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Prev 1 2 3 ...6 7 8 9 10 ...27 28 29 NextLast week I spoke at Reload, a one day conference sponsored by the Urban Youth Workers Institute. I loved the folks I met at Reload.
My seminar was called “Stress in the City” and reflected some research we’ve done at FYI on urban youth worker stress and burnout.
In my seminar, we started talking about how we’d like to think about God constantly throughout the day but we often don’t. Chris was a youth worker in the seminar who shared a great idea. He takes whatever insight he learned during his morning prayer and Bible time and sets it as a periodic calendar reminder throughout the day. That way multiple times during the day, he’s reminded of what God showed him that morning.
I love that idea. How else are you trying to stay connected to God throughout the day?
Last week we had 20 super sharp youth workers at Fuller in Pasadena for a Sticky Faith Summit. The summit revolved around the Hurt research of my friend and colleague, Dr. Chap Clark, as well as our College Transition Project.
Ken Knipp is the V.P. for Training with Young Life and a member of our FYI Advisory Council. He said something during our summit that impacted me both as a parent and a youth worker.
One of our findings is that there is a relationship between kids having the chance to express and explore their doubt in high school and higher faith maturity in college. We were talking about how to help parents give space for their kids to express doubt and Ken said, “I really think a key element is that families enjoy unstructured time together.” He reasoned that families that knew how to just be together would eventually be safe places for honest dialogue.
I don’t know of many families that enjoy time together, let alone unstructured time together. Even tonight we have a free night and I’ve started thinking to myself: should we take a walk as a family? Or play games together? Or read in bed?
I’ve decided NOT to structure our time tonight ahead of time. I want to enjoy unstructured time with my own kids.
I was really encouraged by this article in “Christianity Today” about musicians’ heart for justice. I thought you might be too.
I especially appreciated this part about Steven Curtis Chapman:
“Steven Curtis Chapman credits his daughter Emily—who encouraged her parents to adopt orphans from China—for helping him to think through social justice and Christian engagement in a sinful world.
‘Emily looks at James 1:27, about taking care of widows and orphans and keeping oneself unspotted by the world. She is saying, ‘If we can just get those two together, we’ll be on a roll.’”
Well said. Is it just me or do kids often get justice before adults do?
Yesterday I had the privilege of meeting with a group of youth workers and other pastoral leaders from South Africa. As we shared together about several topics, including engaging youth in concern and action against injustice, one of the group members said something that hit close to home.
Talking about racial integration—obviously a tough topic for South Africa—he said, “Our inability to integrate the church cuts off our hands to be able to do justice because the community and the government don’t trust us.”
When schools have integrated and churches haven’t, it silences the church’s voice about injustice. I shared that here in the U.S., the church’s glaring inability to integrate has similarly disabled our role in advocacy and action (and it also doesn’t help that in some communities white Christians have abandoned entire “integrated” school systems).
The good news is that we all have the opportunity to prove public opinion wrong—whatever our color or background. But gaining that voice back might mean facing ourselves and our fears first.
Leadership: Small shifts can make a big difference to the “before” planning.
This year I decided to work through our summer missions planning in a series of blogs that I’ve written on the FYI Web Site. The first blog was just aimed at setting the framework and the second pretty much just chronicled a failure that we’d already had in September of 2009 as we planned our summer 2010 missions programs.
So it’s November. Our first summer missions project will head out in early June 2010. We’ll be taking 40 5-6th graders to Mendenhall Mississippi to work on a farm and teach VBS to local students. This is a trip we’ve done for about 10 years and have built a very solid relationship with that community. It’s also a very hard trip with a lot of work in some very tough heat.
In Deep Justice Journeys Kara and Brad split up the parts of the “Missions Experience” into “Before, During, and After.” In this blog I thought I’d take a look at some of what we are doing “Before” this year.
The key to successful “before” training of students is to get the two M’s (Money and Medical release forms) to not dominate your planning. The way we try to do this is to purposefully get all the information out to the students as early as possible.
This year we are hosting our traditional Pancake breakfast next week, which is aimed at raising money and awareness in our congregation so they know where we are going and how to partner with us. But, this year we are doing something different. Usually we make this our big sign up day for our summer trips and a big push for parents to get kids on the lists. But reading through Deep Justice Journeys has caused to realize that this doesn’t give students and parents time to sit, think, pray and reflect on what the summer experience will be like.
So this year instead of signups at the Pancake breakfast we are just putting out applications that ask students some probing questions about what their faith looks like, how they think this trip might shape their view of the world, and what things might get in the way of their growth. The focus of November and December will be on students asking these questions and thinking through this before we start doing signups in January.
Additionally I’m teaching that morning on those questions so we are really trying to get our students to think about their lives now and how they need to prepare and grow in the next 7 months before we go on the trip. This is just the first step in our “before” engagement with students, but I think this little shift will make a huge difference.
Read more of Lars’ musings at his blog, www.larsrood.com.
Today we’re in the middle of an intense summit with some incredible youth workers and parachurch ministry leaders. They’re helping us think hard about “sticky faith”—faith that lasts beyond our youth ministries and not only survives, but thrives. We are honored to be surrounded by great minds who also bring years of experience with teenagers to the table.
We’d love to bring your voice to the table, too. What would you say are the most critical elements of youth ministry for developing faith that sticks—and grows—beyond high school? And what are you doing in your ministry to prioritize and sharpen those elements?
Twenty years ago today, the Berlin Wall fell. I’m sure I’m not the first source today to remind you of that. It was one of the more hopeful moments of my middle school career, and rather memorable even in small-town Kentucky and without the Internet. Then—and even now—I couldn’t really appreciate the depth of the significance of this event for Germany and the rest of the world.
One fascinating piece of the story being remembered this week is the role of the church in the fall. Pastor Christian Fuhrer of St. Nikolai Evangelical Lutheran Church in (at that time) East Germany was interviewed by PBS’ Deborah Potter about serving during that season. Fuhrer remembers, “In [East Germany], the church provided the only free space. Everything that could not be discussed in public could be discussed in church, and in this way the church represented a unique spiritual and physical space in which people were free.”
The church began weekly prayer vigils for peace in the early 1980s, a practice that led to the spread of the Gospel as well as the spread of hope for peace and justice. In October of 1989, despite previous violence against protestors, the post-prayer meeting peace walk through Leipzig left the police baffled—and non-resistant—as 70,000 candle-bearers marched by.
What was their motivation to pray, to risk, to march for peace and justice? Fuhrer answers, “We did it because the church has to do it.”
Yes, blessed are the peacemakers. And blessed is free space.
Our church, Lake Avenue Church, is doing a bit of an intergenerational experiment these days. The Navigator Sunday School class, which is a class comprised primarily of senior adults, invited some teenagers to join them for a six-week series. My Fuller faculty colleague, Dr. Julie Gorman, has been doing the bulk of the teaching and I was able to co-teach with her this past Sunday.
The senior adults and kids are in “families” for the six weeks so they sit at the same tables with the same people every week. This past Sunday they took Communion and reflected upon what it meant to be family for each other.
We gave each table the juice, cups and bread but largely left it up to them to decide how to actually take the elements. The highlight of the morning for me was when one of our junior guys was clearly leading the discussion about how they could take Communion.
I’m so glad we are doing this this month. What else are you doing to help the generations connect with each other?
This past Sunday I spoke at our church’s high school gathering. I love the format we’re following this fall: we have a few worship songs, then a 10-15 minute “talk,” and then 20-25 minutes in small groups so that adults and kids can talk together and learn from each other.
This past week I suggested three questions for small group discussion. In my table of junior girls, the first two questions didn’t generate much discussion but question #3 got them talking.
Afterwards, I talked with another leader who said the only question that really resonated with his guys was #1.
The next leader I talked with said that their table had energy for #2 but the other two questions fell somewhat flat.
Three different tables, three different connecting points. A good reminder that we need multiple connecting points with teenagers.
We at FYI are less than three weeks away from the application deadline for our Urban Youth Ministry Certificate program. We accept approximately 20 super sharp youth workers and walk with them through 2 years worth of training. Topics range from community development to a theology of suffering to raising funds and training your entire team.
We love our students. They are some of the most amazing youth workers I know. They are doing radical and courageous ministry, and they tell us that our training makes them even more effective in their ministries. I talked with one a few weeks ago who said that our training helped him better explain his theology of ministry to a potential donor and that donor gave the ministry three times as much as the youth worker had hoped for.
I am praying every day that God will bring the students that God wants into our training. If you think that might be you, contact us or check out our website. We’d love to have you join us.
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