Archives for February 2011

I guess I can’t really speak for all of America or all of youth culture or whatever on this one.

But I will simply say from my own experience over the past 6 years at Journey at least… we don’t just have an absentee dad issue, we have an absentee adult issue.. and it’s at Epidemic levels.

Here’s some cold hard realities of my world:

• it’s simply not possible to have the lasting faith impact we desire in a student’s life in a 1 on 50 ratio, like what we often have in our Sunday program.  This is ridiculous. 
• the prevalence of our teen subculture has resulted in the reality that students no longer have consistent access to caring adults
• just when we most need adults to be stepping into the lives of students, the vast majority are stepping away out of fear, annoyance, or ambivalence to them.
• students don’t need peers as much as they need mentors

This week I’ll do 5 posts on 5 recent convictions I’m reinforcing in my own life about those who work with and minister to students.

First up: encouragement is too rare… and very powerful! 


(side note: I’ll be really honest in this post.  But please hear this, I’m not fishing for an encouraging word.)

Here goes:

For the past few years I’ve had the privilege of teaching a seminar at a couple of national youth ministry conferences.  Each year, I’m asked to pitch some thoughts on seminars that might be of interest to the audience of my peers.  This last fall I pitched one to YS that I’m teaching again in a few weeks at the Simply Youth Ministry Conference called “You Suck: Enduring, Learning from, and Responding to criticism and conflict“.  I cannot begin to explain to you how refreshing this seminar was for those who attended it and how sad it was that we all have this wreckage of harsh criticism in common.

Truth is, I have a super long list of illustrations for this one. In fact, over a decade ago, after a particularly hard season in ministry, I actually went into my senior pastor’s office and resigned.  I’m in ministry today in part because he refused to accept my resignation, but I was definitely down for the count.

Student ministry can be brutally hard in certain seasons.  Ask any parent of a teen, and they’ll tell you it feels like a roller coaster of emotions and confusion. Cuz it is.  And therefore, it’s hard on everyone, including the students.  No joke… without fail, I bet any single weekend in our youth ministry, I could find you at least one teen either crying in our room or on the brink of a breakdown.  Every single Sunday.  Some Sundays, it’s more than I can bear.  I just leave and cry myself.

When I first arrived at Journey about 6 years ago, we had an 8:30 am and a 10:30 am service at church and in our high school program too. Our 8:30 was shockingly much larger than the 10:30.  So much so, that of the 15 or so students who came to the 10:30 service, about 14 looked and acted like they were forced to be there.  I used to go into the bathroom between services and look myself in the mirror and at 32 years old, psych myself up to enter the room.  I quietly called it “preaching to detention center”.  And each Sunday, after service I’d walk across the parking lot and quit… and then re-hire myself on Monday morning.

More recently, a mom came to observe our high school group on the weekend because her daughter was playing in the band.  A few days later, she sent me a very sincere and encouraging e-mail.   I decided to send it to my lead pastor as an encouragement to him, that God was working on our church campus.  He then blogged about it.  The following day, seemingly independent of that, I received 4 more affirmations.  One from a dad who sat through our weekend “sex talk” and thanked me for how I dealt with the subject.  Another parent sent me a facebook message for the same reason after hearing her kids talk about it in the car ride home.  Then another mom thanked me for a convo I had with her daughter and finally, another mom called my cell to say, “ditto 100 times over” to what the mom said in Ed’s blog post.

Super nice. Way powerful words my soul drank deeply from.

But honestly, super rare.  I seriously think this much independent encouragement in such a short window of time was a ministry first for me.

My wife and I are “joking” that it’s the calm before the storm. I must have a pile of criticism coming around the corner.

Regardless, just know this:

If you have a teen in your life, they desperately need an encouraging word from you.  Seriously, NO ONE, is regularly telling 90% of the teens around me how much they are loved.  But that’s another post.  Please, encourage a high school teen today. They already get plenty of criticism from their peers anyway. They are largely encouragement starved as a generation.

Second, if you know someone who is making a positive influence into a teen: either a parent or a teacher or a coach or a pastor or a small group leader or… you name it.  Trust me.  It’s hard. And IT’S WAY TOO RARE that anyone says “Thanks.  You are making a world of impact. Keep doing what you’re doing. We need you.”  

I can’t even begin to tell you how desperately our souls need it.

Every weekend for the past 3 years we have challenged our high school students to bring in a $1 a week for an offering.  It’s stupid really, like American chump change. It’s a dollar. It’s really not a stretch for 99% of our San Diego crowd.  But believe it or not, it’s a rare weekend when our high school offering actually amounts to $1 times the number of warm bodies in the room.  But we keep pushing it every week and reminding them of the difference they can make with just a little effort to help us stack hands together in this.

We use the dollar a week to sponsor 3 kids through world vision (Zambia, El Salvador, and India), an orphanage in Uganda, and a child we visit once or twice a year in Tecate, Mexico.  With that money, we can provide monthly food, shelter, education, and medicine.

This year, I vowed that at Christmas, none of these kids would go without a Christmas present.  So, for the world vision kids, we sent $75 each.  We also were told that this gift would be used to bless not just the kids we sponsor, but the community they live in via the World Vision workers too.  But I had no idea how true that would really be.

We have started receiving letters and pictures back telling us what they did with the money and each time I read a letter and see the pictures, I cry.  I can’t believe how much difference a mere $75 can make.

See for yourself.

LUYANDO IN ZAMBIA, AFRICA got a new umbrella, new clothes, and new bed for herself, a goat for her family, and several other gifts that were given to her community.

RUBY IN INDIA.  Well, the letter said it’s cold there now and people need blankets.  So, we bought Ruby one.  Oh… and EVERY KID in her village got one too!!  I have 2 pictures like this.  Are you kidding me?  EVERY KID got a blanket!  I sent how much again?  Oh yeah….  75 stupid bucks.

It’s crazy what $75 can do.

It’s crazy what I normally do with $75.

It’s awesome that our world is so small that we can change the life of a kid 10,000 miles away.

It’s ridiculous that living standards are so varied on this planet and that I have the power to radically alter that. 

We’re starting a new series this weekend in Encounter.  It’s our annual sexuality and dating series and like many youth ministries, we tag team on February’s love temperature to chat about this with students.  This year it’s 5 weeks long and is called “Flirt”

I have taught a series like this way too many times to count now.  Every time we do so, we try and give fresh eyes and ears to the subject.  We consider our current culture, survey the latest music and media trends, ask our students about the pressures they are facing, and look to the Bible to speak to those issues in relevant and truthful ways.

As the series goes on, I’ll try and use this blog to update you on what we’re teaching and how it is received, but at the outset, let me say a few things you won’t be hearing.

WE DON’T DO PURITY PLEDGES.  I’ve done them before.  I participated in “True Love Waits” lots of times and had my students sign cards and sent them to some national gathering where they would pepper the great lawn in DC or lift to the roof of some super dome in a long string or something.  But while I suppose they helped say something in mass, on a personal level, they just don’t work.  No one in the heat of some opportunity to explore the sexual intimacies of the human body stops to ponder the commitment card they signed in youth group.  Plenty of rings and necklaces and pendants all with good intentions have been worn during plenty of “activities” they did not propose to support.  We will give students a chance to covenant their heart to God- to love God and love others with all their being.  We’ll encourage them to talk that through with friends, family, and mentors and to be open and honest about it.  If they do that, their sexuality will follow accordingly; with or without a signed card.

WE DON’T ANSWER THE “HOW FAR IS TOO FAR?” QUESTION.   Some prefer the proximity limit thing and say you should “leave room enough for the Holy Spirit” (which evidently means the Holy Spirit is a fat guy who wants to sit between you).  I’ve told students in the past that if a bathing suit covers it, you shouldn’t be touchin’ it.  I heard someone this week say, “If anything is in anything, then you crossed the line”.  Come on people, now that one is funny!

Regardless of what arbitrary rule or cute quote we throw at this subject, for the past several years, I have simply refused to answer the question out of principle.  It comes up all the time.  But despite the fact that rules don’t motivate, it’s also not a question that is rooted in devotion to God.  By default, the question is “how far can I go without making God angry?” A better question is “How can I honor God with my sexuality?”  One is about pushing curiosity with God in the rear view mirror.  The other is about celebrating sexuality in cooperation with the Creator.

WE DON’T CATEGORIZE SEXUAL SINS OR SINGLE OUT THE ISSUE.  We love to do this in our society.  My guess is you think rape is worse than funding a porn addiction. I’m an American so I do to. My problem is, I don’t think God does.  I also know that in our society we talk about our “sex life” as a separate entity of it’s own.  But I don’t think that’s Biblical either.  I don’t have a “sex life”, I just have a life of which my sexuality is part of it.  We will teach students that sexual desires are an intimate and integral part of their life.  We also will challenge students to discern which desires should be fed and which ones should be starved to death.  We all have both.

WE DON’T TEACH STUDENTS WHAT TO THINK.  We teach them HOW to think.  As a goal, I have no desire to get students to adhere to my standards or even to Biblical commands regarding sexuality.  I’m really not primarily interested in students knowing what the Bible says about sexual behavior.  Truth is the average person on the street, even in a largely Biblically illiterate America could get pretty close to telling us what the Bible says we should or should not do sexually.  What I don’t think they’d even come close to getting is WHY it says that.  I believe that knowing WHY is the critical task of adolescence.  If we don’t help students answer WHY, then the what becomes merely arbitrary rules that have no value… especially when it comes to sexuality.  Ironically, I think a failure to understand and own the WHY of sexuality is WHY we see so much disregard for a Biblical concept of sexuality in the first place.

I’m sorry overflow. You’re lovely and nice and I like you, but like 12 people in the world follow you. So I confess, I cheated on you.

I wrote two posts for a friends blog.  He was in Kenya and asked for some guest posts and I thought… hey, that might be fun.

The first was called, “LIFE IS HARD, TAKE A NAP AND FIGHT BACK.”

Life is hard. Ministry is hard. Balancing ministry and family and school and my own soul is hard. It just is… and it’s so hard, that life has a way of knocking good people out of the game. I’ve been in ministry long enough to have seen first hand the casualties of marriages, careers, families, and personal faith all destroyed by hard stuff and poor choices that followed.

In an effort to not become a casualty of the same statistics, I had to confess this past December that I was becoming a victim of my own bad habits and neglecting the care of me for the care of others. I know this to be theologically and practically wrong, but I still was doing it. First to go was exercise. Then reading. Then sleep. Then eating right. Then…. I started kicking the dog. It was bad.

So I have had to make the following adjustments before my kids call dog protective services on me:

you can read the rest here.

The second was called, “RETHINKING RETREAT PLANNING.”

Like many of you, when I signed up to be a youth pastor, I signed up to help students do life with God. I also believed then, and still do today, that there is no shortcut. It simply takes time. I also know that there is no greater way to spend big chunks of quantity time with students than the retreat setting.

So far, so good.

But what I didn’t know was that in order to do those retreats, I’d have to sign contracts that would cause me countless nights of stress leading up to them. I had no idea that 12 months out I’d be asking my church to leverage thousands of dollar on the belief that students will eventually express interest and sign up. And for me, times have been a changin’…

you can read the rest of it here.

Ok overflow. I’ll keep spilling my thoughts on you. But come on… like 10 billion people read that other blog. I had to cheat a little.