Category: youth ministry

  • Lie to me, baby

    Maybe we are just a little too authentic in youth group?

    Last night, our high school ministry night met. We were down a couple of adults and up a few students. Actually, the night felt right at that balance between “out-of-control” and “in control” that is some of the secret sauce of youth ministry.

    As I struggled to push my table group through a Bible study they clearly weren’t interested in I was feeling a little heart tug in a couple of directions:

    • I need to push these students through this study on Psalm 19, this is God’s Word… and David was describing some really cool stuff they need to know.
    • I need to pull the plug and call an audible. There’s something serious going on that’s more important than Psalm 19 right now.

    Instead, I decided to just let it ride. We half-pushed our way through and half-let them stay easily distracted and unsatisfied. I resisted the urge to either side.

    I’ll never know if I did the right thing or the wrong thing. But I do know I came home deflated and frustrated. Again.

    Another time, another place

    I’ve been thinking a lot about the purpose of Tuesday nights in our group’s life. On the one hand, we want to “keep it real” and be authentically who we are. But my problems aren’t their problems. And my students already deal with more crap than they can work through in a lifetime. So I’m not sure “being authentic” about a lot of stuff is very helpful.

    Nearly all of my students have spent some time in foster care. Nearly all of my students have at least one member of family member who struggles with drug addiction. Only 1-2 students have a dad in their lives. More than half have experienced some level of physical or sexual abuse. Most scrape by academically.

    At 15 years old most of them have lived a lifetime of grief.

    At the same time they deal with all of the normal pressures, temptations, realities, and burdens of being a high school student.

    They don’t want to keep it more real. They want to keep it less real.

    Maybe instead of dealing with the realities of life… Tuesday night should be an escape from all of that?

    When you desperately need a new life “being authentic” just feels like you get dragged back into the quick sand you’ve just escaped.

    A little less authenticity replaced with a glimpse of Fantasia?

    Maybe Tuesday night would be better if it were kind of an other world experience? A healthy escapism? A place that intentionally disoriented students from their own reality and allowed them to escape to another reality for a night? A place in which at some point, on the way home, they questioned… was that even real?

    Maybe youth group should be more of an escape? Sure, one on one or in small groups or in other high trust situations… we can go there and deal with that stuff. But when we gather as a large group I’m questioning the value of creating an authentic experience when a fantasy one is so much more desirable.

    For discussion: I’ve used my own group as an example. But the reality is, youth ministry-wide, the pendulum has swung back and forth about youth group nights as a whole, about the youth worker being more authentic with their struggles, about sharing in small groups about life stuff vs. Bible study groups, etc. What do you think? Is it more useful for students to have a place of deep authenticity? Or is it more useful for students to have a place of escape to play, worship, and laugh?

  • The other 90%

    I think some people are writing me off as a deconstructionist. As if I’m a leftover from a bygone fad when it was hip to rip on the church.

    Part of me says, “Call me what you want, who am I to tell people what to think?”

    But I think that’s an incorrect label.

    My aim is the opposite. I want to be a reconstructionist. I have this crazy, insane belief that the best days for the American church can be in front of us and not behind.

    If you need to label me something, label me this: “Passionate about the other 90%.”

    I will take that to the bank all day, every day.

    The simple fact is that I won’t be satisfied with reaching 5-10% of the population with the Good News of Jesus Christ. If that were a grade in school it wouldn’t even be an F… it would be an I.

    Incomplete work. I know we can do better. I know I can do better!

    I’m unashamedly passionate about that. And I readily admit that I keep company with people who think the same way.

    When I run into “satisfied Christians” I kind of wonder what is wrong with them? How can we be so comfortable and happy when we believe what we believe and 90% of the population doesn’t even care?

    • Nearly all Christians believe that a life on earth knowing Jesus will be better than a life lived on earth without Christ.
    • Nearly all Christians believe that when you die you will be judged. Those who know Jesus spend eternity with Christ, those who don’t know Jesus spend eternity separated from Christ.

    That drives me to think: What is “wrong” with the “system of church” we practice that leads to reaching only 5-10% of any given community? And what could we change, while holding on to what is dear and true, that would help us (the church, the body, the people of Jesus) reach… 11%. 20%. 25%. 45%. In my lifetime.

    It is up to me and you.

    When I go down this road, people always say the same thing: “Adam, we don’t have the power to do anything about that.”

    I reject that idea. Flat out.

    You may not be able to change entire systems of power or government or even the momentum of your church.

    But you can change you.

    And if you can change you and God has called you to lead others. They will change, too.

    When I look at reaching 10% of the population I don’t first think, “We need to change everything.” I first think, “What do I need to change about myself?”

  • One hundred seventy-seven

    It was really cool to find out that my blog was indexed and currently ranks as #177 of the top #200 church blogs. Always nice to be recognized- thanks Kent.

    Based on how he measures, there are two things you can do to help me move up on that list.

    First, subscribe to my blog via Google Reader.

    Add to Google

    Second, if you have a blog, tumblr, postereus site, or anything like that, it actually does help both my page rank & Yahoo links ranking if you have a link to me somewhere.

    More importantly…

    It’s really cool to see the noticeable addition of youth ministry blogs into the Church Relevance rankings. Here’s a list of youth ministry bloggers on the list, with their YS ranking in parenthesis.

    To have 10 youth ministry blogs in the top 200 is really cool. I’m excited about that.

    As I’ve said about the YS rankings. There is room for you.  You have a voice– speak your mind!

  • New ideas wanted

    The numbers are staggering.

    • 5%-10% of the population are actively engaged in church in our country. (With some geographical variations)
    • The United States population continues to grow, the U.S. Census bureau estimates that we’ll have 392 million by 2050. (Currently 307 million)
    • There seems to be an deepening inverse relationship between the amount of money spent on “church stuff” (staff, buildings, programs, etc.) and the amount of people who are active.
    • There are now so many megachurches that we need to differentiate between the mega (under 10,000) and others gigachurches. (10,000+) At the same time, these big organizations are difficult to navigate, don’t work for everyone, and are by definition not on the cutting edge.
    • Our nation continues to become more ethnically diverse. Our churches? Not so much.
    • More and more people are moving to urban centers. The mega and gigachurch movement typically does best in the suburbs. It’s cost prohibitive to build a 10,000 seat auditorium in an urban center.
    • Meanwhile, a church planting movement continues to explode in suburbs and urban contexts, starting churches of all shapes, sizes, and denominations. (Some prioritize youth ministry, but most seem to emphasize their worship service and children’s ministry, youth ministry is a necessary afterthought.)
    • Adolescent culture continues to evolve, devolve, morph, repeat and fragment. One size doesn’t fit all more now than ever. More and more there are children growing up today who not only don’t go to church, but their parents have never attended church, nor their grandparents.

    All of this to say one thing: We, the church in America, need to keep innovating just to survive!

    None of the items are “bad” except the first item. We are reaching a decreasing amount of people while our population explodes.

    All of these things are cries for new ideas, new innovation, and new adaptations.

    Why? Because we know the church is Jesus’ chosen vehicle to carry His message of redemption, restoration, forgiveness of sins, and promise of eternal life to the population.

    No excuses. Get to it.

    1. If you know Christ you are on the team. (1 Corinthians 12 implies that we are handicapped without you.) No other prerequisite is required. Soft innovation typically comes from front-line workers. Hard innovation typically comes from complete outsiders.
    2. It starts with ethnography. You need to know who your people are, what their needs are, etc.
    3. It continues with prayerful ideation and research to test your concept. Don’t go it alone, you’ll never make it.
    4. It’s empowered/driven by success stories and a healthy dose of “we’re out to stick it to the man.“
    5. It’s sustained by good people doing it for the right reasons.

    The time is now. Today is the day.

    What are you waiting for?

  • Over-communicate with your leaders

    Over-communicate with your leaders

    Want to avoid confusion with your team? Communicate. Communicate. Communicate.

    I define a leader as someone who takes people somewhere they would otherwise not go on their own.

    All-too-often, as I look back on my life in leadership, my tendency is always to get a mile ahead of my team because I have under-communicated the basics with them.

    Why are we doing this? What’s our intent? What do we want to get out of this experience? Who are we targeting with our ministry? Why are you serving? How can we accomplish our goals? When is the best time to do this? On and on.

    Every once in a while I’d get this feedback: “I know you have a reason for everything we do, and you’ve given us all the information about what we are doing, but I am not understanding why/how this is going to happen.” When I was young in leadership I somehow too this as a compliment. But now I see it for what it is… a weakness I need to address.

    When my team lacks focus and drive to execute the vision– That’s my fault not theirs. I tend to communicate the vision too little and the share details too much. In the moment, the logistical details seem more important than the over-arching vision. But in the end, you need both.

    You will have leaders who are OK knowing stuff as they go. But to really take a ministry somewhere you need to execute along the way to accomplish the vision.

    3 Ways I combat my tendency to under-communicate

    1. Give people the big picture often. Before each ministry cycles starts, (school year, calendar year, however your church does it) schedule a meeting with key leaders to go over the plan. When I do this I present a white paper for the year as well as the teaching calendar, event calendar, and a description of a discipled person. In other words, I start with the end in mind and show my team how we’re going to get there together. In youth ministry, at about the same time, I host a parents meeting and go over the same information… plus some other stuff like cost of events, permission slips, etc.
    2. Put your pedagogical statement out there. It feels cheesy to think about, and I totally stole it from Doug Field’s youth ministry classic, “Purpose-driven Youth Ministry,” but I think it’s useful to put the purpose for a ministry, in writing, on everything you do. Even better, when I am teaching a lesson and there is a handout for leaders, I also like to give them a quick sentence about what we are teaching. “The main idea of tonight’s lesson is that students will learn ______.” This puts your leaders on the inside, thinking of your teaching strategy right alongside of you, and values their intelligence/abilities.
    3. Get stuff to people early. This is the one I wrestle with the most because you’ll always have some people who feel like they need every detail when you can only provide the big picture. Such as, I have volunteers who want small group questions 1-2 weeks in advance so they can think about it in advance. The problem is that I can’t give that because I rarely actually work on the talk until 24-48 hours before I teach it. But I can tell them the passage and the main idea of the lesson. And usually, that’s enough. The same is true for events and trips. I need to give them the information early enough where they can rearrange their schedule and jump on board to help. If I forget, or am lacking, in that then I should expect them to bail on me.

  • Slides: Doing youth ministry on the move

    This is a presentation I made last month at the East County Youth Workers Network meeting. Maybe it’ll be helpful to you.

    Here’s some of the content that goes with it.

    Slide 1:

    With the rapid adoption of smart phones, iPad, and hundreds of thousands of cheap/flexible apps being developed, I am quickly seeing youth workers realize that they can do more on the go than ever before.

    My prediction is that we will begin to see more and more youth workers go officeless in the next five years.

    For years we have lamented that we didn’t go into youth ministry to be a desk jockey. Finally, the technology is there (and affordable) to the point where we can be in the field full-time, working with teenagers where they are.

    Slide 2:

    This stuff isn’t going to go away. So rather than whine about the impact of media, I recommend going on the offensive and doing our best to educate parents and students on best practices of a digital life.

    For students:

    • Technologies that take off for students are really all about them and their life. From an adult perspective that sounds entirely selfish. (Because it is self-centered) But we need to remember that adolescents are developmentally limited to only think about life from their perspective. So when talking to students about technology, bear this in mind. Teach them things that will make them look good.
    • Trend-wise, I’m still seeing tons of activity amongst students on Facebook. At the same time, text messaging is infinitely more private and infinitely move mobile-friendly. So texting is still king. But I’m also starting to see pockets of students taking to Twitter. They aren’t using it in the way adults are though. They tend to have tight-knit clusters of friends who all have private accounts. For them, it’s a group texting service.
    • Lastly, it’s important to realize that students are students… they are still learning. Which means you need to teach them what to do and why. There’s been a lot of talk about sexting, I think a big reason it is getting so many people in trouble is simply ignorance about how digital files can go viral and how something so innocent and sweet can do a lot of damage to you for a long time. Yes, I said “sweet.” I think a lot of guys/girls are exchanging pictures to flirt. They just don’t have the same boundaries you or I do.

    For parents:

    • Technology is not bad. By it’s definition, it is neutral. It’s what you do with it that makes it good or bad.
    • This stuff isn’t going away. You don’t have to be an expert to be a good parent. But you can’t pretend it’s not there any more than your parents pretended they didn’t know what to do with your beeper.
    • I’m not a big fan of filtering the internet. I really feel like that creates a false sense of security for parents. And if you ask any kid over about 10 years old, they know how to disable the filters at school. I’d rather see parents focused on teaching good practices like only using computers/smart phones in public areas of the house.
    • There’s an assumption that if you don’t know more about the technology your children are using that you can’t teach them how to use it appropriately. That’s just not true.

    Slide 3:

    Let’s turn from technology use to how you can use technology to become more a productive youth worker.

    Slide 4:

    If you want to ditch your office, you’ll need to transition to cloud-based applications. All that means is that your data no longer lives on a single computer in your office or on your laptop, instead it is stored in a web-server and is accessible anywhere you have web access, on multiple devices. (Phone, laptop, even a guest computer with an internet browser.)

    Here are some cloud-based tools I’m using right now that make me more mobile:

    • Evernote – A note-taking app that syncs with all of my devices. I’ll never say “ugh, that Word doc is funky” ever again.
    • Springpad – This also has a note-taking feature. But I use Springpad for bookmarking web-content I want to come back to later. (Here’s my account) This is also amazingly helpful for event planning, meal planning, shopping lists, etc. It’s HTML5 based, which is just nerd-speak to say that it’s built to work with any web-enabled device and isn’t limited to iPhone or Android on the mobile side.
    • Dropbox – I store all of my important files on Dropbox. It allows me to not only access them from anywhere, it also makes it super easy to share. Dropbox is great if you have multiple people working on a worship service or something like that. Everyone can just save their work in the same folder and everyone can continually have access to the same stuff. I never use our work server anymore. Everything is on Dropbox.
    • Google docs – The original big player in the cloud-based app world. I use Google docs for any document I’m going to collaborate with others on. It has all of the same features as Microsoft office, except it lives in the cloud, is free, and you can add multiple authors in a jiffy.

    Slide 5:

    Larger ministries tend to move quickly into a project management mode. This just means that one person isn’t responsible for an entire project… they have to collaborate with multiple people. Most of my work at Youth Specialties and McLane Creative is tracked through project management software in an attempt to keep all of the knowledge out of our email system!

    Here’s three that I’ve used.

    • Basecamp – This is the gold-standard project management utility. It has lots of deep features, is mobile-friendly, and if you are working with outside contractors there is a good chance they are familiar with how to use it. Everyone uses it! The downside is that it isn’t free.
    • Google groups – Google groups has many of the same features as Basecamp. It has just never taken off in the project management world. I don’t really know why. You can use it in much the same way, and it’s free.
    • Collabtive – I use Collabtive at McLane Creative for project management. It’s very similar to Basecamp, is free (open source) and lives on my webserver. That said, it’s not a novice utility to administrate. So if you don’t have someone confident with PHP, mySQL, and available space on a webserver, it won’t work for you.

    Slide 6:

    Last but not least, here are some other service worth looking at to improve your communication with parents, students, and your team.

    Text-based

    • Groupme – Groupme is a free, group-based, text messaging service. I’ve used it a little and really like it. Essentially, you just add people to a group, the group is assigned a phone number, and people can text the groups number and instantly notify everyone else in the group. The upside is that it’s free and full of potential. The downside is that it’s “reply to all.” If you wanted to try this out I’d recommend trying it with your adult volunteer group first. It could get crazy with a large group of students… fast!
    • Google voice – This is basically an alternative to giving your students your phone number to text. Google voice is 100% free, has a mobile and web interface, and works great. Another cool use for this for youth workers would be that it’s pretty easy to share responsibilities for responding to texts with your team.
    • Tatango / SimplyTXT – Both of these are fine if you are looking for more of a professional grade group texting service. Both are great and both cost money.

    Other online communication apps for youth workers

    • Facebook groups – Groups recently got an overhaul. There are some cool features there for you. It’s basically a profile for your ministry. The upside is that there’s a high likelihood all of your students are already on Facebook a lot and familiar with it.
    • Mailchimp – Email is not dead. Mailchimp is the industry leader in email marketing. What I love about Mailchimp is that it isn’t just an amazing application… it’s free for lists under 2,000! (Which would be nearly every youth group in America!)

    Got questions? I’ve got answers.

  • 5 Ways to Build Intrinsic Motivation in Students

    Fear is a short-term motivator
    Photo by marysia via Flickr (Creative Commons)

    “Fear is a short term motivator.” That was the first lesson in my first class on managing people. As a 21 year old manager of a staff at a health insurance company in Chicago, this was a valuable lesson for me. Most of my subordinates had either been with the company 25+ years or were right off the street, having never held a job more significant than McDonald’s or making license plates in the state pen.

    That lesson stuck with me as I entered into vocational youth ministry. One youth ministry professor drilled into me that big things happen in students lives when we shift the focus from extrinsic motivation to intrinsic motivation. In other words, as faith develops from a childhood faith where rewards motivate students to learn and begin to grow into an adult-like faith, we need to shift motivational strategies so that they will continue to grow because of something inside of them spurring them to learn and grow.

    Question: If fear doesn’t work long-term and external rewards (pizza parties, badges, trips) are decreasingly effective as adolescence progresses, what are intrinsic motivators that work with students in youth group?

    Here’s 5.

    1. Ambition – Remember this Super Bowl commercial from Monster.com? Every student is full of ambition. One way to motivate students is to tie their personal ambitions, self-talk & delusions of grandeur, into Gospel-oriented purposes. When you connect the dots that a life with Jesus could be a fast-track to what they dream of doing with their life, that creates fusion.
    2. Disdain for past failures, family patterns – Disdain is different from fear in that disdain towards your current condition has a repelling reaction. I’ll never forget when I figured out that living a life focused on my relationship with Jesus would help me navigate away from the shame of my personal failures and the gravity family failure. Deep inside I knew I didn’t want that to happen to me. Together that made living as a sacrifice to God more attractive. No sacrifice was too great if it meant I could avoid repeating the things I was most ashamed of and potentially have a more steady family in the future.
    3. Self-improvement – This is similar to ambition but even more internal. I’ve had many students over the years who have a strong, innate desire, to better themselves. They want to learn. And they want to maximize their impact on others. Tapping into that desire to self-improve by laying out how x will make them better at y has acted as an easy way to motivate students. They already want to grow! You are just giving them an avenue for growth to occur.
    4. Serving the greater good of society – So this isn’t exclusively a Christian motivational technique. Yet clearly, there is something in adolescent culture today that seeks to live out lives of justice, mercy, and compassion. In recent years I’ve learned that service projects are easier for students to invite their friends to than fun outings. Why? Because for lots of people public service has been ingrained in them as valuable and they like how serving makes them feel. It becomes your job, as their leader, to clearly make the tie between acts of service and the Gospel being good news to the less fortunate among us.
    5. Joy of doing what is right – We are all born with a conscience. It is shaped by culture with an innate desire to do what is right and avoid what is wrong. Helping students navigate those waters, in a practical and guilt-free way, is a powerful motivation for sticking around. Just like our conscience happens on the sub-conscious level… when you can connect the dots between the right they desire to do and Biblical truth for why they should do that, mountains move in students lives.

    What are intrinsic motivators you are finding work with your students?

  • Hope reigns over youth ministry

    Hope makes humanity unique.

    No matter how bad things may look, you can always choose hope.

    Hope is the reason a widow can smile at her spouses funeral. And hope is the reason a woman living in a tent can shock you with a smile and call out to God with thanksgiving when she is destitute.

    Hope is the fire that brings warmth to your heart during your darkest hour.

    The way I see it, hope is winning in the lives of many friends in youth ministry right now.

    The last few years have rattled us to our core as two realities crushed our confidence:

    1. We realized that the way/methods/modes we experienced youth group and even came into a relationship with Jesus weren’t effectively reaching the students in our lives in the ways or with the veracity we had grown used to.
    2. The economic crisis changed, foundationally, the way our ministry was financed. Many of us lost our jobs or were forced (or given the opportunity) to take on additional responsibilities in the church.

    While, from a humanist perspective, those crushing realities should have devastated youth ministry, I think it has made youth ministry better. When circumstances should have snuffed out the dreams of our heart, hope blew a steady, gentle breath onto the embers, igniting the flame once again.

    From my perspective this last period of youth ministry has brought about two amazing things which I aim to demonstrate more vividly in the months to come:

    1. Youth ministry was never truly about a model anyway. Youth workers have created fresh ways to share Jesus’ love with adolescents built on the best practices of “what we grew up on” and melded into the needs of individual communities we serve.
    2. Youth ministry was always a calling as much as a vocation. When the money got cut back and even when people lost their jobs– they still chose to minister to adolescents because that is who they are more than what they were hired to do.

    So, here we are! We have run the gauntlet and survived! Circumstances can not snuff out hope!

    I am snubbing my nose at those who have declared youth ministry dead. Swooned? Maybe. Knocked down? Definitely. Humbled? You bet.

    But giving up? Never.

  • Is Purity the Right Word?

    Photo by Boris Drenec via Flickr (Creative Commons)

    I didn’t grow up in church. As a result, I am still learning Christianese. You know, the weird language Christians use when talking to each other.

    • Sanctification = I’m less a jerk today than I was yesterday.
    • But it’s a blessing = I’m really disappointed by what happened to me, but I’m trying to make the best of it.
    • That was Spirit-filled = I liked how that made me feel.
    • I’m pursuing righteousness = My choices have screwed things up, but I’m learning from them and trying to do better.
    • We go to a Bible-believing church = I go to a Baptist church.

    Every subculture has code language. As we get to know a subculture, picking up on the code language is key to being accepted.

    It’s mostly harmless. Mostly.

    That said, I have an issue with the code word “purity” as we talk to adolescents about human sexuality.

    We have a whole batch of code language which I don’t think is helpful.

    • Purity = Abstinence
    • We’re going to have a purity weekend = A scared straight weekend, similar to drivers education where we will fill a room with sexualized language, then tell them not to act on it.
    • We want you to commit to sexual purity = Even though we don’t want to talk about sex, we want you to promise us you won’t have sex until marriage.
    • You can chose a new purity in Christ = It’s not OK that you’ve had sex, but we’ll accept you anyway.

    On and on.

    My problem with purity language is three-fold.

    Biblically, it’s not true

    There is a disconnect between language of purity and our own sinfulness. Outside of Jesus, no person has ever been truly sexually pure, by Jesus’ definition. “But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” (Matthew 5:28) There are a lot more verses in the Bible that emphasize our innate sinfulness. I have a feeling that even Mother Theresa may have had a naughty thought once or twice in her life. Certainly, the Bible is full of stories of sexually impure people doing awesome things for God.

    David slept with a woman and got her pregnant. (After watching her bathe from a rooftop!) Then he had her husband killed to cover it up. And yet he is called, “A man after God’s own heart.” Solomon, whom the Bible proclaims as one of the wisest men in history, had sex with hundreds of women. God even chose to create a sexual scandal to bring his Son to earth. The Bible is FULL of impurity when it comes to sex.

    Maybe I’m just too Calvinist? But I believe that Jesus is unique in all human history as the only person to truly be pure. So standing in front of a group of teenagers and telling them to chose sexual purity is starting the discussion from a guilt-inducing place and coming from a hypocritical mouth.

    Purity isn’t the right word. Biblically. It’s too loaded.

    Physiologically, it’s not true

    Sex isn’t dirty but pure isn’t quite the right word either. Purity language makes it seem as though sex is something that it isn’t, physiologically.

    As we describe sex– bathed in the language of purity— we are setting our students up for disappointment. They already know their bodies aren’t pure. And as they later explore their sexuality with another person purity won’t be a useful word for it.

    Statistically, most of the students you are talking to about their sexuality have already experienced some levels of sex. (With another person, alone, or watching it online.) So when you stand in front of them and use language of purity to describe sexuality, they probably think you are crazy.

    From a physiological standpoint, purity isn’t the right word.

    Developmentally, purity is too symbolic

    Adults all know that “sexual purity” is a symbolic term. It’s code language. It’s a way that we’ve come up with to talk about our sexuality in a way we are comfortable with. We justify, even if it isn’t helpful at least we are teaching something.

    The problem with using symbolism to talk about sexuality is that the early adolescent mind can’t decode it. You use the term “purity” symbolically; they hear it literally. So you teach on sexuality using language that they don’t understand and seems completely devoid of their own experience. You finish feeling like you’ve really expressed your view and they leave more confused.

    Purity is a good word symbolically, but it might not be developmentally appropriate.

    Just to be clear

    I’ve got no problem teaching students that they should live their sexual life in a way pleasing to God. I’ve long taught my students, “My desire for you is that you will grow up to have happy, healthy, and simple adult relationships.” And I’ve used purity language tons!

    I’m only questioning our choice of words. Is purity the most useful word to describe glorifying God with our sexual selves?

    For discussion

    • Do you agree or disagree with my premise that purity isn’t the right word to talk to adolescents about human sexuality?
    • What would be better words we should use to talk to students about sexual health?
    • We all know parents are the best people to talk to their kids about sex… so how can we better partner with parents?

  • You aren’t going to change

    On Evolution, Biology Teachers Stray From Lesson Plan

    Researchers found that only 28 percent of biology teachers consistently follow the recommendations of the National Research Council to describe straightforwardly the evidence for evolution and explain the ways in which it is a unifying theme in all of biology. At the other extreme, 13 percent explicitly advocate creationism, and spend at least an hour of class time presenting it in a positive light.

    That leaves what the authors call “the cautious 60 percent,” who avoid controversy by endorsing neither evolution nor its unscientific alternatives. In various ways, they compromise.

    Read the rest

    Here’s the kicker to the article: (read carefully)

    But Dr. Moore is doubtful that more education is the answer. “These courses aren’t reaching the creationists,” he said. “They already know what evolution is. They were biology majors, or former biology students. They just reject what we told them.

    No doubt this article will make a lot of Christians chuckle. As a whole we aren’t big fans of evolution, nor are we fans of the compulsory indoctrination of children to the theory.

    In truth– we should cringe at what this reveals about our condition in youth ministry. We do the same thing.

    Just like schools can’t get biology teachers to teach evolution the way the government requires, we often refuse to change the ways we minister to students. Just like America’s biology teachers, we can read study after study or attend seminar after seminar… but we are ultimately going to teach the way we want to teach using methods we want to use. To quote the article, “They just reject what we told them.”

    If it was good enough to reach us, it must be good enough to reach today’s teenagers. Right? Wrong.

    Truth + human behavior = no change

    • I could overwhelm you with evidence that your communication methods are ineffective. And you wouldn’t change.
    • I could show you longitudinal research proving that your programs don’t deepen a students walk with Jesus. And you wouldn’t change.
    • I could prove, from your own experience, that other methods of teaching Biblical truth could deeply impact your students. And you would not change.
    • I could show you study after study that shows that the way you do youth ministry reaches a decreasing percentage of students in your population. And you wouldn’t change.
    • I could point you to studies which show how certain types of strategies affect long-term change while others seem like they affect long-term change but ultimately don’t. And you wouldn’t change.

    That’s not how change works. You and I don’t change for rational reasons. We say we do. But we don’t.

    You can’t expect change from people who won’t acknowledge their failure.

    Some of you will read that list above and say… “But if you showed me that evidence, I’d change.” No– you probably wouldn’t. You might say you will. But if I come back to you in six months you’d fill my time with excuses.

    • This is a big organization, it takes time to turn the Titanic. (True, but it sank in just a few hours.)
    • I couldn’t convince leadership to make any of those changes. (Um, and they call you a leader?)
    • We already had a plan when we learned those things, but we are planning on implementing them this summer. (Really? I bet if the internet broke in your building you’d get it fixed today.)
    • I want to do things differently but we run this ministry as a team. (Consensus is the way to go. Just ask the federal government how that’s working for them.)

    Change is intrinsic. That’s why extrinsic evidence is often a waste of brain cells.

    You won’t change who you minister to until something changes in your heart. You won’t change how your programs work until something changes inside of you. Your behavior won’t change until you take the time to internalize who you are, what you believe, why you do this, and count the cost of change.

    Take a moment to read this from Alcoholics Anonymous. They deal with the same problem every day. Change starts inside of you!

    Each of us in youth ministry is faced with the same challenge. We are called by God to help adults form meaningful connections with adolescents. And we are called to go and reach students with the Good News of Jesus Christ.

    Will we continue to do things the way we have always done them and watch the church reach 8% of the population. 7%, 5%, 2%… 1%. Or will we snap out of our trance, look in the mirror, and make the changes in ourselves needed to reverse that trend?

    “Wake up, sleeper,
    rise from the dead,
    and Christ will shine on you.”

    Ephesians 5:14