of those for whom ministry is not their job, so I’m eager to see what all the non-pastors will do with it. How many do you know who are coming?


 

Rocky Srocky supinger (472x640)upinger is associate pastor of Claremont Presbyterian Church in Claremont, CA and co-director of this year’s NEXT Church National Gathering. Connect with him at his website, YoRocko!.

Will #nextchurch2015 Move the Church Towards Racial Justice?

 

This week we are gearing up for the National Gathering! This series of posts first appeared on conference co-director Rocky Supinger’s blog and are shared here with the permission of the author. Check out the original posts at YoRocko!

By Rocky Supinger

NEXT Church is next week!

I’ve enjoyed blogging about past NEXT Church gatherings, for example herehere, and here.

This week I’m sharing four questions I’m bringing with me to my favorite annual gathering of Presbyterians [full disclosure: I helped plan this one].

So, my first question:

The fouled up racial reality of the American context is more clearly in focus today than it has been for years, at least as measured by the mainstream media discourse. Michael Brown and Eric Garner are household names, and #blacklivesmatter is necessary to state now. How will the urgency of racial justice inform what happens next week?

A colleague shared this in an email yesterday:

I still have my same concerns about the church in general and about NEXT in particular. The events of the past six months, especially events around Ferguson, have even heightened my sense of concern for organizations that are predominantly led and and membered by privileged white people, including organizations like the PC(USA) and NEXT Church. I’ll be interested to see if your conference makes any movement this year compared to the last several years I’ve attended.

One way to measure movement toward racial justice in a gathering like this is by looking at who’s up front. NEXT has always work hard at diverse racial representation among its leadership, even if the PC(USA) is a mostly white palette from which to draw.

Among others, this year’s gathering will hear from Chineta Goodjoin, the Organizing Pastor of a new African-American church in Orange County, as well as Tiffany Jana, who heads a consulting firm with her husband Matt that helps organizations harness the power of diversity (watch her TED Talk below).

This year’s theme, “Beyond: Our Walls, Our Fears, Ourselves” lends itself well to addressing the church with urgency to explicitly address its witness to a world in which police officers openly send racist emails, fraternity brothers at a prominent university chant “hang ‘em from a tree” with glee, and young black men are disproportionately more likely to be killed by police.

It’s on us to push things in the direction of justice and reconciliation. I expect next week’s gathering to offer concrete ways to do that.


 

Rocky Srocky supinger (472x640)upinger is associate pastor of Claremont Presbyterian Church in Claremont, CA and co-director of this year’s NEXT Church National Gathering. Connect with him at his website, YoRocko!.

 

 

How Do We Stream Church?

Each month, we post a series of blogs around a common topic. For January and February, MaryAnn McKibben Dana is curating a month of reflections on technology, faith, and church. Join the conversation here or on Facebook

By Rocky Supinger

I’ve got an iPod Classic that I never use. It has 160 gigabytes of memory, so my entire digital music, movie, and photo collection is stored on it, and there’s still, like 50 gigs available. But it sits neglected in a drawer while I stream music on my phone, movies on Netflix, and store all my photos on Dropbox.

photo credit: via photopin (license)

photo credit: via photopin (license)

 

You may say I’m a streamer. But I’m not the only one.

The streaming masses are disrupting the cable television business, the music industry, and even Hollywood (Sony Pictures made $15 million streaming The Interview before releasing it in theaters). And as if Amazon hadn’t put a big enough dent in publishing already, it recently announced a subscription service that, you guessed it, streams ebooks.

I love this. The streaming trend has transformed my relationship with media from one of consumption directed toward ownership (and, thus, storage) of a commodity to one of consumption directed toward the experience of that commodity with no need to store it. It’s a more shared experience of media, since the songs and shows I’m watching aren’t owned by any of the listeners and viewers–they’re all on some server somewhere.

It’s also a more social experience, since, as an example, the song I’m streaming on Rdio is  displayed with the icons of my friends who have also listened to it. I can easily recommend songs to friends, and the service continually informs me of what they’re listening to.

I wonder how a streaming mentality will impact will our churches’ relationship with worshipers and neighbors. It’s clearly spreading to the analog world of cars and houses–Airbnb lets people share a room; Uber and Lyft a ride; RelayRides the very car. The option to “stream” these commodities, rather than own them, is increasingly attractive. So how do people stream church?

Given the deferred maintenance costs weighing down many church buildings, aren’t there advantages to sharing a building without the obligations that come with owning one? And if we don’t own the pews, them maybe we needn’t own the Bibles and hymnals in their backs–the bible and the new PC(USA) hymnal are online; they can be streamed.

And what about our leaders? Must we own them by installing them in particular churches? Or  might at-large presbytery membership for Teaching Elders begin to function as a leadership streaming service, not just for churches that can’t afford installed leadership, but for everyone?

We’re probably not ready for these ideas yet, but the streaming world is forcing our hand, I think. Let’s start experimenting now with sharing and streaming services at our churches for the sake of our neighborhoods. After all, it’s not our church to begin with. It’s Christ’s, the server. We’re just streaming it.

 


rocky supinger (472x640)Rocky Supinger is associate pastor of Claremont Presbyterian Church in Claremont, CA and co-director of this year’s NEXT Church National Gathering. Connect with him at his website, YoRocko!.

Getting Organized

By Rocky Supinger

ICON-LogoThe congregation I serve as an Associate Pastor has been working in earnest for a few years on community organizing. Last week my colleague wrote about the impact this kind of organizing has had on the life of our church. I want to say something about the extra-congregational part.

In places like New Orleans, El Paso, and Chicago, Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) style community organizing networks are well established, as has been impressively documented by Jeffrey Stout. Leaders and churches wanting to make an impact in those places can get connected to those networks and begin learning how organizing works hands on. But what if there is no network?

Claremont, California is on the far eastern edge of Los Angeles county but the western edge of what’s known as the “Inland Empire,” a vast unorganized swath of communities and municipalities with some of the highest jobless rates in the country. There’s no network here. There’s hardly anything unifying this region, save for the Ontario airport, which is dying a slow death. So a few years ago some organizers decided to try and build one.

This is where the Claremont Presbyterian Church got involved, on the ground floor of efforts to build a regional community organizing coalition. A major part of this ground floor work has been to learn the IAF philosophy and to reflect theologically on it. Friends like Jeff Krehbiel and Bob Linthicum have been invaluable resources here. But another major part of this work has been building an organization. And that’s a different kind of work altogether.

What started as the Inland Empire Sponsoring Committee has now become the Inland Communities Organizing Network (ICON). Building this regional organization is teaching us some things. I’ll highlight two. First, community organizing is not inherently Presbyterian. That sounds ridiculously obvious, but it’s been a valuable learning.

The organizer in charge of getting ICON up and running became impatient with our church’s discernment. He was clearly used to working with church leaders whose churches did what the leader thought was most important; waiting for a congregation to learn about and a session to authorize public commitment (including financial commitment) to IAF’s ideals and aims created some tension we had to negotiate.

The other major learning concerns the conflict between getting important things done and strictly adhering to principle. The first issue ICON took on was a proposed waste transfer station in a neighborhood dotted with elementary schools. We joined rallies and wrote editorials decrying the proposal, and we surrounded more than one City Planning Commission meeting with megaphone-led chants. In the end, the proposal went forward, but with hard-won concessions about the station’s citizen oversight and the volume of traffic it was allowed. For these concessions our networked was branded as sellouts. We were shouted down by an angry crowd of fellow demonstrators wielding “no compromise” signs as we celebrated what we’d accomplished.

As we grow with ICON, our church is working some muscles it hasn’t worked in a while, and not without some strains. The NEXT Church is a building church, though, and we’re learning how to build something of value with partners who have different instincts. I think that’s making us better, and I think it’s making ICON better.

Rocky Supinger is Associate Pastor of Claremont Presbyterian Church. He blogs at yorocko.com.

De-Programming Youth Ministry

In this post, Rocky Supinger wonders if the future of youth ministry will have less to do with church-based programming—the hallmark of youth ministry in its heyday from the 1970s through the end of the 20th century—and more to do with engaging youth within their own cultural contexts and peer groups. This is an important paradigm shift from an “attractional” approach to a more missional and contextual approach. If post-Christendom youth are less likely to come to us on our terms, we need to meet them in their worlds. Yet Rocky also points out that there is something unique about church space in the lives of youth. Rocky makes good use of Mark Oestreicher’s Youth Ministry 3.0, an essential book to read when it comes to thinking about what’s next in youth ministry.

welcome sneakers copyI’m not all that acquainted with what was “before” in youth ministry in the Presbyterian Church. I grew up an arm’s length from church, and I’ve been an Associate Pastor with responsibilities for youth for a mere six years. Yet allow me to wonder out loud about something that might feature prominently in the “next” iteration of our ministry with junior high and high school students across the PC(USA).

Simply put, I wonder if what’s next is fewer events and groups organized for church youth and more gatherings among established groups of students with no connection to the church.

A little background (and some caveats)…

Each Wednesday afternoon I’ve got two groups of students who gather at the church I serve: one group of junior high girls and another group of high school boys. I’m a bit baffled as to how this came about, as I certainly didn’t plan for it.

Four years ago I invited a couple of 7th grade church kids to drop into the church youth room after school once a week, since they walked right past it on their way home. Within weeks, those students were bringing nearly a dozen of their friends.

For two years that group of junior high boys came to the church once a week. Then they graduated to high school. Their walk home no longer took them past the church, so I didn’t see them anymore. Meanwhile, I extended the invitation to another 7th grader to drop by with her friends after school. Now what started as a “guys” group is all girls, and only two of them are related to the church.

Then something funny happened. I ran into some of those boys who are now in high school and that I don’t see any more. They asked if they could start coming to the church again. Dazed, I said of course, and now there are a dozen or so 10th grade boys at the church every Wednesday afternoon. It’s turned into a kind of drop in center.

I’m not sure what’s happening with these groups. I’m thrilled that students from the neighborhood identify our church building as a place that welcomes them. I mean, I take swipes at “attractional” models of ministry like most of my colleagues, but the fact is that these students are attracted to something they don’t have anywhere else: a building with adults who mostly want to know them and play with them. That’s worth something.

But I’m not teaching them the Bible. We’re not having discussions of life issues. I suppose the most rigorous assessment of what these gatherings are providing is an experience of hospitality that is focused predominantly on recreation.

I wonder if this isn’t a pattern that we should embrace going forward, inviting groups of young people from our community into relationship with us and the church. (note: “into relationship with us” need not equal “into our church buildings,” but church spaces can be uniquely welcoming of teens.)

Of course, hosting gatherings, retreats, and work trips for students in our congregations—where catechesis and life transformation happens—must continue to get all the energy we can give it. But I think we should start supplementing those foci with some exploration of the peer relationships our students have outside the church, looking for ways to walk alongside those relationships.

My thinking in this direction has been influenced heavily by Mark Oestreicher’s Youth Ministry 3.0. Oestreicher suggests that adolescents in today’s heavily networked culture don’t need as much from the church in the area of belonging. That is, most of our students belong to their own peer groups that give shape to their life, whether that’s the marching band, the debate team, or the kids they play video games with. That the church would be a place for youth who are “outsiders”—who have no community in which to belong—is not as evident as it once was.

Of course this is not entirely true, and churches must always be places where young people experience a depth of welcome absent elsewhere. Yet the pattern is playing out in my context that groups of young people from the community with no existing relationship to our church are eager to make use of its staff and facilities for the sake of experiencing one another. I wonder if more of that isn’t what’s next.


rocky supinger (472x640)Rocky Supinger is the Associate Pastor at Claremont Presbyterian Church in Claremont, CA. He blogs at YoRocko.com and has been actively involved in the NEXT Church conversation.

Image: shutterstock/LitDenis