The text came in at midday on a Thursday. It was a parent writing in ALL CAPS. Ordinarily, this would worry me. But this text was different.
It was a mother thanking me because our ministry had managed to string together a few paid jobs for her teenage daughter. Just before Christmas, her daughter had reached out, looking to make some Christmas money. With some work and the generosity of some of our customers, her Christmas wish had come true.
But it was her mother who felt the gift most acutely, and she wanted us to know. She saw more benefits from the experience than just the money her daughter had earned. She sensed her child’s confidence growing, and she saw signs that physical labor was improving her daughter’s health and mood.
This is not uncommon in the ministry we do. My church is home to several entrepreneurial ministries, including a teen landscaping company and a strength-training program.
During the pandemic, we have had to temporarily shut down both enterprises; we’ve lost employees, suspended shared meals and had to rebuild the whole weight facility outdoors — twice. But it’s been worth it.
Students often say that participating in the weights program and the landscaping work is the highlight of their week. For many, it’s the one chance in the week to feel normal. For others, it makes the difference between a depressive day and a decent one.
At every turn, we have discovered the accidental blessings of these two ministries. Because they involve physical activity and enable students to have distanced interaction outdoors with one another and with adults, they have been of immense benefit to everyone involved.
And through all of those dynamic signs of the kingdom, I have sensed a deeper theological truth that COVID-19 is teaching us: the physical matters.
Over the past year, we have certainly been reminded of our mortality. COVID has demonstrated the transience of life on this side of the kingdom of God. And sadly, it has also demonstrated the devaluation of life in our society.
But those reminders show not just that we are frail and mortal creatures in death; they show that we are embodied creatures in life.
Every day, people are confronted with the fact that we cannot greet or hug or grieve in physical ways that would ordinarily serve as a kind of spark or salve. So much communal connection usually happens through corporeal means.
For several centuries, Protestantism has been accused of being lost in ideas. Artists and mystics have rightly accused Protestants of practicing a kind of disembodied form of Christianity. Many times, we try to think our way to faith rather than feeling it or even enacting it.
The irony of this mental trap is that we serve the Christ whose entire entrepreneurial expedition into the world was filled with physical risk. It was tangible. And while the accusations about our cerebral tendencies made sense to me previously, it took a COVID Christmas and a student work project to make me see how much the corporeal matters — to God and to us. Even our liturgy — stiff though it can be at times — has a physicality. And without it, we can feel disconnected.
As we approach Lent, Good Friday and Easter, this point is being driven home again. God doesn’t intend to discard his creatures or their physicality. God intends to magnify that creaturely nature in the resurrection of the body.
Resurrected spiritual bodies are still bodies, after all!
And indeed, every bit of creation matters to God. If Scripture is to be believed, God intends to redeem every last particle. If the physical matters to God, it ought to matter to us.
I think part of what inspired the text I received from that ecstatic mother was the encounter with an intuitive theological truth that physical creatures need physicality. Christ does not redeem humanity through disembodied truth or celestial empathetic “feels” beamed from on high.
Rather, the God we serve was willing to be accommodated in the human bodies of a Jewish child and a Jewish teen mom. God does not just feel passionately toward humanity. Rather, God “passions” for humanity in the form of bodily suffering.
People keep talking about the need to realize that there will never be a “return to normal” in the church after COVID. I think that might be true.
Perhaps in this time of physical denial, we should design ministries that tap into this aspect of our shared story. My ministry accidentally (or providentially) mimics the labor of a Christ who both labored in this world and was labored into the world in the most human of ways.
What if we began to frame ministries that more intentionally engaged our physicality? Could such embodied ministries rekindle the connections that feel so distant during this time? Could more-physical ministries participate more fully in Christ’s redemption of the physical and foster greater community?
I know one mom who thinks they might.
Late last May, a friend contacted me with an idea: he wanted to quit his job and start an affordable, faith-based strength-training program. I told him I was on board.
To make his dream happen, we needed to raise $50,000 for equipment, come up with a business plan, persuade our church it was a good idea, clear a 1,500-square-foot warehouse of vans and junk, install the weight equipment, and begin recruiting the necessary students — all before I headed out for a sabbatical in a little over a month’s time. We got it done.
Why would I — a youth pastor and Christian social entrepreneur with several ventures of my own underway — drop everything to do this?
I proposed that my organization try to launch this dream because I could see that it could magnify the impact of our church-based nonprofit, The Columbia Future Forge.
The Future Forge already was making gospel impact on the lives of teens and young adults, getting them ready for life after high school. But for a while, I had been thinking that we needed to find ways to partner creatively with other like-minded organizations.
So we decided to form an experimental partnership with the strength-training program — called Utmost Athletics — under the umbrella of the existing nonprofit. We already had a teen life-skills, job-skills and mentorship program that engaged students in our county. Students in that core program can choose to take part in our other programs, such as our landscaping business. Now they’d have an additional option.
Utmost Athletics seemed like a great partner. My friend Ty Singleton, who had worked for years coaching athletics, had decided that God was calling him to transform sports culture. He was disillusioned with the massive industry that student athletics had become. He saw that increasingly, students were conditioned to be in it for themselves. Some were being sold a bill of goods by local sports teams about mythical college scholarships. And low-income students were increasingly priced out of sports altogether.
I’ve seen it in my own church. One family confessed that they had spent at least $80,000 on their child’s athletic career and were now struggling to pay for college.
My friend was tired of all of this. He conceived of an athletic program that minimized costs and travel. Like us, he wanted to make a difference in the lives of teens and young adults.
While his ultimate goal is to create sports teams that employ a new coaching model, he decided to start with a sustainable strength-training program that would engage students through faith-based mentoring.
Given my organization’s focus on helping overprogrammed, overscheduled and undertrained teenagers prepare for the next stage of life, my friend’s idea seemed to be a good collaborative fit.
It had the potential for “networked impact” — synergistic progress on significant social problems through the networking of resources and ideas.
The conversation about networked impact is not a new one. Folks in the world of social enterprise have been talking about increased impact on social problems for years.
As I thought about how we might build our network, I realized that, as an established organization, we could provide partners such as Utmost Athletics guidance in mentorship, bookkeeping, and startup and life-skills training.
And by collaborating, we might all develop better strategies about how to connect with and minister to teens who are preparing to transition to the next phase of their lives.
Our partnership with Utmost Athletics has done all of this. Utmost is now essentially a wing of Future Forge, operating under our 501(c)(3). We have helped it get off the ground, providing startup funding and space, as well as business strategy, bookkeeping, and grant acquisition assistance.
Some of the Future Forge core donors have wanted to help with the Utmost startup, and we have students who take part in the two programs at the same time.
The cross-pollination is exciting, but it also has its challenges.
One is that it requires a high degree of trust and good communication. Since launching the program, we have had to spend hours coordinating efforts — and reconciling differences — on matters ranging from setting up office and recruitment procedures to hammering out terminology and mission alignment.
What do we mean in our life together when we say “mentoring,” “gospel” or “evangelism,” for instance? Each of us has to balance the tension of not compromising our core mission theology while also trying to move forward together. The relationship has caused me and my organization to move faster on certain ideas than we would have on our own and also to tinker with some aspects of our existing model to make the relationship work.
It’s not easy to enter into these vulnerable and risky conversational spaces when the income of the people involved is at stake and you are dealing with your callings.
While it was helpful that the founder of Utmost and I had a relationship of trust prior to this partnership, we have still needed to develop our relationship along the way. Our conversations require prayer, trust and careful listening. It has taken us hours and hours to work toward a relative degree of alignment, but so far we seem to be getting there and reaching more students in our county in the process.
It remains to be seen how the kinds of partnerships that our ministry is forging will work over the long haul.
What I do know is that right now my organization has been able to help a friend who wanted to pursue his calling. He’s now making an equivalent wage in a new startup that is already self-sustaining. He is also helping us further hone our goals for equipping and training students and mentors in the faith.
We don’t have true metrics of success in place yet, but we have reached an initial sustainability, we’re coming together for shared meals, and we’re moving toward further mentorship and study of Scripture. What’s more, we went from working with 23 students last year to about 75 students this fall.
Those seem like promising signs of hope amid the chaos of a short-runway startup. It’s a delightful scramble.