back in the day, i did these ‘monday morning update’ posts every single week. they included a little update on the past week and what was ahead, what book i was reading, what music i was digging. stuff like that. it gave me a chance to update stuff that didn’t deserve a whole post. i kinda miss that, even though i have no intention of bringing it back. but, at least today, i’ll try a “random order life and cartel update.” maybe it will become a semi-regular blog feature; maybe not.

- adam and i are having a blast with The Youth Cartel. we work fairly autonomously, but touch base pretty much every day via text, email and phone. we use online software (like google docs and dropbox) for all kinds of collaborative work. i totally trust him, and am stoked by how “he completes me.” yes, i wrote that.

- that said: we’re growing so quickly, i’m concerned about our sustainability. we don’t have any margin right now, and we’re going to have to make some tough choices this year about risk.

- i’m planning on launching the 2012 plans for the youth ministry coaching program in the next week or two. the four cohorts (of 10 youth workers each) i’m currently leading are the highlights of my working life. plans are set for new cohorts starting this fall in san diego and nashville, plus the possibility of cohorts i would co-lead (i’d be at 2 of the 6 meetings) in either atlanta or denver, plus one in greenwich/NYC, and one in vancouver/calgary. i’m also in discussion with 3 denominational groups (1 national, 2 regional) about closed cohorts for their tribe (2 of my current cohorts are this model).

- i’m so over-the-top excited about an announcement i’m going to make in the next couple weeks about who’s coming to the middle school ministry campference. sorry to tease.

- a couple weeks ago, in response to someone’s silly suggestion, my beard got it’s own twitter feed and facebook page. so far, the twitter feed is beating the facebook page in likes/follows, 47 to 33.

- an old photo of jeannie and i somehow made it onto the fail blog this week. so random. it was from the 2006 ys staff christmas party. we had a prom theme, and costume competition. jeannie and i came as protestors, based on the protestors we’d had at the nywc that fall. but — hey — getting on the fail blog is, like, bucket list stuff for me!

- adam and i have made some “it’s time, let’s do this” decisions in the last few weeks about The Youth Cartel publishing. we want to provide resources that others wouldn’t provide, by authors others wouldn’t consider, in ways that others wouldn’t provide them. the Extended Adolescence Symposium Ebook was us dipping our toes in the water, and adam and jon huckins’ Good News In the Neighborhood is a more serious swing of the bat. but the other day i sent out contracts to 6 authors for books i hope you’ll see from us in the next 6 months. this doesn’t mean i’m not going to write for other publishers. The Youth Cartel is passionate about being very open-handed and non-exclusive. i have my first book coming out with SYM in less than 2 months, and 6 more (2 of which are written, 4 of which aren’t) over the next 9 or 10 months. i’m stoked about The Way bible i developed with tyndale (seriously, have you seen it!?), and about my last book with zondervan, Understanding Your Young Teen.

- my family and i leave today on a 9 day vacation. we’re heading up to washington state (3 cheers for airline miles!), where we’ll hang with family friends for half our time, and just our family the rest of the time. we’ll be in a timeshare condo on lake chelan, in the middle of the state. it’s a bit of a bittersweet vacation in this way: family vacations have been a really, really big deal to us, and this might our last one. liesl graduates in june, and heads off to her job at a summer camp the next day. she’ll be home for a couple weeks at the end of the summer before heading to england, scotland, and india, for a 9 month gap year (volunteering in various capacities). when she returns next year, she’ll be heading to university of redlands. so, this is it! this vacation must rock!

- i had a blast yesterday with my fellow middle school ministry volunteer (at journey community church) dan coronado (i’ve always thought his name sounded like a fake hollywood name; like, the name of a cop from a 70s tv show). dan is a brilliant professional photographer and videographer. i asked dan if we could have lunch to get caught up, and if he would shoot a new headshot for me. i was starting to find that people were constantly commenting about how i didn’t look anything like my current promo shots. dan took a ton of ‘em (he’s so good, it’s fascinating to watch him at work), but here are two of the early samples he sent me:

My kids with my parents! (I feel a story about to break out.)

there’s more to this than the obvious surface stuff of finding out dirt on their dad. hearing these stories helps my kids gain more of a sense of identity, connecting them to the lineage of their origin. the stories become part of who they are. the stories become their stories.

throughout history, our current culture stands unique in our affinity to facts. families, throughout time, have been more interested in stories. in fact, education in jewish households was more about storytelling than anything else. before anyone had a copy of the bible or torah in their homes, oral histories (not even printed stories, let alone printed propositions) were the primary means of remembering who we are, of remembering where we came from.

case in point: the passover seder dinner is all about storytelling. each element of a passover dinner is meant to call up another important element of God’s great rescue, reminding the teller and listeners who they are as god’s chosen, as god’s beloved.

of course, jesus is a fantastic example for us in this: he was an amazing storyteller, often preferring a story (real or imaginary) over other forms of communication. jesus knew that stories capture imagination. stories allow listeners to find themselves in the characters. stories – especially the right stories – encourage us, as the lion king’s mufasa reminded his son simba, to “remember who you are.”

i love what paul (in a fatherly voice) writes to young timothy in 2 timothy 1:5 — i am reminded of your sincere faith, which first lived in your grandmother lois and in your mother eunice and, i am persuaded, now lives in you also. paul doesn’t unpack the stories here, but he reminds timothy of stories tim knows well, and has heard over and over again his entire life, stories that tell him, “remember who you are.”

we parents tended to be pretty good about storytelling with our kids when they were little. we bought all those cardboard covered picture books and read them out loud until we wanted to do imaginary harm to the imaginary characters. we sat with our kids watching veggietales or other cute story videos. stories that were cute until about their seventh viewing (and not so much at their seven hundredth viewing). we sat on the edge of their beds at night, making up wild and wonderful tales, full of humor and pathos and wonderful morality and lessons of courage. try that with your 17 year-old son! (no, really, don’t.)

so when did we stop telling stories with our kids? and, more importantly, why did we stop telling stories with our kids?

sure, our stories have to evolve a bit, if we’re going to continue them with teenagers. storytelling with teenagers is less about snuggling and unicorns, and more about the real stuff of life. remember, normal teenagers view their parents as permanently middle-aged. they don’t have much imagination about what you were like as a child or teenager, unless you tell them.

if lines of communication are already open and strong in your family, storytelling is a great way to keep them that way. and you’ll be amazed at the other stuff that will come up before, during, and after stories.

but if lines of communication are already strained, i’d like you to hear a few things. first, don’t panic. you’re normal. yes, this is difficult; but it’s normal. in fact, your goal as a parent of teenager is to wean them from the dependence on you that was normal when they were children. relationships and independence and communication all – necessarily – shift during these years. to try to keep them from shifting actually does damage to your teenager’s development. but consider using stories to create a safe DMZ of communication.

even though it will feel forced at times (that’s ok – some level of uncomfortability is ok), structure some sharing times that are built around stories, not check lists of “what did you do?” that feel more like a gestapo interview than loving parental involvement. my friend, who now has a great relationship with his young adult son, used to tell his distant and moody then-16 year-old son, “you don’t have to like this, and you don’t have to make eye contact with me, and you don’t even have to say anything other than the bare minimum; but you will be going out to breakfast with me once a week until you’re 18, and you will listen to me tell you stories, and you will tell me one story about your week.”

storytelling, by the way, isn’t only important for younger generations. storytelling is beneficial for older generations also! in our culture of disposability and instant-everything, stories provide an anchoring, a macro-level picture of the values most important to us, values like obedience to god, courage, faith, hope, and love. 16 or 75, we all need to be re-anchored to those values.

one of the practices we have embraced in my family is storytelling around the dinner table. we have a no cell phones policy (which, these days, is less about taking phone calls than it is about texting or mobile facebooking or other interruptions that take place just below the edge of the dinner table). sometimes we take turns telling low points and high points of our day. with each of these comes a story. we all learn about each others’ values, each others’ needs, each others’ spiritual and emotional states. often, a story of the day will bring out a “that reminds me of the story of that time…,” with a request or one family member or another to retell one of our arsenal of favorites.

here are some ideas for you to try:

• host intergenerational storytelling dinners. instead of everyone bringing a dish to share, each person has to bring a story (or a few stories!) to share – real stories, not made-up stories. give the categories ahead of time, just like you would for a potluck, and have them choose stories in 2 or 3 categories. make sure you clear the date first with your teenager, because they’re who you really want there! shoot for at least one person or couple from every generation. allow for q&a after each story.
• highs and lows. described above as a practice my family uses, have each family member, over a meal, share a story of a high point and a low point of their day. if your family is open to it, you can add an ancient prayer element to this practice by together noticing where God was present in both the high and low moments.
• letter writing. yes, in these postmodern days, the art of writing snail mail seems almost ancient (especially to teenagers). but, particularly if you older relatives aren’t local to you, asking them to write out stories from their youth and young adult years can become family keepsakes.
• oral history recordings. many teenagers are skilled at simple video editing. challenge your teenager to interview grandparents and other older relatives (or, older people in your church) about what life was like when they were younger. video the interview, and edit it into a short piece you can keep. store them on youtube and share them with other family members (or church members), inviting them to add more.

about 18 months ago, i was sitting in dr. robert epstein’s living room with a group of youth workers from my youth ministry coaching program, talking about his ideas about the cultural construct of adolescence. at one point, his children came home from school and trotted through the house — elementary-aged kids. he had previously mentioned to us that he had two older son (about 28 and 30) from his first marriage, and how a grip of young kids from his second marriage. trying to understand some of what he was talking about, i asked him, “how has your parenting changed from when you parented your older sons to how you parent the children in your home now?”

i remember his response verbatim, because it has impacted my parenting (and other thinking) in significant ways. he said, “i’ve shifted from parenting by control to parenting by facilitation. and by ‘facilitation’, i mean identifying and nurturing competencies.”

he unpacked that thought a bit more, but the damage was done. i instantly saw the truth in what he was saying. and i could see that, while not a super-high control parent, i hadn’t thought of it in these terms before. since then, jeannie and i have tried over and over again to remember this idea when faced with parenting issues.

an illustration:

my amazing 14 year-old son max recently said to me something like, “i want to do something!”
i think he’d said something prior to that, but i hadn’t been paying enough attention. i didn’t know what he meant.
“what do you mean?”
“i want to do something to make a difference. and i’ve tried a few times to start something, but it hasn’t worked”
(i started to realize he was talking about doing something to make a difference in the world, and his “it hasn’t worked” was an attempt to explain the combination of his own lack of follow-through and others.)
he continued, “so, i want to get rubber bracelets made to raise money for haiti, and i want to sell them.”

i was at a control or facilitation junction, baby. i love my son, and i want him to impact the world, and i want him to succeed. and the best way i know to ensure this is to exert my control, to take over the details and tell him what to do, overseeing and prescribing each step. i knew, in that moment, that if i encouraged him and served him, helping only when he asked, it would be a more fruitful growth opportunity for him (get this:) even if he failed.

i said, “that’s great, max! tell me if you need anything from me.”
he said, “well, is there anyone i should talk to?”
i suggested he talk to the guy at our church who oversees our church partnership with haiti. that was it.

max found that adult’s phone number and called him. he also called the pastor on staff who oversees that ministry area. he gathered info all on his own. he found a website that makes rubber bracelets and priced the whole thing out. he asked me for input on what to have inscribed on the bracelets, and i suggested something like “remember haiti” might be cool.

a few days later, max asked me if he could use my credit card to place the online order. i asked, “are you asking for me to pay for the bracelets?” “no, i’ll pay you right now, i just need your credit card to order them.” i had absolutely nothing to do with him placing the order, choosing the quantity, color, shipping method, or anything else. he covered the cost out of his own bank account; and a week later, i paid him $5 for one of his bracelets.

max still has a bag full of bracelets, sometimes remembering to bring them to school and church to sell them, and sometimes forgetting. it’s still unclear whether or not he will make back his investment and raise enough to make a nice donation to our church’s haiti ministry. but this is clear: whether he “succeeds” or “fails”, the experience will be better for him than if i had controlled it.

and here’s where my thinking goes on this…

replace “parenting” with “youth ministry” in that epstein line:
we need a shift from youth ministry by control to youth ministry by facilitation, where facilitation means identifying and nurturing competencies.

heck, replace “parenting” with “leadership”:
we need a shift from leadership by control to leadership by facilitation, where facilitation means identifying and nurturing competencies.

these aren’t easy shifts (especially if you’re steeped in parenting, or youth ministry, or leadership by control). but the implications are massive.

today, thursday, december 22, is christmas for my family. yup.

every year, we head to detroit for the holidays (all of my family and my wife’s family are there). this year, the frequent flier seats we could get have us leaving saturday — christmas eve. yesterday was my kids’ last day of school, so we have these two free days. that means today is christmas, and tomorrow is packing.

the plan for today:

9am — everybody up. coffee is ready. open stockings.

10am — head to a big brunch at hash house a go go (one of the best breakfasts in san diego)

noon-ish — christmas gift opening, followed by family christmas carol singing (bring out the instruments!)

early afternoon — deliver gifts to neighbors, take a trip to the dollar store to get white elephant gifts from each of us for my extended family’s christmas on monday the 26th

late afternoon — see the new sherlock holmes movie together

dinner somewhere. kids free by 7pm to hang with friends (one’s having a friend spend the night, the other is spending the night elsewhere).

should be a fantastic day.

i have to admit, even though i mocked all those nativities on my blog, i’ve slowly grown fond of many of them. i still get a scratchy feeling in my throat when i look at the cat nativity. and the hummel-like little kids freak me out a bit. but some of the latter additions just make me smile. yes, some of it is laughter. but it’s more than that.

anyhow, the other day i was thinking about this, and realized that for all my snarkiness, we have a fairly high number of wide-ranging nativities in our own home every christmas. time to come out of the closet and show them all to you:

this quilted nativity advent calendar has been a favorite of my kids (now 14 and 17) for years. every morning, they take turns moving the character of the day up to the scene.

technically not a nativity, this is the only one of the bunch that stays out year ’round. i’m qualifying it as a nativity, since, while it’s a group of saints, it includes mary with jesus, and joseph. it’s also the most expensive of our nativities. i bought these hand-painted stacking dolls in prague.

this one requires a little explanation. for years, my sisters’ kids and my kids put on a nativity story play as a part of our family christmas at my parents house. the roles changed from year to year, as did the dialogue (sometimes straight out of scripture; other times scripted in other ways). as a christmas gift to my parents one year, we took photos of the kids in their costumes, and took them to one of those places that makes die-cut stands out of photos. we bought an empty creche, and gave my parents the set. as you can imagine, it’s a fairly treasured family thing. we loved it so much, my sisters and i each got one for our own homes also.

little liesl was the sheep that year…

and max, who was only one month old, expertly played the part of baby jesus…

this one qualifies as our oddest (well, until the gift from adam, below). it was a gift from my parents years ago. i call it the siamese holy family. if you look close, you’ll see that joe and mary have one body from the waist down, but split into two above the waist. i bet that made childbirth extremely awkward.

anyone who has been to bethlehem has seen version of this nativity at every roadside tourist stand. but i love this one, mostly because i bought it there.

my kids each have this set, given by my parents years ago. this one sits on the back of the toilet in their bathroom (christmas invades every room in our house)!

adorning a wall in our living room each year are copies of two christmas cards we made years ago, each with a nativity drawn by one of my kids. the first was liesl’s creation, and the second was drawn by max.

and, finally, our newest addition… my partner in the youth cartel, adam mclane, gave me this zombie nativity set as an early christmas gift a few days ago, in honor of the blitzkrieg we both experienced trying to keep my blog alive during the onslaught of almost 400,000 visitors. he bought it from the etsy craftswoman whose zombie nativity i’d highlighted in that memorable blog post.

yup. emmanuel. god with us. maybe the single most amazing and creative reality in all of history.

a few years ago, i showed my daughter liesl my ability to tie a knot in a maraschino cherry stem with my tongue (while in my mouth). i could do this in 15 or 20 seconds. she quickly upstaged me by tying knots in 5 or 6 seconds. her record was 3.6 seconds.

the other night, our family was out for dinner, celebrating max’s 14th birthday. it was a dark restaurant, so the video is weak. but it proves her setting a new record — 2.6 seconds!

i’m writing a short book for barefoot ministries on parents (not for parents, but about parents). it’s one of three short books geared for volunteer youth workers that will be released as ebooks. the other two are on understanding teenagers and leading small groups.

while i don’t agree with the “abolish youth ministry” viewpoint of divided: the movie, i totally think there’s some undergirding truth to the need for ongoing reshaping of our perspectives on parents. to that end, i just wrote these three sentences in the manuscript of the book:

There’s some big picture logic we have to embrace:

If we care about the spiritual formation of teenagers, and know that parents have a bigger impact on their spiritual lives than anything else, we would be foolish not to invest time and energy into parents of teenagers.

If we, ultimately, care about the whole lives of teenagers, and know that their parents have a bigger influence on their whole lives than any other influence (including their peers, and certainly including us), it would be arrogant or myopic to ignore parents in our youth ministry strategies.

If we see in scripture that parents have the primary responsibility for the spiritual shaping of their children, we would be biblical revisionists or showing our ignorance to attempt any youth ministry approach that circumvents parents.

what’s your response?

(as an aside, what’s it say that when i looked at google images with “parent” and “teenager” in the search, the majority of images are of parents and teens in conflict?)

i have a new book releasing in december for parents, called Understanding Your Young Teen: Practical Wisdom for Parents. the book is a significant rewrite of some of my chapters from the book scott rubin and i co-authored a couple years ago, called Middle School Ministry. In this series, i’m excerpting portions of one of the chapters, called “White-Hot Temporary (Early Adolescent Culture)”.

———–

A Culture of Information
We all live in a culture of information. So, in a sense, this isn’t unique to young teens. What is unique is that this reality is shaping them significantly during their early adolescent development and in ways that weren’t true prior to the last decade. What’s also unique is that today’s young teens have always lived in a culture of information.

Almost every bit of information needed (as well as excessive quantities of information that are not wanted or needed) is available with the click of a mouse and in ways that shape our worldviews. This is both about access to information and the onslaught of information. The access of information shapes middle schoolers’ culture of immediacy, their sense of entitlement, and their work ethic. On the other hand, the onslaught of information has a numbing effect. Since everything middle schoolers need to know is readily available and since they’re constantly bombarded with suggestions and data of every sort, they’re less attentive to the stuff that passes by.

A Culture of Immediacy
Think for a minute about the things you had to wait for as a middle schooler that today’s middle schoolers don’t. They can take a picture on their cameras or cell phones and see the results instantly. They hear a song on the radio, and they can instantly download it to their computers or cell phones. Want to buy something? They can jump online in seconds, browse a customized and instantly generated list of sites, get others’ input about an item via user comments, and then, if they want the item, make an instant purchase and wait a day or two at most for the item to arrive. If you’ve ever been “stuck” somewhere without your cell phone and tried to find a pay phone to make a call, then you’ve been reminded of this shift.

Sure, you and I also have access to all this immediacy. But most of us didn’t grow up with this being normative. Today’s young teens have never known a world without instant everything. Doesn’t it strike you as funny that their idea of “old time hominess” includes making bread in a computer-enabled machine that does all the work?

Here’s a great example of this shift: For us adults, email communication changed everything. We were able to send and receive written communication without writing it by hand and going through the “hassle” of using the postal system. Written communication became almost instantaneous. But no one predicted that teenagers would dispose of email as being too slow and clunky and then opt for the intensely more immediate communication pathway of text messaging. We adults saw text messaging as a utilitarian means of quick planning. Teenagers turned it into a social phenomenon.

Middle schoolers don’t have a willingness (or perhaps even the capacity) to wait for anything. Our culture has trained them to expect everything instantly. Patience is a rough one; “delayed gratification” is a foreign concept; and slowness can have a deeply profound impact on them, since it’s something they simply don’t experience in their everyday lives.

———–

still to come: A Disposable Culture, A Culture of Consumerism, An Intense but Temporary Culture, A Networked Culture, and A Driven yet Sedentary Culture

my 17 year-old daughter liesl has been a camp counselor for much of the summer. the staff and counselors of the camp have “secret pals” (like secret santas), and give each other little gifts of encouragement. after giving her secret pal a couple physical gifts, she was out of ideas for the third gift. then, thinking about the fact that her pal is the guy who makes the camp videos, decided to make this video for him. it totally cracked me up.

seriously, i have the most awesome kids.

youth worker, yesterday, i wrote you to say thanks. i meant every word. and that letter was not just a set up, building you up so i could rip into you. in fact, i’d only planned on writing that letter. but after i finished it (and was — seriously, i’m not exaggerating — wiping tears from the corners of my eyes), i thought, “i could probably share a few requests also.”

so, in the context of my deep, deep well of appreciation and valuing of who you are and what you do, i’d like to also share a handful of requests:

stop trying to entertain my kids. they don’t want it, and you can’t really pull it off.

well, i’ll add a little caveat to that, a small qualification: my middle school son still likes to be entertained a bit. he likes the fun stuff, still. it’s not what keeps him there, or what he values the most, but it still has its place with 13 year-olds. but my daughter could give a rip if you have entertaining programs or neatoriffic trips. she wants to hang out with people who know her and care about her. she wants to experience something, and worship can provide that. she wants conversation. she wants to be a part of something that impacts the world. please, shut off the frickin’ lasers, scrap the goofy games that worked ok in 1982.

don’t be a poser, please.

i know my kids, and i know that they really do not care if you are into, or even aware of, whatever music d’jour is in their ears. they do not care about your wicked guitar chops (real or of the ‘guitar hero’ variety). your backward baseball cap only works if it’s genuinely you, and not something you do because you think it’s hip. look, i want my kids to connect with you at a meaningful level. i want — need — for you to have a voice into their lives. and you’re not going to have that if you’re a wannabe. please be yourself, for my kids, for me. this isn’t a ‘youth ministry tactic’ — this is a dad who needs this for his kids.

would you please take care of yourself?

look, i’m asking you this for a couple reasons. first, i want you to be around for a long time. i mean, i like you and all, and i want the best for you. but from a purely selfish place, i want you around for the duration of my kids’ adolescent tenure. i don’t want you to burn out or fall into some stupid moral sin. you know that it would be better if you never even came to our church or met my kids if anything like that happens, right? you wouldn’t just undo the good you’ve done, you’d create an additional pile o’ crap that we’d all have to trek through with our teenagers. and, you know what? i can’t walk through your pile of crap without getting your crap on me. i do not want your crap on me, or on my kids. so… yeah… take care of yourself, please.

also, i want you — need you — to take care of yourself because i know you can’t have an impact on my kids if you’re dry and shallow and stressed and your priorities are all screwed up. you can only minister effectively because you have christ in you. that’s the real issue. i’ve seen sh*tty youth workers have a huge, glorious, beautiful impact on the lives of teenagers because of christ in them, because it’s really not about them. and i’ve been stunningly gifted, talented, hard working youth pastors have the impact of a wet fart — lotsa noise and commotion, quite attention-getting, but no lasting impact — because it was all about their gifts and talents and hard work, and not about christ in them. so… yeah… take care of yourself, please. my kids need christ in you, not superman or wonder woman.

finally: please partner with me.

i know i occasionally seem like your adversary. i know — just keepin’ it real here — that some other parents really seem like your adversary. we’re not. i’m not. what i am is afraid, at times; afraid i’m going to squander the most amazing gift i’ve ever been given (my kids). i’m afraid, at times, that i’m a lousy parent. i’m afraid, at times, that my kids are going to royally screw up, and impact all of our lives forever. don’t mistake my occasional fear for antagonism. don’t misread my insecurity as a lack of trust in you. it’s more of a lack of trust in myself.

not that i don’t think you do some stupid or weird or needlessly risky things from time to time. but, somehow, i also think that’s part of your charm.

but i need you to come alongside me. let’s stop this stupid isolation, this absurd idea that ‘youth group world’ and ‘family world’ are mutually exclusive and have nothing to do with each other. look, i know i’m sending our entire family to your youth group when my kid shows up; because my kid shows up with all the family systems and baggage and good and bad parenting and everything else that she or he has received in our home. so, whether you like it or not, you’re getting all of us. and my kids are bringing you home also. so we might as well work together, huh? please, even if i don’t give you the impression that i want you to partner with me, i do. you’re just gonna have to trust me on that one.

and, now, i return you to my words of thanks:

thank you.

thank you.

thank you.

and may god richly bless you, as you have blessed me.