Category: light force

Tonight is the first Middle Madness for Light Force: Summer Style. What that means is that starting at 7 PM, I’ll be running around and playing crazy games with middle schoolers.

We started Middle Madness a year ago to try to help a glob of incoming 7th graders get acclimated to Light Force.
I liked it so much that I decided that we would do the same thing with this year’s glob of incoming 7th graders.

Now, I’m not a middle school expert like Jason Raitz, Mark Ostreicher, or the rest of the virtually insane people whose lives are "Middle school-centric."

What I like about middle schoolers is something I’ll call "zealous stupidity." I mean that as a compliment actually! Call an adult that and they get all huffy. But call a middle schooler that and they get it. They are like something launched out of a rocket. Going a million miles per hour and don’t care what gets in their way, laughing all the time. They have passion for things that makes no sense and they have energy for things that makes no sense. (Which is why some 9th graders are convinced that they are superheros and can handle playing 2-3 sports simultaneously.) They’ve not been refined to the way adults try to do things reasonably. And the laziness of high school has not set in. Middle schoolers are 1000% passion.

In that regard, middle schoolers are just like God. God goes after people with zealous stupidity… a love that makes no sense. A love that goes all the way to the darkest corners of our lives and brings light and hope and a smile when someone realizes that there is no use, no resisting, no reason… just giving themselves over to him because they’ve been overcome with His zealous stupidity for lost people.

A couple weeks ago, a person got upset with my use of the word "stupid." He felt like since I was calling students to a "stupid faith in Christ" that I was calling them to a life of unintelligence. He was particularly annoyed that I told the group that God would take 90% passion and 10% brains over 90% brains and 10% passion. He said, "Christians ought to be intelligent. There are Christians with brains."

I seem to remember Jesus encountering a bunch of religious people with 90% brains and 10% passion a few times. It’s pretty clear from his choice of disciples that he’ll take passion over brains 25 times in a row.

This is why I love middle schoolers. Passion, passion, passion.

Today was a great day for our church as we asked people to step up and get involved. For those already involved… I hope they heard the message clearly, "We want reinforcements."

I am especially excited that several people indicated that they want to be a part of restructuring Light Force.

Here’s the starting point of the revisioning of student ministry at Romeo. "What we’ve done to this point has missed the vast majority. What we are doing now is great… just not good enough."

I am geeked that people want to be a part of developing something for Light Force that is attractive to those currently not coming.

p.s. I sarcastically thought to myself… "How do I get ‘less involved." Ha! I think we all looked good in our "involved." shirts. It was a win for little Romeo.

Over at YMX there is a lot of discussion about summer in youth ministry. It seems that there are people who either love summer in youth ministry or hate it.

In most youth groups there are two "seasons" where you do things completely different. Summer and School.

• School youth ministry: This is "home base" for most of us. Coming to youth group becomes another cog in the wheel of structured life. What’s funny is that most students feel like youth group is the "unprogrammed" part of their day… so they like that.
• Summer youth ministry: This is "money time" for youth ministry. Students lives are almost completely unstructured all summer long. Because a lot of students don’t work, church and youth group help them keep track of what day of the week it is. By contrast to the school season… youth group may be the only "programmed" thing they attend during the week.

I guess I understand those who don’t like the break in their routine. It’s "easier" to just keep going with regular youth ministry. But I love the change of pace. We use it as a time to rest, revision, increase the connection time with students, and just do everything a little looser. I find this "soft time" of the year to be more productive for ministry. Odd since it’s less structured, but that’s why I like summers best.

Here is the video I put together for tonights senior roast. 5 seniors showed up and a good time was had by all. OK, so there were a few instances of "classic overshare" but that’s going to happen at a roast.

A couple people have been asking me "what did you teach in Albany?" Well… I taught an overview of 3Story Evangelism. We wrapped it around a "metametephor" for the weekend of a Rubik’s Cube. The basic idea is that most Christians want to tell non-Christians about their faith… they just don’t know a strategy for figuring it out. So they just make things more confusing or they get frustrated and quit. And as some of the students demonstrated with their Rubik’s Cube, some get frustrated and smash it.

Additionally, each talk had an object lesson. So… here are the notes.

Talk 1: Walk First (powerpoint only) wheel barrow
Talk 2: Walk Intentionally ax
Talk 3: Walk Together hedge clippers
Talk 4: God makes all things new one story at a time (This was the closing "Youth Mass" of the convention.)

One of the interesting details of this retreat was that I worked much more collaboratively in the talk preps than I normally do. That made this weekend even more fun. Seriously, I need to do more of that.

Check out Chris Brooks thoughts on a fatherless generation:

I had the
distinct privilege today of chaperoning Selah’s year end field trip. We
went to a park for 4 hours; 14 1st graders! It was really quite an
experience. I don’t quite have the words to explain it. There was one
particular theme that kept coming up as I was talking to these sweet
little kids, regardless if they were male or female; Asian, Indian,
African-American, or white. The common thread? A lack of a father
figure. I was shocked by what I was hearing. "Can it really be that
bad" I kept asking myself? Yep. It can. And it is. Fatherlessness is an
epidemic in our Nation. I had kids literally hanging all over me all
day long. They were fighting to hold my hand as we walked from the
playground to the bathrooms. Many were young girls, and the pain I saw
in their eyes and heard in their voices caused me to reflect on young
ladies (teenagers) I know who are oversexed and undereducated – and
who, coincidentally, have a father vacuum in their world.

This led me to two thoughts this morning…

1. Is our church doing enough to reach the fatherless? James 1:27 says, "Religion that God our Father
   accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows
   in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world."
2. What are the long-term effects of a generation of fatherless boys and girls?

A postlude:
I could argue that I grew up partly fatherless. My dad and I had a weekend relationship my entire childhood… but yet I turned out OK. What’s the balanced thinking here? From my own perspective there were as many or more messed up kids from "perfect homes" as there were from "broken homes." Christian logic makes it seem that kids without dads in their lives are doomed and yet I could give hundreds of examples where that isn’t the case. On the flip side, clearly God’s ideal for a child is a father and mother. Where does the rhetoric end and the reality kick in? What does it take to raise a "good kid?" Seems like a rhetorical question, doesn’t it?

The "answer" isn’t mom or dad. The answer is God.

I get a lot of people who don’t go to our church who ask me about MainStreet. What in the world is this? Cows, nacho cheese, pies in the face? What is going on? How in the world is that going to make an impact for Jesus?

Well, for those people… I made a little video that explains a little bit more about why we do what we do.