We used to say you could tell a person’s priorities by looking at his checkbook. I’d submit to you that today you can tell a person’s priorities by how he uses his phone.
If your phone could talk… what would it say about you?
Who is he talking to?
Who is he texting?
How is he talking about people?
How does he talk about people via text?
What is he looking at when no one else is looking?
When is he using his phone?
Does his phone fill his hand more than the hand of the one he loves?
Here’s what I know about technology.One day your phone will tell on you. One day everything you’ve posted on Facebook may become public. One day everything you’ve ever Googled may be public. E-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g.
One day… it will all tell the whole story of you. Every key stroke on that device could one day be exposed. Every text message, direct message, email, and Facebook message could one day become public.
I believe your smart phone is amoral. It’s can be used for noble or ignoble purposes. My hope is that as I use my phone, (and technology like it) I use them as instruments of Good News in how I conduct my personal, family, and business affairs.
Sometimes I’ll meet a person in ministry and think, “Do we live on the same planet?”
I’ve got a really solid core group of kids each Wednesday night– I think they have a chance at winning the Bible quizzing championship.
Our high school students are very involved in the community. Each year we get together with other churches in our district for a youth rally. They love it.
I always take my sword wherever I go. You have to be prepared for battle at all times.
I had to pull my kids out of public school because in California there’s a new law that teachers have to include gay history in the curriculum. (What’s really weird is that they don’t live in California!)
I teach my students that they need to take a stand. A life with Jesus is all about taking the stand, right?
Code language. Insular communities. Church-centric attitudes. It leaves me wondering who they are trying to reach?
It makes me wonder how they have a conversation with their neighbors? I wonder what they are thinking as they get to know Diane next door, who just had to put her mom in a home. Or what they talk about with the gay couple across the street? Or what their neighbors think about them when they turn off their light on Halloween? Or refuse to come to the block party because people are drinking?
I’m guessing that there are a lot of neighbors hiding from a lot of their Christian neighbors in this country.
I believe in Jesus. He is my only hope for salvation. And I fully acknowledge that the church is God’s chosen instrument for believers. But there is this sliver of people in every church who… are really weird.
And no one ever has the guts to tell them the truth: “You’re weird. And you really need to work on that. Jesus asks us to be different in a good way. Your weirdness is making it harder for me.”
The Flip Side – The culture wars are dying
Not all church staff are like that. It’s actually very few.
More and more I’m hearing a bad strategy being replaced with good strategy.
In order to reach a community you have to meet the relevant needs of the community.
In order to start reaching more people we had to stop fighting culture and stop teaching that the output of a life with Jesus is behavior modification.
We recognize that to reach our neighbors we have to be good news before they will hear Good News.
Rather than bring a program into our community which worked elsewhere, we’re going to the community and asking how we can serve them.
But it’s the really weird ones that we now have to shake and ask, “Do we live on the same planet?“
One direction I think youth ministry resources need to go is mobile
In the latest edition of Immerse Journal I have an article called “Technology Swiss Army Knives” that’s all about apps that help you spend less time in your office and more time with students. I’d actually like to see apps for youth ministry get to the point where we could ditch our offices altogether. It’s not like any of us went into youth ministry hoping to maintain office hours. More on this concept later…
Clips is one of those apps that is a great resource for on-the-go youth workers, small group leaders… even parents.
About the creator – RJ Grunewald
It was created by one of my long-time youth ministry network guys from Detroit, RJ Grunewald. He’s a middle school pastor who fell in love with the iPhone and started dreaming about how to use his phone for ministry. Back in 2008, fiddling around after church, he created an app that farts. (Perfect for middle schoolers!) He submitted it to the iTunes store as the WhoopieCushion app and it blew up. (Get it, blew up?) I actually heard about it because RJ called me for some advice about starting a business. It was perfect timing because YS was just starting to think about apps for ministry, too. Long story short, RJ built the MyGuitar app and Tough Topics. (Both successful, but now retired.)
What is Clips all about?
It’s really simple. You’ll be mad you didn’t think of it. If you have a set of Videos that Teach in your office– this is an updated and mobile evolution of that. (I’ve bought at least five sets of Videos that Teach over the years, it’s my most stolen resource.)
The app has a library of popular movies with amazing and powerful clips. The app suggests a clip and provides Bible-based discussion questions and some suggested Bible verses. You can search by movie name or topic. You can save things as favorites so you can come back to it, stuff like that. In a future version he’s opening it up to the community a bit more by allowing users to suggest clips to include in the app. But there’s enough there to last you quite a while.
It’s a resource you’ll want to make sure is in the hands of your small group leaders and parents, too. Help them turn movie time into worthwhile discussion. Tip: Use the iTunes “gift this” button and you can send it to the youth workers in your ministry. If you need a raise… gift it to your senior pastor.
Last thing, I love the fact that RJ owns Clips. So literally, buying this app is supporting RJ and encouraging him to not only make this app better, but to make more apps like it.
Question 1:What’s your favorite movie for teaching students?
Question 2: If you have the app, what do you think?
Full-disclosure — RJ is a client of The Youth Cartel.
My friend and co-worker, Sasha Morgan, is joining the student ministries team at Irving Bible Church in Dallas. (Hooray for a conservative church hiring a female high school pastor!)
David Grant [her boss and an amazing dude I’ve grown to know, love, and respect greatly] asked Sasha to shoot a quick video introducing herself so he could show it on Sunday night. So Sasha borrowed my phone and shot her segment and emailed him. All from my phone and email address.
And I smelled a prank coming.
So I shot the video you see above and sent it to him as a joke. He thought it was funny. Then he showed it to his students on Sunday night. And then it was posted it on the churches blog. And then it went out in the churches email newsletter.
Fantastical.
And now you know that I have the worst Russian accent in the world, which progressively got more French towards the end.
I’m definitely not an “on the road all the time” speaker dude. But I do love teaching and training and I’m stoked to have a few opportunities coming this Fall.
Here’s my next three:
WordCamp LA – September 10th, Loyola Marymount University – Tickets – If you’re a WordPress junkie you know WordCamp is the place the local community gathers to learn from one another. I’m leading a workshop on creating and maintaining an online presence for your brand.
National Youth Workers Convention San Diego – October 1st – 3rd, Town & Country Resort – Tickets – I’m doing a lot at NYWC! I’m leading a fishbowl discussion called, Expanding the Vision: Rethinking Volunteers. I’m teaching a workshop called, Creating an Online Ministry. And I have a few sessions in the interactive media area, Getting Started as a Blogger, Free and Awesome Communications Tools for Youth Workers, and How to Customize a Facebook Page.
If you have a training event, retreat, or even want to bring me in for a day of consultation – Send me a note. As a reader of my blog, you know I’m not limited to the topics I’m speaking on this Fall.
He spoke to the Woman: “Do I understand that God told you not to eat from any tree in the garden?”Genesis 3:1b
O, the temptress. I hear you in the shadows. You slither into my lonely moments and whisper in my ear.
And yet… despite you. To spite you. Stomping you out! Ignoring your coy tactics! I make a choice. I rest in my choice. I cling to my choice.
I will not allow your sneaky voice of doubt a defining foothold. No whisper, seeking clarity, will recast my mission. I will not be defined by you, I will define you!
Instead:
If in doubt… I’ll teach the Bible.
If in doubt… I’ll say I don’t know.
If in doubt… I’ll take the challenge.
If in doubt… I’ll spend time with people my own age.
If in doubt… I’ll compliment and encourage instead of criticize or question.
If in doubt… I’ll be bold with what God’s laid on my heart.
If in doubt… I’ll invest in people instead of projects.
If in doubt… I’ll go with less planning, more doing.
If in doubt… I’ll say yes to a wild idea.
Yes, these are scary times. And scary times make counter-productive doubts seem reasonable.
I’ve made a choice to stand as a crazy man, convinced that God can use me to change things. Circumstances mean nothing. Opposition is a joke. Logic is often illogical. Realism is veiled fatalism!
While it seems natural to teeter-totter, like Thomas, between faith in what God can do and doubt in what I can barely allow myself to dream about God doing– I reject doubt’s gravitational pull and fling myself forward in faith.
Let doubt not define me today. Instead, allow me to define my life as one who overcomes doubts with radical, ridiculous, simple, and audacious faith.
Illustration by Frits Ahlefeldt-Laurvig, HikingArtist.com – via Flickr (Creative Commons)
I’m not a psychologist. Nor am I a sociologist. But I know my profession pretty well. And I know a ton of people in my profession.
Why do we do what we do?
It’s an important question. In many ways it is the only question that our students want to know the answer to.
My intuition tells me that most of us have been trained that the right answer is, “I’m called to this. I couldn’t do anything else because it is who I am more than what I do.”
But behind that veil of the right answer– we find deeper, less correct, more driving motivations.
We want to see teenagers involved in the church.
We want them to steer clear of sex and drugs.
We want to help parents navigate the stormy waters of early & middle adolescence.
We want students to avoid the mess we got in; we want students to be the shining example we were in high school
We want to work at a church and this was the open door.
We want to be important in the lives of teenagers, we want to make a difference.
On and on…
Not all motivations are equal in nobility. While most motivations seem pure not all are with merit. And some might actually be contributing to a new problem more than solving the problem youth ministry was created to solve.
What are some examples of pure motivations which lead to ignoble motivations? If you work in a church or parachurch doing youth ministry– What are your points of contention with donors/supports/parrishners motivated to support your ministry with motivations that could be less than helpful?
There are dozens of services online that let people buy followers.
Prices start at about $15-$20 per thousand, with bulk orders costing less – 50,000 followers will typically run less than $500. Those followers, though, are often dummy accounts run by computers, some in a very obvious way, some in a more sophisticated fashion.
—
“If you’re not familiar with Twitter and someone says I can have 10,000 people follow you, that sounds great,” says Mack Collier, a social media strategist and trainer (and frequent speaker at events like South by Southwest Interactive). “They’re not going to talk to you about how to use Twitter to meet your goals and objectives. … When we don’t really understand something, we go back to ‘what’s the number?’ The biggest number always wins until we understand how something works – especially with social media.”
While no church would attempt to buy Twitter followers, churches who want to grow often think that a really slick marketing campaign is the difference between their growth and their demise.
Church! You Do Not Have a Marketing Problem
Unless you are a brand new start-up, plenty of people in your community already know you exist. Marketing isn’t your problem.
You do a marketing campaign for one of three reasons:
You have a product or service that is new to the market.
You are trying to remind people who have used your product or service and not returned that you have something new.
You are trying to convince people who already know they don’t want your product of service that they really do.
SAT Question: Which of the speakers in this set does not match?
In the past two days church leaders from around the country have voted on who they’d like to see speak at an online leadership conference called, The Nines. Scrolling down the list from the top you’ll see a bunch of pastors and theologians until you come to #14… Seth Godin. A marketing blogger and conservative Jewish man.
The last thing church leaders need is to be convinced that they need a better marketing plan for their church.
Spending money on marketing without changing the reason people already aren’t coming to your church is just validating the message people already know about your church– That’s not for me.
Church! You Do Have a Follower Problem
We have bought into a lie that the way to grow a church is one of two extremes. (And our inability to grow is a marketing and not a discipleship problem.)
Extreme #1 – To lower the expectations we place on people who attend and follow us.Come as you are, listen if you want, that’s between you and God.
Followers are free but the cost of following is high. In John 6 Jesus fed five thousand people and walked on water and as a result had a whole slew of people who wanted to become his disciples. So Jesus held a quick disciple orientation class to explain what the cost of following him was.
Jesus said to them, “Very truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day. For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in them. John 6:53-56
Yeah, that wasn’t going to work. They just wanted to follow Jesus for the free lunch and magic show. John 6:66 says, “From this time many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him.”
In reality… that’s what a lot of people come to church for. The free lunch and magic show your church is offering. When you actually challenge them to count the cost and follow Jesus they just move on.
Extreme #2 – To raise expectations to a non-Biblical level by adding things to the Gospel message.To be a part of our team, you have to meet these 26 extra-biblical requirements as laid out in our church constitution…
Followers are free but you keep raising the cost.Acts 15 documents a case of this.
Certain people came down from Judea to Antioch and were teaching the believers: Unless you are circumcised, according to the custom taught by Moses, you cannot be saved.” This brought Paul and Barnabas into sharp dispute and debate with them. So Paul and Barnabas were appointed, along with some other believers, to go up to Jerusalem to see the apostles and elders about this question. Acts 15:1-2
This isn’t unlike what we see today in many churches. They add extra-biblical requirements to being on board with the church. You have to be baptized in a certain way, attend certain classes, volunteer a certain way, on and on. While none of those things are typically “bad” they are extra-biblical requirements which weed people out falsely.
In Acts 15:28-29, the council replied to these extra requirements that people were teaching with this, “It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us not to burden you with anything beyond the following requirements: You are to abstain from food sacrificed to idols, from blood, from the meat of strangled animals and from sexual immorality. You will do well to avoid these things.”
You don’t need a new marketing campaign to grow your church. The best growth plan you could ever have is to start eliminating the extremes. (Too little or too high.)
Question: If you have an existing congregation and the community has already decided they don’t need you. How do you change that perception?
My buddy Marko is in the hospital with a bout of pancreatitis. He wasn’t feeling well when we went to the Padres game on Tuesday night and was admitted to the hospital Wednesday.
I tried to convince him that the only possible cure would be eating hotdogs, handfuls of peanuts, and drinking over-priced beer. But he wouldn’t take my sound medical advice. He drank water. And look who is in the hospital now?
Dedication:To Marko’s pancreas. May you be less irritated and inflamed in the days to come. I hope for you that you will soon be happily hugged by your friends the gall bladder and small intestine.
An Ode to the Pancreas, the most phallic of internal organs
The Pancreas – A Limerick
Seeing your tail makes me giggle
I can imagine that sometimes you wiggle
To know when inflamed you must be even more round
With giant scopes and crazy cameras, perhaps a lost quarter is found?
But mostly your picture makes me giggle
The Pancreas – A Haiku
O sad pancreas
Only rhyme with couple things
Like pain in the ***
The Pancreas – A short sonnet
Let me not delay this decree
Admit impediment, impurities I oft partake
Thou pancreas please, in thou’st head whilst thou forgive me
All of thine yummy treats, I shall now forever forsake
O, no I promise I shall never re-embark
To mock you, my beloved pancreas, for thine striking shape
For thou doth look as male genitalia– I’m forced to remark
Proudly serving other organs, you deserve to wear a cape
The pancreatic juice, while gross, I require
Thine juices flow from duct to duct to Duodenum
Without you in my life I may expire
For these juices are needed, and more than cool denim
