Don’t flay the sheep.

What I’m reading (and paying attention to) this week

1. Just to get my brain thinking about the new call, yesterday I finished Family-Based Youth Ministry, by Mark DeVries. The basic idea: family will always have a stronger influence on a teenager (even if the teenager is loathe to admit this!) than a dynamic youth worker. Youth ministry must include parents. And, youth ministry must connect teens to the other people in their church, too. Great book.
    
2. Children Matter, by a whole bunch of authors. A big, fat compliation of ideas, theory, and theology about ministry to children. Again, to get me thinking about the new call.
    
3. I haven’t started it yet, but sitting in my bag is Lost Icons: Reflections on Cultural Bereavement, a book of essays by Rowan Williams (what a title!). I read it a few years ago, and I want to re-read the essay about childhood.
    
4. The latest addition to the pile of baby books is Baby 411. Maybe I could put this off for a few weeks yet, but I think it is time to start familiarizing myself with the intricacies of such subjects as diaper contents and baby sleep patterns. This book is so much more straightforward than anything I’ve read, and funny too. The funny part helps because it keeps me from feeling completely freaked out at the prospect of being responsible for the quickly-coming little one.
    
5. It’s like a car accident I can’t pull my eyes away from: the CRC(NA) Synod  (national gathering) is meeting this week in Grand Rapids, MI. My plan was to  largely ignore the event, other than a little long distance cheering for friends who were being approved as candidates for ministry. Besides, the General Assembly of the PC(USA) is meeting beginning this week, and I thought I’d try to pay more attention to them (remember—I’m currently a minister in both denominations). But then I got sucked in: Preaching to the Choir, the blog of another woman pastor in the CRC who is monitoring things from Grand Rapids, alerted me to the issues about women in office that were coming to the floor of Synod. So now, I’m listening to the live feed on the web.
    
6. And in an effort to read something light, I’ve been working my way through Frek and the Elixir. Erik recommended it as “Harry Potter, but with biochemistry instead of magic.” I’m not sure I’m going to make it through—every time one plot line seems to resolve, another one takes off, and all of these separate plots are not well inter-laced at the edges. Or, maybe I just don’t like biochemistry that much.

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