Archives for October 2009

IT IS SO STINKIN’ HARD…

October 14, 2009 by Brian Berry 2 Comments

… for me to stay motivated to finish my Masters of Divinity (MDIV)

WHY? honestly? I have struggled with this for years due to philosophy and ideal differences, but today while cramming for Greek, I pondered my own soul too and I think there are 3 main reasons. I’m not saying they are good or whatever, just that they are what they are:

COMPARISON GAME: I’m really tired of hearing about friends and co-workers who got it done in less time. There are days when I just want to quit because my life is blitzed and one class at a time is all I can afford in both finances, time, and energy. Honestly, I don’t think I would ever do this again this way. If you are headed for ministry, I would get the seminary thing done ASAP… being a dad, a coach, a student, a pastor, a leader, a husband and yatta yatta is just plain too much and too hard. This thing just might kill me… especially when Greek is requiring something like 10-15 hours a week. I would never try and hold all these hats high at the same time if I had another choice.
ENDURANCE: This pace means a 2 year full time degree is taking me something like 15 years to finish. Yes…. 15 years. So, I’m whittling away, and it’s hard to keep the light at the end of the tunnel in view, especially when I say no to hanging out with my wife or kids on my day off so I can study.
PURPOSE: Today while cramming all day for my Greek class, I got a text from a friend who lost his job. He has a baby on the way, recently became a first time home buyer, and now is looking at no job and no severance. I wonder what difference my degree will make as I strive to help people relate in the real world. After hours of writing papers, memorizing stuff I easily had access to in an instant on my computer or shelf, and reading stuff that none of my neighbors even care about, it just wears on me. Today I spent 5 hours memorizing greek words… and it still wasn’t enough and I had to guess on 5 words on my test. Really…. I know that knowing Greek can help me study and teach, but sometimes this degree thing seems so far removed from the real world of parenting, soccer practice, hurting friends, and student’s real life struggles.

SO WHY DO I STAY? I did some soul searching there too….

FINISH: I’m too far to not finish. Quitting now would be pointless. I can’t quit. I’ll regret it for the rest of my life if I do.
BELIEF: I believe that the subjects and learnings are important- even if I often disagree with the philosophy they employ in teaching it. I’m determined to be a better pastor by being a smarter student of theology, my Bible, history, and even a better me as a result.
OPPORTUNITY: I have no idea what God has for my future. But the last time God moved me, it became clear to me that without a masters degree, my options were limited. Whatever God has in store for my days ahead… if it’s in pastoral ministry, a seminary degree will only open doors, not close them. I can’t say that confidently of the reverse.

So, here I go… a grip more classes and hundreds of hours of language studies left to go. Wish me luck.

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MY FIRST EVER PODCASTIN’

October 7, 2009 by Brian Berry 1 Comment

I did a couple of video podcasts for YS while at the NYWC a few weeks ago.

One is more “devotional” in nature. One is more “training” in nature.

The first one came out today I think, it’s the “training one” and is like 5 minutes of yappin’ about calendaring to defeat they tyranny of the urgent in student ministries.

If you have 5 minutes and want to give it a listen…

You can hit it up here on itunes.

Or you can download it directly here.

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SMALL BRAIN ON BIG WORDS

October 3, 2009 by Brian Berry Leave a Comment

Yeah… I’m not much of a big word guy.

Every once in a while my wife will say something to me and I’ll have to go look it up to see what the proper response should be. I pause to look up words sometimes when reading an e-mail, cuz I have no idea what someone just said. Some people like to shorten several small words by dumping in one big word that means essentially the same thing. Which makes them sound really smart. You’d think with a Bachelors degree from UC Davis and a grip of seminary classes in pursuit of my M.DIV- I’d have a better handle on the big words, but nope. I’m dumb.

So, last night in church, Ed used the word “despondent”. Yeah. Because of context I knew it was bad, but essentially I had no idea what it really meant. He kept saying it, even threw out “despondency” and then he even had it in the printed outlines as a subtitle for a section of Elijah’s life.

This left me feeling dumb again…. so I searched my trusty iphone dictionary app while sitting in church and here’s what I discovered. That cool word means, “feeling downcast and disheartened and hopeless.” “Oh”, I thought, “Like how I feel when everyone acts like they understand the big words and I’m scratching my head like an idiot.”

Also last week, in my Greek class, our prof kept using the word “declension”. Which he then told us is a “pattern”- to which one of my brave peers asked, “why not just call it a pattern”. I laughed out loud. Classic. Those were my thoughts precisely!

Now what is to follow, will surely be shocking to you because the next series we are starting in Encounter in 2 weeks is called “BIG WORD THEOLOGY” and yes, it’s about BIG words. BIG BIG BIG WORDS…. mostly cuz the have crazy BIG implications for us, but they are also big and letter filled.

So, wish me luck. I’m gonna have to double my study time this next month or something. We’re gonna look at 4 BIG THEOLOGY WORDS (or groups of words in some cases) and talk about what their implications are for our lives.

WEEK 1: The Omni-God: Omnipresent, Omniscient, Omnipotent.
WEEK 2: Anthropomorphism: expanding our view of God. (HA! That’s a mouthful.)
WEEK 3: Sanctification: being and becoming holy.
WEEK 4: Hypostatic Union and the Trinity: thinking and rethinking the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit thing.

There you go. If you just read that and didn’t have to look any of it up… you should teach seminary or something cuz mine really really loves Big words.

Anyway, there’s really ZERO possibility of doing any real justice to any of them in a 35 minute talk, but hopefully I’ll get some students walking out the door with the assumptions turned on their ear and with an increased desire to study more on what it means for their daily lives and their connection with God.

I think I’ll just preach to myself this whole series and hope someone else is like me 🙂

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HELPING STUDENTS TO OWN IT.

October 1, 2009 by Brian Berry Leave a Comment

I just got back from teaching a couple of seminars at the National Youth Workers Convention this last week in Los Angeles. It is always so much fun to talk about this kind of stuff with my youth ministry peers. I’m really not sure there’s much I love more about my job than helping fellow leaders in the trenches think through how we can do a better job of leading students.

One of the seminars I taught was called, “Creating a Teenage Owned Ministry: Developing a High Level of Ownership Among Your Teenagers“. It was all about trying to rethink what it means to help students own their faith. I didn’t do so from an “expert” position, but rather from the trenches of one who is trying to do this daily and flush out what it means in my own ministry context.

If you were wondering what it was about, I’ll reproduce the basic premise and ideas here. They are essentially my introductory thoughts on the 90 minute seminar.

I proposed that there are at least 4 basic problems in youth ministry today regarding ownership and 4 values that I think we have to champion if we’re going to see those problems become a thing of the past:

PROBLEM #1: Students follow Jesus for a season.

As much as we’d like to not admit it, most of the students that come into our programs will not spend a lifetime serving Jesus. Even the most involved, the most influential, or even the most invested in our youth ministry can end up leaving it all behind in the wake of early adulthood.

LEADERSHIP VALUE: We’re trying to raise up life long disciples of Jesus, not youth group champions. (Mark 8:34-36, Matt 28:19-20)

This is an issue of OWNERSHIP, not INVOLVEMENT. Our goal should not be to increase student’s involvement in church, but rather their ownership of the core values that our faith/church is built on in the first place.

PROBLEM #2: As student’s exposure to other world views expands, their “Christian” values diminish.

Far too many ministries think that we need to build a ministry with big bunker walls to keep the evil out. But my experience says that this works about as well as putting a wild animal in the safety of the zoo and then expecting it to be able to survive again in the wild. Bunker mindsets don’t produce owned values, they produce immature and naive children.

LEADERSHIP VALUE: The learning process is more important than the end product. (Matt 7:21-23)

In other words, the ends don’t justify the means, but rather the means determine the ends. If we want students to OWN their faith as theirs, we need to go through the messy process of helping them interact with true faith in real world experiences. Faking it does no one any good.

PROBLEM #3: Students don’t know how to interact with opposing view points.

Many ditch their faith because they simply assume they were intentionally taught only half the story. They leave the church, find out that not everyone believes what they believe, and start to think that this must be because they were brain washed.

LEADERSHIP VALUE: We are trying to teach students how to think, not what to think. (Isa 29:13, Acts 17:11)

I have ZERO interest in teaching students how to repeat the “right answers”. I am looking for ways to teach students HOW to think. This means we must expose them to opposing views in our ministries and give students a chance to wrestle with those views. The Bible doesn’t hide other opposing views from it’s readers, neither should we.

PROBLEM #4: Students are underestimated and under utilized… in our own youth ministry.

Youth pastors are notorious for complaining that their jobs are nothing more than glorified baby sitting. My push back is not that this is untrue, but rather that many of us have created ministries where this is precisely the case. Before we complain that the rest of the church treats them like children, maybe we need to ask ourselves if we do.

LEADERSHIP VALUE: Students are not only becoming ministers, they are ministers. (1 tim 4:12, Prov 1:1-6)

Henry Blackaby: “When you believe that nothing significant can happen through you, you’ve said more about your belief in God than you have about yourself.” Maybe this is true of our how we treat students. When we don’t give them significant responsibilities in our own ministries, maybe we are saying more about our own doubts than theirs.
Doug Fields: “They are not the future of the church, they are the church” I’ve heard Doug say this a thousand times. I have no idea who said it first, but I’ll say it again. I need to remind myself of this all the time if I’m going to see ownership, and not just involvement increase in my ministry.

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