The Extremes of Wednesday night Bible Study

These two conversations illustrate the lack of middle ground on Wednesday nights; either we really get it or we really don't:

Seventh-grader at dinner: "If I had enough armpit hair, I'd like to braid it!"
His friend: "Hey, yeah! That's a great idea!" (They start looking at their armpits.)
Isaac: (wads up napkin and throws it at them) "I'm throwing a flag on this conversation!"

Sixth-grader, in small group: "So if you're a Christian, is it hard to go to Hell?"
Isaac: (starts laughing) "Yes, C, when you're a believer, it's very hard to go to Hell."

Cookie Night quotes for 2007

Last year we established a tradition with our middle school youth group that they would, at one of their monthly events, make care packages for the college students from CSMSG.

This past weekend we held our second Cookie Night. Part one of the evening is making cookies (we use big tubs of premixed dough for efficiency's sake) and part two is writing notes to the college students. I usually put up a few examples on the screen so our kids aren't shooting blind, but this year they were especially good at coming up with their own, like these:

(The High-Pressure note) "I hope you like these cookies, because I made them. So LOVE THEM!"

(The Guilt-Inducing note) "I hope you like these cookies, because a good friend would make them for you, but a great friend would also send you a postcard!"

(The one that isn't getting sent) "I hope you like these cookies. I added a 'special' ingredient!" (The writer's comment: "I think you'd have to be a college student to understand my note...")

(The Clever Holiday Song Parody) To the tune of 'Away in a Manger'-- "Away at your college/ Asleep on your bed/ With dreams of good cookies/ And 'A's on your tests! Well... maybe! At least you have cookies!"

(The One-Liner) "Get ready for your exams with these fresh-baked cookies! Well... they were fresh when we made them!"

(And, of course, the Nyah-Nyah-Nyah) "On the first day of Christmas, my youth group gave to me... 10 boxes of cookies... sorry, we only sent you one!

My favorite, of course, is the one with the drawing on it (which is supposed to look like me) "May God be with you as you work your way toward the outer life and pass your final exams. These cookies are to aid you in your quest to become whatever you want."

The most recent issue of the Journal of Student Ministries has an article by Chuck Bomar about how churches are making strides at connecting with college students; check it out if it's something your group has been talking about doing, or that you see the need for.

Here's last year's post about Cookie Night.

My youth group just amazes me

Tonight we had our first regular high school group get-together. I'm much more creative when it comes to the middle school group, honestly, so when I was inviting people to this one what I said was, "This is your chance to tell me what the group will be doing the rest of the year."

We do a "Sunday night Coffeehouse" format, where I bring in my espresso maker (soon to be replaced with two permanent, youth group-owned machines) and make Starbucks-style goodness for everyone, and we get to relax a little bit. The original idea was to make this place a haven, away from pressure and deadlines and such.

This time, I asked the group to come up with problems they'd like to solve and efforts they'd like to be a more active part of.

The first comment was, "We should serve more." The group remembered a service project we'd done with a housing agency here in town and wanted to work with them again. We've had a kid in the hospital a lot this fall, so we wanted to do something for him, and then talked about expanding our vision to do more with people in the hospital in general. Then we talked about what we might do for the homeless people in our city.

Right now the crew is brainstorming ideas and we're going to come up with one to focus on deeply for a while. We're going to keep up the coffeehouse event as a time to relax and all check in, and add these other projects as we come up with them.

The best comment: "It's not like we could just go out and find homeless people and say, 'here's a blanket.' (Pause.) Wait, maybe we could!"

What was cool was that without any formal Bible study tonight, the group came up with most of Jesus list of things to do for "the least of these" in Matthew 25.

I "gently sprung" this on my leaders

This week pray for my small group leaders-- they are flying solo on Wednesday night and while I know they're up for it, some of them are a little nervous.

I'll be out at Group's headquarters for a speakers' training workshop (and hopefully blogging from there) and completely forgot that I'd need to set up some system for covering Wednesday Bible study, until last Wednesday. So the leaders agreed to give it a try, and the kids agreed to show up, and we'll see how it goes.

God's got a plan for it, I know that!

What took my breath away this morning

Over the summer, the staff at Fortune Lake led a prayer walk, and one of the stations was about expressing our identity as we see it, and considering our identity the way God sees it. This photo was the board after that station was over, the last week of camp. "I am broken like Christ" made me a little teary. (Click the photo to see it full-size and read it better.)

(credit to my friend LB on Facebook)

Halo 3 makes news as an outreach tool

In the NY Times this morning, this article about churches using Halo 3 in their youth programs.

"Thou Shalt Not Kill, Except in a popular video game at church"

"Martial images in literature or movies popular with religious people are not new. The popular “Left Behind” series of books — it also spawned a video game — dealt with the conflict preceding the second coming of Christ. Playing Halo is “no different than going on a camping trip,” said Kedrick Kenerly, founder of Christian Gamers Online, an Internet site whose central themes are video games and religion. “It’s a way to fellowship.” "

CSMSG's ministry uses the Nintendo wii to give students a fun way to start and close our events, or to hang out and chat after school, but I do make a point of limiting the type of games and screening violent ones. It doesn't seem to matter to the kids-- they might comment on how I pick lame games, but they'll get up and play them right after that.

It's one of the things I've always feared

One of my kids came up to me after our church school classes let out today and asked, "Are you really as obsessed with God as you were down in the gym this morning?"

(Each week we gather for 20 minutes or so of fellowship as a whole group before they break off into classes, and each week I do a Gospel minute where I share a story about the Gospel lesson that applies to the students' lives. That's what she meant.)

"My friend says you're only like that here because that's what you're paid to do. When you go home you're probably like, 'Oh, whatever.'"

It was hard to hear. And I'm not sure what to do about it, since I can't just take all my students home and have them live with me. They know, because I tell them all the time, that I truly enjoy life with God, but I've always wondered if professional youth workers have less credibility after kids figure out that we get paid.

A little shift in perspective, and suddenly...

On my way out the door to go look for kids the other day, I realized that I'd forgotten to pick a book off my shelf to bring to Starbucks, and asked my program director if she had anything I hadn't read (or loaned her my copy of). She grabbed Mark Yaconelli's "Contemplative Youth Ministry" which I'd been meaning to get into.

Mark makes the point that the rarest gift teenagers have is an adult presence who truly listens to them, and those words jumped out at me. I like to teach, and talk, and I put a lot of pressure on myself to always have something useful and Godly to say to my students when I see them.

But this morning I decided to go about things a little differently; I went in determined to listen. And before the main service, I'd had four good conversations, two of them with students I haven't seen in a while.

A lot of my summer has been devoted to writing programming and lesson plans for this coming year, and that attitude bled over into the way I related to kids. So reading Mark's words brought me back to the place God had prepared for me today.

On making a speech you can believe in

One of my students asked me the other day, "Do you know any good topics for debates?" Her homework was to write a short (1-2 minute) speech on a topic that people could debate. (The class wouldn't actively debate each topic, but the assignment was supposed to test the students' understanding of what topics will bring out lively debate.)

The advice I gave was, "You should make the speech about something you believe in." For two reasons, a speech should always be about something the speaker believes in, and the more passionate the belief, the better. Audiences can tell if a speaker is just reciting. Sometimes speakers have to debate the opposite side of their own position, but this should only be done as an exercise, not as a habit.

So we tried to come up with something she believed in. And we came up with three categories of things that count as beliefs: religious belief, political belief, and "cause" belief-- for example, one of my causes is worldwide literacy.

What I couldn't convince her to do was to actually pick a strong belief and make the speech about it. Part of the problem was that the assignment was due the next day. But another part came from this student not wanting the challenge of using such a short speech to convince an audience about the power of her belief.

That's a problem a youth worker can sink his teeth into. We're called to be "always ready to give an explanation for the hope that is within us," (1 Peter 3:15) and sometimes we only have a short time to do so.

With that in mind, here's an exercise I use, borrowed from a pastor I worked with.

Get students to pick partners. Then give them these instructions:

"Imagine you're in an airport seeing a friend off. You have one minute until s/he boards the plane, and your friend suddenly turns to you and says, 'You know, I've always noticed something was different about you. You have a lot more hope than most people, and you have this way of getting through things. What makes you work like that?' In the one minute before the plane leaves, explain how God's love affects your life."

A bag-o-friendship to teach commitment

Last week, a friend from here at church dropped off a fragrant bag at my office. In it was about a cup of "starter" batter for a batch of Amish friendship bread. The bread, a tradition probably started by the Amish, is passed on in starter form from one friend to another; the recipient works the bag for 10 days, sometimes adding ingredients, mostly just mushing it up to keep it from being stagnant. At the end of the preparation, you make several gift starters to pass on to your own friends, add the last ingredients (including, oddly, a box of instant pudding) and bake the actual bread. What you end up with is a sweet, cinnamon-sugar-crusted loaf of Amish goodness.

When I told one of my students about it, she let me get about a sentence into the story and interrupted me to say, "Just to let you know, I don't want one!" According to her, it was far too much work.

So that made me start to think about how this weeklong bread might be a good activitiy for a small-group Bible study during a series about friendship and what it means to be a friend. You have to be committed to this bread or the starter will go bad. It takes some waiting; the bag leaks odd smells through the days when it sits on the counter; it's harder to make than most bread because there's a specific order to the steps. It's like a good friendship. (Which, of course, is why I suspect the Amish named it the way they did.)

"Of course it's hard. Anything that's worth doing is hard," I told a student one day. But to see that there's an investment required to build up good, Christian friendships, this kind of concrete, tasty project might be just what students need.

Here's the recipe:

Amish Friendship Bread Starter
Amish Friendship Bread (requires the starter)

A "Spiritual Interview" for youth and leaders

I was sitting in Starbucks the other day, reading “The New Faithful” by Colleen Carroll, and noticed a job interview happening at a table across the cafe from me. This made me think about the number of job interviews I'd seen happening there since I moved to St. Louis-- every time I walk into a Starbucks store, someone's trying to get a job, either at the store, or meeting an interviewer at this convenient place.

The purpose of a job interview is to find out how well the person applying will fit in and what he/she will contribute to the company. One tactic that interviewers use all the time is asking challenging or tricky questions, trying to find out how well people think on their feet or how much they know. After the interview, the applicant will have an idea of where he's a strong choice for the job, and a set of weaknesses she can work on before the next meeting.

It made me think about how useful it might be to hold spiritual interviews with students once in a while, to directly ask questions about faith that check what students know and give them some things to think about afterward. The idea wouldn't be to put pressure on students to come up with certain answers, but to see where they're at and help us figure out how to help them more precisely. Greg Stier's “Ministry Mutiny” has an idea like this; that's another spark source for me on this one.
These are some useful questions for a spiritual life interview:

When you go to worship, what part of the service do you most look forward to?
If God had a message to give you right now, what medium (music, people, words, etc.) would He use to deliver it?
When you need to make a big decision, what steps do you take to discern what God wants you to choose?
How do they make M&Ms? (That's an actual interview question, designed to check creativity. Throw it in just for fun.)
What spiritual practices give you strength when you're tempted?
Talk about the times this year when you've been the highest and lowest, spiritually. Where was God in both of those places?

Sometimes we can get these things to come up in conversation. But I also think there's a place for a planned check-in.

How do we make this happen?

I had a whole discussion this week with my small group about how they weren't going to read their Bibles. We had a dare, since we're in a series right now about how to use the Bible, which was to pick a number between 3 and 8, and read the Bible that many days between group meetings. The discussion then ran through some of the following comments:

Buddhist student and pastor's kid: "We already know everything about the Bible; we've read it before!"
Fairly reliable student: "What if reading it one time is pretty much impossible?
Me: "How is that impossible?"
FRS: "Well, I'm studying for finals."
Particularly obnoxious student: "Yeah, finals are way more important than the Bible!"
Struggling student: "What if I read the same thing every day?"
POS: "What if I read one word every day?"
Me: "You have to read more than one word at a time."
POS: "What if God was leading me to that one word?"

How do we overcome resistance to reading the Bible because it's too ________ (fill in: boring, old, weird, violent, irrelevant, hard...)? I really want my students to be excited about Scripture because every time I open it something jumps out at me, but they don't seem to be catching on. Help!

But why do we have church?

A student came up to me last week and asked, "Why do we have church (meaning the regular Sunday worship)? Why can't we just have youth group and Bible study?

I explained it was because we needed to hear the Gospel and have Communion.

"But why can't we just do that in youth group?" he wanted to know.

I told him it was because we needed a priest to do Communion, and that we needed to hear the sermon.

"But why couldn't the priest just come to the youth group?"

I didn't have a good answer for him that day. But it made me think.

Well, J, the reason we have church is because we need the chance to worship with the whole community. By which I mean this:

If we had the Gospel and Communion in the youth group, we would end up having those things with people who were just like us: young, growing in faith, and without a lot of experience at anything. We would invite Jesus into our little circle and enjoy our time with Him all by ourselves.

We have church because we need to worship with people who are old. People who have a lot of stories to tell with their lives. People who are just beginning to wonder about God. People who are wrestling with Him. People who are different-- in their ages, in their faith development, in their involvement with the church-- from us.

Church is so we can talk to God together.
Church is so we can see the people we pray for.
Church is so we don't ever think we are the only ones who know God, because we're comfortable in our own little way of doing things.

I've been waiting four years (the number of years I've been working directly with confirmation classes) for this to happen. My senior pastor in Michigan used to tell the class it was an option every year, and said he'd never had anyone say it either.

I'd messaged a student to ask for some feedback on our confirmation class, and my student wrote back to me, "I just don't want to be confirmed."

I'll tell you why I was thrilled about this.

Confirmands make promises. It's not just what they promise their youth minister that matters, it's that they promise their congregation and their God that they will, among other things, "continue in the apostles' teaching, in the breaking of bread and in the prayers," something that new members have promised to do since the church in Acts.

Every year, at least one confirmand makes those promises without intending to keep them. Every year, a few of them drift away after confirmation, without really thinking about what a serious breach they're creating between their promises and their actions. Especially in mainline churches, the temptation is to see confirmation as just another ritual, and go through the motions to make your parents happy. (That's a whole separate problem, by the way, not something I'm happy about or working to allow.)

So I'm thrilled because someone finally said, "This just isn't for me." We're not going to lose track of this student. But admitting honest doubt is, even if the doubter doesn't realize it, a step toward honest faith. Someone who says, "No" isn't always saying "Never" but often "I need more time."

How big is your box?

Talking with a student the other day, we started on the subject of who should go to Hell. Let's just say we had very different opinions.

Actually, let's say a little more than that. My student believes that, even should someone reach him with the Gospel of Christ, Osama bin Laden categorically deserves damnation.

The dangers I pointed out in his thinking (thank you to the Spirit for these, since I'm positive I hadn't thought about this myself) are twofold:

All deeds aside, (not to excuse them but because the argument goes a different direction) Osama is more a symbol today than an actual man, and beginning to think a certain way about him will subtly begin, in our fallen and sinful human minds, to stamp everyone else associated with the symbol of the leader the same way, and thus begin to call for all the leader's followers to wind up in Hell as well.

This leads to the second problem: we cannot decide that any person deserves Hell with no chance of redemption. For one thing, it's not our decision; it's God's. For another, if we've already decided, we've drawn a box around who can be reached with the power of the Gospel, and who can't. That limits our evangelism, our prayer life, and the challenges from God we're able to hear for our lives. And that does not advance God's plan for us.

What makes radical Christianity different from radical anything else is that we truly believe there is no one outside the reach of Christ's grace. This isn't to say that everyone will believe in that grace or respond to our invitations to experience it, but neither is that objection an excuse for us not to earnestly reach out to everyone and try to share the story we have. If it turns out some surprising people are in Heaven because of the outreach of radical Christians, so much the better.

We may not ever stop believing that repentance and redemption is a possibility for anyone.

As we're getting ready for Lent to begin, I think a worthwhile exercise is to ask God to expand the boxes we work in so that we can believe and act as if no one is outside them, no one is not worth prayer and outreach.

He thought I wanted to hear it...

A student of mine invited himself to come to lunch with me yesterday. He was telling this story about a girl, who is apparently "really cute" and he'd love to go out with her, but they don't know each other very well, but somehow they spent the afternoon in the same place... the important part came when he said,

"And then she offered to drive me home and I thought, 'COULD THIS GET ANY BETTER?' because... um... uh... because she's such a safe driver!"

What I learned on the ropes course

Ropes courses, to me, are very inspiration. Usually I'll pull out some kind of devotional point. This past weekend, though, on the middle school retreat, I learned one simple lesson, at the intersection of prep time and face time.

Trout Lodge's staff does an amazing job leading students through their different courses, so when our middle schoolers got out to the site I'd been planning to cheer them on for a little while and then head back to the lodge to get ready for the next program session, setting out the supplies and material we'd need.

But my students kept saying, "You have to climb with us!"

I hadn't thought they'd be so insistent. "But I've done this before!" I said. That had been a valid excuse for the kids who weren't climbing.

"Maybe, but we haven't seen you!" one smart sixth-grader shot back.

So I climbed. I put on a harness and went through the course and said to myself, "Isaac, you can go back and prep when the next group comes through."

But the next group wanted me to stay too. They let me hang out on the ground, after I told them (and the staff vouched for me) that I'd climbed earlier, but they weren't letting me go anywhere.

On the way home, I thought about that. And I dug one simple rookie lesson out of it:

Any chance for face time with students has to be spent with students, duh! It's straight out of summer camp training, and something I remind adult leaders about near-weekly: spend most of your time with students.

Minor prep can always wait. Program-writers and perfectionists *Isaac raises both hands* like me need to be especially careful not to forget that.

References

When a student comes to you to ask for a reference, for a job or some kind of special fun cool program you wish you'd been offered when you were in school (just a little bit of personal baggage there...) what's the criteria you have for offering the reference?

I generally have a very open-door policy about giving recommendations, because I really want these kids to have a lot of great opportunities. At the same time, writing a couple of references has put me in an odd position. In one case the student had asked after not being anywhere near me for a couple of years, and I wrote it hoping the position she was applying for would be exactly the challenge she needed to get her life organized. In a second one, the kid's mom said to me, "Thanks for writing the reference, but I don't think he's living up to it."

Most of the references I've written haven't caused any trouble like this, but these two stick out in my head as ones I sort of wish I hadn't done.

How do you handle this, and how can I better handle it in the future? Are references a good chance to challenge students, or should they only be given when a list of conditions (and what should be on the list?) are met?

Pros and Cons of tech in ministry

This morning I have a confession that will not surprise anyone. I want to announce that I am a tech-addicted youth minister. As we were working on next year's budget, I made a short list of things to pick up should mysterious money be left in any odd corners, and all of them, from an updated cell phone with a Bluetooth headset, to the new Nintendo wii (for the sixth graders, strictly for the students!) were tech items.

After this year's NYWC, I came home all fired up about MediaShout, which as a program truly is all it promises, and using videos in our youth events. Our little Canon digital camcorder comes to all the events, and the next day the youth minister spends some time splicing and editing to make quick highlight reels for the next Sunday, to show all the folks who weren't there what they missed. When other churches join us for events, they get copies of the videos too.

In a lot of ways, tech is a good tool. But it can also be a distraction. When I'm stuck on a video problem, or surfing through iTunes trying to find the perfect soundtrack to go with a clip, a lot of time goes by, and it's easy (for an often hyper-focused person) to push everything else on the list further down. So what are the pros and cons of tech in ministry?

Pros:

Youth know tech. They've been surrounded by it their whole lives and are fascinated by it. Learning it myself gives me a connection to students and a way to offer them ownership of the ministry.

Tech (especially video) appeals to visual learners. It's an effective way to drive the message past filters the teenage mind uses to screen out things they can't interact with, and thus aren't relevant.

Tech can (believe it or not) save time. Just one website, Bible Gateway, lets me find the Bible verses I need for talks and studies when I just know a few words of the quote. Mapquest (Google Maps, whatever; not trying to be exclusive) gets me where I'm going without digging through the paper maps myself.

These, of course, are just a few.

Cons:

Tech can be a crutch that I hide behind when I haven't really prepared properly. It's easy to throw up flashy, meaningless video, knowing it will catch kids' attention, when what I really want to do is pretend I spent more time working on the lesson than I actually did.

Tech can isolate me from my students. When I go to a place using better tech than I have, my first reaction (which I sometimes, to my chagrin, allow to be the only reaction) is to run home and spend however long it takes making my setup shine just as much. It's a keeping up with the Joneses thing, but it means I'm not out finding students and living truth into their lives; I'm in my office tinkering with my computer.

Tech can make the church seem just like any other place my students go. If I'm using tech and excluding silence, candlelight, the Eucharist, other things the church has that are unique, I'm ignoring the raw power of God's story to change lives, and relying on "relevance."

I'm not going to give up tech, but with anything so labor-intensive and two-edged, it pays to keep both sides in mind.

Good Read: Workplace Chaplaincy

Talking to my mom the other day, she suggested that airports during the holidays would be excellent places to minister, providing care packages and other practical services to travelers who might be stuck, worried or otherwise in need.

With that in mind, this article caught my eye this morning, in the New York Times. Workplace chaplains are apparently becoming more popular, turning out to be less expensive than traditional employee-assistance and counseling programs, and creating "faith-friendly" workplaces. Paralleling the military model, these chaplains are not expected to evangelize, but to serve employees of all faiths and help meet their needs.

"Companies tailor the chaplaincy program to their culture. Cardone Industries, a Philadelphia company that refurbishes auto parts for resale, draws its chaplains, almost all lay people, from its employees. Other corporations, like American LubeFast and Herr Foods, contract with an outside company like Marketplace Chaplains to provide chaplains. Some, like Tyson Foods, which started its program in 1999, have their own chaplains, 127 of them at about 250 of the company’s more than 300 plants in North America, said Allen Tyson, the company’s head chaplain, who is not related to the founders of the company."