From Sampler to Sower

Monday I shared a survey I prepared to help me get a grasp on how well my teens understood some of the most basic tenets of Christianity.

Yesterday we started looking at the five questions in which student’s responses diverged the most from my own.

Today I’d like to continue looking the results from our beliefs survey, continuing to move from the questions where student opinion diverged the most, to those in which they were most aligned with my own.

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Note: If you’re from MCON and have any interest in taking the survey yourself, please don’t read any farther until after you take the survey to avoid skewing your responses.

Yesterday I shared the Basic Beliefs survey that I asked students in our youth ministry to complete in order to investigate their understanding of some central tenets of Christianity.  The purpose was one part evaluative (has anything I’ve taught stuck?) and three parts prescriptive (going forward, what topics need special attention?).

Today I’d like to start looking at some of the results.

Methodological Concerns

Before diving into particular questions I would like to offer a couple of caveats.  First and foremost, let’s face it, taking tests isn’t most students’ idea of a fun night at youth group. Couple a students distaste for testing with the total lack of consequences for carelessness in taking this survey, and one must wonder “Did my students think through any of these questions carefully enough to answer what they really believe?”

Complicating that issue is the fact that in the interest of brevity, this survey lacks the kind of redundancy necessary to evaluate just how indicative of true beliefs the responses really are. I didn’t have time to ask each question three different ways so that I could compare how consistent any given respondent’s answers were.

And compounding all those concerns is the fact that I am by no means a trained pollster. I tried to be careful to make sure my responses did not reflect a bias one way or another, but the question remains just how effectively I accomplished that goal.

So, keeping in mind those weaknesses to this survey, let’s look at the results…

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Not long ago I was sitting in a sermon-slash-lecture presented by a local educator to a group of pastors from our community.  He was arguing that private Christian education is vitally important not only to the intellectual, but also to the spiritual development of our students. He mentioned some beliefs central to the Christian faith and cited research that showed such seemingly basic beliefs are no longer widely held among American youth.

And that got me thinking…

Just how well do my students understand the basic tenets of Christianity?

And so the survey was born.

Last Wednesday night I asked the students at our midweek service to take our Basic Beliefs survey.  I explained up front that this wasn’t a test.  Unlike tests, this obviously wasn’t for a grade.  And unlike tests, it wasn’t as if every question only had one right answer. That’s not to suggest there are no wrong answers on the survey, but in cases where there were more than one answer that could be correct, they were to choose the answer that best matched their understanding. The point was to help me understand how they viewed various aspects of theology, not to see if they could find the one right answer.

20 questions total. 16 drawn from topics covered by the Articles of Faith and the Agreed Statement of Belief for the Church of the Nazarene. (Incidentally, this school year I taught on each and every one of these subjects at Water’s Edge. So for those who have been a part of our program throughout the school year, these should be familiar subjects.) Four are demographic, dealing with age group, length of time involved in Water’s Edge, frequency of attendance, and the involvement in other religious activities at the church.

Today I’ll share the survey with you. Tomorrow we’ll begin looking at some of the results from my group, Wednesday we’ll wrap up the review of the results, and Thursday we’ll see if there’s anything we can learn from all this.

You can download a pdf version of the survey here, or check out the questions and answers after the jump.

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Two weeks ago I wrote about a new way we were seeking to help our students learn to pray. We’re encouraging students to learn to pray in much the same way they learned to speak, not by talking about prayer, but simply by praying.  We’ve passed out daily prayer cards which have a simple question or instruction for each day, designed to help them open up a conversation with God.

Here is the second set of 16 prayer cards: one daily prayer card and one weekly memory verse card for two weeks.

You know the feeling. Perhaps you just watched a coworker get all the credit for a project you worked together on. Perhaps the friend who always comes to you for help when finances are tight just went on an elaborate vacation while your financial situation kept you at home. Someone else just landed what you’ve been dreaming of, be it the dream job, the new home, the opportunity of a lifetime.  Whatever it is, you wanted it, they got it, and you’re left dealing with the disappointment and resentment that what you wanted just passed you by.

Welcome to envy.

So far in our series The Seven Deadly Sins of Youth Ministry we’ve looked at the ways gluttony and wrath can get in the way of our ministry.  By way of review, the traditional list of seven capital vices includes:

• superbia (pride)
• avaritia (greed)
• luxuria (lust)
• invidia (envy)
• gula (gluttony)
• ira (wrath)
• acedia (sloth?)

Today we’ll tackle invidia, also known as envy.
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I (along with I suspect a healthy number of fellow Christians thanks to some brilliant pre-release publicity from John Piper) recently read Rob Bell’s new book, Love Wins.  Unlike some other prognosticators, who apparently understand Bell’s reasoning so well they can respond to it before it’s even published, I’ve decided to take some time to think, read, pray, eat and love before chiming in.

Having spent a decent amount of time the last two weeks doing those very things (especially eating…) I think I’m going to start here.

It’s probably an understatement to say that much of what Bell suggests run counter to the faith as it was handed down to me. While Bell isn’t the first to suggest things like the possibility of post-mortem repentance and the idea that maybe, just maybe, God is good enough to save all humanity through faith in Christ (not by at least 17 centuries), suffice it to say there haven’t been many voices in my ecclesial neck of the woods advocating such views.

And that’s what makes Bell’s book such a good thing.

Let me explain.
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If the foundations be destroyed, what can the righteous do? (Psalm 11:3, KJV)

I was reminded of this verse recently while listening to a moving speech by a local educator, warning myself and several of my colleagues about the dangers that Nazism and Communism pose to area youth. His concern was that if we allow the foundations to be destroyed, we have no hope.

I was sorely tempted to include this verse in my post about the Top Six Verses that AREN’T in the Bible, as it seems like this verse is so often used in a Chicken-Littlesque warning that the foundations of Western Civilization are crumbling and if we don’t do something fast, the righteous won’t have a prayer (as if, somehow, the foundations of Western Civilization are the footing on which our faith is founded!).

As much as using it this way seems a bit of a misunderstanding at best and blatant proof-texting at worst, I have to admit there is some room for interpretation in this passage. Using the text the way my educator friend did is not as cut-and-dried out of context as the others on the list.

So I’m giving the verse a post all its own.

Before we go any farther, take a second to read all of Psalm 11, maybe even comparing a couple translations. (Don’t worry; it’s only seven verses long.) Then read the rest.
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June 6, 1884 a 28 year old Nikola Tesla arrived in New York City after a long journey from France.  The brilliant young physicist had spent the previous year working for the Continental Edison Company, where he came to know Charles Batchelor.  Batchelor, close friend of Edison and the manager of Edison’s power company in Paris had written a letter of recommendation, introducing Tesla to the great inventor.

It was the start of a very ugly relationship.

It started with promise.  Edison quickly recognized Tesla’s brilliance. Tesla bent his mind to improving Edison’s motors and generators.  But a dispute about promised payment for the work soon had the two inventors at odds.  Tesla would resign when Edison did not only refuse to pay the bonus he had promised, but also declined to give him a raise.  And the relationship only went down hill from there.

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Our church is currently holding revival services with Rev. Larry and Tamla Leckrone.  That’s right, good old fashioned revival.  I count it a privilege to serve a church that still makes a priority out of revival. And it’s an honor to be a part of a theological tradition in which revival services have long had an important place.

Of course, sometimes being a part of the Wesleyan-Holiness tradition carries with it some baggage which proves less than helpful.  The Holiness tradition in general and the Church of the Nazarene in particular have a long reputation of being legalistic.  For many years the American Holiness Revivalism movement has defined holiness in terms of the things we don’t do.  We took seriously the call to “Come out from among them, and be ye separate” and frequently measured that separation in terms of the things we turned away from.

• We didn’t drink.
• We didn’t smoke.
• We didn’t dance.
• We didn’t cuss.
• We didn’t wear make-up.
• And we certainly didn’t stop the list with just five prohibitions.

Then something happened…

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