I’m an introvert caught in an extroverts life. Fortunately, I’m married to a fellow introvert. And we dream about simple things… like taking vacations places where we can walk in silence and be alone. Where we are free to explore and discover. And where we take the time to just be.
I find the Spirit’s voice loudest and my mind most alert when I make the time to be alone.
I’ll admit to never giving the Dirty Jobs star a shot at being actually über intelligent. But this talk blew me away. I love a good old-fashion contrarian.
A few weeks ago I mentioned something our youth ministry does over the summer. We hire a group of high school students to run our children’s ministry outreach program. Here’s a highlight video they showed in church at the end of their experience.
I’m so thankful for the impact these students had on our community! Of course, they didn’t do it alone. The whole staff of Harbor was fully engaged as well as a big crew of adults from the church as well as some other missionaries from InterVarsity’s urban project.
My view of discipleship has radically changed in the last two years. I’m increasingly convinced that my role as a shepherd to high schoolers is about putting them in moments of spiritual crisis so that they recognize that they need to learn more from God’s Word.
This is in stark contrast to my previous model. Before I spent way too much time preparing them to do ministry and giving them information that just didn’t seem relevant to their walk with Jesus yet. The more I turn that upside down, putting them in situations where they know they need to learn more, the faster they grow up. When you couple that with my desire to see students take greater responsibility for themselves earlier in life… you start to see a new view of what we used to call a “description of a discipled person.”
As more time goes on I see my role in disciple-making less as a manager of a program and more as a curator of the spiritual life. (see Richard Dunn’s pacing concept in Shaping the Spiritual Life of Students for that concept.)