Going back a few years ago, Kristen and I were very proud members of http://www.calvarymemorial.com. We still refer to Calvary as “our beloved Calvary.” (Though this has faded a bit as time has gone on. We actually don’t miss it too much anymore.)

Anyway, each week I get an e-mailed version of the Sunday sermon. I personally think Ray Pritchard is one of the best communicators of the God’s Word anywhere. (I’ve heard all the big names and he is at least as good as them.) Long story short, last week’s e-mail was from a sermon in 1989.

At that time, a young lady sat in the audience and heard this sermon about committing to missions. Later on, she did. She and her husband were sent from Calvary in the early 1990s to minister to military dependents in Hanau, Germany. A few years later, I moved there as a young, pissed off, and desperately seeking acceptance, 16 year old. Thankfully, they were there and accepted me for who I was. Under their care I accepted Christ and was discipled.

A few years later, as a student at http://www.moody.edu I began attending Calvary Memorial Church in Oak Park, IL. Unbeknownst to me, this was the same church that had sent out the missionaries that befriended me and led me to the Lord. Kristen and I joined there, grew there, served there, and I interned there. In a supreme irony Kristen and I took a seat on the same mission board who sent Dan & Barb out in the first place. I served the youth group who discipled the woman who discipled me.

I was excited to read that sermon. As I read it I felt like I must respond. I’ve never sent an e-mail to Ray and even though I was on staff there, we were never close. So last week I sent an e-mail to encourage him that his sermon in 1989 changed my life indirectly. I let him know that through God’s awesome vision, he had actually been a key part of bringing me to the Lord.

So, yesterday I got a nice response from Ray.

Adam,

Thanks for your note. It came at just the right time. This is World Focus Week at Calvary and it’s good to be reminded of why this week matters so much. I preached that message in May 1989, eventually Dan and Barb got married and headed for the mission field. Along the way they helped disciple you and you served on the Missions Committee. And now you are on the staff at FBC, Romeo. Thanks for reminding me (and the staff and elders because I forwarded your message to them because I know what you wrote will encourage them too) about why we do what we do.

God’s best to you always. Thanks for taking the time to write. You put a smile on my face.

Ray

As I’ve been taking this class at Huntington I’ve really wanted to study more about how the LDS motivate train and send out about 40% of their students for a mission of 18-24 months.

I recognize that there are significant differences theologically and practically between LDS and evangelicalism, but there simply must be something we can learn from their “success.” I’ve been doing a little research and even watch a mormon movie on the ups and downs of missionary service called My Best Two Years and am intruiged by the question “how can they get 18-22 years olds to commit that much for something which is actually a lie?”

• Is it all guilt?
• Is it because of parental influence?
• Is it because they are convinced that LDS is the only way know God?
• Is it a rite of passage?
• Is it done for fame?
• Is it because of a predisposed expectation that they would go?
• Is it because they really think they can change the world?
• Is it because mormonism is works based and they want to get to a higher level of heaven?
• Is it because of the high level of expectations and accountability?

More on this later as I further explore the prospects of “what can we learn from them?”

I rarely write about my children since I don’t want to be that guy who blabs all kinds of embarrassing things off about his kids. But this is begging to be told.

Megan is now 3 1/2 years old. She just started preschool a few weeks ago and she is generally easy to get along with. Recently however, this has been another story. Since she was an infant we knew that she was going to be strong willed and it has shown itself in bunches. We’d almost forgotten that she had this streak in her since we are pretty good about placating her desires… But recently we’ve hit a wall.

It started about 2 weeks ago we she had a tantrum over Paul. Who knows what was going on… But Megan freaked out for a while. She has since had tantrums at the church, in the car, and especially at home. One worth noting happened a few nights ago when Kristen went out shopping without her. Both Kristen and I asked her lots of times if she wanted to go and she didn’t. She wanted to stay home and play on the floor with me. So Kristen left without incident. For about 10-15 minutes we wrestled and played on the floor. Laughs and giggles galour. Then, as if she had suddenly been struck by a case of diarrhea, she says “I’m so sad. I’m lonely. I miss mommy! I wanted to go!” It was actually funny and I laughed about it since she so clearly changed her mind and mommy couldn’t possibly come back to get her. Her tears quickly turned into anger as she demanded that Kristen come home and get her.

I told her mom wasn’t coming back for a while and that “Megan” didn’t want to go. This was the turning point where she started kicking and pounding her fists. Her face was pure anger. After about a minute of this I decided I was going to take control since I was the adult. I put her on the couch and told her that she couldn’t get off the couch until she was done crying. About 10 seconds later she flopped on the floor kicking and screaming. So I put her back on… Long story short, after more than a few warnings she earned a spanking. Still wouldn’t listen and then got another spanking. From that point on, she listened but continued to rage.

After a few more minutes, and my anger level had risen… Oh to have a home blood pressure testing matching! I decided to go to the basement and remove her tantrum audience. I figured that as soon as I left, she would stop crying… Boy was I wrong. For about another hour she sat on the couch and screamed and kicked. I did my best to ignore her knowing that she was safe and didn’t need anything. An hour later I went back to the living room where I found Megan, still on the couch and crying. I said, “are you done?” She looked at me, said yes. Then we just played and had a good time.

I’m not claiming to be some sort of parenting expert. But I do think that I handled this pretty well. I regret having to spank her. No parent should like doing that. The biggest thing that Kristen and I have learned about Megan’s tantrums is that we have to remain in control. (It rarely ends in a spanking, this is just one case where it did… Almost all the time counting to 5 gets the job done!)

But this isn’t about spanking. It’s about tantrums. I can summarize it all by saying that we hope this stage is short-lived. Tantrums are something we are just coping with now.

This is just about the end of the road for my marathon of weekends. If you’ll remember, I had something planned either personally or with LF for every weekend between August 1st and November 1st. I can now smell the finish line with only two weekends left. (Crap, I just looked at the calendar and forgot we had the Superbowl on Nov. 6th. Make that 3 more weekends!)

Anyway, this weekend we are off to http://www.blbc.org for a junior high retreat. We have only 4 students going, but the 4 who have committed are all really cool. So I am looking forward to it. For the guys it is mostly a weekend of fable painting (meaning do crazy stuff since I am invincible!) and for the girls, it means endless trips to the bathroom in swarms. For me, the best part is that I can just show up and participate. I’m along for the ride and I don’t have any responsibilities other than to invest in these 4 students. (Kristen is going too) It’s so much fun to go to a retreat and not have to lead. It’s almost like a retreat.

We’ve never been to Bair Lake, but I’ve heard some good things about it from friends. I know they have nice facilities and all the jazz that junior highers will eat up. Climbing wall, high ropes, huge group messy games and that kind of thing. Mostly, it will be fun with high highs. But since they are 7th-8th graders, we will also have low lows.

More on this after the weekend!

OK, I had a weird day. But it has ended exceedingly well.

The weird part of the day was meeting with this guy who showed up at our church Sunday morning. As I was clearing the sanctuary after church (shaking hands and kissing babies) this guy walked up and asked me if he could talk to me for a minute. Long story short, he was interested in applying here and wanted to get together. So today I drove down to where he lived and had lunch on his turf. It was a good meeting and I really liked him. But knowing how the process goes I’m not sure he’ll ever get talked to. A shame!

Tonight at LF we did our monthly concert of prayer. It went very well. LisaB led all of it. If I haven’t said this lately, that girl is growing! I don’t mean physically, she has matured spiritually a great deal in a short period of time. Of course she is still an adolescent and makes mistakes… but it is clear to see God working on her. The students really responded well to the COP. They happily participated and even each contributed well. Another area that I feel pretty good about is the attendence. We had a total of 135 people on Sunday at church… so I could expect about 13, right? Wrong… we had 35. That’s 26% of Sunday AM attendence. Too cool.

Here are some things I shared on the YS site that show how good I am feeling about life and ministry now.

– My Tuesday bible study group is going great! We just finished Daniel last week and it was incredible to see students really wrestle with those prophesies and learn to ask good text based Q’s.

– Youth group was fantastic tonight. 3 students completely led a concert of prayer and it was fantastic. I can’t even begin to describe how much one of my 11th grade students has grown in the past year. She led all of the prayer and contemplative stuff tonight. Wow. At the same time we are taking this big emotional step of introducing monthly COPs (3rd one) we’ve actually seen God use them. I’d forgotten how cool that is to see.

– My students are influencing their friends for Christ. We are equipping them with skills on how to introduce their friends to Christ through their testimonies… and they are actually doing it. We’re on the verge of a massive milestone of one of our students leading a peer to Christ.

– Even though our church is hemrogging adults (long story) the youth group is growing! That’s not supposed to happen.- An adult actually got up at a business meeting and nominated me to be the senior pastor. (We don’t have one now) Of course, I would never want that… but it was flattering and an powerful reflection of how God is using me to work here.

– My adult leaders are truly graspoing ahold of our vision. They are getting trained and are now asking hte right questions. Phew!- I help coach a HS golf team. Our season just ended and at our banquet students openly shared in front of their parents and their friends how much it meant to them that I’ve been a part of their lives and that I have had an impact in them maturing as young men. They even insisted that they have their pictures taken… in front of the church van they call “Big Sexy.”

Hope that paints a good picture for how good things are going.

For those who are careful observers of All Blogs Go To Heaven, you have noticed that while I did “preach” [I prefer teach] on Sunday morning I have yet to publish my transcripts. That is because the transcripts don’t exist. I had a very brief outline and just kind of “winged it.” This obviously isn’t my preferred method of instruction from God’s Word and I can cite specific places where I messed up, but it was the best I could do under the circumstances. (I only practiced twice!)

For the record. I think I only looked at my notes 3 times during the 25 minute talk.

this is a fine example of the work of despair.com 

For those who aren’t familiar with what I am talking about. The concept of pacing in student ministry is championed in Richard Dunn’s book, Shaping the Spiritual Lives of Students. (You can buy it online at http://www.amazon.com.) It goes like this… In order to lead people and disciple them you only give them what they are ready to handle, walk along with them as they get it [pacing] and your job is to always throw out the next challenge.

I practice pacing in how I disciple students. I always challenge, occasionally give glimpses of the big picture, but empathize and walk beside mostly. It is helpful with “postmodern” students since they don’t feel like they are just another cog in a program. Formerly, “discipleship” had become such a program and so stringent and so impersonal, that it had become regulated to something people either chose to include in their program or didn’t. Like VBS or a ladies. You can either chose to disciple or you can chose not to.

My personal priority is to disciple people. To chose to not disciple is the choice of misrepresenting Christ’s command in the great commission. It’s not someone else’s job… It’s mine! It’s all believers.

But I am left to wrestle with “how do I go about the business of discipling students in a postmodern, hyperbusy world?” Pacing is a good way to do this because it is mostly about walking beside an individual vs. “come to my discipleship group on Thursday’s at 4 PM.” While this is comfortable for me and I think I am pretty good about keeping the pressure of pacing on… I wrestle with the reality of who I’m leaving behind. Jesus went after the few… But left many behind. But he was God… He had some clue as to who to choose and who not to choose. I don’t have that advantage and I choose to not pace some while I do pace others. How is this right?

My biggest fear [and a dose of reality] is that I am investing in the wrong student. The phone will ring in 2015 and some enthusiastic voice will tell me about how they have grown and they are a father and how awesome a youth pastor I was. The reality of this vision is that someone invested in me and learned from me but I didn’t invest in them. They didn’t ever hit my radar screen. Worse yet. The Sixth Sense haunts me with the reality that maybe their is a student who cried out to me and I missed it. Then one day, out of sheer rage, he will show up in my bathroom and shoot me.

A lesser fear is that I will not invest in a student and a vocal parent will get me fired. They will accuse me of being lazy since I technically could have invested in their child and choose not to. They will say, “you invested in these golf team students, who’s parents aren’t paying your salary, but you didn’t invest in my boy. Look at him, he’s a failure and it’s all your fault.”

So I am left with the same question I started with. Am I pacing with students or am I just lazy?

I haven’t been able to post for the past few days because things have been moving a little too fast.

My class at Huntington went pretty well. This is the first time I’ve had a full class, and there were some things I was impressed with and some things I was disappointed by. My biggest two beefs have been that the “pace of play” is way too slow for me in a Dave Rahn class. I’m learning from it, but I just wasn’t sure if he didn’t have enough material or if he really thought his group learning exercises really were more valuable than content. All in all there was about 1/2 to 1/3 the content of a similar class I took on the undergrad level. The other beef is that there was zero biblical content to our sessions. We never opened our bibles in the 4 days the class met. Nor did we pray together. That really saddened me.

Saturday I took 4 of my volunteers to a Sonlife Training session in Saginaw. This was about what I expected and wanted all wrapped into one offering. The adults got swarmed with the Sonlife philosophy and it fostered a lot of good discussion. I think it will help them really clearly see what their task is as well as what the goal of the youth group is. Too cool.

On Saturday night I got a call from our interim pastor to let me know he had the flu and wouldn’t be able to do the talk Sunday AM. This put me in quite a bind as it meant I had to do the talk and I couldn’t possibly prepare correctly. Essentially, I did a simple talk that exposed a ton from my family background and such. I tackled two essential questions that all believers need answered. Can God use me? And What is my job as a believer? It goes without saying that the audience got a heavy dose of the Sonlife philosophy.

Interestingly enough, I must have done OK since at the business meeting a little later someone made a motion that the church hire me as the next senior pastor! (One of the funniest moments of my career.) I knew that some people thought that was a good idea, so I got up and explained what my intentions were and what I sought to do with my life. The biggest thing I think I communicated in that one minute “speech” to answer the motion was that I want to be here to support the next SP.

After that I had to rush over to play in the golf teams final event. We had a 2 man scramble. I played with one of my sophomores and we had a good time. We triple bogied the 4th hole to open our day but managed to end up with 2 over par. Except for that one hole, we played pretty good. Not to toot my own horn, but I played pretty good and helped get our score respectable on a day when the wind and the temperature brought out some ugly scores.

At the little banquet, I really got to see clearly how God is using and will continue to use junior golf. Many of the students were very open and even a little emotional about expressing their gratitude to me. I was really touched by this. The bottom line is that I see it as an honor to work with these young men. I hope that they learn about the game and I hope they learn about life too. I think I’ve helped to accomplish that. At the end of the banquet the seniors dragged me into their pictures and even made sure to go out and get their picture taken with the van, Big Sexy.

What a ride!