the brain of a middle schooler

//I just have a quick post about last night.  Our lesson in confirmation last evening was about the Holy Spirit.  In my talk, i shared some about the roles of the spirit, how the Spirit gifts us, and then about the fruits of the spirit.  During the small group discussion that occured after the talk, i watched the brains of middles schoolers try to wrap their minds (might i add unsuccessfully) around an abstract concept.  I asked the question, “Imagine you had a small tree in your back yard that you always called an apple tree.  If the tree began to produce pears, would you still call it an apple tree?  Why or why not?  How is this like and unlike a Christian and the fruits of the Spirit?”  I wanted the students to make the connection on their own that the fruit Christians (which i referred to as a spiritual trees) should produce should be the fruits of the spirit.  However, what i got was (among many ideas), “I think if I was a tree I would be an orange tree because i have red hair.”  :-)  We all laughed a lot last night at that and many other things that were said.  I love my students.  They are the best.

 

NYWC Thoughts – Part 1

//What follows are some of my thoughts.  They may not make sense to everyone, but really that doesn’t matter to me.  I would say I’m sorry if it gets long, but that would be lying because I’m not.  This is my attempt at trying to think through and review some of the National Youth Workers Convention in St. Louis.

 

//In the first general session, Duffy Robbins spoke and said something like, “The process of spiritual growth doesn’t always look like progress.”    It is often easy to get down on kids because they (like everyone else) have their ups and downs.  One minute they will blow you away with their insights and thoughts.  The next minute you will be saying, “How old are you again??”  Or “I know you didn’t just say or do that…did you?”  Anyway, it was encouraging to be reminded that the spiritual lives of people are not like a rocket that takes off into outer space.  Rather, I think it is more like a roller coaster with lots of up and downs, twists and turns.  What I need to remember is that the journey itself is every bit as important as the destination (whatever that may be).  Which leads me into some of my next thoughts…

 

//One thing that Tony Jones said in his seminar on Theological Tools for Your Youth Ministry Toolbox was that (paraphrasing) our relationship with God is like an asymptote where we may always be moving closer and closer to got, but we never fully touch the line.  This is true both personally and as a society as a whole.  We may know more about God today than we did before, but our understanding of God will always be imperfect. 

//Anyway, the big picture idea that I took away from Tony’s seminar was nothing new but was something that I think I almost needed permission to do.  One of the premises of Tony’s whole seminar is that we need to be thinking theologically about everything we do.  He defined theology as the “Human reflection on the nexus of divine and human interaction.”  Therefore, everything we due is theology, what we eat, what we wear, what house we live in, how we raise our children, how we do youth ministry.  Much more was said and by the time the seminar was over, my brain was hurting…in a good way.  The rest of the weekend I think I was rather annoying to my team of volunteers because I kept asking them for their theological basis for the statements they would make.  I plan on continuing to do so…even if they get sick of it.  Thinking theologically and deconstructing my world is something I must do.

 

//Later that evening I had the opportunity to go to the late night theology talk with Tony.  It was fun to sit in a room full of people and discuss the speakers, bands, and seminars of the day from a theological perspective.  I enjoyed the theology talks so much, that I talked to Sadie about trying to have evening theology discussions at the Perkins home.  I don’t know that anyone would come, but we might give it a try.

 

//And I can’t leave the topic of Tony without saying that his daughter who came to St. Louis with him, was an adorable little girl.  Given that he was with his daughter, Sadie and I really wanted to sit down with him and have some coffee (or other choice drinks) to discuss his theology of parenting.

 

//Ok…what next.  I guess I’ll make a quick mention of some thoughts I had about the “worship” bands at the convention.  My question is this, when does worship (musically) become a concert?  Not that concerts are bad, but are they two different things?  Both of them can bring glory and honor to God, but is there a significant difference between the two? I’d love feedback on this point, with supporting reasons.  I ask because as I watched David Crowder perform/lead worship/whatever, I was struck by the fact that it seemed more people were worshipping David and his band rather than God.  I very well could be way off base and I’m not saying that is what was happening.  That is just how it appeared.  And I should go on record that I love the music and quirkiness of DCB.

 

//While I’m on music, I should say that I was impressed with Jars of Clay.  I haven’t heard them in a llllllllllllllllooooooooooooonnnnnnnnnnnnngggggggggg time, but they sounded really good.

 

//I was disappointed in Duffy’s Seminar on Programming to Build Disciples that I went to on Saturday morning.  I thought he has some great insights at the beginning of the talk, but then he headed straight for the funnel programming technique.  Given the name of the seminar, I should have expected it.  Interestingly enough, in the seminar I went to that Marko led, he mentioned that he would highly discourage people from using the funnel when it comes to youth ministry.  Two very respectable youth ministry leaders.  Two very different thoughts.  I agree more with Marko.

 

//I went to Tony Campolo’s super seminar on What Youth Ministers Can Learn from Sociologists.  Campolo had a lot of good things to say, but since I didn’t take notes, I’ll have to steal Sadie’s notes to process some of what he said.

 

//I can tell that I’m starting to get lazy about what went on, so I’ll have to make this post part one and I’ll continue soon (I promise!!) with part two about Chap Clark’s Deep Justice seminar, Marko’s Middle School Ministry Visioning seminar, and a Communication Seminar by Matthew Penn, as well as a few other thoughts.

 

incarnational missiology

//So, i’ve decided to actually make a post on this blog that i registered a while back.  i don’t really make any promises that i will continue to blog, but after reading today, i felt like i needed to get some of my thoughts out of my head and down on paper (so to speak).  I figured, why not put them on the new blog as this could possibly inspire me to continue to blog.  Regardless, here’s some thoughts…

//I’m reading The Shaping of Things to Come by Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch (recommended…i mean assigned to me by Matt) and the first couple chapters were good, but nothing really all that new to me.  Really it was all just a helpful refresher on many of the things i was taught at college or have come across in other books.  They had been talking about the need for the church to do more than evolve.  They see the church needing “revolutionary new approach” (6).  They continue with this line of thinking sharing examples of various people who are attempting to do and more importantly be the church that God intends for them to be.  They then discuss the post-Christendom and postmodern era that we find ourselves in.

//The third chapter is where i really began to mark up my copy of the book.  Underlining sentences here and drawing arrows and stars there.  This chapter has to do with the need for the church to have an incarnational approach to ministry.  What Frost and Hirsch mean by this is that just as Christ came to us, we must go to the world and share the good news of God’s kingdom.  It is not longer enough (as if it ever was), to call inviting people into the church evangelism.  True evangelism  and outreach for a Christian has always been about going out and entering into genuine relationships with those around you. 

//The authors compare incarnational and attractional ways of mission.  They posit that most western churches (95%?–their guess) are involved in primarily attractional ways of evangelism.  About this way of ministry they write, “Evangelism therefore is primarily about mobilizing church members to attract unbelievers into church where they can experience God.  Rather than being genuine ‘out-reach,’ it effectively becomes something more like an ‘in-drag’” (41).  (Which reminds me of the time Noah and i were talking about this issue of outreach in college and he said something to the effect of, “You don’t push a pull-cart.  You pull a pull-cart.”–There might have been a few more words in there…but we’ll just move on.)   Now, the authors do state (more than once) that they don’t “object to inviting people to worship meetings” and that there “should be the opportunity to invite not-yet Christians to experience Christian community and worship” (49) even in the incarnational church.  However, expecting people to come into our churches just because we invite them is not what Christ would have us to do.

//The authors also share some great examples of how an attractional body and incarnational body would handle various scenarios differently.  I don’t really want to get into those examples, but it did make me begin to think how i, as a youth minister, could begin to have a more incarnational approach to ministry with teenagers.  I have a love for teenagers and yet as a youth minister there are so many times that i feel like the things i am doing in my “job” don’t really matter.  For a while now, i’ve desired to lead a different kind of small group (if it can even be called such) focused on mtn biking or the outdoors.  This is something i would love to do outside of the boundaries of my job.  Something where there are no expectations on me from anyone else.  I haven’t wanted this group to be merely full of members of Peace or even other Christians (though all would be welcome).  this is something that i would like to do to interact and meet students who don’t know Jesus, but love mtn biking or the outdoors.  As i think through this idea, it seems to be a much more incarnational approach of reaching kids than having lots of pizza in our student center.

//Ok, that’s enough for now. 

//A few other quotes from the chapter that i don’t want to take the time to discuss, but i liked. 

//”We believe the missional-incarnational church will spend more time on building friendships than it will on developing religious programs” (44).

//”The missional-incarnational church will make Christian teaching attractive by living it under the very noses of those who have not yet embraced it” (54).

//I should also note that the authors discuss some ideas that came from St. Thomas’ Church, Crookes, in Sheffield, UK.  I found this interesting because a lot of the new ideas that Peace is getting came from some of their experiences.  Just interesting…