(Monday) Media Recs: A playground, a video, a mantra
Plus a scheduling announcement
Colleagues, I'm sharing the usual Friday post today since I figured you wouldn't be doing a lot of this sort of reading on the holiday. Relatedly, I will be away on vacation for the next two weeks. I'll return to the newsletter's new production schedule on July 21. Thank you, as always, for supporting A (Christian) Formation Playbook.
'Northern California church launches outdoor play cafe as safe, inviting community hub' (Episcopal News Service)
If you missed this new ministry feature from ENS, make sure you check it out. I love the idea for a church-sponsored playground café, and I love even more the story of its gradually coming into being. This is not an "if you build it, they will come" situation. It's clear the Rev. Christy Laborda Harris (who I know a teeny tiny bit from our California days) and others put in the relational work over many years to build the community before the more brick-and-mortal aspects came into place. Since ministry is so contextual, I always think stories like this one are best thought of as models for process and posture rather than product. I hope many ministry leaders will be inspired to action by this story—without trying to treat it as a blueprint.
Intergenerational series on Building Faith
On a recent coaching call, a client and I were talking about how persistent it still is for folks to operationally define Christian formation as basically "age specific church programming that isn't primarily worship." (Interested in coaching? Let's talk.) In fact, much of the best formation is intergenerational. Sarah Bentley Allred and Wendy Claire Barrie are sharing some of their early work on the Roots & Wings project over at Building Faith, and the posts on the ages-and-stages model and the intergenerational model are resource-rich and definitely worth your time. Don't sleep on Wendy and Steve's video.
A helpful mantra for the AI era
My friend and onetime CPE classmate Cantor Matthew Austerklein shared a great post recently in his Beyond the Music newsletter. In writing about the wisdom cantors have to offer in the AI era, he shared this slogan:
Of course, there are some things we can do with AI rather than giving to AI. But as a guiding principle, this one seems deeply true to me. I don't know how the world is going to change in the coming years, but I know I don't want to forget skills I've worked really hard to develop and hone.
