From Sampler to Sower

I was talking with a friend of mine recently, about his challenges in getting a new youth ministry off the ground.  He knew what to do, it was just that there were obstacles at every turn.  It reminded me of how hard starting out can really be.  And it got me thinking about how we started out here.

When I first moved to Middletown, over six years ago now, I took things slow.  We moved in the first of October and I immediately started at the church.  However, we did not hold our first youth service until three months later, when school started back up in January after Christmas vacation.  And we didn’t launch our grand opening promoting the service to the general public until March.  During those first several months, I focused on building a core volunteer team and laying the ground work for the youth service we would eventually call Water’s Edge.  Our praise team met weekly to practice.  Our leadership council began planning and preparing.  But we didn’t have any youth services other than our weekly Sunday School classes on Sunday morning.  What I understood then was that for a youth ministry to succeed, it had to have a backbone.

What is a “backbone” program?

According to Todd Capin’s Youthworker Journal article from 1998, now available online from Youth Specialities website, a backbone meeting is “the ministry time around which all other youth group ministries and meetings revolve and function.”  He goes on to give this sound advice: “In fact, until a student ministry has established a backbone, all other facets to the group should be put on hold (or at least pared back) until a solid, regular, backbone meeting is established.”  (more…)

Recently a fellow youth minister whose blog (The Timbo Times) I read wrote about his love of hot chocolate.  I especially liked his description of coffee as “hot of water that’s been carelessly drained through dirty beans.”  It reminded me of my grandfather, who when asked in a restaurant what he’d like to drink, would invariably reply “bean soup.” But I digress.

I chided him that a true hot chocolate lover wouldn’t just write about it, he or she would share their favorite recipe for the drink.  I figured that I ought not council of others what I am unwilling to do myself, (and I was short a post for today), so here it is.  I will warn you, this is true hot chocolate.

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Weekend Teaching Series: Write them On My Heart (A series on the 10 Commandments)

Message Title: Word Six: You Will Not Murder

Sermon in a Sentence: We must not treat life with such a casual disregard that someone else loses theirs because of it.

Text(s): Deuteronomy 5:17; Psalm 51:4; Genesis 9:6; Romans 12:19

Weekend Scale of Difficulty: 5 of 10; At least from a technical standpoint it was seemingly easy (though we had no end of sound glitches), the only difficulty was preaching “You shall not murder” to a bunch of teens who assume that verse doesn’t apply to them, since they’re not murderers and all.

Message Summary: We started by looking at the form and structure of the ten commandments, noting that with the shift from first half to second comes a shift of focus on our relationships with God to our relationships with each other.  We noted how the last five appear, not as five separate commands, but as a single run-on sentence – a grammatical feature lost in most modern translations.  And they seem to be ordered in descending severity: murder, which is the destruction of someone’s body; adultery which is the violation of someone’s body; theft, the violation of someone’s property by force; false testimony, the violation of someone’s property by deceit; and covetousness, the violation of someone’s property by intent.  Yet since they are all connected, it’s not really one is worse than any of the others, instead it’s the realization that if we violate one, we violate the community they all protect.

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The answer is 42.  But unlike Douglas Adams, I know not only the elusive answer, but also the question.  Are you ready?  The question is, “How many times, while laying on cold, wet concrete under an old, rusty bus blooding one’s knuckles on the cold, hard frame, will a youth pastor think to himself ‘This isn’t in my job description‘?”  And it didn’t even take me 10 million years to come up with the question.  Just three hours one slightly snowy November morning, lying underneath the aforementioned bus.

Why, you might wonder, was I under said bus?  I was attempting to remove the seats from the bus, so that one of our parishioners who owns a metal fabrication business can replace the rotting floor.  The bolts which held down the seats pass through the floor.  And the nuts which had to be held stationary while the bolts were loosened, were accessible only to someone lying underneath the bus — a job which unfortunately fell to me because my considerable girth is slightly less considerable than the guy helping me accomplish the task.  (In other words, while wide, I am not too wide to get under the bus.  But J-Dubs is.)

Every time my knuckles were scraped along the “rust proofing” (note the quotation marks, employed to denote just how rust-proof that rust proofing was) I found myself muttering under my breath something to the effect of  “They don’t pay me enough for this.”  Or “There’s a reason I didn’t go to school to become an automechanic.”  Or more often than not “This isn’t in my job description.”  It really isn’t.  If you don’t believe me, you can see for yourself here.)

I find myself thinking that a lot as a youth pastor.  Anyone who’s been in this position can tell you, there are a lot of things that I do that don’t fall into the neat categories laid out in my job description.  From cleaning the youth center, to fixing networking problems, to hanging out with K-Reb.  Oh wait, that last part is in my job description.  I just wish it wasn’t.  (Just kidding Caleb!)

There’s nothing that can poison one’s job satisfaction more than dwelling in the land of “It’s not my job.”  And while we cannot ever fully control the things we are asked or expected to do, we can control the way in which we respond to those things and the attitude we have while doing them.  I suppose it’s also true that we can control what we are expected to do by simply delegating all those things that we’d prefer to pass off to someone else (like, say, crawling around on cold, wet cement, underneath an old, rusty bus).

And while from a managerial viewpoint delegating would probably be the smart thing to do, I’m not sure that from a ministerial viewpoint that is always the case.  I’ll tell you why after the jump. (more…)

So, you’ve mastered the art of harnessing the power of friendliness and because of word of mouth and word of mouse, new teens are checking out your youth ministry.  Now that they’re here, how do you make sure they “stick?”

The answer, in a word, is hospitality.  Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged dictionary defines it as “the cordial and generous reception and entertainment of guests or strangers socially or commercially.”  My favorite definition however comes from Washington Irving who said “There is an emanation from the heart in genuine hospitality which cannot be described, but is immediately felt and puts the stranger at once at his ease.” (from his story “Christmas Eve” in The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.)

I like that a lot.  Genuine hospitality is hard to define and when you try to do so you end up with a cold fish of a phrase like “the cordial and generous reception and entertainment of guests or strangers socially or commercially.”  (No offense, George, Charles and Noah.)  But while hospitality is hard to define, it’s easy to recognize.  Some places, some people, simply have a way of putting a guest at ease which is immediately felt by all.

But more than something that we do, hospitable is something that we are.  Danny Meyer, author of Setting the Table puts it this way:

“Hospitality is present when something happens for you.  It is absent when something happens to you.  These two simple concepts—for and to—express it all.”

As long as we equate hospitality with all the things we do to our visitors, we miss the point.   Instead we must be hospitable for them, and most of that hospitality takes place long before they ever visit.  If I were writing the dictionary, I’d define hospitality as “the way we show others that we had them in mind before they ever came be our guest.”  Maybe it’s the Wesleyan in me, but hospitality is prevenient.

So how do we become a hospitable youth group?

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At Water’s Edge, we believe in friendship evangelism, and we understand that our job it to equip teenagers to share their faith with their friends. Our goal is to design a weekly youth program which makes sharing your faith is as easy as saying “Hey, do you want to come to Water’s Edge with me?” But how does a youth ministry make sure they are equipping their teens to reach out in this way, rather than using a professed faith in friendship evangelism as a way to pass the buck of responsibility for evangelism to their teens?

This weekend I’ll be leading a couple workshops entitled “Building a Friend-Friendly Youth Event” at our District’s fall retreat.  That really has me thinking about friendship evangelism and how we equip our teens for it.  In my mind there are two closely related aspects to success in this area.  The first is to unleash the power of the personal invitation.  The second is to practice hospitality so that when the invitation is accepted, guests are more likely to stick.  I’ll be tackling these two topics in a couple of posts.  And I’d love to have some feedback before I head off to retreat.  Sound off in the comments below.

Now, as for harnessing the power of friendship: (more…)

Weekend Teaching Series: Write them On My Heart (A series on the 10 Commandments)

Message Title: Word Five: You will Honor Your Father and Mother

Sermon in a Sentence: God calls us to understand the importance of our parents in our life, and to treat them with the respect they deserve.

Text(s): Deuteronomy 5:16; Ephesians 6:1

Weekend Scale of Difficulty: 7 of 10; Two video clips tonight, including one that needed some editing.  Lots of unusual buttons and cues for tech crew.  But what really made it tough was the subject matter.  If you’re honest and faithful both to scripture and the realities in which your teens live, this subject can be messy and brings up tough questions that defy easy answers.

Message Summary: We started by breaking out the Beat Box and kickin’ it old school.  The year was 1988.  It was the summer after my eighth grade year.  (And yes, that really is me on the right.)  I was at Purdue university, enrolled in their Star program, taking classes in Biology and Chemistry.  I was walking from my dorm to the science building for class when a car drove by with windows down.  And for the first time in my life, this boy from Nowhereville, Indiana heard rap.  It was DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince with their 1988 hit “Parents Just Don’t Understand”

(Did you know that iTunes actually sells this old music video?  It was at this point that we played it. Or at least the first “verse.” Before you show it, take time to examine the graffiti in the background and edit out any you find too offensive. It goes by quick and is hard to notice, but you might want to redact some of it.)

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Okay, first teen to bring a KazooKeylele to Water’s Edge and play in the praise band is officially the winner.  Winner of what? you ask. Winner of life, the universe, and everything.

Recently, Richard Reising of BeyondRelevance.com posted a new video which asked the question “What would happen if Starbucks marketed itself like Starbucks?”

The point of the video, in Richard’s words:

Have you ever tried really hard to make a point and when people say they get it, you are just not sure they do? Sometimes it takes us seeing our world through new eyes–something that it is hard to do as believers. Sometimes a little bit of juxtaposition does the trick.

So granted, he’s not trying to suggest that the Church should be more like Starbucks, but to point out the awkwardness of so much of what we do.  However, that got me thinking.  What could the church learn from Starbucks about creating an attractive and friendly atmosphere?

So I went on a research trip to Starbucks.  No seriously, it was all about the research.

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I’m stealing an idea from Josh Griffin at morethandodgeball.com.  Here’s a brief rundown of what went down last week at Water’s Edge.  I always find Josh’s interesting.  Maybe you’ll find ours the same:

Weekend Teaching Series: Write them On My Heart (A series on the 10 Commandments)

Message Title: Word Four: You will pay careful attention to the Sabbath

Sermon in a Sentence: God instituted the idea of a Sabbath rest to challenge the way we understand our place in the world.

Text(s): Deuteronomy 5:12-15

Weekend Scale of Difficulty: 5of 10, The message pretty much wrote itself, and the music wasn’t a challenge, but there were multiple video clips to challenge the tech crew.

Message Summary: We flipped the service again this week.  Sermon first, music afterward.  Began by using the Highway Video’s Identity video to ask the question “Where do you find your identity?” Then we talked about how we see ourselves.  Used several “About Me” sections from students’ facebook pages to look at the words we use to describe ourselves.  From there we transitioned into the categories the world uses to identify us.  Here we played a clip from Baraka (a great movie you’ve probably never heard of) to provide visuals while I spoke from the back of the room.

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