September means 3 things for our family: back to school, back to soccer, and my travel schedule heats up.
We have soccer practice three nights a week in our family now. And it takes quite a bit of effort for me and my husband to get home, get dinner on the table, make sure homework is finished, load up our kids for soccer practice, and actually try to connect with our kids in the midst of it all.
Similarly, it probably takes the parents of the students in your ministry quite a bit of effort to bring their kids to church, or to youth group, or to a small group meeting.
Granted, parents should be grateful to you as a youth worker for all you’re doing. But how about if you try thanking your students’ parents for making the effort to involve their kids in your ministry’s events. It might just make their day. And it might just build a stronger relationship between you and the families you serve.
Earlier this year Leadership Journal interviewed Kara on intergenerational ministry and insights from our College Transition Project. That article was made available online this week, so we thought we’d share it with you if you didn’t catch it in print. Click on the image below to read the interview.
Last week I spoke at the Gathering, a marvelous four-day conference for folks involved in and interested in Christian philanthropy. I had the chance to catch Ron Sider, which is always a treat for me.
In talking about how Christians can respond to same-sex marriages, Ron said, “If we don’t do this, our rhetoric about family values is a farce.”
What was the “this”?
It was modeling positive, vibrant marriages ourselves.
The start of the fall is always an exciting time for Fuller students, especially the students in our Urban Youth Ministry Certificate program at the Fuller Youth Institute. What we hear over and over is the depth of impact this program is making in the lives and ministries of youth workers in inner cities across the country and beyond.
For today’s post I’d love to let Billy Coleman share his perspective of that impact as a student in our program:
P.S.: The admissions deadline for next year’s cohort (beginning in Spring 2010) is November 20th, just two months away. Check out the details.
Last week I spoke at The Gathering, a conference for foundation leaders and philanthropists that was hosted in Phoenix, Arizona. At the first evening session, Austin Gutwein, founder of Hoops of Hope, shared his story, which had already been captured on video by CBS Sports.
When Austin was nine, he started Hoops of Hope, a basketball marathon, to raise funds for children in Zambia who were orphaned because of A.I.D.S. Six years later, God has opened up amazing doors and Hoops of Hope has gained momentum in bringing about deep justice. He says he’s not even that great of a basketball player, but he loves the sport and cares about kids around the world.
Austin is now fifteen, and while I’m always a bit concerned when we hero-ize teenagers who perhaps aren’t developmentally ready for that sort of attention, his deep justice story is inspiring. I love this quote from Austin at the end of this video: “When given the opportunity, kids will blow you away.”
If you’re like me, most of your decisions about summer missions projects come down to two things: 1. Calendar. 2. Price. I wish that wasn’t the case and certainly our plan of integrating the missions component into the lives of our students is hindered by where we start. But it’s very tough to get past this same old starting point.
Very quickly after deciding on time and price, we begin getting caught up in the details. How will we get kids to sign up? When should we publish the trips on our website? How will we do fundraising? What leaders will go?
This is all followed by beginning to look at transportation, lodging, food and all the details. If I’m honest, this is where the majority of my time and thought goes. I think about the logistics of the trip and the safety of students.
It’s usually at this point that we start thinking about the purpose behind all of this. We’ve already made the majority of the decisions and we are trying to come up with a purpose/vision and then take the trip we’ve already decided on and planned and put it into some sort of framework we come up with that is aimed at changing lives.
This year we are trying to do something different. Scott, our Youth Missions Coordinator, is reading through Deep Justice Journeys and working on creating a framework for how everything happens in our Youth Department. He’s posed several probing questions to our staff specifically as it involves “Who” should go on trips next summer and what the “Qualifications” should be. He’s been tasked with rethinking everything we do and coming up with a vision for the process.
But we’re making things hard on him already. While he was on a trip, we went ahead and tried to do everything listed at the beginning of this article to free him up so that he could focus on the training.
We recognized after he got back that you can’t separate any part of the decisions, prep or training. For this whole process to be a “journey” and for it to be more than just a “trip” for students we need to integrate much of the ideas in the book before we make decisions.
So confession. It’s only September and we’re already doing it wrong. Restart about to happen.
Note: this is part of a year-long series of guest blogs by Lars on utilizing Deep Justice Journeys in their youth ministry. See the first post here.
Recently I spent a day at Disneyland with my family, riding rides and battling crowds at the “Happiest place on earth.” Despite my cynicism for over-commercialized places and my frustration about marketing to kids…we had a great day and my kids had a blast.
But there was one thing that distracted me over and over throughout the day. It wasn’t all the teenagers attached to their cell phones — I actually saw most of the teenagers engaged in real-life conversations with the people around them.
It was the parents.
I couldn’t help but notice how many parents of kids of all ages were getting off rides and immediately checking their email and text inbox, ripping back responses as they floated behind their kids to the next attraction. Maybe they were bored out of their minds to be spending the day with their kids, but I doubt it. Maybe they were just distracted at that ONE time at the point I happened to see them (and I happened to catch about a hundred of them at just the right time). Or maybe they forgot what boundaries are and how to give their kids the gift of presence.
I get a lot of things wrong in parenting. But the more I saw this behavior, the more I was determined to completely ignore my phone (and it was my birthday!) to be present to my kids. I have to wonder, though: if this is what kids see at Disneyland from the adults around them (parents or otherwise), what are we as a culture showing them day after day in our “normal” lives?
I suspect that if we want them to put their phones down every now and then, we have to go first.
Last weekend I spoke to a group of parents of teenagers, and as usual, I learned a lot from them. In a conversation afterward, one parent shared something with me in response to a point I had made about increasing the number of connections between kids and adults. She said that she decided she was going to contact the parents of the other members of her son’s new high school small group and invite them to get together for a barbecue to get to know each other and begin to pray together for their sons over the next few years. She was hoping this would be a first step toward inviting parents to invest in each other’s kids.
When I said “What a great idea! I’m actually surprised that I haven’t heard of parents doing that before,” she responded, “Well, we have so much to lose.” That part caught me off guard…with its truth. What she meant was that getting to know each other and beginning to share in each other’s lives is a huge risk, because we’re giving others access to who we really are outside the church, to the ways we parent, and inevitably to what’s going on in our own spiritual lives. In other words, we have our well-kept images to lose!
In the midst of all the things we teach our kids as parents and as youth workers, I pray we can teach our kids that it’s so worth it to lose the facades that keep us from developing real relationships. It may be painful at times, but it’s worth it. And unless we’re willing to go for it and model it like this parent, the chances they’ll pick it up on their own are slim.
I’ve long been concerned about what we do to teenage athletes in our culture. It’s quite possible that, to borrow our colleague Chap Clark’s terms, this is one of the most systemically abandoned groups among an already-abandoned youth culture at large.
While they are launched into the public spotlight and at times given opportunities to make crazy amounts of money — on one hand every teenager’s dream — on the other hand they’re left there in the spotlight to fend for themselves. While we stand by and watch, they live out their adolescent awkwardness and search for identity right in front of everyone through their mess-ups on and off the court, and too often in front of the cameras. Not to mention the family problems way beyond their control. This was highlighted last week by the U.S. Open and the media exploitation of 17-year-old Melanie Oudin’s parents’ relationship struggles (that none of us needed to know about).
And then there’s the countless number of high school and college football players being placed on the chopping blocks this fall by eager fans, parents, and hometown communities who thrive on critiquing their performance moment by moment, game by game. In our obsession for perfection on the field, we forget about the very real (and often very scared) 16- or 19-year-old kid inside the uniform and pads whose worth we’ve based entirely on his ability to receive, pass, or hang on to a ball. Seriously? And we’re not even talking about basketball fans yet.
Check out this recent NY Times piece on the “early and hasty life lessons” young athletes face. Journalist George Vecsey aptly muses, “It’s a wonder more of them don’t self-destruct.” I think this can be as true in small-town settings as on national television.
What are we doing to counteract this in youth ministry, with whatever kinds of athletes we have contact with? Do we give them safe spaces to be real aside from their athletic persona in our ministries, or are we another cog in the wheel of pressure for performance? Are we simply abandoning young athletes alongside the rest of the culture, or are we offering countercultural relationships that speak a different truth into their lives? I’d love to hear your ideas.
I continue to be fascinated by this Newsweek article on kids and race. In particular, here’s a disturbing excerpt:
The unfortunate twist of diverse schools is that they don’t necessarily lead to more cross-race relationships. Often it’s the opposite. Duke University’s James Moody—an expert on how adolescents form and maintain social networks—analyzed data on more than 90,000 teenagers at 112 different schools from every region of the country. The students had been asked to name their five best male friends and their five best female friends. Moody matched the ethnicity of the student with the race of each named friend, then compared the number of each student’s cross-racial friendships with the school’s overall diversity.
Moody found that the more diverse the school, the more the kids self-segregate by race and ethnicity within the school, and thus the likelihood that any two kids of different races have a friendship goes down.
Moody included statistical controls for activities, sports, academic tracking, and other school-structural conditions that tend to desegregate (or segregate) students within the school. The rule still holds true: more diversity translates into more division among students. Those increased opportunities to interact are also, effectively, increased opportunities to reject each other. And that is what’s happening.
The article highlights the importance of adult/kid conversations as a way to process race and develop a more sophisticated understanding. I love diverse schools. Part of why I love living in Pasadena is because of the ethnic diversity. But we can’t assume that diversity—without conversation—will bridge the racial divide.
The debate has swirled for years about whether more exposure to on-screen violence leads to more real-life violence and aggression. That debate has narrowed over the past 10-15 years to studies of exposure specifically to violent video games.
