Am I the only one excited about this movie due out December 22nd? DeNiro, Stiller, Hoffman, Streisand! I am so there. 

Yeah, I have a lot of plates spinning. But it’s always nice to get the reminder that I am here to minister to students.

Mission trips. Research papers. Fun events. None of that matters without the core reality of people ministry.

Amist all that is going on we have some perfect illustrations of students who are starting to see opportunities to share Christ with their friends. They are really starting to see a difference between who’s a circle and who’s a square because they’d prayed about it. Because they’ve made it a priority to seek out opportunities they are starting to see opportunities.

Right now I’ve got a student who has just figured out that her best friend may not be saved and is looking for ways she can take what they normally talk about and turn it into a conversation about the Lord. Tuesday afternoon, we’ll be having a conversation between about 5 students where we’ll seek to reconcile some broken relationships. It’ll be hard, but it is awesome to see God be proclaimed into a nasty situation.

This is the heart of ministry. Students seeking to please the Lord with their friendships, their personal relationships, their school work, their service hours, their future plans, and their day-to-day time.

Thanks Lord for reminding me again why I do what I do.

Hot

1. Focus on long-term impact and leadership development

Too often student ministry is short-sided and doesn’t see their role extending beyond the youth room doors. It is nice to see that they authors started with, and reminded their readers of, an understanding that on some level all student leadership will one day make it’s way into the pews of our churches.

2. Leader reflection sections in the first part of book



As I read through the book I found all the leader hints, “you’ll need,” and leader reflections to be right on. Youth Specialties often times publishes books that are obviously meant for ADHD readers and not normal people. But in this case, the reflections and hints were exactly where I was at as I read.

3. Assumes redemptive lifestyle vs. life style of perfection for student leaders.



A huge fear with students is that they won’t be able to live up to the high standard of the word leader. There were a few places, especially session 13, which acknowledged that the goal was a redepemptive relationship with the Lord instead of expectations from the movie Saved.

4. Incredibly rich resources

Even if you weren’t going to buy this book as a leadership training manual, it’s well worth the wealth of awesome resources it provides. There are great group building activities, stand alone Bible Studies, tip sheets in the back, recycled Ideas library references, and a great appendix with forms.

5. Trains outside the box



There are some pretty adventurous topics breached here. I was particularly interested in the idea of training students to do basic counseling. I don’t think I would do this since I fear giving students only enough skills to be dangerous could cause more harm than good, but I was challenged by its line of thinking. As well, I was particularly impressed with the prayer retreat on 225-226.

Cold

1. Exaggerated claims



It’s a pet peeve of mine that most ministry books make overzealous claims and offer self-contradictory statements. Praise God that these men are better practitioners of ministry than they are authors. The first is the most obvious, the books subtitle. It’s simply not everything you need to disciple your kids in leadership skills. You need to have been discipled yourself, you need some experience, you need to develop intangible skills for sniffing out leaders, on and on. A better subtitle would have been, “a complete guide to training student leaders.” Another misstep worth noting is on page 29. They first say that the book is not simply lists, theories, and ideas and then they back this up with lists, theories, and ideas! It sounds good to say that, but since it’s a manual you’d expect lists, theories, and idea. So things like that bugged me throughout!

2. Too holistic of an approach

It doesn’t seem realistic that anyone would actually put all 31 sessions on a calendar and try it all. Their insistence on regularly scheduled meetings and blasting through this material is counter-productive to the idea of pacing. (As I thought of my student leaders I saw right away that they would get lost. Not because they can’t handle the work but because they like to stop and try to implement things before they are ready to take on more!) This is far too linear and solution based for ministry in the post-modern context.

As I looked at individual sessions I was happy to see that it didn’t build on top of itself so much that if you missed a few sessions or skipped some that you’d be lost. But at the same time, this seems like a shotgun approach to training leaders. I just don’t want to train my leaders in all of these areas because they never be good at anything. Even the book mentions that it’s better to be good at one thing than OK at a lot. (p. 18) I was begging the material to stop expanding!

3. Poor publishing

It’s too bad when the publisher takes a lot of good material out of the public’s hands simply because it’s poorly marketed and graphically unappealing. I had looked at this book on the shelf prior to this class and I put it back because it looked so confusing. There are pop-up testimonials everywhere. Fonts change size. Things printed in weird directions. It’s too bad that if I were to try to use anything from the book, including the Bible studies, that I’d have to re-do everything to make it less distracting visually. Even though I work with students doesn’t mean that I like everything I buy to be “teen friendly.” I just ends up looking like everything else Youth Specialties publishes.

4. Not enough Scripture



As I looked at the sessions I was amazed at the amount of time spent in games, group building, but not in the Bible. Who exactly are these students supposed to be modeling themselves after? I’d much rather they had a good grounding in Scripture than in what I’m seeing presented. Even the content of the studies is pretty thin.



5. Assuming that all readers are starting at the beginning

It would be nice to hear these guys articulate how there plan fits into the existing paradigms of different readers. (Purpose Driven, 360, Sonlife, Word of Life, etc.)

Hot Five Sessions

#1 Becoming a Leader

I thought the games were a little cheesy, but they get the point across. Overall a great lesson. I thought the brainstorming was good and the talkback was great. This is a great lesson for students leaders and potential student leaders to walk through. It first of all addresses the student leaders and reminds them what a leader is and they brainstorm together what there group might look like. And for the potential student leaders, it helps them get a grasp of what this is all about before they sign up for a commitment.

#8 Discover Your Spiritual Gifts, Part Deux

Great stuff! I love the assessment, and I think that the assessment needs to be taken a least every two years until the age of about 25. I thought this whole lesson hit a homerun. I would almost combine it with part one, because there wasn’t much substance in it. but, I understand the majority of the time in part two will be taken up with the assessment. This is a necessity!

#11 A Leader’s Devotional Life – Prayer

Who doesn’t need prayer? Or who can’t pray? I think your book nailed it on the head when with the model of pray, invite, tell. And I think that is why I side with the 360 model we looked at where you pray for three people 6 days a week and miss 0 opportunities. This is the starting point for every student leader. Even if your not a “student leader”, you can participate in this. This lesson is ok, the challenge is good, but this is a necessity.

#12 A Leader’s Devotional Life – Time with God

Ok, another necessity. If your not spending time with God, then where is your source of power of strength coming from? Yourself? Others? In that case priorities need to be adjusted. I thought the team building was a good idea and the lesson was great. There might be a little too much, maybe need to break into two lessons, but this is a necessity.

#19 Sharing your Faith with Your Friends

Another very important message. This lesson is a necessity because without sharing your faith, what kind of leader are you? Now, there are different ways to share your faith, not just by word of mouth or a three point strategy. I think it is alright to teach strategies and methods, but being a servant leader and striving to live for God is one of the best witnesses I have ever seen.

Cold Five Sessions

#6 What Pumps You Up?

I thought this lesson was really weak and probably not necessary. The team building and team huddle was ok, but the team study was just weak. And finally the talkback and team prayer we alright. I just don’t see this lesson having much of an impact on students. I think I would direct them more to spiritual gifts and spheres of influence.

#16 Helping Friends in Crisis – Counseling

Ok, I didn’t think this was a necessity. It would be good for students to recognize how to talk and listen to others, but I think even more then that, they need to know where to direct students in need of help. They are not qualified to deal with some of the issues that students are going through, so they need to know where to direct students with specific issues.

#17 Helping Friends in Crisis – Case Studies

Again, I thought this was ok to teach, but not necessary and my argument holds with what I said in #16 above. I don’t think we should train students to be counselors, but caring listeners and people that know where to direct others for help.

#24 Leadership Excellence

I agree that leadership is excellence, but this lesson is weak and I could only choose 5 hot lessons. There is so much that could be taught on excellence, such as paying attention to details or failing forward. But I am not sure I even agree with this lesson “Practice Makes Perfect”. I know it is a great saying, but what if you are practicing the wrong thing? Ok, maybe I being a little harsh, but I think you have to be careful teaching this lesson, because even though God is perfect, we aren’t and I don’t want to misdirect students understanding of God.

#25 The Call to Christ Is the Call to Serve – Motivation

Again, I thought this was another weak lesson and not necessary. I really like interactive teaching and object lessons, which this lesson has, but not much meat. I think that there is so much more that could be done with this lesson. I totally agree with the concept of serving and motivating people to serve, but I think by looking at people’s lives or characters of the Bible would be more beneficial.

Pretty wicked awesome title, eh? Yeah, overweight graying 28 year old youth pastors have brains too!

This is a powerful title for something that is awfully fun about student ministry. Long story short, when new students jump into your ministry it gives everyone a shot in the arm.

Recently we’ve had a couple of students “step up” and look to get seriously involved. That has been fantastic and scary at the same time. It’s fantastic because it means that God is working in and through our ministry and the student is responding. It is scary because it means we have another mouth to feed.

With the vast majority of my time being taken by the core of the group lately, it’s no wonder that those looking for some face time with PA have noticed that one way to do that is to grow up and step up. I am very excited about these two new prospective folks and I’m not quite to the point where I’m ready to invite them in to the core… But I can see that they are well on their way.

It’s cool to be the wise owl, isn’t it? I love being able to see from afar what God appears to be doing and learned to be patient enough to let things happen naturally. Those who come and go in ministry too quickly can never experience this. I just hope I am in Romeo long enough, well into my 40s, to see the cycle play out over and over again.

The missions committee met last night about our summer missions trip. The consensus among the group was that Ireland was the better choice for this year. While they thought the Russia trip is fascinating their observation was that Ireland was more in line with the equipping phase of ministry we are in right now as opposed to the multiplication in Russia.

This leaves me with tons to do for the weeks to come. Namely, we’ll be launching an massive informational barrage to get students/parents involved before the end of 2004. More on this as it develops.

In the past few weeks and for the next few weeks, we’ve been looking at prayer. I know what you are thinking, fun and prayer rarely go together. But I should rephrase that to say that we are creatively looking at some verses that teach us a lot about prayer.

Last week, we had students paint pictures to describe the scenes in Matthew 6:5-6. Someone doing something in private. Someone standing on a street corner. A hypocrite. We got some good drawings and we got some bad ones. But it did drive home the point when we got to the passage.

This week, in order to drive home the point of using few words in prayer as opposed to lots and lots… I’m asking students to come up with Haiku. (You know, the old 12 syllable variety of Japanese poetry.) They will have a few minutes to come up with a haiku that describes some common scenes in their lives. Junior high dances. Playing video games. A clothing drive. Getting dumped by your girlfriend. My dog ran away from home. Deer hunting.

I’ll have to post some of my favorites!

Little did I realize this, but apparently, my big brother Aaron is pretty good at this thing. His team just finished an appearance in the world championships and they finished 3rd overall. That’s pretty cool.

I didn’t even know that the Firefighter Challenge was any kind of a real tour in that way. Let’s just say that I learned more about this part of my brothers life in the last 2 hours than I ever knew. From what I understand, this will also air on ESPN sometime in the future. I’ll have to check that out!

This also marks the end of Aaron’s career. He’s been done for a few weeks now, but I was told he was going to compete in this thing and that would be it.

I don’t know if I have an opinion about him getting out of the military right now. It seems to be a thing he is doing for mixed reasons. According to my dad, he is getting out since the military isn’t offering him a bonus. But my mom tells me that he’s getting out because he’s afraid to get sent to Iraq. I’ve got mixed feelings about that both ways. On the one hand I’m not happy about someone getting training for 15 years and then not going to do your job. On the other hand, it’s not my life to lose. I’ve tried to stay out of it since the first part of it got me yelled at just for mentioning it.

I haven’t been sick since the pneumonia over the summer. So I was a bit taken back by the flu-like symptoms I’ve had in the past 24 hours. Still not sure if I actually had the flu or if it was because I ate like 2 lbs of leftover grapes from Light Force. The bottom line is that I was worthless yesterday.

It’s feels great to be back on my feet today. I have a pretty straight-forward day today. I have to go pick up a U-haul for the clothing drive tomorrow and make sure that all our signs are out in front of the church. Other than that, the big debate is still whether we should get the kids a cat. I love dogs but the kids are absolutely overcome with the idea of a cat and don’t seem to like dogs.

Yesterday was a pretty good day. So I have a lot of little things to comment on.

Cranky update: I’ve had some very positive breakthrough e-mails recently. It seems that by me putting a name of stuff it has helped the girls finally talk about what’s really going on. They’ll probably be horrified that I knew all along when they said stuff like “you don’t need to know.”

Clothing drive: everything is OK. GCOH is happy to accept our donation. That’s a big relief because it would put us in a bit of a pickle if they couldn’t have taken them.

Go market rally! My investments have been soaring in the past 3-4 weeks. I’ve gained about $1000 in value on one of my investments alone. Investing in international stock is finally paying off. When the bulls start to run they run big time in emerging markets!

Homework done: If you scroll down you will see that some of the project for my Student Leadership class has been posted but mine hasn’t. I e-mailed it in last night. Glad to have that little project done. One more paper to go and my first grad class is completed!

Light Force: We set a 2004 high with 42. That’s just about where we were prior to Mike’s departure. It’s awesome that we’ve taken a step back, re-evaluated, and then returned to where we are. Even more amazing is that about half of the 14 vans kids are now coming on their own.

Mission trip: We’re making this decision on Sunday between Northern Ireland and Russia. I think I might be more nervous than the students! Going to Northern Ireland sounds “easier” from a leadership standpoint while Russia would be highly, highly stressful. Both will be fantastic opportunities for the students at Romeo.

I’m sure I could come up with some more. But today is technically a day off for me. I should really get to some of the honey-do stuff Kristen hasn’t exactly mentioned.