In last week’s HomeWord Weekly Culture Brief, Jim Burns and his team brought my attention to an interesting study reflecting how we as parents can be a bit out of touch with our kids. What struck me the most about the study was this finding:
Only 10 percent of parents think their own teens drank alcohol within the last year, and 5 percent believe their teens smoked marijuana in the last year, according to the latest poll by the University of Michigan’s C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital.
These low numbers severely clash with the university’s 2010 Monitoring the Future survey, in which 52 percent of surveyed 10th-graders reported drinking alcohol in the last year and 28 percent reported using marijuana within the last year.
While we as parents tend to view our own kids through rose-colored classes, the opposite is true for our kids’ friends:
While most parents seem to assume their own kids aren’t trying alcohol or drugs, they certainly don’t think their child’s peers are as innocent. In the poll, researchers found that many parents of teens are very likely to believe that within the last year at least 60 percent of 10th-graders drank alcohol and 40 percent of 10th-graders used marijuana.
Note that 60% is higher than 52% (mentioned in the previous block of text) and 40% is also higher than 28%.
As I read this study, I thought of an episode on “The Oprah Show” in which interviewers with cameras went to local parks to talk to parents about the possibility of their children leaving with a stranger. While the parents were on camera saying that their kids would never leave with another adult, you could see in the background that child actually leaving with an adult who was part of Oprah’s team. This happened time after time.
What can we as parents do about our tendency to believe the best about our kids and the worst about others? Besides pray and ask God to help us see reality, we can ask others to help us do so also.
Several years ago, a friend of mine boldly but lovingly mentioned to me that I was treating two of my children differently. I didn’t know I was doing it, but as soon as she said it, I saw immediately what she meant. And it’s made a huge difference in my parenting. She could have remained quiet, but she spoke up. And it made a difference in our family.
Who do you know who you could ask what they are seeing in your family? Who would answer that question honestly? Is there anything going on in another family that perhaps you need to talk to them about?
It’s the power of community. It works because it’s how God has designed us.
This week we’re expanding “Team FYI” from 4 to 6, and we couldn’t be more excited. We are adding two new part-time interns, both of whom are Fuller students and super sharp, to our team.
Haley Smith is a first year student at Fuller Seminary from Dallas, Texas working to earn her Masters in Theology and Ministry. She graduated from Baylor University with a BA in Journalism and has worked the past four years in fundraising for ministries and social justice organizations.
Daniel Kim is getting his M.Div. at Fuller and is a youth ministry volunteer at his church, hoping to one day be a full-time youth pastor. He’s originally from New Jersey and is a huge Philadelphia Eagles fan, so he also had a rough Sunday (as did I as a Chargers fan).
As they join our team, I’m reminded of a few leadership lessons:
1. God intends for us to train up others. Just as Elijah modeled with Elisha and Paul modeled with Timothy, God intends us to pour into others. I am where I am because a few people poured into me.
2. Often training others means more work at first. Just because it’s right doesn’t mean it’s easy. Often equipping others to do ministry, even if it’s eventually going to mean less work for you, starts off by being more work.
3. Inviting new blood into our system shows us our own strengths and its flaws. I am sure that there will be aspects of FYI that Daniel and Haley will applaud, and aspects of FYI that will leave them scratching their head and suggesting better options. We need both affirmation of what we’re doing well and insights as to ways we could improve.
4. This experience is about their growth, not just FYI’s needs. We are doing our best to fit their tasks into the vision God has given them for their futures. So yes, they will end up making copies and shopping for office supplies, but hopefully they’ll also be better thinkers, leaders, and ministers because of our time together.
Today we are excited to invite you to join us for a FREE LIVE WEBCAST at 11:00 AM PST to celebrate the book release of Sticky Faith! All of the Sticky Faith contributors–including myself, Chap Clark, Cheryl Crawford and Brad Griffin will be joining us, as well as local youth worker Jeff Mattesich, who was part of the 2010 Sticky Faith cohort.
We’ve embedded the livestream channel below so you can view it from our site, or go directly to Livestream. Please join us and chat in your questions through the live chat feature. See you at 11:00!
We at FYI are big fans of Dave Livermore and his Cultural Intelligence work. I was especially struck by his blog last week about the differences in leaders across cultures.
Dave opens his blog by talking about how when asked to guess which individuals among a group of Czech leaders were the most influential, he picked two that would have been influential by typical American standards (e.g., they were charismatic). But actually, those charismatic leaders didn’t fit the Czech version of leadership. It was two other leaders who were the most effective-leaders who were more quiet and demure.
Dave makes some great points about leadership outside of the U.S. As I thought about our church’s youth ministry, and trends I see in youth ministries here in the U.S., it’s not unusual to have multiple cultures represented in the same grade of kids, or in the same small group. The obvious ramification is that we need to expand our vision for what makes a “good” small group leader. The different cultures and different personalities represented by the students in our group mean that we need a variety of types of leaders.
In my very early days of youth ministry, I discounted potential volunteers who I viewed as “too quiet” or “not enthusiastic enough”. Over the years, I’ve come to see how wrong that is. Often it’s those quiet volunteers who connect the BEST with students because they are quicker to listen than us more “verbal” folks.
I think immediately of Jan. Jan was one of the quietest college students I had ever met. Guess who loved her? Talkative junior high girls! They knew that Jan would be a great listener, and they were right.
Who in your community might be a great volunteer, if you had new eyes through which to see them?
“If It Feels Right,” A recent Op-Ed New York Times piece by David Brooks, has been raising eyebrows this week. Brooks pulls from the National Study of Youth and Religion’s work by Christian Smith and others, specifically what the team learned about the moral behavior of emerging adults (18-23 yr-olds).
Here was the researchers’ problem:
When asked to describe a moral dilemma they had faced, two-thirds of the young people either couldn’t answer the question or described problems that are not moral at all, like whether they could afford to rent a certain apartment or whether they had enough quarters to feed the meter at a parking spot.
One young adult is quoted as saying, “I don’t really deal with right and wrong that often.” Doing “what feels right to me” lives in tandem with withholding any judgment for “what seems right to someone else” in the hyperindividualistic milieu emerging adults call home. They’ve received it as an endowment from their parents, teachers, and most other adults in their lives. Indeed, as Brooks writes,
Smith and company found an atmosphere of extreme moral individualism — of relativism and nonjudgmentalism. Again, this doesn’t mean that America’s young people are immoral. Far from it. But, Smith and company emphasize, they have not been given the resources — by schools, institutions and families — to cultivate their moral intuitions, to think more broadly about moral obligations, to check behaviors that may be degrading. In this way, the study says more about adult America than youthful America.
Here’s the kicker, in my opinion. We’ve long seen moral relativism growing, so this isn’t a huge surprise. But the final statement Brooks makes is this: “Morality was once revealed, inherited and shared, but now it’s thought of as something that emerges in the privacy of your own heart.” I’d argue that we could substitute “Faith” or “Religious Tradition” in the same sentence and be accurate:
Christian faith was once revealed, inherited and shared, but now it’s thought of as something that emerges in the privacy of your own heart.
In other words, is what’s happening (happened?) to morality happening at the same rate to faith? In tandem with this NYT piece, USA Today offers the same suggestion this week: “More Americans tailoring religion to fit their needs.” They quote researcher George Barna as saying that America is becoming “310 million people with 310 million religions.” Over the past 20 years, more people say they are Christians, but less people say they are attending any church. Rather than passing along faith from generation to generation, we are encouraging the same kind of individualistic faith as we are a personal morality. Which raises the question, is this all connected with the loss of meaningful community in our culture?
In the midst of this, what do you see happening in your own context? And what thoughts do you have for how the church can be responding in hopeful ways?
Today we’re sharing a guest post from FYI author and research team member Meredith Miller, reposted with permission from her blog earlier this week.
My role for the past year has been working with college students at Pepperdine University through our Volunteer Center. One theme we cover with our student staff in fall training is not-so-deep service vs. deep justice, from Deep Justice in a Broken World. One of the contrasting pairings in the framework is:
Not-so-deep service is an event. Deep justice is a lifestyle.
Not two weeks after we covered this concept, our office hosted a one-time service event. And it wasn’t just any one-time service event. It’s, well, big.
1,400 participants broken in to 90 groups, working with 70+ partners, traveling into our community on 23 school buses, 9 huge vans, and 9 shuttle buses big.
And then we had to stand in front of the student staff and explain why we do it. Why this is not, in fact, a total contradiction from what we just said. This can be tough, especially when you consider that our team is newly forming and newly engaging in social justice. They care about serving, about people and helping the poor, certainly. But deep justice? That’s still fairly new territory for them.
I do believe there is a place for one time events in social justice work, provided we attend to a few things:
The work for the day should be determined by your non-profit partner and their greatest needs. On Skid Row, for instance, there is actually not a lot of need for food servers, because of the popularity of that opportunity. Let them decide how to put your group to work, so that you’re really meeting one of their needs. Which leads me to…
Work with a good non-profit partner. Find an organization that is on the ground full time, and who does their work well. Ask them if they’d consider hosting your students for the day, and have them spend a some time explaining their mission and work to the group before diving into the tasks. We often just want to get to work, but rushing can dishonor the expertise of those who are really in the field and the community they serve.
Use it as a spring board to recurring, consistent service. In the case of our event, we close out with an In-n-Out lunch and an ocean view. But the central component of the post-service event is a volunteer fair that features over 15 ongoing service opportunities. Hundreds of participants make a commitment to serve again. And if they do it again, and again, it does indeed start to become a lifestyle.
Bookend your experience. A day of service is only as effective as the meaning participants draw from it. So have enough conversations before and after the day to set up your students for success. Talk about themes of partnership. Ask what they think it feels like to do that work full-time. Focus on everything that happens when you are not there, rather than everything you think you accomplished on their behalf in a few hours. Which lead to my final thought…
The organization is the one doing you a favor by hosting you, just as much as more than you are helping with some extra hands. It can be a serious hassle to have a one-time group. They need to be trained on the work, supervised by representative from the organization, and may not share the values of the partner. Bringing an attitude that they are lucky to have you is destructive on multiple levels.
What types of things have you done to leverage one time service opportunities towards a full-time deep justice lifestyle? What questions do you ask your group, or what types of projects do you select?
Or are you part of a host-organization? If so, what else do you wish a one-time group understood?
One of the topics Lars writes about is the “buzz” that we can generate as youth workers. Stories are valuable resources that we need to use productively and wisely. When people ask how we’re doing, we typically have a story to tell what’s going on.
We live in a narrative culture. People absolutely love good stories and no doubt you’ve felt the pressure to have something good to reply with. Harry Potter didn’t become a billion-dollar franchise simply because the special effects were great. It was memorable, personal, and transformative.
When starting to change the youth culture of your church, you might see more failure than success. This is often the experience of youth workers who participate in our Sticky Faith cohorts. Are we supposed to just bury the bad and only advertise the good?
Stories don’t always need to be successful in order to be used. Lars points out that our failures as youth workers can be just as powerful and effective. These stories don’t always need to be about the successful, winning teams.
Scott Cormode of Fuller Seminary writes, “The first duty of a Christian leader is to provide a Christian perspective, an interpretative framework for people who want to live faithful lives” (from Making Spiritual Sense). Sometimes that perspective is about how bad things are.
And that’s okay. Use the current story to change tomorrow for the better. Be efficient in your narratives.
As we tell the readers in Sticky Faith, “You have more power than you think to bring about change through the stories you tell.”
Every year Group magazine’s Rick Lawrence unpacks the results from their surveys of students who participate in Group’s summer work camp experiences. Last year they collected data from 23,000 teenagers about their faith and practices. Group published results and reflections on the data in December (you can see a pdf of the results online), but I came across this article again in my files this week as the data relates to time with God.
The good news is that two out of three spend time with God once a week or more in some form of “set-aside time that’s just for fueling your relationship with God.” Most of them see the importance—even necessity—of some kind of time like this, indicating an internal motivation as opposed to feeling shamed or coerced by leaders or parents into doing so.
On the not-so-good news side, kids only seem to know how to talk at God during that time. Nine out of ten “talk to God in prayer,” two out of three also “tell God about my own needs,” and an equal number “tell God about the needs of others.”
Two out of five who set aside time to be with God listen to God during that time. A little over one in three reads the Bible during part of that time. One in five says they receive guidance from God about issues and concerns.
Rick’s assessment—and I agree with him—is that kids are “dependable mirror-images of the adult Christians in their lives.” They tend to see us as leaders and parents talking at God (telling God things, asking God for things) rather than listening to God or interacting in any other form. In this way we have ignored a huge chunk of Christian tradition and wisdom from the psalms about ways we can interact with God in prayer.
With that in mind, how are you teaching and modeling prayer that isn’t only about telling or asking? What ideas do you have for others who care about teenagers and their spiritual formation?
So last week, our family enjoyed a day at Disneyland. And lucky for us, so much of the world was back in school that we didn’t have very long lines after rides. So we went on ride after ride after ride. We went on Thunder Mountain four times in a row!
After every ride, as we were walking toward the exit, we would turn to each other and say, “Wasn’t that great?” “I loved the part when we went down fast.” “Did you see the rattle snakes?” And often, “That was awesome.”
What was interesting was that we had all done the ride together. We had all experienced the same thing. And yet what we wanted–and really needed–to do was share about it afterwards.
I’m participating in a Theological Forum in a few weeks at the upcoming National Youth Workers Convention. One of the questions the panel is supposed to address is the role of youth ministry. So I’ve been thinking about that, and spending some time reflecting on how so much of youth ministry is making space. Making space for God to work. Making space for teenagers and adults to respond.
As our family kept re-living our rides together verbally, I thought about how much of youth ministry is like that. We give kids the chance to re-live what they have experienced. Whether that’s their day at school, their fight with their step-mom, or the short-term mission trip they took this past summer.
Debriefing events is important. Talking about them with others is part of how they become real to us.
So our kids are still not back in school. They start tomorrow, September 8. So we have been enjoying this last week when most of the world is back in school as our chance to hit amusement parks. Notably Disneyland and Raging Waters (a water slide theme park near Pasadena). With only 5-10 minute lines for rides at both places, it’s been one of the highlights of the summer.
I did Autopia with our 5 year-old, Jessica. I have so many fond memories of Autopia, especially before I was able to get my own driver’s license. The feeling of power that came from driving as a 13 year-old; I can almost taste it now.
With Jessica, I did the gas pedal (she was too short to reach it) and she did the steering. Or rather, she let the car steer itself. Which meant that the car bumped along drifting to the right, until it hit the cement island running under the center of the car with its left wheel and then bounced violently back to the left. Jessica, deciding to turn the wheel AFTER (and not before) we hit the cement island, would then jerk the wheel to the right, thus repeating the process. So we were basically like a pinball, bouncing left and right through the course. We laughed and laughed. The more violent the jerking back and forth, the more we laughed.
Here’s the leadership lesson: Jessica corrected the steering wheel AFTER it was too late. She had no ability to perceive the drift of the car until it was too late. And then by steering, she actually did more harm than good.
How true that is for us as leaders. We often have no ability to perceive drift. And then when we correct, our helping actually hurts.
As I was laughing with my husband about what happened, I told him that I wanted to write a blog post about it. And then I thought about 3 questions that Chap Clark and I encouraged leaders to ask in Deep Ministry in a Shallow World:
1. What type of transformation is God bringing about now?
2. What is creating space for God’s transformation now?
3. What is hindering God’s transformation now?
These are good questions to ask yourself – at any time. Like now. Before it’s too late. And you overcorrect and do more harm than good.
Haley Smith is a first year student at Fuller Seminary from Dallas, Texas working to earn her Masters in Theology and Ministry. She graduated from Baylor University with a BA in Journalism and has worked the past four years in fundraising for ministries and social justice organizations.
Daniel Kim is getting his M.Div. at Fuller and is a youth ministry volunteer at his church, hoping to one day be a full-time youth pastor. He’s originally from New Jersey and is a huge Philadelphia Eagles fan, so he also had a rough Sunday (as did I as a Chargers fan).
