I know this is late in the day and she will prolly not read it until tomorrow, but it has been a crazy day. I just wanted to say thanks to my mom for all that she has done. Being adopted as a grown up has been a cool experience for me. It is neat to have a place where I can call home.

Thanks, Brenda, for all that you do. I love you.  

My little boy will turn 2 on Monday so I am heading to his grandmother's house in Pell City for a party this weekend. It is Fire Engine themed in case you are in Pell City and want to stop by. All of you looking to purchase a gift for him, he is really into fire engines and the wooden train sets (the generic versions are fine he doesn't know who Thomas is). OK, I will admit it, I am as much into the wooden trains as he is. The cool little battery operated engines are pretty neat. Of course you can always drop us a donation using the link in the sidebar. I will assume that all donations from now until Monday are for him.

Last night I wanted to challenge my students about how they were living their life. We have a large group of psudo-Christians: people who come to church and don't really do bad things, but who really aren't choosing God in their daily life either. Church for most of them is something fun to do, but God rarely impacts their daily life.

So I asked them these questions:

• Why does God matter?
• Why does choosing Jesus as Lord of your life matter?
• Why does living life God's way matter?

To each of these questions they gave some good answers. I used the "Socratic" method (I think that is what it is called) where I pretty much just asked them a series of questions to try to get them to think about the ideas in different ways. They all came together and agreed that God matters and that asking Jesus to be the Lord of your life and following God's way matters more than anything else.

So then I moved to this question:

• Why does reading your Bible matter?
  

They gave a few answers and then I said. "If all of this other stuff is most important than reading your Bible should be a top priority because in your Bible you will find out not only how to live your life, but you will find the heart of God and come to understand Him better." 

I closed with this:

• If all of these things matter. If God really matters and Jesus really matters and following God really matters then why don't you live like it does? 
  

I went on to talk about how what is most important in our lives doesn't show by the words that we say, but by the things that we do. Then I used the verse that I think speaks more to the modern church than any other.

 "My people have committed two sins:
       They have forsaken me,
       the spring of living water,
       and have dug their own cisterns,
       broken cisterns that cannot hold water.
Jeremiah 2:13

That is what we are doing when we choose things that don't really matter. We are turning away from what can really satisfy us and chasing after things that can't satisfy. These are the two great sins of the modern church. We have forgotten about God and turned towards other things even though those things can't satisfy.

It was a nice night. I so seldom get a chance to actually teach instead of preach (our group size doesn't lend itself to that style) so it was nice to engage students in conversation.

I also got a chance to play 4 person Carcassonne.  It is a whole different game when you add more people.

Jeremy Walden recently put together a dating study for teenagers and added it to LULU. I have been checking it out for the past couple of days and I like what I see. It is a 12 week program dealing with love, trust, respect, and sex. The material is well designed and easy to follow.

Dating and relationships are such a powerful force in the life of teenagers. I normally try to come back to the topic in a large scale way every 2 years with little lessons spread out along the rest of the time as well. I doubt I am the only youth pastor looking for a new way to talk about this fun, yet sensitive subject to their students.

If you want to check it out you can purchase it at http://stores.lulu.com/store.php?fAcctID=2279887

I took a day to write this post because I didn't want to say too much last night. I hate to censor myself in this way, but that is the reality of this site now. Sorry.

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I am not really a summer blockbuster kind of guy. From time to time there are movies that are fun, but normally these big budget flashy action pictures leave me wanting more conversation and less fighting. I know it probably means that I have to turn in my "man" card, but I would much rather watch a romantic comedy than an explosion and Enchanted was my favorite movie last year.

But I have a youth group full of guys so I end up watching a ton of summer movies. Today was Iron Man the next instalment in the Marvel comics movie line. Growing up I was a Marvel comics guy, but I was never really into Iron Man. I would see him when he had dealings with The Avengers, but not really much else. So I didn't really have an invested interest in his origin story or the "sanctity" of his character. I think that always helps when going in to see a movie like this. The less you care about the characters before the movie starts the less they can crush you if you don't do something exactly right. 

Alright, that is enough of an intro; let's talk about the movie. I have to say that it is the best superhero movie since Spiderman 2 hands down. If I were to rank the recent superhero titles It would have to go Spidey 2, Iron Man, Spidey 1. Robert Downy Jr. did a great job of bringing Tony Stark to life. I told Meredith that he was really too much actor for the part, but that was a good thing because he made the character work.

Actually the characters are what I liked best about this movie. When Marvel actually has control of a movie they understand that the special effects get people to come see the picture, but they tell their friends to go see it because of the characters in the movie. Downy played Tony Stark as part funny, part tortured, part playful, part driven and did them all with a subtlety that is normally lacking in an action movie. The rest of the cast worked as well, with Gweneth Paltrow(who plays Pepper Potts Tony's secretary) as the only disappointing performance. And she doesn't really do bad, she does as well as you can expect Gweneth to do.

All in all it was a popcorn movie worth watching. Of course that is when you watch it with low expectations as I had. I imagine I have already ruined the viewing experience for all of you by raising yours. Sorry.

On a related note: Why am I so worried about the new Indiana Jones movie? I can't figure out if it is a fear of Harrison Ford's age or memories of what Lucas did to Star Wars or something else that I can't quite put my finger on.  

 

This sort of follows in with our previous post. In our church that is desperate for workers we have a youth work force that is desperate to find something to do. For every need that comes up--from childcare to decorating, to cleaning, to setting up room--there are students willing to step up and help.

Sometime I feel like I am taking advantage of their willingness, but many times they are all that are willing to do things. So here is the question. How much is too much to put on students?

Here are some of the dangers that I see:

• Many of these students are very new Christians. There is a danger of giving them too much before they truly understand God.
• I worry about burn out and putting more stress onto students who are already taxed for time
• When students go and work with the children instead of being a part of Sunday church they are missing out on the intergenerational fellowship that I think is so important
• And finally this one has less to do with the students than with the church. THERE SHOULD BE ADULTS WILLING TO STEP UP AND HELP!

What do you think? 

I know that there are challenges of being a minister of every church of every size, but being a minister in a medium sized church has its own unique problem set. The biggest problem is that our members expect us to have all of the programs that a larger church has, but since only 20 percent of the people actually do anything we never have enough workers. (or money for that matter, but that is another story).

So we are stuck with very real concerns such as finding people to work with our children. One train of thought that says to cancel anything that there aren't workers for because if it was God's desire then there would be enough help is hard because without children workers (especially for a nursery) we end up driving away the youth families that we need to survive.

Now I know that there are lots of different ways to make these things work. The problem is when you have a church full of people who have spent their lives sitting on a pew instead of getting involved or you have a group of people who used to be involved, but who don't like the youth pastor or the music or the pastor and they have decided to sit this year all of those ideas fall flat.

Working in a medium sized church it just seems that there are never enough people willing to help out. We have talked about vision, asked people personally, had spiritual gift survey. We have tried exhortation and guilt and even outright begging and still it is the same people willing to step up and make a difference.

It feels like we need to blow everything up and start again with programs and groups and an organization structure that actually works for a church or size, but how do you convince people that it is something that needs to be done. Our church had a multi-month vision meeting where a group of people were tasked to figuring out what our church needed and at the end of it our suggestion was to add 3 more Sunday school classes and start some discipleship classes (which will need childcare btw, and as such will compound the problem).

What we are doing isn't working, but it seems like we refuse to see it.  

Tonight (as a thank you for countless "honey can you reach this moments" I am sure) my wife agreed to play a new game with me. It is called Carcassonne, and it really isn't new, just new to us. I have always loved board games of any type. Any time there are a few people sitting around I love to pull out Apples to Apples or Taboo or recently the great "Kill Doctor Lucky".

I have recently gotten interested in European style board games and so I thought I would grab what I heard described as a gateway game and see what I thought. I loved it. Meredith was polite enough not to act bored, and we had a good time together. Not a bad way to spend an hour if I do say so myself.  

I am sort of sad that our "Our Favorite Monsters" series is finished. It was a fun lighthearted study that addressed some very serious issues. It was also one of those studies that spoke to me personally on several levels. I think that the sins we were discussing are universal. Everyone struggles with pride and being nice to people and envy and greed and lust and apathy. That is what makes them so dangerous. But while studying to teach about them I had to take some serious looks at my own life and examine how I was dealing with those monsters.

I think that always makes for a good lesson. Anytime I can work through some of my own issues I can better present the struggle to the students.  

Sometimes I forget how much I learned about God and the Bible while in Sunday school as a child, or in VBS, or just sitting around and talking with my family. I forget that people who come to church later in life, who didn't spend years learning the stories or going through Bible drills, people whose families don't sit around talking about God and church and the Bible, don't know some of the things that I just take for granted.

That is what makes youth ministry (and all of church for that matter) such a balancing act. There are some people who have spent their life learning about God and who need to be challenged to make that knowledge real in their lives. There are others who are still struggling with what it means to be a Christian and "why should I read my Bible anyway." Trying to find a way to minister to all levels of spiritual maturity is like being in a one room school house.

But more and more people are coming into our ministry with very little prior knowledge of God. So we are starting a basics of Christianity bible study for everyone on Wednesday nights before church. One of our youth will be leading what will essentially be a trip through the Student Survival Kit. It should be a good opportunity for these students to at least see some of the basic disciplines and truths of the Bible. Hopefully this will be just the first step for these young Christians.  

I am a strong believer in re-branding, but mainly because I think it is fun. In my 9 years that I have worked at this church we have used 3 different major identities. (Refuge, The Journey, and now Catalyst). Included in those is about 100 different ways to refer to the ministry as a whole (CSM, Catalyst Student Ministry, Calvary Student Ministry, Calvary Youth, etc).

I have just recently changed the colors of our logo and our letterhead (while keeping the catalyst name) and I think it is probably my favorite look so far. What I was wondering is whether I am the only youth pastor who cycles through names like this or is it something that others do. Let me know the name of your group and some of the names of your past.

This journaling prayer experiences is longer than what I would normally use in a church setting. To do this right you will need about 10 minutes just for this activity. It would work well in a retreat setting. If students already have journals that they are using for other reasons this would work well as an entry to that journal.

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When I set up a multi-station worship gathering I try to incorporate some sort of drawing element. Normally I place a large sheet of paper on the wall and let worshipers add their picture to the wall. This adds a communal aspect to this very personal worship time. As people continue to draw the wall becomes a mural of praise.

I try to vary the drawing wall to meet the theme of the evening so I have used several variations on that similar theme. Here are a couple of them that I have used in the past.

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...at least this week I do. So I spent most of last night just trying to organize what I have written and what ideas I have that are in my head by not written yet and figuring out who might want to publish them. It is more work than just sitting down to write that is for sure.

Most of the things that I have been paid to write have sort of fallen into my lap. People call me up and say they liked me on Nailscars.com and want to know if I can write, or they see something on the site and want to know if they can print it. I guess I did submit some samples for LifeWay that kicked that off, but it wasn't like I was stressing over them or anything.

I guess at some point in time if I really want to write I will have to start doing the work of a writer. That is unless there is anyone from Group or Youth Specialties who wants a 10 week lesson series on Ephesians or anyone at all who wants to publish my creative prayers journal. If so just send me an email and you can save me from lots of work.