I’ve been having an interesting e.mail discussion with some Fuller faculty colleagues as we at Fuller are moving more and more into distributed (aka online) learning. Yippee!
One faculty member said something interesting recently in an e.mail: “Interactivity is the key to good learning”.
That’s a strong statement. Do you agree? I’d probably soften it to something more like: “Interactivity is one of the keys to good learning”. (The researcher in me rarely talks about THE key to something; life is usually more complicated and nuanced.)
If I was to ask your students what percent of the communication you have with them is interactive, what would they say?
I first heard about the Origins Project from Eric Bryant, the executive pastor of Mosaic Church, based out of Los Angeles. The Origins Project defines itself as “a network of people who are passionate about Jesus, humanity, and innovation.”
As I had coffee with Eric and heard more about it, I became a fan. As I understand it, Origins was birthed by three leaders I respect: Dan Kimball from Vintage Faith Church, Erwin McManus from Mosaic, and Dave Gibbons from New Song Church in Irvine. Part of what appealed to me was that it’s somewhat of a theological middle ground – not too conservative and not too liberal. That sounds a lot like me.
There’s an Origins Event in Los Angeles from July 23-24. The speaker line-up looks incredible and the vibe will be authentic, conversational, and Kingdom-minded. If you can make it, I encourage you to. Origins events are designed to be e gathering some of the leading creatives, activists, and equippers in our world who are committed to the life-changing mission of Jesus. Sound like you? I thought so.
It’s less than 2 months away so look into it today…
Two days ago Chuck Norris (yes, that Chuck Norris) posted an online commentary called “America: Graduating from God?” and mentioned our FYI College Transition Project research in his third paragraph. We were tickled that this “Walker, Texas Ranger” action star knew about our work and we thought you might be also.
One of the things that gets us most excited at FYI is face time with youth workers. Conventions are one of the ways we get to do lots of that — in kind of insane doses. This fall we have opportunities to share FYI’s research-based work in San Diego and Nashville at National Youth Workers Convention. We love the way these folks are retooling and thinking hard about how to best resource you and support you in your ministry. Here’s the new convention promo they’re releasing today. Whether you are a “convention person” or not, you’ll appreciate the story! Especially if you’ve ever had a challenging relationship with a senior pastor…
I was saddened when my husband first told me the news last week that Al and Tipper Gore were separating. In the midst of the media coverage, my favorite article on what’s happened with the Gores is one that appeared in the online version of “Christianity Today” by Glenn Stanton, the Director of Family Formation studies at Focus on the Family. I met Glenn in January when I shared some of our College Transition Project findings with a team at Focus. I was impressed then by him and I am even more impressed now.
My favorite quote from Glenn’s insightful perspective on how God can work in and through a marital separation is this: “Separation, however, can be an extreme and wise life-giving move for a marriage. It can allow a troubled couple to take a critical time-out from their seemingly hopeless marriage for antiseptic distance and hopefully a new perspective on what they have together, while making intentional plans for the road to health.”
Glenn shares his own experience in his marriage of going through a time of separation – a time that eventually seemed to make their marriage stronger. The time of separation was, as Glenn put it, a time for he and his wife to “fight” for their marriage. It was also a time for them to experience the power of a supportive community and wise counsel.
Thanks, Glenn, for helping us see the grace of separation.
Kids are always learning. We are always teaching something. The question then becomes: What?
I know this, of course. And so do you. But sometimes I need a reminder. This weeks’ interview with John Losey highlighted that truth for me yet again. We talked about setting up specific experiential learning “initiatives” and creating intentional learning opportunities. But as John reminds us, we miss the point of all of it if we don’t realize that even when we’re not wearing our “teaching hat”, we’re still teaching. In the van, on the court, after the meeting, hanging with our families…kids are learning something from us.
We can take that truth and turn it into incredible self-pressure, or we can be reminded of the grace of God that covers us when we fail to teach well. I’m leaning on that last part. But I’m also thankful for the reminders that even when I think it doesn’t matter…it all matters.
This week we’ve released an article by Dan Hodge called “The Soul of Hip Hop”. Dan spent part of his time at Fuller as a research fellow with FYI during my first years here, studying urban mission and pushing us to see the importance of Hip Hop culture to youth ministry in any context.
Dan always stretches me. Always. In this article he stretches me by calling us to seek God in the obscure. In this case, “The obscure part of Hip Hop is its theology.” I confess that, although “white kids love Hip Hop,” I wasn’t one of them. I’ve had to work as a youth worker to pay attention to Hip Hop music and become more aware of the implications of Hip Hop culture for youth ministry. And Dan has, over the years, opened windows for me to peek into the theology weaving its way through Hip Hop.
Whether you are or aren’t one to seek God in the obscure—Hip Hop or otherwise—I invite you to be stretched and join in the dialogue!
This week’s E-Journal features Jesse Oakes’ new article on the study of resilience and its implications for youth ministry. Let me give you a hint up-front if you like research: check out the footnotes. This guy has done his homework (something we admire at FYI). But he’s done it for the love of kids, as a practicing high school pastor.
One part of the article is particularly intriguing to me, asking the question: What (and who) defines “health”? Overall health (physical, emotional, spiritual, intellectual) can be hard to really pinpoint, and we tend to define it based on the biases of our respective viewpoints. But check out this insight (I’m directly pulling from the article here) from the work of researcher Anita Hunter:1
Analysis of focus group data gathered from teenagers in the United States and Africa revealed that young people often overcome adversity by internalizing their pain, rationalizing it by denying their self-worth, isolating themselves physically, and insulating themselves internally from their feelings. In essence, the students made “survival” their primary (and perhaps, their singular) goal. “Resilience” for them was the process of borrowing against their emotional future in order to keep themselves together in the present.
Read that last line again. Borrowing against their emotional future in order to keep themselves together in the present. Know any kids who have survived this way? I sure have. And when I think about them, I realize that some of them are the ones we most let down in youth ministry. We praised their resilience without really being a helpful part of shalom-health in their lives. Take a look at the article and add to the conversation—when have you seen resilience have a shadow side, and what can we do to nurture the healthiest kind of resilience?
Anita Hunter, “A Cross-Cultural Comparison of Resilience in Adolescents,” Journal of Pediatric Nursing 16, no. 3 (June 2001): 172-179. [↩]
I’m excited about today’s June FYI E-Journal and the new resources we’re sharing. One of those resources is a video of a talk by Tod Bolsinger that we’ve (re-)titled “Chief Learning Officers: Becoming Adaptive Leaders.”
I was able to hear Tod give this message to a group of Fuller grads who have been serving in ministry post-seminary, many of them youth workers. Tod uses the narrative of Lewis and Clark adeptly to frame Harvard theorist Ron Heifetz’s leadership model for pastoral ministry in what I found to be a helpful way.
Real change in just about any context requires new learning on the part of everyone involved. This means “adaptive” change rather than simply changing structures (think programs, processes, people—the things we usually change when we want to fix something that’s going wrong). One of Tod’s conclusions is that we in ministry must re-vision ourselves as “CLOs”, Chief Learning Officers. In other words, as leaders we become the first to say, “I don’t know.” We become the first to remind others that we have more to learn together. That frees us—and the community around us—to pursue whatever new thing God wants us to learn through the opportunity at hand.
I don’t know about you, but I like the ambition of becoming a CLO. It’s gutsy. It’s anti-superyouthpastor. And it rings of something Jesus cared a lot about: discipleship, becoming people who are good at learning as we follow the Master.
Last week Fuller was a host of a gathering of scholars and practitioners on the topic of North American Mission Work. Robert Priest from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School was one of the professors. I have great respect for Robert and enjoyed having lunch with him while he was here in Pasadena. His research, among others’, was what prompted our own research that led to our book that has been used by countless youth ministries, Deep Justice Journeys.
The folks who attended Bob’s lecture were folks who had been studying missions, and practicing cross-cultural mission work, for much of their lives. Gathering from the tone of the questions after Bob’s lecture, in which some of the weaknesses of short-term missions were presented (i.e., they don’t manifest the long-term change in participants’ attitudes and behaviors that we would hope for or assume), a few folks seemed willing to simply abandon short-term missions. To throw the baby out with the bath water.
I appreciated Bob’s answer to a few of these questions: “Mission work, as it is currently practiced, has not yielded the results we would hope for.” In other words, Bob was acknowledging the problems but fighting to revise how we do mission work instead of merely to jettison it.
As you get ready for your short-term mission work, what are you doing ahead of time to prepare your kids? What structures do you already have in place to help them debrief and connect the dots once they return home to their second period History class or to life at home? The subtitle of Deep Justice Journeys captures our hope for the book, and I know your hope for your own mission work: moving from mission trips to missional living.
One of the things that is heartbreaking to me, and I’m guessing you too, is how poverty is such a vicious cycle – so hard to escape. An article in the Washington Post a few days ago…
