How well do you Yada?

Here's a little snippet of our weekly high school leaders email I'm trying to send out on a weekly basis. 

For your heart…

            If most of you don’t know by know you’ll find out that I’m a geek when it comes to the Bible. It probably borders on an unhealthy level if that’s even possible. Let me explain. (and hopefully this will feed your soul today too! ) Let’s talk Hebrew…

יֹודֵעַ (yo-dey-ah) like the little green guy from star wars but with an A sound.

This is the verb yada meaning "to know" but written in the participle form meaning "knowing" a present action. In Hebrew the verb yada means much more than to know. It means to have an intimate and interactive relationship with its subject. http://www.ancient-hebrew.org/emagazine/018.html

This is the kind of relationship God wants with each one of us. An intimate AND interactive relationship. Which side of that coin do you tend to land on? Jesus encouraged us to love God (intimate) and our neighbors (interactive) As we work with teenagers please please please remember that it’s out of our yada relationship with God that we seek to see the live of students transformed.

Thanks for being the kind of people willing to go into the trenches of teenage life and invest!

Resolve for Monday

Every Monday I'm going to post one of Jonathan Edwards resolutions. He penned these while still a very young man and used them to guide his life. What am I using to guide me, my family, my ministry???

32. Resolved, To be strictly and firmly faithful to my trust, that, in Prov. xx. 6. ‘A faithful man, who can find?’ may not be partly fulfilled in me. 

•  "My God, I bless thee that thou hast given me the eye of faith, to see thee as Father, To know thee as a covenant God, to experience thy love planted in me. For faith is a grace of union by which i spell out my entitlement to thee; faith casts my anchor upwards where I trust in thee and engage thee to be my Lord. Be pleased to live and more within me, breathing in my prayers, inhabiting my praises, speaking in my words, moving in my actions, living in my life, causing me to grow in grace. Thy bounteous goodness has helped me believe, but my faith is weak and wavering, its light is dim, its steps tottering, its increase slow, its backsliding frequent. It should scale the heavens but lies grovelling in the dust. Lord fan this divine spark into glowing flam."  (From: The Valley of Vision; A collection of puritan prayers and devotions. ) 
• If we put faithfulness in our callings at the top of our priorities then all others things fall into alignment. This week ask Jesus to show you through the scripture what it means to be faithful to what God has laid on your heart. 

The Numbers Game...

It's the number one question I get asked by ministers, priests, friends, strangers, parents, and leaders."So how many kids do you have coming to youth group these days?" My favorite answer is... "Our semester is going great we have a real healthy number hearing the gospel." This usually confuses the person asking because it's just as vague of an answer as the question they don't realize they are asking.

The number question is hard because it's the quickest and dirtiest way to measure. (note i didn't say measure success.)  For example I could give out beer at youth group this Sunday get a million teenagers and the Mt. Pleasant Police BUT according to "justification by numbers" it would be a success! A million teenagers would hear the gospel AND I'm sure most of the local police force. Wouldn't that be great? (Then I could start a vibrant prison ministry from the inside out!!) A great teacher I heard once talked about this in the context of John 6. Jesus starts out by planting a mega church by the Sea of Galilee with 5,000 men. Not bad according to the numbers game. Exactly one chapter later and Jesus Christ only has 11 guys left and a devil willing to follow him.

Now I'm not saying don't count. I think it's important to track attendance however what we do with that information will either glorify Jesus or glorify ourselves. 

Below is one of the best articles I've read on this condition it appeared over at The Resurgence.com and was written by  Dustin Neeley...

Church Math

As kids, I bet most of us reading this post probably hated math—all the subtracting, borrowing, and dividing. These are all words that make pastors nervous. No wonder teachers called them "problems."
But as we aged and began ministry, something miraculous happened and we suddenly fell in love with numbers. In fact, we learned the whole new subject called "church math," like baptisms, budgets, and Sunday service attendance. The number of things to count became almost endless and almost fun—that is, as long as the numbers were up. But if the numbers went down, especially the Sunday attendance number, our spirits would often go down with them. And that is a problem indeed.

Our Relationship With Attendance

I am not against counting things when it comes to church. The old adage which says, "We count people because people count" may be trite, but it is true. We should count the things that we keep track of. But all of us will readily admit that there is something suspicious going on with our relationship with the attendance figure. I believe it is because, at times, we look to it to justify ourselves and our ministries.
The equations on the chalkboard of our heart usually go something like this:
Lots of people = Visible success in ministry = I am happy
Fewer people = Failure in ministry = I am depressed
Anybody else think that math is a little fuzzy?
Here are a few tips to help us clear things up.

1. Define yourself by what Jesus did on the cross, not what you do on Sunday.

Though we all know this is true, we often struggle to believe it when it counts. To see change happen, we must do what it takes to write this gospel truth on our hearts, so that it is ready when we need it most. As we grow in our ability to use the gospel in daily life, we will be better equipped to fight the enemy's lies.

2. Be careful with counting.

As I said before, I'm not telling you not to keep track of things. I’m simply saying that we recognize attendance records can be like handguns—helpful in some situations and dangerous in others. Ask yourself questions like, “Why am I watching the attendance so closely? For Jesus or for me?” Remember, our worth as followers of Jesus and as pastors is not wrapped up in how many people attend our services, but in the gospel.

3. Be careful with how you define success.

Though our “bigger is better” mentality may tempt us to think otherwise, a big crowd doesn’t necessarily signify a faithful ministry. In fact, as we study the Scriptures we see a number of “successful” preachers who weren’t always surrounded by huge crowds—Isaiah, Jeremiah, and at times, even Jesus. While we can take heart in this fact, we must also guard ourselves from going too far in the other direction as well. Pastoring a small church doesn’t necessarily make us more faithful, just as pastoring a large church doesn’t make us unfaithful.

4. Be part of the solution instead of part of the problem.

Nearly every pastor I know struggles with this issue. Will you join me in serving your fellow strugglers and not let “So what are you guys running these days?” be the first question you ask your pastor friends the next time you talk to them? Ask about their soul, their family, or how they are engaging their community. As we do, I think we will do the kingdom a great service.
Our justification is in the gospel, not how many people attend our services. What are you looking to for your justification today?

 

Mutants and Fake Christians

Interesting article was sent to me from CNN which was titled..."Author: More teens becoming 'fake' Christian" As I spent some time reading the paragraphs I was really encouraged that the discussion of moral therapeutic deism (here's a previous post where I've mentioned MTD before) was coming to the surface. If you're not sure what moral therapeutic deism is here's a quick definition : If I'm morally good God acts as the big therapist in the sky to make my life easier.  Here's a video that explains it better.


The article goes on to say that 

"Dean drew her conclusions from what she calls one of the most depressing summers of her life. She interviewed teens about their faith after helping conduct research for a controversial study called the National Study of Youth and Religion.

The study, which included in-depth interviews with at least 3,300 American teenagers between 13 and 17, found that most American teens who called themselves Christian were indifferent and inarticulate about their faith.

The study included Christians of all stripes -- from Catholics to Protestants of both conservative and liberal denominations. Though three out of four American teenagers claim to be Christian, fewer than half practice their faith, only half deem it important, and most can't talk coherently about their beliefs, the study found.
Many teenagers thought that God simply wanted them to feel good and do good -- what the study's researchers called "moralistic therapeutic deism."

This make me so grateful for our confirmation classes which time and time again see students stand up in front of hundreds and articulate their orthodox faith.

Honestly the discussion of moralistic therapeutic deism was the highlight of the article. The rest of it seemed to point the finger at others, deny the sovereignty of God, deny the power of a truly regenerate heart, and ultimately ended up plugging Dean's new book.  It brings up some good points but doesn't offer much.


Props to Joel for the heads up on this.

A Fun Guessing Game

Can you guess the knee with the torn ACL??

I'll keep you posted as details come.

Buckets

I had the chance a while ago to hear a well known speaker talk about how they prepare their message. It was good as they talked about the disipline of study and of illustrations. One thing however that stood out to me was that they also had developed a system to collect bits, clippings, and other useful experiances into what they called "buckets" then in the preparation phase of planning they could go and draw from these to add flesh to their message.

Right now I'm in the middle of Doug Fields and Duffy Robins book "Speaking to Teenagers" It's a good read and a reminder of the need for faithful message prep. They too have a chapter on collecting illustrations and hooks so that those listening are able to hold on and engage. Instead of set times of collecting they emphesise the need to develop a constant radar for such opportunities.

Interestingly enough the website The Art Of Manliness had an article on the pocket notebook. One historic profession they highlighted was that of the minister. Here's a great section from "The Methodist Review from 1907 that encourages young ministers to have a notebook in their study to seize every "germinant thought"


The article reads...

“Have upon your study table, always accessible, a good-sized substantially bound blank book. Whenever a germinant thought comes seize your pen and write it down. Such thoughts will come out of your special course of literary reading, out of your cursory scanning of current fiction, even out of the five-minute glance given to the morning paper, out of nowhere and from anywhere. Thought-compelling suggestions entirely foreign to the sermon on which you are just now engaged will frequently send you to your treasure book, and without any damage to present preparation you will scribble down a page of matter that will set you on fire at some future day just when you are in need of inspiration and help. Have also a special vest-pocket notebook and let nothing escape you.” -The Methodist Review, 1907

I found it interesting and wonder how sites like Evernote could add a technology spin on the age old quest of collecting buckets? ? 


p.s. if you use something like Evernote let me know. I haven't been able to get a grasp on it yet.

Resolve for Monday

Every Monday I'm going to post one of Jonathan Edwards resolutions. He penned these while still a very young man and used them to guide his life. What am I using to guide me, my family, my ministry???

31. Resolved, Never to say any thing at all against any body, but when it is perfectly agreeable to the highest degree of christian honor, and of love to mankind, agreeable to the lowest humility, and sense of my own faults and failings, and agreeable to the golden rule; often, when I have said any thing against any one, to bring it to, and try it strictly by, the test of this Resolution. 

•  How we treat others says much of our view of God. In this resolution the young Jonathan Edwards creates kind of a goal post for how he should speak of others. On side of the goal is honor and love the other side is his own sense of his "faults and failings". In general how do you treat those around you? 
• When was the last time you had to catch yourself from saying something that wouldn't have made it between those goal post?
• These are Edwards boundaries for the way he speaks to people. What boundaries do you have set up in your life?  Maybe in other areas?

Youth Leader's Overnight Pt. 2

Here's some more pics from our overnight last weekend as we prepare for a great semester. The pics show a lot of the fun and community we had. We also talked a about big picture vision, what part leaders play, and what are some healthy practices in youth ministry. It was a great time of equipping and team building. Below I'll include my notes from the section I lead.










Goals for this weekend are two.
1. Is the belief that discipleship and community are inexpressibly linked. So as we grow in community the outpouring of that is discipleship.
• Luke 10:27
o And he answered, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself."
• 2. Equip you as leaders who love and are called to work with teenagers.
Here’s the frame work for the next day or so…


Before we talk about big picture stuff need to give thanks because God has been ineradicably good to us.
• We are coming off a solid summer where we saw steady attendance and actually new people joining in over summer. That doesn’t happen.
• We saw a great New Wine Youth come and go all of which is pouring into our students and helping them grow.
• We are ready to launch a great semester

• We have some great doors opening up for us as we look at equipping families to disciple their teenagers
• New student life groups are set to launch this fall.
• Phil is on board as our new middle school ministry leader.
• We have a small army of new leaders who have felt a call into serving youth in various capacities from simply praying for them to ….
• We are launching a student Alpha to evangelistically reach high school students
• Phil is putting together a team to reach the Moultrie Middle School campus with the Gospel as we have a strategic location near there.
• We’ve got some great things in the hopper for Basic and Impact this Fall.

To sum all that up is to say that God is good and I believe he has some great things in store for us this season of ministry. If I were to summer all that up, to give us some direction for our mission it would be that our hope, our goal, our prayer is to see families and their teenagers transformed by the power and presence of Jesus Christ.

Every teaching, every foursquare game, every Facebook conversation, every postcard, every cherry limeade is to see that happen.
• Now how that happens is fairly simple it’s Jesus.
The Spirit causes growth in people.
For our part…
• We can’t make fire, we can’t make electricity but we can flip light switches, and we can use lighters. We then have faith that fire and electricity will be there.

2 Corinthians 3:17-18 (English Standard Version)
17Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. 18And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.

We present them before the spirit and we see them changed. Our desire is to see that life transformation happen in two ways it happens both deep and wide…
• Deep and Wide

Youth Leader's Overnight

This about sums up my weekend. Really it was a great weekend of celebrating our youth leaders community and getting excited about all that God is doing in the youth ministry at St. Andrews Mount Pleasant

Boy glues self to bed to avoid school

Here's a throw back blog post from `08...

Boy glues self to bed to avoid school.

MONTERREY, Mexico (AFP) - A 10-year-old Mexican boy glued his hand to his bed to avoid going back to school after the Christmas break, authorities said Monday.
"I thought if I was glued to the bed, they couldn't make me go to school," the boy, Diego, told AFP. "I didn't want to go, the holidays were so much fun."
"I remembered my mom had bought a very strong glue," he said of the industrial strength shoe glue he used to stick his hand to the bed's metal headboard, where he stayed stuck for two hours.
for the rest click here.

Thought it fitting seeing how everyone goes back to school tomorrow. 

Resolve for Monday

Every Monday I'm going to post one of Jonathan Edwards resolutions. He penned these while still a very young man and used them to guide his life. What am I using to guide me, my family, my ministry???


30. Resolved, To strive every week to be brought higher in religion, and to a higher exercise of grace, than I was the week before. 

•  One prayer I remember from soon after God saved me was when someone prayed "Thank you for this next breath of air." I can remember thinking to myself how thankful  am I for even this next breath. It was humbling and challenging. Pause for a moment right now and thank your creator and savior for something. 
• I've been thinking about roots lately and how the in Matthew 13 Jesus talks about soil. Is the soil I'm planted in causing me to put down deep roots deeper "then I was the week before."?
• How do you "strive" perhaps today is a good day to ask the spirit of God to help you strive. It's only through him do we even get the ability to do so. 

Angry Birds

This has been consuming my life lately. Ugh must finish it.

'Forget the pizza parties,' Teens tell churches

An interesting article on teenagers and church. Thanks to the fusion musing blog for the heads up. One thing I noticed from this is that USA Today is mainly using attendance numbers to equal success or failure. While I desire many to come to know Christ I believe that metric has some inherent flaws.  I think the last four sentences of this clipping sum it up nicely.
 

'Forget the pizza parties,' Teens tell churches

By Cathy Lynn Grossman and Stephanie Steinberg, USA TODAY

"Bye-bye church. We're busy." That's the message teens are giving churches today.

Only about one in four teens now participate in church youth groups, considered the hallmark of involvement; numbers have been flat since 1999. Other measures of religiosity — prayer, Bible reading and going to church — lag as well, according to Barna Group, a Ventura, Calif., evangelical research company. This all has churches canceling their summer teen camps and youth pastors looking worriedly toward the fall, when school-year youth groups kick in.

"Talking to God may be losing out to Facebook," says Barna president David Kinnaman.

"Sweet 16 is not a sweet spot for churches. It's the age teens typically drop out," says Thom Rainer, president of LifeWay Christian Resources in Nashville, which found the turning point in a study of church dropouts. "A decade ago teens were coming to church youth group to play, coming for the entertainment, coming for the pizza. They're not even coming for the pizza anymore. They say, 'We don't see the church as relevant, as meeting our needs or where we need to be today.' "

"I blame the parents,"who didn't grow up in a church culture, says Jeremy Johnston, executive pastor at First Family Church in Overland Park, Kan.

His megachurch would routinely take 600 teens to summer church camp, he says, "and many would be forever changed by that experience. But this summer we don't even have a camp.

"Remember, 80% of kids don't have cars. Their parents could be lazy or the opposite — overstressed and overcommitted. If parents don't go to church, kids don't, either."

Don't forget the overcommitted teens themselves, the recession and growing competition from summer mission trips, says Rick Gage of Go-Tell Youth Camps, based in Duluth, Ga.

Registration fell 22% in 2009 but stabilized this summer with 2,000 middle- and high-school teens at five camps in four states. Attendance peaked in the late 1990s at 5,000 teens, Gage says.

Chris Palmer, youth pastor at Ironbridge Baptist Church in Chester, Va., says its youth group enrollment slid from 125 teens in 2008 to 35 last winter.

He pulled participation back up to 70 this year by letting teens know "real church, centered on Jesus Christ, is hard work," Palmer says. "This involves the Marine Corps of Christianity. Once we communicate that, we see kids say, 'Hey, I want to be involved in something that's a little radical and exciting.' "

Rainer agrees. He says teens today want Scripture, they "don't want superficiality. We need to tell them that if you are part of church life, you are part of something bigger. The church needs you, too." But first, they have to find the kids."

You can read the rest of the article and the interesting comments by following this link.

Twilight

Something to think about as we digest the culture around us. Thanks to Jason for the heads up.

Prioritizing Family: Jonathan Edwards

As my earlier post alluded to I'm in the process of reading up on Jonathan Edwards. There's a great 5 book set titled "The Essential Edwards Collection" that does a wonderful job in summarizing his work into digestible almost devotional segments.  The section below is the editors taking Edwards thought process and distilling out his thoughts on family and youth ministry in light of Heaven and Hell. Enjoy...

"Sometimes we can act as if our family members will not live forever. That may sound strange to Christian readers, but practically , it applies to the way many families live on a day to day basis. We need to adopt and apply an eschatological mind-set for the sake of those we love. Our spouses, children, and extended family members will spend eternity in either heaven or hell. Remembering this simple reality will prod us out of our complacency and cause us to approach all of our family interactions with care and a sense of gravity.

Instead of leaving witnessing to someone else, we can assume responsibility for this momentous task. We should not , for example cede spiritual care of our children to another person, weather a youth minister, coach or other authority figure, however gifted they may be. As parents, we need to shepherd our children and raises them in the fear and admonition of the Lord. We need to keep their lives in eternal perspective, carefully choosing what sins and attitudes to tackle at a given time." (pg121)

Edwards on "Young Persons"

"Young persons are very apt to trust in parents and friends, when they are sick, or when they thing of being on a deathbed. But this providence remarkably teaches you the need of a better friend, and a better parent, than earthly parents are; one who is everywhere present, and all-sufficient; that can't be kept off by infectious distempers; who is able to save from death or to make happy in death; to save from eternal misery and bestow eternal life..."

Letter to Edwards son Timothy

From The Essential Edwards Collection. 

Resolve for Monday

Every Monday I'm going to post one of Jonathan Edwards resolutions. He penned these while still a very young man and used them to guide his life. What am I using to guide me, my family, my ministry???

29. Resolved, Never to count that a prayer, nor to let that pass as a prayer, nor that as a petition of a prayer, which is so made, that I cannot hope that God will answer it; nor that as a confession which I cannot hope God will accept. 

• Confession time... I've been convicted lately at the amount of times I've told people I'd pray for them and then never gave it a second thought. It's something I'm working on so Edwards resolution really hits home. Am I alone in this?
• The truth is that God hears every prayer, holds every confession. How would our prayer lives change is we held that truth dear? 
• As you think about this resolve over the course of this week make a habit out of giving the kind of honor to prayer that Edwards attempted to.

Missouri Bus Crash Jesus Wins

My morning coffee hadn't cooled enough yet to drink when this news story caught my eye. It's about a bus crash in Missouri. As someone who uses school buses to move students often turned my attention to the report. Horrified at the pictures my mind started spinning what my reaction would be? As I thought through this the report continued that two students lost their lives in this horrific accident. One of the students faimilies released this statement soon after the event...

"Jessica had asked that all friends, in the event of her death, to wear bright colors to celebrate her short life here on this planet and to rejoice in her new life with Christ." 

My heart rejoiced as it grieved. In light of such an accident Jesus wins and is sovereign. 

Impact Is Comming

Resolve for Monday

Every Monday I'm going to post one of Jonathan Edwards resolutions. He penned these while still a very young man and used them to guide his life. What am I using to guide me, my family, my ministry???

28. Resolved, To study the Scriptures so steadily, constantly, and frequently, as that I may find, and plainly perceive, myself to grow in the knowledge of the same. 

• If God is who he says he is.. If Christ is who he claims to be.. If the Spirit has and uses the power to inspire and preserve scripture THEN it's important that we pay attention to what has been written to us. Every Christian is a student. 
• "⁵Oh that my ways may be steadfast
     in keeping your statutes!
  ⁶Then I shall not be put to shame,
     having my eyes fixed on all your commandments.
  ⁷I will praise you with an upright heart,
     when I learn your righteous rules.
  ⁸I will keep your statutes;
      do not utterly forsake me! "  Psalm 1195-8     How do you keep your eyes fixed on his commandments? 
• Edwards wanted to study scripture in such a way that as he did so he would find himself changed. To me this says both frequency and depth. How is this played out in your life Christian?  
• John Piper's "When I Don't Desire God" is a great book which talks about internalizing scripture.