YMX has had some slow days recently. This was due to some unknown database issue. The site was working properly, but some of the areas were slow. The net result was that people didn’t hang on very long… about 40,000 hits less than normal yesterday. This was very disturbing and annoying to YMX users.
Just as mysteriously as it came it went. Everything seems back to normal now.
Today I met up with fellow-Detroit metro youth guy Jason Raitz. He runs a cool new ministry called Project 3:11. He’s a really great guy and I liked connecting with him. I hope that since we have such similar aims in life we can partner up on some stuff. I want to take the virtual community of YMX and bring it into the real world… and that earthly connection is his passion. I think we’re going to try to connect up again with a larger group maybe in the second quarter.
Today I’ll be spending a little extra time out of the office for lunch as I head down to Royal Oak to meet-up with a new YMXer. This is cool for me on 2 levels. First, I like to meet YMX folk. Making an offline connection enriches the online experience greatly. Secondly, I am not a Metro Detroiter and it’s a good opportunity for me to hook-up with other Metro Detroit youth workers. OK, so this guy’s church is 50 times bigger than Romeo but we do have oodles in common. It should be great.
On January 3rd I published an article on YMX called Finding God on Brokeback Mountain. I knew in publishing a "pro-Brokeback" article that it would be both a wee controversial, but also good for the community to read. In fact, all of Andrew Seely’s stuff seems to be pretty provacative. But that’s OK, God’s big enough for different opinions.
The article was later picked up by Relevant Magazine and obviously gained some momentum from there. (They have a few more readers than YMX!) Here is what one response I’ve found about the article:
He sounds like a guy I could connect with over a cup of coffee. I don’t have to agree with him on every point in order to appreciate his thoughtfulness and respect his journey. He reminds me that labels — progressive, conservative, gay, ex-gay — need not be impenetrable barriers to being good neighbors to each other. [Read the article]
This is exciting on a lot of different fronts. Way to go YMX!
unConnected The reality is that for every person who feels connected to a church or to "people like them" there are 10 who aren’t connected. This isn’t the end of the world, but it isn’t all that great either.
If you’re a student and you’r unConnected than you are a floater. You’ve got plenty of acquantances but are looking for some friends who will really love you for who you are. You’d be cautious about calling yourself lonely because that makes it seem like you are a loser or something. You aren’t a loser, you just are unConnected. The answer is keep trying to make the connection!
Connect! There is an "aha" moment when someone finally connects with someone they click with. It happens and you aren’t sure how or why… you just know that you feel a sense of relief and you instantly feel like you’ve belonged for a long time.
For youth workers, this happens on YMX every day. It is exciting because someone realizes that they aren’t alone in their struggles. They find out that geographically they aren’t even that far from one another! Suddenly it dawns on them that while they feel anonymous and ambigious in the universe of youth ministry they can connect.
Connecting The next step is when you realize that the first connection may have been an accident, but you can do something about connecting some more.
For a LF student, this isn’t all that easy! Middle school students feel very stuck in their groupings. They tend to fear that if they go outside of their group, even if they made a new link to someone and connected, if they go outside of their group too much they fear that they will be rejected by this. It’s not any worse for a guy as it is for a girl. Here’s the crazy reality though… you can connect your group by being the link!
Connected Almost every day I’ll talk to someone and say "I know a guy in New York that does _________." Then I’ll see their head turn sideways and you can see them think, "How does a youth dude in tiny Romeo, Michigan know another youth pastor in another state?" It’s because I am connected to a group that doesn’t have geographical boundaries.
Every group has boundaries. (Study Group Dynamics and your head will spin!) When you have good friends in high school there is a paralizing reality during your senior year when you realize that this group you’ve been connected to forever is falling apart due to geography. One of you is going to State. Another is headed to Alma. Another is going to stay at Macomb. But being and getting connected is not limited to geography. For me, YMX and it’s predecessors where fantastic at helping me get connected with people who were wired like me. Is it weird that most of these "friends" have never met in the flesh? Sure it is. And an awkward thing is that not every time you meet up with a YMX friend does it turn out the way you want… (Meeting up with Todd and Kim has been the coolest thing in YMX so far!) but it’s better than being unConnected. [About YMXes vision]
At the end of the day you are reading this in one of these chairs. Are you unConnected, connected, connecting, or connected? Of course, most of us sit in all of those chairs at the same time… but as I reflect on different areas of my life, I think about those levels of connection.
I spent most of last night at the Starbucks on Hall Rd since there were a gaggle of high school females at my house. I ended up staying there for about 5 hours. During which time I watched a movie, Omagh, and mostly just chatted online with friends, worked on some stuff for YMX and people watched.
On Omagh. This was a town fairly close to where I spent my summer in Fivemiletown, Northern Ireland. We went there on our day off, and I knew that it had a severe bombing. I had no idea that this is a lot like visiting the WTC area of New York. On October 15th, 1998 a bomb went off in the central shopping area of Omagh while children were going to and from school, people shopping, on and on. It was eery to see places and realize that I was there. I don’t know if the film was shot in the exact location, but it if was I stood right there, and went in that shop where the bomb went off.
On people watching. This was a big eye opener for me. When we were in Fivemiletown we marveled at the way students congregated in key areas. As we tried to draw a parallel to this in the States the only thing we could come up with was football and basketball games. Now I know another place… Starbucks. For hours and hours tons of high school students filtered in, hung out, and filtered out. I have to look into that more. Wow. But more than that, there were all sorts of characters to watch. People like me on laptops. Ladies reading books about mystery. Young workers collecting checks. First dates. Business meetings. Old friends spotting each other over mochas. The occasional panhandler. And swarms of people either just going to or just finishing a movie. It is weird that I can concentrate so well among the noise of those places, but I can get more done in a few hours there than I can in an entire day in my office.
Paul Martin, in his blog called Like a Fire, described YMX as "source for people “in the trenches.” I like that a lot. That’s true. Take what you find at YMX and run with it. Make it better, tear it apart, put humpty dumptie back together again and share like mad. If all of us "in the trenches" do that then youth ministry will, as a whole group, be a lot more effective.
Wikipedia defines Open Source as "Open source describes general practices in production and development which promote access to the end product’s sources. " Yeah, let’s do that in youth ministry today… how cool is that?
It was a good day for both things that I am a part of and care about. Tonight’s LF was pretty solid. A bit weird since there were some middle schoolers missing with a meeting at the schools, and there was a smell of "winter duldroms" since students were well, down. Weird, but OK and part of the school year cycle.
It’s also been a good week for YMX. We’re up to 172 members… pretty good for a newbie site. We’ve had a lot of hits and a lot of activity. I can’t get over nearly 26,000 posts in the forums. 26,000? Holy crap that is a lot of action. We also settled on a new logo and I am excited about a full run of meet-ups coming along.
When we launched YMX on December 2nd, we also decided to have a logo contest for members to submit a fresh looking logo for the new site. The deadline for entries was 12/31/2005 and we now have some finalists.
We’re going to turn it into a vote by the membership and we’ll see which one wins.
This week is a big "looking back" week. It’s in my nature to be reflective on the past. I want to get hung up on what I’ve been up to, what God has done, and what could have gone better. In fact, I tend to worry about yesterday more than I consider right now or tommorow. I want to spend my time looking forward. Forward for my family. Forward for Light Force. Forward for YMX. It’s my hope to make this a week of dreaming and visioneering. In the days to come… as I do this, I’ll post some of those dreams here.
But don’t think I’m going to be tied down to this on my week away from the office. I’ve got a lot planned for fun as well.
Everyone seems to want to talk about Christmas presents. Well, this is the big thing I got. I’ve wanted to have satelite radio for a while and back a few weeks I decided that Sirius is the one I wanted of the two. (It helps that I own their stock, eh?) So far I really like the radio and the service. The one we bought connects to our home stereo in it’s cool little cradle and of course works nicely in the car. Another benefit of the membership is that I can listen online. That will come in handy at the office.
Later today, we’re off to Ford Field and the Motor City Bowl. Even though Detroit+December=COLD we still host a bowl game. I’ve never been to one and I’ve always wanted to go… so we’re going to watch Memphis take on Akron in the "Who Cares Bowl." But, like a lot of things, the company you go with is as much fun as the event.
P.S. There have been some excellent member submitted articles over at YMX. I know I am completely biased, but some of these are great and it’s my pleasure to feature them.