Tag: inward outward and beyond

  • Retreating

    A couple weeks back I wrote about our free retreat. I just got back. It was a quick, but profitable time.

    I’m more convinced than ever that when you are good news first, not only will the Good News be received, but the news of Good News will spread like wild fire as a result.

    Last night the whole group shared some intimate details of our story. At the core we found a deep need for our Heavenly Father to step in and our desperate need for our community to become our family.

    There is great hope, there. To have a heavenly Father that literally can’t betray you, leave you, and is bound to never forsake you is a promise too important to miss.

    Half of my brain is thinking, “Wow, we’ve stumbled on a great way to minister to hurting teenagers.” But the other half of me is thinking, “Wow, we’ve stumbled on an amazing way to minister to every teenager.”

    Our culture is wounded and destructive. But praise be to God that these wounded students cry out to God from Genesis 50:20, “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives.”

    I’ll unpack that more another day.

  • Beg, Borrow, and Steal our Retreat!

    That’s the goal of our high school ministries Winter retreat.

    I’m not talking about a cash neutral event to the youth budget. I’m talking about… we’ve got no money so we need to do this retreat for free. We don’t have budget money and our students literally have no cash to offset expenses.

    Here’s what we’re trying to do:

    Create a memorable, kinetic, outside-of-our-neighborhood, experience with our high school group. We need this retreat. It’ll be good for the students and it’ll be good for the group.

    Here’s how we’re going to do it

    Beg: I’m not too proud to beg. Especially when it comes to the faith development of the students in our ministry. Fortunately, when it came to location, I didn’t even have to beg. I just asked a Kingdom-minded friend if we could crash his youth building for 30 hours. When I visited Danny Long earlier this fall and saw his facilities (about 30 minutes from City Heights, but far enough into East County to feel completely separate from the urban environment.) I asked if it might be a possibility to use his building for a retreat. Without flinching he was happy to do it.

    Next up, Kathy (our youth pastor) asked her cousin to lead worship. Done. Teaching? I’m pretty sure we’ll split those duties. Now we’re out begging for folks to pick up the tab on our Costco run for food for the retreat.

    All that’s left is to beg off some programming elements. One of the tricks I learned from retreat-guru Lars Rood [author of an upcoming YS book on doing ministry for cost-neutral or free] was to not skimp on experience. So we are officially on the lookout to bring something to this retreat that our students from City Heights completely unexpected. (Horseback riding, sledding, paintball, or something along those lines.)

    Borrow: We’re going to borrow ideas. Darn near all of them. Why spend all the time thinking up stuff when we can take things people are already offering for free and tweak them to work in our ministry/ From activity ideas to theme to kitchen appliances.

    Steal: OK, we’re not going to steal anything. But we are stealing victory from the enemy by doing something we can’t afford for free. We might not be a resource rich ministry, but we are a resourceful group who aren’t ashamed to rely on the Kingdom.

    Have you ever done a ministry event like this? If so, leave a comment and share your idea. [So I can steal it.]

  • Front-loading ministry in the discipleship process

    A couple weeks ago I shared a post about discipleship that raised some questions about how we do things in our student ministry. Most of the comments were affirmative. Some of the more critical questions which arose required some follow-up.

    With that in mind, I grabbed a few moments with Chris and Kathy, our staff members who run the New Heights Project to drill down into some of the questions that came up.

    • What is the New Heights Project internship all about?
    • Who we are and who we partner with?
    • Why intentionally hire non-Christian students to do children’s ministry?
    • What has been the effect of this method in students lives?

    One additional thought. The thing that freaked most people out was the concept of intentionally hiring a mix of Christian and non-Christian students as interns. Every church I’ve ever done ministry with had students help in ministry areas who weren’t Christians. Any ministry leader is fully aware of that same fact. The only thing that is different here is that we’ve made it part of our strategy. Typically, ministry leaders know it but don’t acknowledge it because we’re talking about children of church members.