Category: hmm… thoughts

It’s been about 2 months since the church started shifting to "the new stuff." While it’s been the hardest 2 months of my ministry career (people upset, a few departures) it has also been tremendously rewarding.

• Small groups for both Light Force and adults are going great. We have about 70 adults in small groups right now… way more than Sunday school.
• Phase 1 is essentially complete.  The building looks good and people are very happy with it.
• KidsTown is going really well. All three children’s environments are a hit.

So what’s left? We still have some living room environments to roll out (seniors and married life) but essentially all the "change" is done. At this point it is just a matter of taking what we’re doing and constantly improving and innovating to make what we’re doing better.

All around, I see wins. And it feels good to play for a winner.

Today I got together with some guys in my old youth network. I haven’t been a part of that gang for about a year and it was really nice to start the re-connecting process.

For the first time since I’ve been here I really felt like I got something out of going today. I have been a little discouraged in general and even though I didn’t really have time to go all the way down there, I made time to get encouraged. So I went a little discouraged and left feeling OK about myself and my ministry.

Quick sidenote: It’s one thing to teach students "when you feel the most discouraged it’s because you are really close to a major break through and Satan is attacking you with discouragement" but it’s another really hard thing to live. Pressing on towards the goal sometimes sucks.

Today we talked about outreach. It’s one of those words that means a lot of things to a lot of people. I’ve seen churches call their Christian schools "an outreach" since there are people who aren’t Christians in the school. I’ve seen churches call events "outreaches" that were really events where one ministry of the church was reaching out to another. I’ve been to evangelistic "outreaches" where there was an event and a gospel presentation. I’ve been to churches that call "outreach" serving th community or feeding the homeless. But what is "Outreach?"

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I’m not anti-education or continuing education in theory. But when it comes down to it, school isn’t my favorite thing to do. OK, I like school because I like to talk and listen to new ideas, I just don’t like homework. Today is the official start to my fall class call Qualitative Research in Youth Ministry. My professor for this class is Terry Linhart, the youth ministry chair at Bethel College in Mishawaka but the class is part of the Master in Youth Ministry Leadership at Huntington University.

So, most of my first week’s reading is done and I have to finish that up right away so I can participate in discussion. Ultimately I’d get the weeks work done on Monday and not have to think about the class much until the next Monday.

p.s. 1 hour until Tigers tickets go on sale for the World Series.

I’m not certaint percentage-wise how many women deal with issues like this, but I know many women I know have bad feelings about themselves in one way or another. This is a great little video that shows just how "real" models are. (Thanks to Marko for the link)

My experience with the change process at Romeo has revealed a lot about what I think about the change process in the local church and what I think about paradigm shifts in our culture.

This has a couple of folds to it that I’m still trying to work out in my brain.

1. Early adapters to new trends and shifts benefit the most. By the time the rest of the world catches on to what they are doing or talking about (sometimes by the time THEY figure it out) the community they are working in is shifting once again. I’ve observed in 2 specific contexts ministries who were "the it thing" and teaching their methodology that have already significantly shifted again. How come ministries don’t look at what is working best now in their community before they look at models that are being marketed?
2. Leaders never succeed by taking photographs. I think why "shifting" a ministry from one model to another works is not generally because they are copying something that is good, it’s because they try to adapt the photograph of what they’ve seen into the reality series they live in. (In our case, why it’s working is because everyone is suddenly on the same page, from the pastoral staff/deacons on down to the newest volunteer we are all asking the same questions and speaking the same language.) A photograph is a one-time event that captures success in a moment, but living a reality show is an entire different ballgame. I’ve seen ministries try to copy everything… and fail miserably because by the time the photograph gets to them, the stuff in the picture wouldn’t work anywhere because culture moves so fast. One of the cool things I’ve seen at Romeo is we study the photograph and then determine if there is anything we’d like to adapt. I cannot think of a single thing we’ve copied 100%. How can I lead an organization away from the photograph takers and into the photograph makers?
3. Christian are cautious adapters. Perhaps it’s because paradigm shifts are somewhat cyclical, perhaps it’s because they cost resources and money, perhaps it’s because church people are so involved in their church that they don’t see the culture, but even the latest "lightning in a bottle" shift out there is still one-to-two cycles business in comparison to what’s really working in the business world. How many churches are striving for superlatives when people are after niches?
4. Ultimately, all church models are business models. This has driven me insane for a long time. I think that models in ministry are extremely valuable because they allow an organization to focus on what they are good at. But I don’t think that we should ever eliminate non-business models simply because they aren’t what business people know. Most of the Bible talks about and to agrarian people and yet we use city/business terminology. There is a solid argument that most ministry leaders (paid and lay people) are trained in the business world so we’re simply adapting what they know to for a virtuous purpose. How can we get beyond what we’ve known and develop models that adapt at the speed of today?
5. No one expects the church to succeed. This is something that I experienced while in Northern Ireland. It completely shocked me to see churches use 1950s or earlier approaches to ministry. When I met the people, most of the people in charge didn’t really think that God could change their world. So they had taken the stance of "we’re holding on to what we know." The church became and institution and not a living organism. Young people fled the church because they had absolutely no way to connect to the institution… the results were scary. There was an expectation that young adults would fall into sin so deep that by the time they were in their 30s they’d hit rock bottom and seek God.

I’m not done here… our ability or inability to shift paradigms shows us a lot about who we are in Christ. I’m still working all of this out in my mind. But my departing question of the day for myself is, "How did the church in Acts determine which paradigm shifts were worth adapting to?"

Our precocious five year old is really enjoying Kindergarten. She’s a lot like her dad in that she has to be the first at everything. Mom just doesn’t understand why being at the end of line isn’t good enough, but I do. When I was that age I loved that my name was Adam because I usually got to go to the front of the line. I always wanted to be the smartest or best speller or fastest and Megan is exactly the same.

Megan is learning to read using phonics, so right now everything can be spelled in our house. We’re having fun with it by turning it into a game. When we read books, she picks out all the words she knows. And when we want to motivate her to do something we get her to try to spell what she wants.

So this morning Megan wanted up to get up. But since our bed was cozy and we

wanted to delay, we made her learn to spell "up." In the process she spelled "hot" too. It’s weird when you look at your five year old and can’t help but think of her as an infant. Infants don’t spell! Only 3 weeks ago we took Megan to get dedicated by Pastor Ray, and here she is manipulating mom and dad out of bed by spelling words.

Brought to you by Dr. Al Yankovich

Christianity Today published an article called What’s Next: Youth in their 50th anniversary edition. Basically they went around and asked a bunch of people "What will youth ministry look like in another 50 years?"

Mark Ostreicher, president of Youth Specialties, (a big player in youth ministry, publisher of YM related stuff, and all-round cheerleader of the cause of YM) is involved in discussing the article on his blog. He’s asked a lot of his friends "in the biz" to pipe in with their thoughts.

I’ve not had time to formulate my thoughts, since YMX was mentioned in his post as "the nifty gaggle of peeps" I think that’s an invite to chime in. If I get time or have something to say I’ll jump in. But at this point, I’m most likely to observe.

My initial thought to the article was, "Cool, people think there will still be youth ministry in 50 years!"In all seriousness, so long as their are people hard-wired to think differently in the body of Christ (adolescents brains literally work differently) God will create people in His body with the gifts and desire to reach them.

Some people are shocked that xxxchurch.com even exists. With a tag line like, "The #1 Christian Porn Site" I’m certain they rub many Christians the wrong way. Yet their ministry is extremely relevant, needed, and changing lives in the name of Jesus. I’ve been an observer of this ministry for a long time since I’ve long had a passion for reaching people for Christ using the internet. From the moment I heard about them in 2002, I’ve been curious. These guys clearly do a great job at connecting virtual reality with reality. I don’t have any stats but it’s safe to say that porn is easily accessible to anyone in the world and it is extremely dangerous for people to look at.

Their ministry has two specific arms.
1. They help anyone, but especially Christians, get free of porn. They talk about porn in churches, they appear on talk shows to talk about porn, they’ve created great software for helping you get away from it, they help restore your relationship with Christ. That message is pretty simple, "Jesus said lust isn’t good and we know porn is degrading to women, we want to help you stop."

2. They minister to porn stars and pornographers. This is brilliant in its simplicity. It is effective in its strategy. Pornography degrades women and makes pornographers rich, right? (Though many argue that it’s needed or that a legal porn industry is better than an illegal industry or that the women aren’t degraded since they are compensated, blah blah blah. Porn isn’t lifting anyone up, is it?) So xxxchurch sends women, most of them former porn stars themselves, to porn conventions. They don’t protest outside,  they rent a booth right in the middle of it! There they provide information and express the love of Christ (not preaching condemnation, sharing truth that we are all sinners in need of a Savior.) to the men and women "in the biz." But they don’t stop there. They also reach out to the men and women who shoot the movies and own the studios.

The true test of a ministries worth (for those of us on the outside of it) is to discover what God is doing through the ministry. I agree with these guys theologically and metehodologically in theory… but is God blessing it?

Enter Donny. Donny is a pornographer. Or was a pornographer until the other day. This week, he came to know Jesus through the ministry of xxxchurch.com. I’m going to post his testimony and a note he wrote to his friends in the business. (For obvious reasons, no link and I’m slightly editing his post for more obvious reasons.) Donny is from Chico, California. Just up the road 20 miles from where we used to live… for some reason it’s a porn hotbed.

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This morning I was reading 2 Peter 3. Just a simple observation about end times. It’s only been like 2 days since Jesus left. Peter said:

With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day. The
Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness.
He is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to
come to repentance. (2 Peter 3:8-9)

To me, the question isn’t "how long will God allow this world to go on before the End? To me, it’s how much work can we get done in joining the Lord in bringing people to repentence? The pages of Revelation aren’t pretty. I guess sometimes I wonder what the rush to get there is.