What is a convert?

This semester I'm taking two classes. One of which is with one of my youth ministry heroes, Dr. Chap Clark, Author of Hurt: Inside the World of Today's Teenagers (Youth, Family, and Culture). 

In our first few weeks we have been reflecting on something called Incarnational Witness. The basic idea is that our methods of evangelism should reflect the life and model of ministry Jesus practiced. This model dictates that evangelism should be motivated by the same things that motivated Jesus, like being sent by the Father. We should model our evangelism after Christ's example, leaving our place of comfort to go to the broken, the hurting, and the forgotten.

• These lectures are invigorating my love for youth ministry!
• The course material is also solidifying my belief in relational youth ministry as opposed to creating a class or a program for every kind of problem teens will face. When I look back at my adolescence, it was people who journeyed with me that made the difference and not classes or even sermons! I remember the way my youth pastor and youth leaders listened to me, came to my games, and took my questions. I pray that I can be that for our youth and train others in the same model. 

When you think back to your teenage years or even a recent crisis, what made the difference for you?

If you are a youth pastor, you need imovie.

I was goofing around this morning and made a little trailer for summer camp. If you go to lift, sign up today! The registration deadline is tomorrow!!!

A snapshot of ministry to middle schoolers

This is a short from one of our recent jhi fun nights. These type of games can only be pulled off if you get tons of leader buy in. I'm so greatful for these guys and gals. I feel like we can do almost anything with their leadership! As you can see, we had a fun time. I think this game is called, amoeba tag. 

What wakes me up at 7 AM Sunday morning: A mini rant

Can we talk? (I guess so since you're reading this.)

If I'm honest I have to admit that I'm frustrated. There are a handful of amazing youth workers that show up to volunteer first service on Sunday morning. I realize that support and consistency are huge emotional needs for me, but what frustrates me goes beyond my emotional health. I could rant about being true to one's word, keeping commitments, and duty. Relax, I don't think that will help. I realize that much of my frustration comes from the fact that I'm asking people to serve 12-14 year olds at 8 AM on a Sunday morning. The rest of it comes from an inability I've had as a leader to cast a vision that helps people see the importance of what happens from 8:30 AM -10:00 AM each week.

I want to be clear that I'm not mad at any specific person. I don't think there are bad guys or gals in this situation. I also do not think that a church service is an 'end all' 'be all' to a young teenager's spiritual formation.

I have however, accepted the responsibility and the task of making sure that young teens are loved, guided to God's presence, and personally engaged every week, regardless of the time.

Here's a few reasons why I show up on Sunday.

• Someone did it for me.
• On some level, young people expect to meet with God at church. It's an honor to be a concrete representative of Christ when someone is looking for Him!
• It's fun.
• It makes a difference. The longer I'm involved in relational youth ministry, the more effective I've been with teens, parents, and their families.  Trust takes time, and after 5 years I'm seeing more "results" than ever. 
• The "week to week" matters.  With tons of change at school, community, and family, young people benefit greatly from knowing that there is some consistency in their lives.

Ok, I feel a bit better now. I keep thinking if people really knew what goes on in our services, it would be difficult to STOP them from helping these teens. Maybe I'm crazy. 

Thoughts?

Weekend Wrap-Up: July 25th Service

Game: Above Average

Today we actually planed two games. One was a freebee from simply youth called "Race This" that we experienced at Group Work Camps last week. This game was effective for 12-14 year olds. It takes a lot to get people awake during our 8:30 AM service, and Race This did the trick.

The second was a classic youth ministry game called "Human Hearding" that we found at Chad Swanzy's blog/site called the youth leader stash.  This game was perfect at getting people to mingle around a little bit. It was a little intimidating for the 6th graders, so I will rethink when we will play this sort of game again and how we introduce it so it doesn't overwhelm and isolate anyone again.

Lesson: Above Average
We focused on the Prodigal Son Story found in Luke 15. We carried this over from the mission trip theme of God's undeserved love for humanity. We had one of our young people read the story and two more share their testimonies of seeing God's unexpected, extravagant love for them and others!

Lesson Length: Under 20 Minutes

Volunteer Involvement: Average

Fun Factor: Above Average

Overall: Above Average

Weekend Wrap-Up: July 11th Service

Lesson: When God doesn’t give you what you want.

Lesson Length: 12 minutes. And we added break out sessions that we'll call, "HUDDLES" at the end of the lesson. We're officially launching a small group type element in all of our middle school services on August 29th. We'll take the rest of the summer to train and work through the bugs until we have our grand opening for the fall. 

Music: We had a full band. Robby led for the first time and I am so proud of him. What a pure heart that comes through when he leads!  

Attendance: Average. As always, things that are healthy are not always big. jhi is growing in health every single week, from leadership team, youth, and their families too! We had a big first service, which was an anomaly for this time of year.

Volunteer Involvement: Average. We've put a lot of effort into reorganizing our team because we lots some key leaders. These amazing leaders transitioned out of our ministry for different reasons.. some t to pursue carriers in other states etc etc.  All the reorganization is working. New leaders are stepping up in the empty spots! More kids lives are getting touched, communication with parents and  our ability to serve new students is improving! The love of volunteer leaders is defiantly spread out to many of them.

Fun Factor: Above Average for WHOLE SERVICE. 

Games Played: Ninja Feet provided by Chad Swanzee's website!

Back From Challenge Camp

I just got back from a great youth ministry experience. Several seasons of my life converged in one evening and it was quite overwhelming. This was caused by the realization that I already knew many of the young people transitioning into jhi. I knew them as YOUNG kids though. I know their parents and older siblings that have already graduated from jhi and high school. It's fun to see entire families move through the ministry here.  In the previous post I talked about how our Children's pastor ivited me to a special event for the outgoing 6th graders. I drove out to Giddings Texas about an hour away with one of the leaders from our middle school team, Matthew. It's so fun talking about ministry and catching up with our leaders. He's been on vacation, working hard, and going to school full time so we haven't caught up in quite a while. Matthew is a fantastic relational leader in middle school and high school groups and is a tremendous support to me administratively. It was nice just to chat on the way there and on the way back.

Camp Tejas is amazing. Our youth ministry at church has been on the waiting list for this camp for quite some time, but it's always too full to find a week for us to enjoy it. The camp will be well worth the wait. I was so impressed. Speaking of impressed, I was blown away by how smoothly the teams moved in and out of the services with so many kids to take care of. Pastor Ken and his team do a tremendous job with organizing summer camps!

After their evening service, we took the kids transitioning out of the 5th grade and into our middle school ministry on a hay ride. I thought it was interesting that most of them thought we were going to try to scare them or leave them in the woods. It was so cute that they were showing that they still wanted to be taken care of. The hay-ride was a great chance to get to know the kids and laugh a lot. for 6th graders, they were so fun, so bright, and FUNNY! One girl kept pulling hey out of the stack and saying, "HEY!" as if to say hello. Brilliant!

At the end of the hey-ride we came to a clearing with a huge campfire in it. Pastor Ken talked about how important this week is in their lives and how important the next few years will be in their lives and that they can nail down a commitment that night to serve God. Then he gave the youth ministry a huge endorsement and tried to settle their fears about the unknown youth ministry transition. We sang some praise songs and then I had a chance to encourage our kids to care more about what God says about them than way people say about them. I tried to unpack that idea in light of some embarrassing examples from my journey through middle school. I'm not sure how much of the talk they will remember because the fire was so stinkin' cool, but we did connect.

The thing that blew me a way was Pastor Ken asking them to commit to attending our middle school service for a year and really endorsing me and the jhi ministry. I was overcome by this show of trust because those kids LOVE him. Something really good is cookin' at our church. Departments are communicating. Parents are getting involved. Leaders are stepping forward from the congregation to help out the youth ministry. I can't wait to see what happens!

Lift the City Fall Kickoff: Weekend Review

Fall Kick-off, Super Sunday, Back to School Weekend, whatever you call it that's what we had this weekend at Shoreline. We planned to rearticulate our senior pastor's vision to unveil God's love to our world. We did that by raising money for an orphanage and making cards for patience at Dell Children's hospital.

Feel: We had Alex, one of our Young Adult members of our tech team come in and DJ for us during hangtime and it was so great. Feel is so important to middle school aged youth and Alex made the room feel great with his music. I noticed our teens talking to one another more than usual and there was an overall easiness to the room that made people receptive to the message and to our cause.

Volunteer Involvement: It was fairly good. We have a lot of opportunity to help out in a hands on way during first service on Sunday. We've added some amazing new helpers in both services though. Chris, Donna, Christella, and Latonya have been key players in getting things going in the right direction first and second service. Thanks guys!

Music: We started out our meeting with the band on stage playing live music as our group came in. That felt pretty good too. There was a creative element planned that combined video with live music, but it never synced up quite right. If we do that again I think we'll need to practice it a few times. We didn't have the full band that we are used to, but the youth responded really well to a post worship set altar call.

Overall: I think the most important things that needed to happen did happen. Young people were challenged to look beyond themselves and live for something bigger. They met new friends and were connected with caring adults. We raised a ton of money for the orphanage and the cards our kids made were super cool!

Next Week: Lift the City part 2 - We will talk more about being the church and getting into community. After the teaching we are all making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to give away to Austin's homeless populations through a local shelter. The youth are bringing the supplies to make them with too.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

My first larva.

We are playing a game called wheel of misfortune at camp next week and one of the challenges is to eat bbq larva. I ate one today. Mmm! Tasty!

An Open Letter To Senior Pastors

I like what Walt Has to say about youth culture and how the Church (with a big C) should approach ministry to teenagers. I've said this before, but I realise that I'm very fortunate to be at a church with a great clearly communicated model of youth ministry.

A Letter from Walt Mueller to your Senior Pastor

I’ve asked your youthworker to forward this letter on to you. It’s about the kids in your congregation and the powerful role that you play as their pastor in their spiritual nurture.

Weekend Service Review

As a team, we've really tried to tighten things up logistically. Most of the experts on adolescent development agree that how a service feels is just as important as the content (sermons, games, etc.)

With that in mind we've realized that I need to be spending more of my time on our leadership team instead of creativity. These past few weeks stretched me a lot. I'm used to making a video or spending tons of time on a sermon. Those things are important, but they don't mean much if our youth don't feel welcome, safe and valued before and after our service.

I've used more 'canned' creativity that I like to admit in the past few weeks. Simply Junior High put out some great resources that got the burden of games off of my back. I never knew that creating games that middle schoolers actually like could be such a burden, but it is tough! Simple works well, messy usually works, but they can be really finicky. I love.

I'm also finding that asking for help works really well. I used to wonder why people didn't help more. I thought that they would telepathically know what needed to be done and just do it. That explains why the kinds of people who thrive on our team are thriving...they are self starters and go getters. I'm finding that if I ask for a little bit of help, and give a little bit of vision/direction, people are exceeding what I could ever do.

Volunteer youth workers that minister to middle schoolers might be the best people in the world! I know I'm biased, but that's what I think.

Junior High Space

Ok, I'm just gong to put all my cards on the table here. A few months ago I realized that when our church opened the new children's building, there would be a void of space in our new building. I wanted to bring our middle school students to the main building. I figured if we can't have our 6-8 graders in with the adults, then we could at least be under the same roof. I asked for the space and our pastor gave it to us. I asked for a budget to make it junior high friendly...our pastor approved the WHOLE thing. The truth is, I shot for the moon with the budget and put down my dream list for what tools we would need to do junior high ministry.

I find myself in a awkward position that few junior high pastors find themselves in. I work in a church community that LOVES teenagers. I don't have the luxury of complaining or passing the buck, or blaming things on my leadership. My challenge is not thinking of how I can convince my pastor that I'm more than a baby sitter. I need to figure out how to lead the WHOLE congregation in ministry to young teenagers and their families.

I know shoreline is not perfect, but I don't take being here and being discipled by MULTIPLE people for granted. This is a great place to be.

Now I'm wondering what we need to do the best job of ministering to the middle schoolers of Austin.

Craving Pity

In the morning we are continuing our teaching series on how to get along with families. We took a couple of weeks to talk about parents and this week we will focus on how to get along with siblings. Cain and Abel seemed like a good place to start for this one. The only thing I'm going to teach them is not to compare themselves to their siblings. I'm also going to tell only children to listen up because they need to learn not to compare themselves to others too. I picked up Biblical Literacy by Rabbi Joseph Telushkin to brush up on the story and to get some extra commentary on the story.

I appreciated his observation of Cain never saying that he was sorry. He never even responded to G-d's rebuke. Rabbi Telushkin connected that with a quote from Isaac Bashevis "People who don't show pity to others, crave it for themselves."

Shoreline East

Every other month our middle school ministry has the responsibility of providing a church service at our East campus. The campus is located in a part of the city that helps us serve a lot of homeless and section 8 communities. Every week a different ministry from the church provides a service for the guests that includes a song service, creative element, a testimony, and a teaching. After the service, we serve our guests some food. In march one our young teenagers helped preach part of the message to our guests there. I was so proud of him telling about what God did in his life and sharing scriptures and what they meant to him.






After James shared, I came up to transition into a song service and it seemed to work well. All the guests and volunteers were hanging on his every word and I think that having a teenager share from the scriptures enabled all of us to hear truth from a different perspective. As Rob Bell says, "let familiarity breed unfamiliarity." That's what happened for us when we heard scripture teaching from someone we weren't used to listening to.







At the end I was thinking that I shouldn't have got up to tie things together because it wasn't really necessary. James did a great job of sharing and not much needed to be said. However, since this was our first try at tag team teaching with a teenager, I think it went well. One problem we have is actually getting our teenagers 20+ miles south to downtown Austin. I want to get better at communicating to parents that this can be a family thing and all of them can serve in this ministry environment together.







I also wanted to point out Thomas Wright. He's the director of Shoreline East and does an amazing job. Click on his name to check out some of his art. He's incredibly talented and such a good guy. He's pictured here to the left.

being vs doing

I've been going over the notes from this years middle school pastor's summit. This is a gathering of full time middle school pastors that discuss important issues facing teenagers. I always read the notes and get something out of it.

One thing that caught my attention from this years summit was not one of the main topics of discussion, but I think it is very important to consider. There was a disagreement, a very minor disagreement over what to call teenagers. One youth pastor called them students, but the expert that the summit people brought in (Christian Smith) said not to call them that.

Christian said this because, #1 our primary work does not take place in a school, it takes place in a church. #2 If we call them students, we subtly reinforce the idea that teenagers identity is wrapped up in their performance. This is because a student can pass or fail a class. They can do well or they can do poorly. So if someone is not a good student they can think that they are not a good person or a person without value.

I realize that in the big picture this doesn't seem like a big deal, but since we are called, lift STUDENT ministries, I just thought it should be something to think through. I also realize that we started calling them students because they didn't like being called kids. I'm going to casually ask a few high schoolers and middle schoolers how they feel about different ways of being addressed.

For now, when I refer to them, I'll just call them "you guys." That sounds loving right?