I don’t know if it’s “epiphanal”, but it’s something.
I realized in a recent conversation about the-way-things-work in our high school ministry, that we had been spending a considerable amount of energy and time formulating ways to communicate to the students in our community WHAT WE ARE NOT…
…boring
…irrelevant
…stale
… (despite all of our unsuccessful best efforts) uncool
We had slowly and inadvertantly stopped talking about the beauty of the church.
So, in a recent staff meeting, I had our team start by talking about why the church was beautiful. Why is it good? How is it the hope of the world? What is good about the church for a high school student living in South Orange County? Then we read this together…
It’s a place of welcome and laughter, of healing and hope, of friends and family and justice and new life. It’s where the homeless drop in for a bowl of soup and the elderly stop by for a chat. It’s where one group is working to help drug addicts and another is campaigning for global justice. It’s where you’ll find people learning to pray, coming to faith, struggling with temptation, finding new purpose, and getting in touch with a new power to carry that purpose out. It’s where people bring their own small faith and discover, in getting together with others to worship the one true God, that the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts.
- NT Wright, Simply Christian
What does that story look like? That’s the one I want to tell. That’s the one I want to communicate to our students and through our students.
Today, my team read THE_MYTH_OF_THE_TEEN_BRAIN, an article by Harvard phD, Robert Epstein, who says the recent research on the immature teen brain and its necessary causal impact on behavior is, well, flat wrong.
He suggests that adolescent acting out is a function of societal and cultural influences and that the differences in brain anatomy between teen and adult brains is similarly the result of a society that “infantilizes” teenagers. His principle argument is that if the teen-brain phenomenon that has gained so much ground in the past few years in the US was truly a determining factor in teen “acting out”, then it would be consistent with teenagers everywhere, in every people group in the world.
It isn’t.
Only when western education and media make their appearance in pre-industrial societies (who may not even have a word for the period between childhood and adulthood) do teenagers begin acting out. He says, teen brains are better equipped to handle new information than most adult brains and that as a culture and society, we cripple most teens by limiting their freedom and potential to become adults.
Lastly, he says, when teens are isolated into peer groups/peer influence from the rest of society they shape themselves. In other words, teens in pre-industrial societies aren’t learning how to be independent from adults, they’re learning how to BECOME ADULTS by being around them.
Big implications (if he’s right) for youth ministry everywhere.
Credit Tripp & Tyler for creative inspiration. Check out their intro to Andy Stanley at Catalyst on youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGcPSIuXZ30
We leave on Friday afternoon for our annual (though not cleverly-titled) GROW RETREAT. We’ll spend time in prayer and silence, hoping to give our students a restful time with God in the mountains.
This year, I did something I have always wanted to do, but never got around to it — drafting a short guide for parents after our students return home. Here’s a brief synopsis: (For the full version click here)
1. Prepare to be an “outsider” to their experience:
Let it be their experience.
2. Tell them you missed them:
Let the first words they hear when they return home be words of affirming love.
3. Let the experience have it’s own “breathing room”:
Avoid talking about school obligations immediately upon returning.
4. Pray for them while they’re gone. Tell them how you prayed when they return.
Pray that your son or daughter will experience God’s love in a significant and perhaps, new way.
5. Create space:
Give your son or daughter the opportunity to talk or not talk about their experience
I heard the story of a youth pastor recently in a big church who staffed his team based on the various high school sub-cultures. So, there was a “goth” specialist, a “jock” leader, a “skater” coordinator, and so on. The various groups would meet whenever their leader thought best and in a setting that most suited that particular subculture. I thought it that was a pretty innovative idea.
It got me thinking about how we do stuff in the Mariners High School Ministry:
GUIDING MINISTRY VALUE: “Be in it”
(whatever “it” is) First with our volunteer leaders and second with our students.
NOT WHAT, WHERE…
Our church serves multiple high schools and school districts. Our staff and volunteers are assigned to particular geographic areas that cluster a few high schools together. In effect, the centralized super campus is decentralized to the neighborhoods in the surrounding areas.
SIMPLE WEEKEND EXPERIENCES…
The weekend used to be our “open door” for new students (and in many respects it still is). But, because our first step for new students isn’t actually at the church — it’s in a home — we have really simplified our weekend experience with two semi-unique twists: 1) Students sit loosely in the areas where their midweek home is located. 2) We don’t utilize our stage. Our speaker teaches and the band leads from the middle of the room in order to create more community and greater connectivity within the program elements and their intended audience.
FOR THE CURIOUS-ABOUT-JESUS… and those who bring them.
Weekly, our area teams create an in-home environment for students to introduce their friends to Jesus and his followers. Typically, the 1-hour meeting involves connecting through relational and intentional interactions, eating together, and a 10-minute message about Jesus.
CONNECTING BEFORE THE SIGN-UPS…
In contrast to the present model of our church and the former model of our own high school ministry, we now form small groups not from an online registration form or sign-up sheet. We’re working on helping new leaders form small groups through the various relational settings in which they lead (like our midweek program). As such, small groups are formed in a more natural setting and manner (most small groups become small groups before the students even know it) but with obvious drawback of a longer set-up period.
“What if the one thing I was looking for most was somehow wrapped up in the things I was most committed to avoiding?”
The context is about avoiding the deep, the dark, and the not-so-wonderful about ourselves — that stuff that we’re terrified someone else might ask us about. Sometimes THAT thing is a habit, an addiction, a behavior, or a decision. Other times it’s something that happened to us, through no fault of our own. In either case, to address it is an expression of weakness and vulnerability.
I wish I didn’t say it. Now, I think about it. It haunts me.
Here’s the message, entitled: SPOONFULS OF LIFE
Here is how our trip went:
- 12 hour drive turns into 18 hours…
- My knee swells for unknown reason.
- Visit a walk-in clinic on the Vegas Strip: that’s a disgusting place to bring your children
- After 2 hours, get back in the car, Amanda gets a $250 (91 in a 75) speeding ticket.
- Make it to Park City, get dropped off at the house.
- I get out of the car step into friend’s truck and go directly to walk-in clinic in Park City (decidely less disgusting than Vegas)
- I receive antibiotic shot and am told come back in 24 hours
- I return to walk-in. They send me to Salt Lake City to the ER
- ER admits me to hospital
- Have surgery the following afternoon to drain infected knee joint (cause unknown – literally)
- Back to Park City Thursday with a home care nurse, IV antibiotics, suction evacuation back hanging from his body, and a wheelchair.
- Saturday: home care nurse removes the “drainage tubes” from my knee.
- Sunday pack up bags and car.
- Sunday Night: have one of the richest and most vulnerable conversations with my friends, I ever could have imagined.
- Monday: 13 hour drive home.
What is crazy… We actually experienced God work in really powerful, challenging, and extremely uncomfortable ways. But, as one Christian mystic says it: people in transition [to deeper intimacy with God] need a holy wound. Truthfully, I would’ve happily settled for a “holy peaceful vacation” or a “holy ice cream cone”. But, if it takes holy wound, then I guess some day I’ll learn to appreciate it.
check out marriedtoayouthpastor for my wife’s perspective.
I had one of those profoundly spiritual moments that I felt I missed as a child in the deep end of my in-laws pool.
The “accidentally” over-chlorinated pool in Bob and Joan’s backyard was where my two oldest kids spent the bulk of their days in San Antonio. My daughter swam the shallow steps, always with one hand on the stairs, lest she have to actually swim. And my oldest son, now 5, spent his time daring himself to touch the deeper parts of the pool — his fear always a bit stronger than him.
Then, on one afternoon…
I held up a diving ring (a brightly colored ring that has supplanted the quarter as the ideal object to sink to the bottom of the pool) and threw it into the deepest part of the pool, just as my son surfaced for a breath . He looked at me, realizing what I had done, and then burst into tears. He splashed me and screamed, “I wanted that thing and you threw it in the pool!”
I splashed back frustrated, “You can still have it. You just have to go and get it.”
Still crying, he blurted, “I wanted that!”
“You can still have it,” I said, now a bit calmer after the eye-sting of the chlorine had dissipated.
“It’s waaaayyy down there, though.”
“I know. But, you can get it. You can do it buddy.”
He hovered there for a bit, scanning the water below. He looked at me again. Then dove. A moment later he surfaced ring-in-hand first, then poorly fitted goggles, then beaming smile.
“I did it.”
“I knew you could do it. I’m proud of you, son. You just dove to the deepest part of the pool. Let’s tell everyone.”
A few soggy footsteps into the house later, my son announced what he had done. Everyone knew he could do it. So, they cheered, not because they doubted him, but because of what he discovered about himself and the deep ends of all pools in all the world. Whatever that is, that’s why Grandma’s and Grandpa’s and mom’s and dad’s and sisters and brothers cheer.
What else is in the deep end? What else is there that I’m afraid to face? What is it that God might actually refuse to give me in order that something deeper might be built (or broken) within me?
In the mountains, in a teeny speck of a town, three and a half hours from everything… I feel like I’m beginning to recover a piece of myself that goes wandering off on really important tasks in my “normal” life.
A mind-bendingly generous family from our church is hosting us at their ranch home. When I say “ranch” I am not intending the picture you might have in your head of a one-story tract home in a master planned community.
Ranch. Like ranch. Cows. ATV’s. Shotguns. Big meals. Big trees. Big nature. It is nothing like my neighborhood — where it isn’t uncommon to get a letter from the HOA informing me that my garage has remained opened too long. No. This is a different world.
It’s a green and unmanicured world. Somehow in all of it — getting away, I haven’t found a new ministry tool. I haven’t seen the road clearly marked out for me for the next forty years (although I did get to look through a pair of really cool night vision goggles). But, I’m simply agenda-less. I eat when I’m hungry (too much mostly). I sleep when I’m tired. I laugh. I pray. I walk. I sing (to myself… why ruin everyone else’s time?). I’m remembering what life was like in summer camp. I’m having a blast.
And, when I’m really still, beneath the giant sky in the thick dark of night, something begins to unfold. Perhaps it’s the bigness of everything. Or, more aptly, a recognition of the smallness of myself. I am learning to listen to God again — to hear Him, to hear His voice, and to receive the love I am so willing to talk about but so often fail to experience as my own.
Tonight was salmon and key lime pie. I’ll still be full at breakfast.
