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Prev 1 2 3 ...11 12 13 14 15 ...38 39 40 NextWow. That’s the best word to describe my experience at the third and final day of our Sticky Faith Summit yesterday. Dr. Scott Cormode, Professor of Leadership at Fuller, led us through a three-hour discussion that revolved around this question: How do you help people change who need to change but don’t want to change?
The biggest insight I gained from Scott is the power of telling stories – stories that capture what you’d like to see more of in the future. And to tell those stories again, and again, and again.
And again.
And when you’re telling stories, to connect the stories with the church’s existing vision, values and narratives – thereby helping folks connect the dots between the past, present, and future.
Scott’s definition of vision is a “shared story of future hope”. That’s my new favorite definition of vision.
Yesterday was day #2 of our FYI Sticky Faith Summit. We’ve got teams from 12 amazing churches gathered to discuss our research and its implications for ministry – youth ministry as well as children’s, college, young adult, and even the approach of an entire church.
We got talking about how to engage senior pastors in the vision and research, and one senior pastor attending the summit, Dave Burns from Hillside Community Church, shared some interesting insights about how youth pastors can connect with senior pastors. Few highlights:
-Find out what sort of experience your senior pastor has had with intergenerational ministry (which was the focus of yesterday morning), or any other areas you’d like to see change in your church. Perhaps he or she doesn’t have much experience with your vision.
-Give him or her a taste; invite him or her to an event and give them a specific role that can help them really experience the vision.
-Give him or her tangible action steps about what you are hoping they will do in the future. They’ve got a lot to juggle so the more specific you can be, the better.
Can’t wait for today – Dr. Scott Cormode from Fuller will help us all understand how to bring about organizational change that sticks.
In 2010, we have 12 churches who are part of our Sticky Faith Learning Cohort, which largely revolves around our FYI College Transition Project research. Yesterday we started a three-day summit here in Pasadena with teams from Highland Park Presbyterian Church, New Song Irvine, Bel Air Presbyterian, Meredith Drive, Hillside Community Church, Lake Avenue Church, Mars Hill in Grand Rapids, Pasadena Nazarene, Richland Hills Church of Christ, Solana Beach Presbyterian, First United Methodist in Tulsa, and Yuong Sang Church. Each church is bringing 2-4 team members so we had an incredible group of 45 folks. Chap Clark did much of the teaching.
The biggest theme I walked away with was the importance of loving kids unconditionally – without any selfish agenda. So often we as parents or youth leaders have selfish agendas for our kids – we want them to behave certain ways more because it will make us feel better than it’s necessarily the best for them. We want kids to come to youth group because a room full of kids makes us as leaders feel better about ourselves than a room half full of kids. We want our kids to do well in school because the more A’s on their report cards, the better we feel about ourselves.
I want to work on that as a parent and a youth leader.
A few nights ago, our family had Jesse and Megan Oakes over for dinner. Jesse is one of our youth pastors at Lake Avenue Church and we’re in the middle of a February teaching series on “Love, Sex, and Dating”.
Jesse was leading a small group of ninth grade boys and in an effort to help students think about how they are God’s masterpieces, Jesse asked those guys what they had that was most valuable. The first kid who answered said, “I know what you want me to say: it’s my virginity, right?” So that was the answer he gave.
The rest of the small group gave their answers then, which ranged from their camera to their computer to their collectibles. After hearing a few of his friends’ answers, the first boy said, “Wait, so I don’t have to say it’s my virginity?”
How many of our kids are just waiting to give us pat answers – answers that they think we want them to hear. Let’s push them a bit further to really think and tell us what they really think.
My friend, Brian Raison from Ohio State, sent me the press release below by the Drug-Free Action Alliance about how teenagers responded to the Super Bowl. During the Super Bowl, the friends that we had over all agreed how pervasive alcohol ads were. Note below that students didn’t vote those their favorites. I like the encouragement below to TALK to kids about tough subjects, including alcohol. Parents and youth workers can use ads as a springboard for deeper conversation…
Now here’s the press release:
According to the more than 30,000 middle and high school students nationwide, who participated in the Drug-Free Action Alliance Super Bowl Survey; while alcohol ads were widely remembered, they did not place in the top three favorites among youth, as in past surveys.
Doritos stole the show, with kids voting three different Doritos commercials as their top picks.
NATIONAL Middle School High School
#1 Doritos: Hands Off Doritos: Hands Off
#2 Doritos: Shock Collar Doritos: Shock Collar
#3 Doritos: Stole Tim’s Doritos Doritos: Stole Tim’s Doritos
#4 Bud Light: Stranded Budweiser: Human Bridge
#5 Bud Light: Clydesdale Snickers: Betty White
(Results based on over 30,000 middle and high school students within 38 states.)
“It is refreshing to see youth choosing commercials promoting a snack product for their top three favorites, however, there were plenty of alcohol ads, and based on the survey, kids definitely took note of it,” said Patricia Harmon, executive director for Drug-Free Action Alliance.
Not only did alcohol ads show up in the top five favorites, but when middle and high school students were asked about the products they remembered being advertised, alcohol was the second highest item recalled by both age groups (following closely behind food items).
“The concern is the influence of alcohol advertising on young minds,” said Harmon. “Considering youth, under the age of 21, make up about 18% of the Super Bowl viewing audience, we know there are a lot of underage people being exposed to alcohol advertising.”
Research shows that the more youth are exposed to alcohol advertising, the more likely they are to drink, drink more often and drink to excess. The effects of alcohol on developing adolescent minds and bodies can be devastating and long lasting.
Each day, 8,000 kids (between the ages of 12-17) take their first drink of alcohol. Those who begin drinking before age 15 are five times more likely to develop alcohol problems later in life. Alcohol is associated with a variety of risky behaviors including teen violence, car crashes and sexual assaults (among many others) and can cause permanent damage to the still developing adolescent brain.
Though it is unrealistic to think parents could possibly shield their children from all alcohol advertising, there is something parents can do; talk to their children. Research reveals that kids whose parents talk to them often about the dangers of alcohol and other drugs are 50% less likely to use.
“The next time your children are watching TV, we encourage you (parents) to sit down with them, making it a teachable moment. Use the commercials as an opportunity to teach your children to read between the lines of advertisements, building their media literacy skills,” said Harmon. “It’s an easy way to bring up the topic of underage drinking and to encourage your children to make healthy choices and avoid risky behaviors.”
A couple of weeks ago I was at a middle school retreat where a discussion arose among leaders about kids’ inability to articulate what they believe.
According to the National Study of Youth and Religion (NSYR) team led by Christian Smith, “the vast majority of [U.S. teenagers are] incredibly inarticulate about their faith, their religious beliefs and practices, and its meaning or place in their lives.” One of the team’s conclusions from this is that faith communities are giving kids very little help in knowing how to express their faith, why it’s important to them, or how it connects with the rest of their lives. In general, this trend seems to have been true in the second wave of NSYR research five years later, reported in Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults
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The leaders at the retreat were talking about how difficult it is to help students make those connections and actually articulate what it is they believe. What I appreciate about Mark Oestreicher, who was the speaker for the weekend, was the way he was working to help leaders help their students articulate their own faith. He used his platform time to help weave together the Grand Story of what God has been up to throughout history, the centerpiece being Jesus as the Rescuer, and encouraged cabin discussion time as the time to begin fleshing it out.
I like that language of rescue, and I think it’s something teenagers can grab on to. In fact, our cabin discussions led to some kids working through what it may mean to be rescued, to live as rescued ones, and to participate in the Kingdom of the Rescued every day at home and at school. But more than that, I like that youth workers are wrestling with this important gap in the faith development of our students…
FYI blogger and Fuller grad Lars Rood, along with our friends Jeremy Zach (also a Fuller grad), Mark Oestreicher, Adam McLane from Youth Specialties, and several other ministry bloggers are heading to Haiti tomorrow. Follow them on Facebook or their blogs for regular updates if you’re not already doing it. They have a challenging task ahead of them: to tell the stories of what’s happening on the ground in Haiti (perhaps especially what they learn from the Haitian church), to inspire/challenge the youth ministry world with ideas about ways to respond (and not respond) in the coming year, all while trying hard not to exploit the very real people they encounter or make a spectacle of what’s already quite a spectacle.
They need our prayers.
Lars has committed to blog at FYI this year about his own youth ministry’s changing approach to short-term missions (based on utilizing our Deep Justice Journeys approach), and I’m excited to see how this trip will also impact his perspective and their changing practices. But more than that, I’m excited about how God can use the voices in this team to spread the word about what God is up to in Haiti.
How many times have you — like me — been in the van on the way back from a mission trip and said, felt, or heard from someone else, “We’ve got to do something more at home like this?” Many of us know the importance of connecting work away from home with missional living in our communities, but we aren’t sure how to bridge the gap.
A few posts last week from YouthWorks’ Eric Iverson point toward that connection. Today check out this Deep Justice Story about a youth group who never came back to do another YouthWorks trip. Why? Because they went home and developed Imagine Ministries.
How have you helped connect the dots in tangible ways between mission “out there” and missional living “right here”?
Here’s one to pass on to parents of teenagers.
In this 2-part article, Psychologist Alan Kazdin (Yale) with writer Carlo Rotella analyze research on the adolescent brain in an attempt to bust the myth that teenagers are worse than adults at assessing risks and making rational decisions. It’s an interesting read, inviting us to revisit how we try to prepare teens for decision-making in the face of high-risk options (I’ve shared other thoughts on this in a previous post on teen brain research). The authors contend that there are a lot of common interventions and prevention measures that simply don’t work.
What research does support in terms of parenting strategies that work to counteract high-risk behaviors among teens (according to the authors) is a set of fairly unsophisticated responses. The primary practice for parents to prevent bad choices? Monitoring. Keeping track of where kids are and—especially—who they are with. Peer influences are incredibly important because the teen brain is most rewarded by the presence and approval of peers. Hanging out with other kids doing high-risk behaviors is one of the strongest predictors of substance use and abuse. (One interesting note on gender here: parents tend to monitor teen girls more than boys, which some have suggested may be a reason teen boys participate in more high-risk behaviors—simply because they have less supervision.)
Monitoring sounds like policing or high-intensity surveillance, but it doesn’t mean the same thing as hovering. Here’s a quote from the authors about what kind of monitoring they’re talking about:
The members of families in which parents monitor have stronger ties, are more involved with one another, have warmer relationships, and are more cohesive and communicate better. A more askable, approachable parent with a warm relationship to a child will have more success in monitoring without turning into a warden. To that end, it helps to make monitoring normal and mutual in your household—which you can model by talking to your children about your day at the dinner table or during rides in the car—and to begin early.
The other suggested strategies include: building and modeling values for family, school, and society; developing competencies in kids (1 or 2 is plenty; no need for extra-curricular overkill); and nurturing the parent-child relationship. The last one seems like a no-brainer, but during adolescence can feel like incredibly hard work, especially when kids push away. Yet, “When there’s more parent connectedness—a child feeling close, loved, wanted, listened to, and satisfied with the relationship—a child is at much less risk for engaging in dangerous behaviors.”
Worth thinking about this week.
“Parents who complain of feeling burned out at work are more likely to have kids who are burned out at school.”
Last month I posted research about stress becoming a top health concern for teens in the U.S. Last week NY Times reporter Tara Parker-Pope shared about a study in Finland that revealed that burnout tends to run in families. This is particularly true between mothers burnt out at work and their teen daughters burnt out at school.
On some level this seems intuitive, but for us who are parents, how much do we pretend or hope that our stress and even burnout won’t impact our kids? Perhaps we’re fooling ourselves to think that’s possible. And on the flip side, how could our own self-care practices prevent burnout—both for us and for our kids?
For more on stress and burnout, check out this resource we put together last year for urban youth workers with the help of Dr. Jude Tiersma Watson and Kimberly Williams.
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