Month: September 2009

  • NYWC is Gonna Be Fun

    National Youth Workers Convention

    I’ve been so busy working on spreading the word about National Youth Workers Convention that I’ve literally forgotten to post about three exciting things I’m a part of in all 3 cities.

    1. The FUN team is back and better than ever! Last year was YS’s first serious forray into social media during a live event. We didn’t really know what it should look like and we did some stuff great and not-so-great at others. This year I have a great team of volunteers in each city and we’ll be focusing on bringing together some fun live elements, some relections, and some video.

    2. Social Networks, Video, and Your Ministry. I’ll be leading a grande lab with my co-worker and flipping video genius, Ian Robertson. If you want to learn how to mix social media skills with the power of video in your ministry… I will dare say this will be valuable for you. We really are going to show you how to use cheap cameras, cheap editing software, and great ideas into video magic for your group. Sure, we have high end “pro” toys we could show of. But true skill is using what you have to make something great.

    3. Teens and Technology fishbowl. I’m not really “teaching” this one, but in all three cities I’ll be facilitating a fishbowl conversation around this important topic. I have no real idea where it’ll go and that’s the joy of a fishbowl. But it will be fun to see what the problems are that are out there and come up with some solutions.

    If you’re on the bubble about coming this year, I just want to encourage you to make it happen. Unlike any other time in convention history… participants will be shaping the conversation of the convention. And that conversation will just be beginning at NYWC… more on that later.

  • 3 Positive Effects of Recession on the Church

    3-positive-of-recession

    Nearly every day I encounter someone who tells me their churches budget was cut, people at their church are about to lose their jobs, or otherwise their church is encountering hard financial times.

    That’s not purely a bad thing. Here are three positive things that a lack of money bring to a church.

    1. A gut check for the staff. If you’ve worked in a church you know that there are people who are on staff because they are absolutely convinced God wants them there and there are people who are there because its a job. When budgets get slashed, programs get cut, and necessary and unnecessary stuff gets trimmed to cut costs… each staff member has to examine herself and ask, “Why am I here? Do I really want to be here?” Some will double down their efforts and some will check out. Both are positive for the church going forward.

    2. A gut church for the parishoners. Along the same lines the people who attend the church have to face the same choice. When their beloved program is dismantled because of a lack of funding they have to ask themselves, “Am I here for that program, or am I here because this is where God wants me?” When they see a staff member lose benefits or their job or even their house, they re-examine their financial priorites automatically. “Am I being faithful to God with my money? Am I being a good steward of what I earn?” This is a positive outcome!

    3. A gut check for the dreamers. I can’t help but think of the mid-2000’s boom in church growth. With the last coughs of the Field of Dreams model [If you build it, they will come… and give!] of church growth, congregations built massive additions, added satellite campuses, and even reached out to buy up struggling churches. For the most part this was done during good times and using credit. Now those churches see double digit decreases in giving and are stuck in a catch-22 scenario. Admit they were wrong to buy on credit and sell property or trim programs and staff to try to ride out the dip. This is a positive outcome for the church, even if it means they go bankrupt. The healthy and faithful congregations will make it. The ones who depended on their own talents will fail.

    A bonus positive: A side effect of the extended recession is that I am seeing a massive wave of volunteerism in the church. As churches trim their budgets and people in the pews realize that they need to step up, the church as a whole is seeing an increase in volunteers in key church leadership positions.

  • Think Social Media is a Fad?

    I snort when I hear that question. Typically, it’s blurted out by old media types who see the boom in social media as a hiccup in their returns. That’s when I just smile and nod… and eat them for breakfast. I’ve heard the same thing from pastors. Well, ministry over the internet isn’t real ministry. While my blog doesn’t take an offering… the post you are reading right now will be read by more people than 99% of sermons in America.

    The way messages (marketing, religion, news) are received is changing. Are you adapting? Or are you investing in something that no one pays attention to?

  • The New Four Spiritual Laws

    new-4-spiritual-laws

    In 1965, Bill Bright wrote the tract Four Spiritual Laws. It’s hard for us to believe this, but in its day it was a powerful and releavant tool for explaining the Gospel to people. In an America in where religious education was part of the public school education, it was based on a presupposition that God exists, that Jesus’ story is real and true, and that every person sinned.

    Four Spiritual Laws was a tool that helped millions people, largely teens and young adults, connect the dots between what they knew to be true in their own lives, that they mess up, that they know there is a God but they don’t know if they can have a relationship with Him. And what they learned/memorized in grade school and high school.

    Remember, up until 1964, children in America didn’t just pray in school, they were taught the story of God in the Bible, memorized Scripture, and were taught the tenants of the Protestant faith. Bill Bright was genius to create this tool that connected those dots!

    The 1964 Supreme Court decision which cemented the abstract idea that the original founders of the United States wanted a literal separation between church and state amplified the culture wars between Evangelicals and “the world” that we see today. What started in 1964 in abstraction became a gulf of culture within a decade which made tools like Four Spiritual Laws irrelevant.

    Obviously, those presuppositions are long gone in America today. Today, children in the church don’t grow up memorizing Scripture. Today, schools do not teach children about a monotheistic God. Today, schools are afraid to refer to Jesus Christ as a person in history for fear that a parent would cry “seperation of church and state!”

    Looking at the Four Spiritual Laws themselves, I don’t know if we would describe the four tenants of them in the same way. At the core this is the evangelical faith– hasn’t changed a bit. God loves you and wants a relationship with you. Your sin separate you from that relationship. Jesus Christ, by taking on your sin at the cross of Calvary made it possible to for you to know God anyway. By putting your faith in Jesus you can have a relationship with God and begin a new life in Him. Seriously, that’s not changed.

    But methods have. Walking up to someone and asking if you can hand them or read them a tract is flat out offensive. (If you know people doing this in America, feel free to smack them.)

    So have the secondary things in Four Spiritual Laws. People who come to Jesus do so for today as much as tomorrow. The Gospel we preach today isn’t just about eternal life, its about righting wrongs, bringing wholeness, restoration, and justice to today.

    And so I am left to wonder. If Bill Bright were to write Four Spiritual Laws today, what would it look like? What form would it take? How would he capture the obvious from culture to connect the dots? What are common things we all believe in America which point us to a relationship with Jesus?

  • Youth Group vs. Youth Ministry

    Youth Group vs. Youth Ministry

    Last night I sat around a table with some people to talk about youth ministry in our church. As I’ve mentioned a number of  times, our church is in a working class neighborhood of San Diego. We are a community of people with tangible needs. There is real poverty. Real educational problems. Real family trouble. Real gangs. Real violence. Not that life in the suburbs is all perfect, but the needs of students in City Heights are different from their peers just 6 miles to the East in La Mesa. It’s outside of my evangelical, middle class, white culture. And that’s what I like about it.

    Thankfully, there was a ton of agreement around the table. We all can see that we need a ministry and not just another program. And we know that our little ministry has no hope if it isn’t holistic. This is an opportunity to live out more of the Gospel practically than we’ll teach formally.

    I came home last night with one phrase: “We want to create a youth ministry, not a youth group.” As we defined that, we implied that youth group points inwardly and creates a cluster of kids around a common purpose. Not intrinsically bad, just not our target. Instead, we are trying to form a ministry that looks at the whole person and pushes those students out into the world, transformed to transform their world. While I have no doubt that we’ll do youth group-type things… retreats, events, Bible studies, and stuff like that. That won’t be our focus.

    As I shared last week. I’m not in this to waste my time or keep busy. Not being on the church’s staff changes my perspective completely. Oddly enough, not being on paid staff emboldens me even more!

    I’m interested in developing leaders for influence in their culture, I’m interested in upsetting Satan’s plans, I’m interested going where the kids are, and I’m interested in sharing leadership. I’m not interested in a group, to babysit and entertain the apathetic. It seems like those parameters are common with the others in the group of people trying to figure it out.

    Shared values are a good place to start. Going to the next step, I feel pretty good about beginning something that is focused first on ministering to students.

    Photo credit: Camaradas by Julián D Gaitán via Flickr (Creative Commons)