This Too Shall Pass!!!!!!!!

Last night I had my first in person board meeting with my nonprofit board in a long time. That wasn’t all because of the virus, but we still hadn’t been able to meet in person for SO LONG! It was incredible. Not only are most of our our community programs restarting, but the story sharing about impact and our sense of gratitude that God has allowed us to even do this incredible work in our community was flowing. How have we even survived this past year as a ministry!?!? Our athletes are all back, we are doing life skills and mentoring on a local campus, our student housing is full, and we are mowing lawns and ruining landscaping trucks like crazy! Even though the pandemic isn’t over, it feels different this fall (good and bad).

I want to share a cool story with you. Hang in there, it’s worth it. 14 years ago (+/-) several students in my youth group were captivated by a unique band called, “OK Go”. The band never has done super well on albums, but has instead chosen to create beautiful music through online followings and LEGENDARY one take videos. They do their music videos live and in one continuous take and its the individual songs and videos that have created their following and a kind of sense of community rather than a pure fan and product type of relationship.

Their original video featured a bunch of treadmills and was incredible.

In any event, these church kids chose to figure out how to do their own version of the treadmill video and engage with the band online. Oddly enough the band was captivated with the connection and invited them to come on stage when they were in the area and perform their routine for the crowd. They did, and it was amazing. I wish I had that video. You would have thought these small town kids had landed on the moon!

Now, I listen to all sorts of music. But, when people ask me if I like listening to specifically Christian music I will often say not really. I do, but I find it tiresome many times. Instead I prefer to listen to all sorts of music and to find music that touches on gospel themes and theological ideas without knowing it. Especially I like music that captures the emotions of the gospel. Particularly, I most frequently look for songs that capture the resurrection emotions and the emotions of the Kingdom coming in full! I long for that morning when all things will finally be set right in this world of ours.

In 2010, OK GO released another song called, “This Too Shall Pass”. It achieved legendary online status because they did the whole video around a gigantic Rube Goldberg device. And again, they did it in one continuous take! It was nuts and beautiful and took them a ton of takes to get it right. I had forgotten about the band until my kid’s teacher shared the video as they were having to design a small Rube Goldberg device for a class project. I liked the song immediately because I recall that phrase (This Too Shall Pass) being used in my house growing up to spur us on when things were tough. The phrase isn’t biblical, but it is ancient. It may have come out of Persia. From there it made its way to my childhood home over several thousand years to probably be misappropriated by my suburban family.

As it turns out, the band struggled with making that video because it was so technical and their record label (EMI) didn’t want them to be able to embed the video code because it cut into revenue streams to allow their fans to so freely share it. The band’s online following was so infuriated that the band left EMI and formed their own label. They refused to let the beautiful video die though and State Farm Insurance stepped in to fund the project.

But here is where it gets cool.

Because the band had to release the song fairly quickly, they decided to do a stripped down lower production video. They filmed a marching band version of the song with a bunch of kids and the Notre Dame marching band in a field in Indiana! The result is beautiful and this is where my ears, my weary pandemic minister’s soul, and gospel music re-enter the picture.

Sometime during the second pandemic surge the band’s alternative version was re-released and through some evil algorithm it wandered into my feed. All I could think about when I listened to it was, “This is what the struggling moments just before redemption feel like.”

And so yesterday I caught a sniff in the wind that even though I was deeply stressed about fall startups and the overwhelming number of tasks before me as husband, Dad, minister, and executive director, something good was coming. I had a sense that the stone one the tomb of the last year and a half might be budging just a little bit. We were going to be able to do this work with schools and kids outside the church again. There are still a billion problems to solve.

And lo and behold, the low production video version of “This Too Shall Pass” popped up again on my YouTube recommendations yesterday before my board meeting and after a long few weeks.

I am not saying it was a divine algorithim, but it was.

The key lines in the song are:

1.) You Can’t Keep Letting It Getting You Down.

2.)You Can’t Keep Lugging That Weight Around.

3.)When the Morning Comes

4.) Let It Go, This Too Shall Pass

If those statements aren’t a thread of the moving gospel, I don’t know what it is.

So, as Fall begins and as we process all the grief and frustration of the last two years or so I invite you to watch a music video that points to something bigger. Something that points to what is to come ONE DAY.

Today, I beseech you with all my ministerial might to enjoy a marching bad. In a field. With a Xylophone. And please pray for students and teachers and counselors and medical workers and churches and non profits and businesses and even your enemies.

Here it is.

And then, go do something beautiful and good.

Until the morning comes!

-Pastor Matt-

Oh, and OK GO!…if you are reading this, thanks for lifting this man’s soul by making musical art.

Innovation Virtues: Courage

A few months back I wrote about the need to define innovation as an idea that actually hits the ground. The goal was to define as something different than creativity or invention. The question with all three (creativity, innovation, and invention) in my mind is what it takes to actually do them. I mean innovation is actually about the doing!

I thought it might be good to do a post every once in a while on the “virtues” of innovation. I spend a lot of time thinking about the virtues that the gospel calls me to cultivate in my life. I don’t spend a lot of time talking about them. Most of the people I have met that talk a lot about virtues I find to either be boringly dogmatic or remarkably hypocritical. That might sound harsh, but I have an inherent distrust about people that talk too much about virtues. Virtues are not something you televise, they are tools to self scrutinize and reflect. And to be honest, I remain fairly certain that if you push a virtue too far, it often becomes a vice.

So my innovation question is, “What are the virtues that are required to not only think of an idea, but to get it to ground? What are the virtues necessary for innovation?” The first virtue: Courage.

A few months ago I came across this quote from C.S. Lewis that I had not read before. I thought it was a great quote to describe some of the tension in Christian social enterprise and in innovation.

“Courage is not simply one of the virtues but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means at the highest point of reality.”

One of the things about innovating anything is that it requires people to do things a bit different. You have to learn outside your circle. You have to take a risk in piloting experiments. You have to fail periodically and not hide, but rather analyze why something didn’t work. In my social enterprise based world you have to have the courage to take financial and legal risks in starting a business. And of course (and this may be its own virtue) you have to have the courage to trust God.

Lately, youth ministry groups and others are starting to launch various kinds of social enterprise, innovation, and design tools. I am excited about this. Some of them seem to be pretty darn good. But, in my conversations with the designers that implement them and innovators on the ground it seems pretty clear that no tool in the world will help someone launch an innovation if they recipient lacks some essential courage. Even the small innovations require courage at times!

The reality is that in a world that only seems to value or believe in what can be seen, touched, etc., even more courage is needed to do anything. In a culture (my culture) in which your failure in material achievement actually functions as a kind of denial of your existence, failure does feel final and fatal. Failure becomes an inability to assert your identity and self actualize. This secular reality only ups the force of failure. So, to ask people to risk and innovate is a higher stakes game in the modern world.

Now, back to C.S. Lewis!

What I love about this quote is that it acknowledges that courage itself is an essential virtue to living out other virtues. When doing innovation work and social enterprise work there is always this tension between the business and the ministry. There is tension between whether the idea helps the Kingdom go forward or whether the innovative idea has become the main thing. You never want that, but it is a tension. Courage is needed at every turn. At every turn in innovation as you court failure and financial problems, or being fired, there is a temptation to retreat from all the virtues. In many ways, courage becomes the virtuous fulcrum on which all other virtues are tested. Lewis nails that.

So, take courage in whatever venue you find yourself. May you cultivate the virtue of courage as best you can so that you might find the boldness to live out all the virtues! And do all of it in such a way that the Kingdom of love, hope, peace, and joy moves forward!

The Covid "Old Guy Dating Service"

So, last week I went out to a job site to get a bid going for one of our enterprises (Mowtown Teen Lawn Care- www.mowtownteenlawncare.com). And what I ended up witnessing was a blind date between two retired dudes who became fast friends. It was incredible. Let me explain.

I was accompanied to the bid by a 70 something friend who has served as an advisor for our lawn care company. This friend had worked for 30-40 years as a part of the forest service in the Pacific Northwest and when he retired he created a landscaping company that his son now owns. He helped me found the social enterprise that I now run and was on the team that hired me at my church. At least part of the reason that we became friends was because I had started my college days at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo as a forestry major. He is also kind of a visionary dude and he loves to pass on knowledge.

Now, the client that we were meeting to consult with was a black gentleman who grew up in Portland, Oregon and had also worked for decades in the forest service. This man and I have also had a great relationship. We initially hit it off in his backyard because he had worked in Washington D.C. and I was born there. My Catholic Italian godfather owned an important bakery there and I asked the client if he had heard of it. He almost fell over. He had eaten my godfather’s pastries at many of the events that his government office had hosted in D.C. It was a fun connection.

I have had my ups and downs with this client. My crew has left his gate open 3 times. He has been frustrated with our work at times. But, because of the bigger social purpose of what we do, he has refused to fire us. And we have deserved it at least a couple of times. One time, we left the gate open and someone stole the cushions off their patio furniture. Interestingly, it has been those conflicts that have produced the greatest fruit in our relationship. We have ended up with a running dialogue on race dynamics that we have chosen to frame as the pursuit of friendship and trust. It has been an incredible journey, especially during this time of racial tension in the United States. What is so fun about it is that I am probably 30-35 years younger than this friend.

So anyway, I had an inkling as I brought my landscaping buddy over to this man’s house that they would strike up a good conversation because they had both worked in forestry. I also suspected that they might actually know each other without knowing it.

And here is what happened.

We arrived at the house and made our introductions through our Covid masks outdoors. Immediately, the two friends started swapping stories and sharing about shared professional relationships and connection points. It was this incredible rolling dance of conversation. For about 35 minutes I simply stood there, seemingly without purpose, attempting to call us back to the “actual work” and just listened to these two retired dudes from very different corners of life (racial and otherwise) reminisce and find meaning and hope during a time of Covid based relational starvation. I stood their marveling and smiling when I began to realize what I was witnessing. The job wasn’t the job. The interaction was the job. I was witnessing two older guys who have been starved for relationship experiencing the joy of connection and connection to their own past vocational callings. Neither of these men had grown up in contexts that would suggest that forestry would be their callings. One had grown up in the plains states and had never seen a forest. The other had grown up in a predominately urban environment and had no exposure to the undeveloped outdoors.

It was a wonderful, beautiful, and tragic moment all at once to see the relational starvation and connection walking around that yard.

For months I have spent time thinking about the relational starvation of teenagers and young adults. I am, after all, a youth minister. We built our social enterprises as student programs around life skills and job skills for teens through employment. But, over the last few years we have realized that so much of what we do has unexpected impacts on adults as well. This was one of those wonderful moments and this one story I have shared hasn’t been an isolated incident. A number of times, backyard landscaping estimates have served as a kind of informal confessional, venting space, grief share, or pastoral care session.

At the Columbia Future Forge we refer to this common surprise as “the ministry within the ministry”. It’s a second level of care and transformation that unexpectedly springs forth from the first level. It’s the beautiful unintended consequences of the Kingdom of God unfolding in real time. It’s like you planted a mustard seed and a tulip farm sprung up!

Anyway, when I got home I told my wife, “Sometimes I feel like I am running a backyard dating service for retired folks.” And this is the beauty of social enterprise. It gets you into people’s relationship backyard in a way that little else does. It pops up and springs forth in the most unexpected ways. You think you are cultivating shrubs and business, but you are really cultivating the joy of the Kingdom of God.

Before we Innovate...

One of the things that I get excited about is the fact that youth ministry circles are starting to finally seriously engage with the topic of innovation. It is much needed and way overdue. Our leaders are tired. Our models are worn. Twitter is full of self marketing and youth ministry products that are a kind of economic ecclesial echo chamber of…stuff. And most importantly we are not producing missional adult disciples of Jesus Christ who are participating in the unfolding of God’s Kingdom in the world.

So, yeah. It’s time for change.

So, it IS exciting to see what is in the wind. But, I also have some concerns.

I have been invited to participate in about 8 different Christian social enterprise/innovation events around the U.S. over the last few years. Most of them have not been related to youth ministry. My biggest concern when innovation, or innovation through Christian enterprise comes up, is that generally speaking we do a terrible job of grounding the goal of innovation in our theology. I was thinking about this again in an acute way over the last few days while simultaneously reading several books on innovation. I started developing some critical questions that I think we need to answer before any individual or org sets out to innovate.

1. Why are we innovating?- It is a most basic principle of design thinking that you design with the end in mind. We need to thoroughly explain to the church in North America WHY it needs to innovate. I have been serving in churches for 20 years and the majority of them are often clueless about the shifting ground under their feet. Give them a bit of data and rationale. You don’t need to overwhelm them, you do need to equip and educate about what is shifting.

2. Is God an Innovator?- This is a REALLY important theological question. What makes an innovator? Does God demonstrate those attributes beyond just the act of Creation? Folks need to develop a STOUT theological framework for innovation. If the orgs and programs we create are to reflect the life and movement into the world of the Christ, then we will need conceptual and scriptural grounding. And it will have to be way more than a wink, a nod, and a proof text.

3. Who are we innovating for?- Are we innovating for youth groups or churches themselves? The students within them? Are we innovating for those outside the church? Are we innovating with the least of these in mind? Are we innovating with a lens toward racial biases? It seems highly likely to me that innovation will simply conform to the regular pattern of the church’s neglect of those outside its boundaries. So, we had better think that through. We don’t want to end up simply with a new kind of more functional church or youth group that is growing/producing the wrong things!

4. What is required for innovation?- This is a critical question as well that has individual, communal, and institutional dynamics. We need to recognize that while anyone CAN innovate, innovation often springs out of practices, experiences, and ecologies fueled by the Spirit of God. And like all GOOD things in God’s world it is going to cost something in terms of blood sweat and tears to pull it off. Have we counted the cost of doing this work?

5. Who is doing the innovation?- I have been struck on a number of occasions about the degree to which innovation takes a secular humanistic point of view and assumes the best of human beings or human designed innovation processes. We have to ground all innovation in who God is rather than who we are. It is God who is innovating, not us. Period. End of story. (Philippians 2:13) To ground any creative or innovative activity in our activity is to court danger. Need I remind us that church leaders are reportedly more likely to be narcissistic than in other professions?!?! Need I remind us that most congregations have no thoughtful systems of accountability that intentionally limit power and authority?!? And do we need any reminding that American Christians tend to prefer powerful figures who are charismatic to restrained and wise ones?!?! Any process of innovation must involve safe guards and critical self-exploration at MULTIPLE levels.

6. What is the innovation process?- A number of the gatherings that I have attended have seemed to ground innovation in some assumptions that never get named. (Big thanks to my friend Andy Root for naming this for me at 4:30 this morning!) If we borrow an innovation process from say, Google, what assumptions does that process make about humans, the marketplace, the pace of transformation in human lives, and the God’s world itself? The key part about a process is that in terms of practical theology, it is our process that reveals more about what we actually believe about God than what we claim to believe. The process and programs we design are the most powerful testimonies to what we REALLY think God is like. What does our process say about God, our neighbor, and God’s world?

This is just a start. But, I think these are some critically important questions for Innovation.

Compounding Interest as a "Confidence Snowball"

Each year at the Forge we take our students through a money management training. One of the key principles of that training is explaining to them how the rule of compounding interest works in their favor in terms of investment, but works against them in terms of debt. It’s a great lesson to teach and it is one that I learned in high school from an honors English teacher of all things. He stopped class for 2 days to teach us about money. It was the only lesson on money I received from anyone in my life as a teen.

Well, the other day I was doing a Zoom call with some local high schoolers and their teacher talked about their need to have experiences. That teacher and I have discussed at length the idea that part of what the Forge is disrupting is the scarcity of experiences that many teens seem to have these days. We do this by giving them jobs, skills, and mentorship. He mentioned that these experiences compound over time in life and I began to think about compounding interest as a social mathematical factor rather than simply as a financial one.

The reality is that investing in human beings operates by the same principles. You need to invest in them early and often and keep moving forward trusting that the good work will compound over time. And just like retirement, the likely returns may not happen while you are around. My faith teaches me this idea repetitively. I serve a God who invests for the long haul rather than the short fire sale. I serve a God whose way of doing and being requires that I trust at every turn without necessarily being able to see the eventual outcome become realized. Half the time I am not even sure what the final picture may look like.

What triggered all of this was that a student’s parent had texted me the other day to let me know that simply bringing her out for a few landscape jobs has boosted her confidence. She is learning that she can earn money and that she is capable of doing things…including socializing. It’s provided an opportunity to compliment her on what she is good at: detail work, following instructions, and keeping moving.

What that mom was saying, without knowing it, was that she can see the downhill roll of a growing “confidence snowball” that is critical to every adolescent becoming a healthy adult. Each one of those experiences with caring adults, caring community, and accomplished tasks will compound over time in terms of her ability to interact, take risks, and clear hurdles. That interest will further compound if we can help this student to realize that she also has a calling to then serve others in a similar fashion. And I remain convinced that kind of outward investment is fulcrum point at which the compounding curve explodes upward. We become most fully human in helping other to become image bearers of God. We begin to lift when our sense of what matters proceeds beyond ourselves. Christ models that. Christianity insists on it.

Utmost and Teen Athletics: Leveraging Impact

This last Spring, a friend of mine for about 8 years had a unique window of opportunity open up in their life. They no longer wanted to teach at a school that they were working at due to the unhealthy leadership culture that they had experienced and needed to move on. For 20 years they had been dreaming of an alternative kind of sports league where low income students were no longer priced out of sport, where teens were taught character and ethics rather than individual aggrandizement, and where student could be engaged with healthy Christian witness and the gospel itself.

The problem at the time was that I was scheduled to go on sabbatical in just six weeks. We had a few conversations (probably too few!) and I met with my board. In just 4 weeks we raised 40K in funds (eventually 55k) and built a class-A weight and strength training facility in the back of one of our church buildings. We chose to do weights because although we wanted to work with sports teams, there was no way to build a sustainable sports model without hundreds of thousands in investment or donors. I also needed to be able to replace my friends teaching salary in a very short period of time.

We are 10 weeks into the program starting and we have 62 students participating. We have also replaced our program directors former salary in that time.

Every time I tell this story, I get lots of questions so let me just do this in bullets.

1. Who is your coach/how did you find this person?- Our director/head coach at Utmost Athletics is a former D-1 softball coach. He is seminary trained but decided that full time ministry was not for him…and yet that is what he is now doing just through different means. He was tired on the unhealth of D-1 sports and so he stepped away from that. He is well versed in strength training and has connections to the D-1 strength training community.

2. How does this connect with your overall Forge program/youth ministry?- Well, both models require adult student mentorship and engage life skills coaching. Instead of working for our landscape company or another job in the community, these students pay a fee to participate in a healthy sliding scale strength program. They are allowed to get it at low cost in exchange for participation in life development.

3. What donor/church/grant support is required to make this run?- Basically none. We needed capital to get started, but it is already self sustaining. We may need donors or grants to expand to other chapters a few years down the line, but right now the revenue that the program generates makes it self-sustaining. The unspoken beauty of this is that all students pay something.

4. What sets this apart from other weight or fitness programs?- Several things. The first is coaching ratio. All the high schoolers have a 1-4 or 1-5 coaching ratio which is much better than they would get in a normal high school gym. The program is also different because of its atmosphere. It is HIGHLY encouraging and functions as a team. People greet one another (required), they ask a life question, they cheer each other on, and develop community over occasional meals. It also is the opposite of other weight programs in the sense that it’s emphasis is on slow and healthy development of strength rather than machismo. While there are “max days” and lots of cheering, the atmosphere is not about “more, more, more”. You might consider it the opposite of the mental image cross fit. Technique is HEAVILY emphasized. Last, they talk alot about character development. Each session coaches more than the body. It is designed to coach the heart and soul as well.

5. Who are the students?- They are from all kinds of backgrounds. We wanted a program with mixed socio economics because at the Forge (the umbrella organization) we feel that students need to cross pollinate more frequently across economic zones. We also know that to have programs that are sustainable you need programs that tap into the broad spectrum of economics. We have a significant number of college age young adults as well as high school students. We also have a small but growing crop of middle schoolers who focus on other exercises.

6. What is your role in this program?- My role is to provide theological reflection on the program and development support. The Forge takes care of all grant writing tasks, donor communication, strategic planning, and book keeping. This way, our program director is free to focus on what he is good at and we have massively increased the startup efficiencies of a new ministry.

7. Is it all honey and gravy or have their been challenges?- There are massive challenges! The main one has been alignment. Although the program director and I knew each other fairly well, we did not have a lot of time to make sure we were talking about the same things when we agreed to partner. Basic questions about the gospel and mentoring are still getting sorted out. We are having to spend loads of time in a room with others to make sure that we have programmatic alignment. We are also working through decisions about whether all weight students MUST participate in the overall program or whether a certain percentage can just be “customers” who might enter the ministry side at a later time. Second, we are struggling to figure out how to properly train the coaches as both mentors and as coaches. It’s a lot to ask given that they are in the gym 3 times a week for 1.25 hours. That is a BIG volunteer time commitment.

8. Why Did you Do This?- Over the last year or so I have been reading a lot about the concept of leveraged impact in the social enterprise world. Stanford has been leading the way in this kind of work. Read some of their stuff here. My sense was that I could spend years growing the core ministry of the Forge, or I could leverage our way to greater impact by partnering creatively with other like minded non-profits. Utmost Athletics was one of those non-profits. We made the leap this fall from about 25 students to 75 students. While I am not remotely all about numbers I do want to leverage greater ministry impact and increase the efficient startup of redemptive enterprises. I also did this because I was acutely aware of the need/potential of youth sports. It is both a huge outreach area as well as a massive economic engine. It’s also pretty much an idol. Don’t believe me? Read this.

The Renewed Medieval Glebe: A Vehicle for Kingdom Work

              As a part of my sabbatical this summer, I headed with my family to explore some of the places where I spent summers and where I was born. As I was running one morning in Arlington, Virginia I found myself running on the familiar "Glebe Road". I had heard the term again in the colonial episcopal church in Williamsburg, Virginia. During the tour they continually to "glebe lands". I knew that the term “glebe” was an ecclesiastical one, but I didn’t really know what it meant. As it turns out, not only is it interesting, but it is also pretty relevant to Christian social enterprise.

              The glebe is a medieval term that refers to a system of ministerial support for clergy that existed primarily in England, Scotland, and in the colonies in America. The glebe was essentially a patch of land (or strips of land) that was granted to the localized church by the local royal authority or by the colonial governor and was designed to serve as support for the minister. Generally the glebe functioned as agricultural land, but it was also sometimes land that was developed with mills or manufacturing works.

              The system was one that gradually and partially replaced the tithe system. In England, in which property ownership is a bit of a guarded secret, it is hard to know how much land is actually owned by the church.  Since about 1976 all glebe land was transferred from the local parishes to more regional bodies so that churches that had no glebe lands could equally benefit from the rents acquired by those clergy whose churches did have glebe lands. Even today in the Church of Scotland there are still functioning, though underused glebes. Today, many glebes have become community parks, gardens, and other entities that are now owned by the state rather than the church. The particular difficulty in the U.K. is that the church and state are not separate entities.  This always meant that the church and the state have functioned in mutually supportive fashion in some remarkable (an often times unhealthy) ways. The church often sacrificed its prophetic voice around issues of justice and state sanctioned violence and the state relied upon the church to give the appearance of divine sanction to its actions. Now to the point.

              The reality is that in the United States, the level of both tithing and attendance are on the decrease. I am not actually primarily concerned with what this means for income, career, or even survival of the institution as we know it. There are parts of me that are actually excited that aspects of each of those might be passing away. But, I am concerned that social work and Kingdom witness continue to go forward no matter what the status of the church as institution is. I continue to believe that the Christian story (and by that I mean the testimony of scripture and the narrative arc of that story) has a unique witness for humanity and culture when understood properly. If we want that unique witness to go forward and continue to impact our world, then we will need to find alternative ways to fund that work and witness.  Here is why I think the glebe concept might matter to that coming/present reality and what I am proposing.

              I think that we need to begin to create (perhaps using social enterprise) a new kind of glebe system in the United States that can help support clergy, but we need to do so in a way that does not simply provide for the clergy or the church. And yes, for those objecting already,  I do think that some kind of educated clergy are necessary for the health of the church.  What we need is a system that simultaneously provides for the clergy, but also uses that glebe to benefit the local community and those within that local community that find themselves in need.

              Obviously, it does not make sense to create a new agricultural model of the glebe. For starters, the agricultural state of affairs in our nation is inordinately complicated and is no longer the small parcel affair that it once was. Mechanization, consolidation, and agricultural specialization have made farming its own industry. The romantic notion of the American farm, whether in country music or children’s books, is garbage. But, what might make some sense are alternative economic models of the glebe. One might for instance, create a housing/rental model in which low income families are given reduced rent so that they might save for a down payment on a home. Or, we might create a commercial space that offers co-working space for both small non-profits and for profit entities and brings in retired business people to offer meaningful mentorship. While I was in the U.K. recently I learned about a Catholic charity that buys and refurbishes trailer parks that are run down and often occupied by low income families. In theory, the minister could function as a kind of property manager (if they are “tent making”) and they may be able to be an important convener of community there or perhaps minister to the trailer park community. A certain percentage of the housing could be fair market value while other portions could be low cost.

            Another church I encountered in Edinburgh, Scotland is collecting all the discarded pews from decommissioned Scottish churches and crafting them into various pieces of furniture and craft goods while giving jobs to folks that are struggling to find employment. A similar model of carpentry might be created where the church owns a kind of co-working craft space or "makers space". Part of the day, the space would be used for manufacturing craft goods and providing jobs. The other part of the day it could be used by local wood workers who could then have access to the tools and space they need to work on particular carpentry or metal projects. Not only might this provide the kind of space where craft workers could work on larger projects, but it would also provide space where craft workers could collaborate and create community themselves. In many cases it would seem advisable that the clergy would not own the glebe or be able to unilaterally dispose of the glebes assets. This was a problem in England for instance into the 1800’s in that clergy could actually sell off the glebe to line their own pockets.  The modern glebe, by contrast, would be held in trust by the governing body of the church or the appropriate denominational body. This might also help provide some boundaries for responsible use of the glebe, making sure that it has a dual purpose of salary and ministry rather than simply benefitting the institution or the minister.

              One of the potential upsides in the United States that such a system MIGHT create is that it would allow ministers greater economic freedom from their individual congregants. Many clergy are aware of the tension that is created by the fact that their salaries are paid by their congregants. This is not all bad of course, but it does sometimes create a dynamic where every minister has to ask the question when preaching or teaching, “Just how prophetic can I afford to be?” In other words, the minister is always caught in the dynamic of weighing out preaching what needs to be preached with trying not to upset or irritate their congregation too much. At times this can produce a healthy check to the minister, but at other times it can produce a kind of status quo maintenance that is unhelpful to the forwarding of God’s justice and reconciliation.  

          Another benefit of a new glebe system might also allow the local minister a way to explore and employ their own unique gifts and talents for the benefit of Kingdom work. So, imagine a minister that is superb at making craft brews (As a Northwesterner, this is right up our alley).  They might be able to create a collective brewery space in which local small scale craft brewers can brew together and create community space. They might be able to sell the beer to benefit various local charities or ministries.  Or, we might think of a minister who loves designing board games or is superb with app design. Ordinarily, it would be difficult for most ministers to utilize that sort of talent within the life of their church. Many ministers feel that there are parts of their interests or talents that are excluded from valid ministry. They can often feel confined within their churches professionally or socially. The neglect of social networks outside the church and the neglect of unique interest areas and hobbies are often listed as reasons that clergy burnout over time. It might be that the glebe system leads to greater satisfaction within a calling because the minister could feel like he/she can utilize all of themselves in serving a local context.  A more creative exploration of the minister’s gifts and talents could create a myriad of creative missional expressions of the gospel. It’s a way of expanding the playing field of ministry.

          The thing about a modernized glebe system might not require many churches to actually acquire or significantly develop any new spaces. Many churches,sepecially those that are older, are optimally located in town centers or near public spaces. Many churches have underutilized spaces that could be re-deployed or dual deployed for Kingdom purposes. Several years ago I brought several small non-profits into our youth center in order to provide them with collaborative office space. All of them are youth related non-profits.  All this would mean that churches might be able to do quality Kingdom work without having to take any radical steps to creating a kind of modern glebe space.

              A difficulty that emerges in all of this equation (and there are many) is that this requires ministers to either have/develop certain specific skills in order to create or manage specific expression of ministry. Obviously you probably could not have a minister managing a wood working space if they have no wood working skills. Part of the implications of this kind of system is that it will require seminaries to either alter the way in which they educate theologically (reducing the amount of time to get a degree) or it will require them to provide additional skills development as a part of their education. They may need to train clergy in more specific business skills, trade skills, or leadership skills.  This burden might also fall to local churches. Clergy might be expected to use their study leave early in their ministries to acquire certification in things like property management, basic business finance, bookkeeping, etc.

              In the end, this growing reality of resource scarcity will hit all of our churches in the next 30-50 years. Some churches remain solvent. Some churches are already neck deep in the sustainability problem and many rural churches are struggling to provide clergy for their people. Other churches have clergy, but cannot sustain them beyond their first case of burnout because they are paid at such low levels. Quality clergy tend to be quality people and the simple truth is that you cannot compete for the kind of people you want to be clergy in a local community if you cannot adequately compensate them. The ancient glebe system might offer a kind of helpful framework for how the church in North America (and elsewhere) might continue to forward a missional Kingdom witness and possibly even enable that witness to be more authentic, prophetic, and gospel centered than it is in the current (but dying) economic system.

The Matryoshka Haus: A Community of Innovation

About a year ago I was made aware of a group of folks working on solving social problems together as a human network. The place was called Matryoshka. If you don't know what a Matryoshka is, its a Russian nesting doll. On two different legs of my trip to the U.K. I was able to meet with folks from Matryoshka to better understand who they are and what they are doing. Let's start with the basics.

Matryoshka is a community that began with the work of a woman named Shannon Hopkins. Creatively working in the U.K. she created a pub initiative that helped fight human trafficking and a creative arts project called, "Doxology". She learned she had a knack for this kind of social impact work and that she was adept at gathering others who were interested in this kind of work as well. Overt time a community began to develop of people who were skilled at collaboratively working on engaging social problems in area.

Today, Matryoshka is housed in its own space in the Canary wharf area of London. They have a co-working space that includes folks inside and outside Matryoshka's direct network. Many of these folks are engaged with Christian faith, but others are not. That characteristic is not considered a necessity to solving pressing issues. What is clear to me is that their faith does inform both the work that they do and the way that they gather in intentional community. Matryoshka uses this co-working model to sustain part of its operations, but the majority of their sustainability comes from what they produce.

Matryoshka has begun to develop tools to help non-profits create solutions to intractable social problems and to figure out how to better measure the impact of their work. They sell these tools to organizations throughout the U.K. and the U.S. as well.

There are a number of organizations that are designing tools to help faith based organizations ideate and innovate, but what makes Matryoshka unique is that the people that design their tools are people who are on the ground and have experience practicing social innovation. They are actually engaged in the work on the ground.

Many folks who are beginning to design tools in the U.S. have not themselves actually built any social change organizations or enterprises. It is far more likely that they are able to design tools because they have the time to do so (afforded by their institution) and access to larger institutional funding. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but I often wish that practitioners of innovation were the ones designing tools rather than exclusively research institutions or large ministry companies. My own sense is that if practitioners were at least more heavily involved in the design process and testing process that significantly different tools and ideation processes might be developed.

My hope is that research institutions will begin to creatively partner with those that are doing the innovation work to generate ideas and gatherings that might help other individuals do similar kinds of work more effectively. Social innovators who are on the ground take a ton of risk and invest loads of blood, sweat, and tears in their work and they should have a seat at the table to share their expertise when they can. They not only have a clearer sense of what is possible, but also are the embodiement of the passion and ethos that is required to make this kind of work happen. That spirit, or elan, is not something that is reproducible and I am not sure that it is possible to do this kind of work without it. Last, its worth noting that in Matryoshka's early days it was Christian institutions that pulled funding away from their trafficking initiative because it overemphasized social justice. It is important to understand that many Christian practitioners of social innovation are seeking to avoid the church and have often been burned by it. One of the reasons that I think involving and funding practitioners matters is that generally speaking Christian companies and learning institutions are generally not very good at finding, reaching, and involving these sorts of outsiders.

For Youth Ministry Innovators, the hope is that we can begin to utilize some of the tools that Matryoshka has designed as we work with churches and youth ministries that are seeking to impact their localized communities through the work of their churches. I also hope we can be a helpful conversation partner with Matryoshka to help them reflect theologically on the work that they are doing.

Regardless of what happens, they are doing amazing Kingdom work.  They work collaboratively on problems that each of them faces, they have common gatherings and meals together, and they have a well developed sense of their values:

-They believe that social innovation is a tangible expression of God's Kingdom.

-All people are designed to do good work.

-Hospitality is critical and their community is shaped by the radical welcome of God in Christ.

-Christian Social Innovation is a particular kind of innovation that is guided by the life and work of Jesus.

-The process of innovation involves critical discernment, imagintion, creation, and inspiring future expressions of Kingdom work in others.

Matryoshka is a fabulous organization and one of the most unique expressions of the gospel that I have ever seen. We hope to continue to partner with them in some way moving forward.