Hey All! I wanted to let you know that I will no longer be blogging at this site. I have moved the blog over to a self hosted site. Please go over to www.organicstudentministry.com and subscribe! I look forward to continuing the conversation with you all at the new site! Thanks
I am very excited to be speaking at a very innovative and important conference in Nashville at the end of November. The conference is called Txt2Speech. The conference is designed to ask the questions:
What is the future of Christian proclamation in a society increasingly driven by networked technologies and 140-character communications? What place does preaching to young people have in such a society, and what form might it take? How might we move from mere sermons and “youth talks” into affecting the lives of young hearers?
Bringing together a diversity of voices for workshops and “big room” sessions, we’ll explore both the present and future of Christian proclamation in a digital age.
I am also thrilled to be presenting with some incredible practitioners and theologians like Kenda Creasy Dean and Mike King. Today is the last day to take advantage of their early bird rate so make sure to go and register ASAP! Click Here for More Details
Prescriptive- to set down an authoritative direction
Proscriptive- to prohibit or limit
The Amazing Minds of Teenagers
One of the fears I hear fairly consistently about youth ministry asks they question, “How far should we let them go in their exploration, question asking and thinking about God?” This is a legitimate concern that I feel the need to address. I do not believe it is a concern for the same reasons as the ones who ask those questions. I believe that it is a legitimate concern because we should be asking the opposite questions of the theological exploration of our students. Continue Reading…
My new book, Hollow Faith, is available for order now and I am so excited about all of the great buzz coming from the book already! You can order it at www.cymt.org or at Amazon. I would encourage you to please share these links and help us get the word out about this book! I am also including a special link HERE for you to be able to read a sample chapter from the book!!! I would love for you to share these with your friends, family and anyone who is looking for a deeper more substantive faith for your students! Please make sure to rate it on the Amazon site as well! Thanks again for all of the support!
The Journey
I began a journey the Summer after I graduated high school. I grew up in a small rural town and was moving to Birmingham, the biggest city in our state to attend Samford University. Samford was know as an excellent academic institution, with an outstanding religion department. Scholars from some of the best schools in the world populated our department. While I was very excited about this some of those who cared for me back at my home church were very fearful that I might loose my faith. I was told things like “you have to go in there firm and knowing what you believe or else they will try to steal it away from you” or “the class room in a place like that is a place of spiritual warfare and you have to go in armed or the enemy will defeat you.” Believe it or not this made my want to go even more. Not so I could “put on the full armor of God” to fight the evils of some of the greatest men and women I have come to know, but because I believed I might find a God that I could not imagine on my own. I knew that I had seen glimmers of God in my home church, not in their doctrines or sermons but in the love of many of the people who cared for me as I grew up. I also knew these were only glimmers and I knew my mind and my heart could be equally stimulated with these ideas of theology and interpretation. So I left my small town with one mantra, If I believe that God is all truth, and I go to school seeking wisdom and truth then I would eventually discover God. I remember well, I felt like an adventurer setting off on a journey of discovery. So I went, against the advice of those from home, wide open to learning, knowledge and questions. Continue Reading…
A Reframing of the Theological Conundrum
is the beginning of a new series of posts where I will outline and challenge you to consider and practice a counter intuitive pedagogy. Before I get into the actual post I want to explain my reasoning. First, we need a new model by which we engage theology and students. The previous models are no longer relevant (in the best sense of the word) and are producing a zombie/lemming disinterest in theology and study. Secondly, I would not be writing these posts unless I had seen glimmers of hope and interest in and through some of my experiments in leading and facilitating theological conversation. Not only have I seen glimmers but, for many students I have seen sparks ignite into theological infernos, this gives me hope. Thirdly, I believe, as many others believe, that we are in a major paradigm shift in the ecclesial world. We know from history when there are major shifts in paradigm, in order to move forward, do not need innovations (new answers to old questions), we need to reframe the question and change the information that is important which generally eliminates previous dichotomies. (a paraphrase from Edwin Friedman’s, A Failure of Nerve, p.37) I am not seeking new answers, I desire to reframe how we think about the role of theology in the church and more specifically ministry with students in an ecclesial setting. Continue Reading…
Prayer time in a small group setting can be magical or manic. Rarely is there a middle ground, especially when Jr. High boys are invovled. While not all, or most, prayer times are going to ground breaking sessions that will take you inside the very holy of holies these few techniques and exercises can make them much more meaningful.
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Several times a year our student ministry puts on large 200+ person retreats and as the director of the student ministry I am in charge of making sure these retreats are safe, fun and help our students grow in their faith with God. At one point in my career that induced a huge amount of stress and excitement. Over the years I have developed a few practices leading up to a retreat that takes away the stress and just leaves the excitement!
Practice 1: Lists
I cannot tell you how much I depend on lists, not just lists of what I have to do but lists of what I have done. We all know the importance of keeping good lists of what is coming. I want to offer a couple of ideas for how you use lists.
The first is to keep your lists long after you are finished with your retreat! I will always keep my lists when they have all of their items checked off. I do this because I know that I will do this retreat again next year, and the next year and so on. Since I am not a big fan of re inventing the wheel I know that there will be many, usually for me 85%+, tasks that I will need to repeat again next year. It includes simple things like remembering to bring a bull horn to large things like getting all of our small group boxes completed. I need to take a break here and note that I do not consider these lists as a replacement for my Preventative Maintnance Calendar. PMC’s are an invention of my good friend Mark DeVries. These are calendars that systematically lead us up to the event usually from around 8 months before. These are invaluable to my ministry and I highly reccomend using these. If you are more interested in this concept I would love to put on my Youth Ministry Architects hat and talk with you more! Back to the subject at hand, the lists have a great ability to keep us from having to remember the small details from year to year. It can also act as an evaluation tool to look at how we managed our time from last year’s retreat.
Practice 2: Have the Retreat Two Days Early
Ok, not really, but if you pretend that the retreat will happen on a Wednesday instead of a Friday you will not find yourself nearly as stressed or run down when Friday actually rolls around! It is a silly trick but it really works! I usually work towards Wednesday and pretend like that is the day when everything is due. When I do this I find myself doing a lot of the more time consuming and important things earlier and am much more ready for the weekend than I would be otherwise. I believe the reason why this works is because, as you know, we always will have those things pop up at the last minute. There will always be the chaperone who cannot attend, the video that will not work or the band who is late. When these things happen they are not nearly as stressful because we actually have the time to deal with them and not have to neglect what we already had scheduled.
Practice 3: Outsource, Outsource, Outsource!!!!
Often times youth ministers, myself included, have a bit of a martyr complex. We love to go into a retreat weekend and absolutely spend ourselves. I remember an old football coach used to tell us to leave everything on the field or else we would regret it. Many of us practice youth ministry and especially retreats with this mentality. I have come to believe that we are so much more useful and successful when we make sure that we have few scheduled jobs during a retreat. Now do not get me wrong, you will work and work hard but you will be able to spend your time doing the things that require your immediate attention and that can often only be accomplished by you. For this reason, you should not try to lead a small group, facilitate games or be the lead in the skit during the retreat. The other positive of this way of thinking is that you, sometimes, will have those breif moments to sit back and watch the beauty of the weekend that you worked so dilligently on play out in front of you. This is a gift you should give yourself from time to time, it is well deserved.
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This past week I had the honor of being one of 15 participants in a theological Think Tank funded by the Lilly Endowment and hosted by the Center for Youth Ministry Training, CYMT. It was an absolute fascinating time full of discussion and some of the brightest and most innovative minds in student ministry. I had the privilege of being around the table with Kenda Creasy Dean, Mark Matlock, Brian Kirk, Mike King, Jim Hancock, Mark DeVries and Dori Baker among several other incredibly talented folks! Our group was commissioned with the task of discerning what would be the major concerns and issues facing student ministry in the next 5-10 years.
We each had to submit 3 papers prior to the event proposing our answers to the question. Just before the think tank we were sent all of the papers together to read and review. That in and of itself was an incredible opportunity just to see what 14 other practitioners and thinkers saw as important issues facing student ministry in the next decade. Once we arrived in Nashville for the think tank we were then put into groups to choose 9 of these papers that we felt were the most relevant to our discussion. I was in a group with Kenda Dean, Mark Matlock, Deech Kirk and Crystal Kirgiss. We were the token group that chose to create 18 new papers instead of narrowing down the ones we were given. There were some major trends that we saw in the papers. Sexuality and more specifically homosexuality and the church’s overall paralysis in talking about it was a major trend. Some other trends were the dying influence of the American church in both a national and global context and what what means for the future of Western youth ministry, the lack of faith language in students and the church at large and the changing demographic of our country both religiously and culturally and what will be the church’s response.
As my new friend Brian Kirk over at ReThink recently said, “my brain is still spinning with the sheer volume of information, ideas, questions, and challenges that came out of the group’s efforts.” There will be many more posts that will come from this wonderful three day long discussion but to begin the conversation on here I will leave you with the three papers I submitted for the think tank’s consideration.
Decentralizing Students in Student Ministry
Summary: If you talk to the average religious American parent of a teenager about beginning to practice intentionally spiritual parenting, the majority of parents will express both a lack of spiritual/biblical knowledge as well as an ineptitude regarding their own faith and how it expresses itself in their lives. While there are several books out currently dealing with the subject of placing the role of primary spiritual nurturer back on the family, they seem to be missing one glaring point. With increasing data pointing to parents as the primary spiritual nurturers/ influencers in an adolescent’s life, and other data telling us that youth mirror their parents Moralistic Therapeutic Deism faith, is it not imperative to tap the breaks on pushing family structures as the primary place of spiritual nurture, and provide a restructuring of the faith component of adult spirituality? In the National Youth and Religion Study we found that our students were practicing Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. A few years later inKenda Dean’s book Almost Christian, Dean took the research a step further recognizing the youth’s Moralistic Therapeutic Deism is simply a reflection or their parents Moralistic Therapeutic Deistic faith. With these findings at the forefront of our mind are we not going to simply perpetuate the same MTD versions of Christianity by not caveating our drive for parents to assert more prominently their roles as the primary influencers of their children’s faith?
I believe that in order to create more sustainable faith in youth as well as fight MTD we must take refrain in our quest to simply bolster whole family intergenerational spirituality and address the issues that the faith that we might be encouraging our youth into is ultimately a faith that we will have to continue to fight in the years to come. I also believe that my last statement “a faith that we will have to continue to fight in the years to come” is a best-case scenario. We have to remember that this faith is the faith that teenagers and young adults are leaving in droves and are rejecting wholesale as an inauthentic and cheap spirituality. I think, therefore, our problem is two fold. The first is that yes we have to recentralize the family as the hub for spiritual development, encouragement, equipping and growth. This alone will not stick where the findings of the NYRS are concerned. There has to be an equipping of parents not only to embody the role of primary spiritual nurturers but also to also challenge and reequip their spirituality that has primarily expressed itself as Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.
Current Responses:
This is probably the fastest growing segment in youth ministry publications currently. Books like Soul Searching (Smith), Almost Christian (Dean), Sticky Faith (Powell) and Think Orange (Joiner) are the most talked and blogged about works which are currently available. I have not seen resources that linkthe two problems together completely, asking the question “Are we setting this entire system up for failure by promoting and pushing youth into a familial structure that is MTD at it’s core?”
Questions:
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Is it the role of the student ministry to lead the way in this endeavor? If so, how can it do so effectively in the current social, political and ecclesial climates that are already so contentious?
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What are the necessary tools, practices and techniques that will have to be utilized and developed in order to address such a massive systemic problem?
Learning to Speak Again Summary: One of the major findings of the NYRS (National Youth and Religion Study) was that youth did no longer possess an adequate way to speak about their faith and faith experiences. The study showed that not only are youth silent about their faith, but they also lack an adequate vocabulary if they did want to verbalize some sort of transcendent experience. If we follow the rest of the research, that our students faith mirrors their parent’s faith, we can hypothesize that the adults in our congregation are just as lacking in regards to their faith vocabulary and the ability to speak confidently about their spirituality. The language of historical Christianity is slowly fading away to exist only on the pages of ancient church fathers and reformation theologians. This does not have to be the case. I, however, do not believe the solution is to simply have our students memorize the creeds and be able to recite a list of the varying atonement theories. While they do need to have a working knowledge of these expressions of faith, I believe there is also a greater need for our students and their parents to be in the business of creating and finding their own voices and stories in the theological narrative. While there is a wealth of theological language and terminology already in existence, it is a language that no longer fully reflects the experience and the cultural understanding of our modern faith. Theological expression can also no longer be rooted in the practice of semiotics. The church must reestablish its place at the table of the arts, knowing that the finitude of language can only be supplemented by the infinite possibilities of prose, sculpture, paint poetry and other artistic expressions. Phyllis Tickle, inThe Great Emergence, writes about the church’s need for a spiritual and practical rummage sale. In this the church cleans out it’s theological and liturgical attic. In this process we find pieces we have put away and want to reclaim to the forefront. We also will find pieces that we no longer find useful or practical and we take them out front to the rummage sale. There must be a development/ reclamation of a new/old faith language, expression, liturgy that is honest, authentic, narrative, flat and organic while being both Biblically and culturally reflective. Current Responses: There are a number of books that are dealing with the idea of developing a new/old language to reflect a growing and emerging faith and theology. Many of then have been found within the Emergent or Emerging church movement. The problem with much of this movement is that it is not taking place within the broader realm of modern Christianity. Rolf Jacobson has done some interesting work in this direction in his books Crazy Talk and Crazy Book, where he gives an urban dictionary set of definitions to major theological terminology. While there are many books proposing new expressions of faith, language and liturgy very few are doing so with the family (microcosm) within the greater ecclesial body (macrocosm) being the primary place in which this development takes place. Questions:
1. Is there an ancient model for creedal/liturgical development that can be applied to the familial structure as a subset of the greater church and denominational bodies?
2. If we understand liturgy as “the work of the people” in a way that puts the primacy of faith expression and language to the people, then what sort of implications does this have for the mainline connectional church in it’s uniformity and structure?
Summary: Youth are finding themselves in an increasingly more pluralistic world. Both cultural and religious pluralism and diversity are becoming more prevalent across our country’s landscape. This is not only evident by the ever-changing face of the average American but can also be seen in the broad array of cultural influences on most people living in the United States. This influx of change has been met with several varied and notable reactions in the past 10-15 years. On one hand, we have seen elements of education embrace this this diversification through the expansion of historical and cultural inclusions. We have also seen this change met with a much less tolerable response. Our most current of these responses being immigration laws and a growing anti Islamic sentiment have seemed to gain momentum and adherence in the public forum. While many people have taken a “hunker down” mentality, people of faith are often caught in a much deeper tension between what is means to belong to a demographic with nationalistic and often racist tendencies while believing in a God of all people. The majority of the rhetoric and discussion has been dominated in the area of an increasing pluralistic nation has been dominated by a more extremist sentiment fueled by nationalistic fervor and practice just short of the Jim Crow movement of the 1960’s. This movement has been very successful at either co-opting or in some cases tapping into a wide base of Christian America. Overtones of nationalism and a sense of patriotic exclusion then take the place of the large scriptural narrative of how a God honoring people group responds to the sojourner, stranger or alien in our midst. While in the past, this has been a peripheral issue to be discussed and debated among adults, teenagers are now on the forefront of the diversification of America. The idea and face of pluralism is a varied entity as well. In our current context it can mean everything from the Muslim child who sits next to a teenager in math to the family down the street with two moms raising their little boy. I believe we have an amazing opportunity to answer this highly contentious issue with a uniquely Christian response that is not dictated by political allegiance or policymaking. We have the opportunity to reclaim the Christian practices of hospitality, love and Samaritanism as the answers to the questions of plurality and who is my neighbor. Current Responses: There is an organization out of Chicago called the Inter Faith Youth Core led by Eboo Patel. Eboo is a Muslim, Indian American. Eboo is providing one of the only major non-partisan attempts at bridging gaps between these diverse demographics. IFYC is primarily focusing on bridging gaps between religious (including non religious) groups. I believe there is an even greater response needed that also includes socio economic, ethnic and lifestyle gaps as well. Questions:
1. Assuming the church can harness enough energy and cooperation and momentum is it presumptuous to believe that the other demographics are willing or able to do the same?
2. Beyond fulfilling the Christian practices of Hospitality and Love what, if any, are the political, social or societal end goals of this sort of practice?
3. How can denominational bodies, which are in decline both in numbers and influence, find the ability to participate in these sorts of potentially devastating movements and maintainmembership?
So I am not a huge fan of Sunday School, I also believe that family based youth ministry is where we need to go. This video, however is pretty jacked up.
While presented as a “documentary” it is anything but. ”Divided: The Movie” is nothing more than a faux documentary promoting nut jobs like Ken Hamm, Organizations like NCFIC, extreme right fundamentalist homeschooling and throwing back into the dark ages of understanding family structures. I am so afraid of this sort of destructive thinking gaining traction. Each of the “experts” interviewed represent the neo fundamentalist wings of the church. By the way if you are a woman, according to this documentary, you have no business in the spirituality of your child. FYI
This is Jacked Up.
