Archives for March 2011

We ended our “FLIRT” series on sexuality and dating and such last weekend. We called it “Talk to me about Flirting” cuz it was a “4 couple panel” made up of one engaged couple and three married couples: the youngest of which had returned from their honeymoon the day before and the oldest of which was 8 months into this gig.  They responded to some predetermined questions to get us started and then to some written by students on cards.

The result was some very fresh eyes for students on the end game of the dating world and some powerful stories on hope and regret and healing too.  The most interesting part I asked them about was why they all chose not to live together before getting married, even the one couple where one of them had been previously married and even the couples where “virginity” was no longer still being “saved”.  All chose to not go the common route and all experience significant pressure towards that from friends especially.  This choice is super rare today and they had such powerful words to share and in ways I never could have said them myself.  Honestly, it was one of my favorite mornings in a long time.

It also gave me another chance to remind our students of my four fold process and I wanted to encourage them to find truth in.  It’s my “how to think vs. what to think” filter of sorts for finding or discerning the will of God in their life.  I’ve been processing it for a while and have landed on 4 B’s as my memory tool.  This week was all about the third B.

I laugh every time I share them because I have a friend who sends me e-mails to “BBBB”, which he says stands for Big Bad Brian Berry.  So I hear his voice in my head every time I share them, but here they are, with some cautions I tell students as well:

BIBLE: what does the Bible say about this issue or choice? 

• caution: be careful with this question.  Cuz if you’re looking for what the Bible says about texting, oral sex, abortion, sex before marriage, the internet, or any number of other topics, if you simply “search for those words” in some online Bible, you’ll find them not in there. Therefore, you could say the Bible has nothing to say about those issues.  But you’d be wrong.  Asking what does the Bible say about an issue is deeper than this. 

BRAIN:  does this make logical sense?  Do I have to do mental gymnastics to endorse this? 

• caution: sometimes God calls us to do that which makes very little reasonable sense. 

BELIEVERS: what do some people you respect, especially those in the faith who are older and wiser and farther down the life experience road than you….. what do those people say about this issue or choice? 

• caution: be leery of getting your opinion validated by your peers.  

BEEN THERE: what does experience tell you?  

• caution: there are only two ways to learn stuff in life: the hard way and from those who learned it the hard way.  the wise go to school on other’s people’s mistakes as much as their own.  Be a learner of experiences, both good and bad. Both yours and observed in others. 

Last Saturday we hosted a training day for parents at JCC.  It was the best one we’ve done yet by pretty much all accounts.  In case you missed it (or showed up at like 10am) or maybe you’d like to do one in your own church, here’s the grand summary of it all in one post.

We tried to help parents understand the impact we can have on their child as a church in terms of time.   We asked them imagine if we get them an hour on Sunday for 9 months out of the year, for 29 years.  We broke this down into tons of different illustrations.  The most powerful of which was a rope.  If you take the statistics on this slide and break it down into a rope representing time.  The rope of their life you bring on stage will be 60 feet long and the amount of time you can color in to represent time spent in our church building will be 5.5 inches long!!!  

As a youth pastor, my image of doing ministry is a little more crass.  I often feel like the hour on Sunday is spent dumping spiritual chlorine in a pool at nascar pit crew fuel speeds. The problem is, the pool of a student’s life is lined with relationships and a culture that are peeing in it, and until the student starts kicking some pissers off the side of the pool, this is a largely pointless endeavor.  An hour on Sunday is only as powerful as it is impacting the massively larger quantity of hours that are spent outside this space.   

Hey blog readers!

Today is WORLD WATER DAY.  Let’s truly make the overflow start flowing!

SO, I NEED YOUR HELP.   Myself and 100+ other bloggers from around the world are joining hands to raise $10,000 to make the world a cleaner and brighter place.  How?  By each of us raising $100.  To do this, I’m giving $20 to the adventure project today to do my part. Then I’m asking at least 9 of you to join me.

There are thousands of places to invest in world water day today.  Here’s why I’m asking you to join this organization.

#1. I am like 2 degrees removed from their cofounder and I have lots of friends that know her personally.  I can vouch that this organization is legit in what they promise.  You can read about their vision here.  You can check out cofounder Jody Landers’ personal blog here if you want.

#2. I love what their doing and how they’re trying to truly fix the situation.  They aren’t digging new wells, they’re TRAINING AND EMPLOYING LOCAL indigenous men and women in India to FIX DEAD wells!  Read the details below:

1/3 of all wells built in the last 20 years are BROKEN due to faulty hand pumps.

Over 4,000 children die every day from lack of clean drinking water and mine just runs happily down my sink, very very clean I might add. 

When you help adventure project, they help the locals repair broken wells. The well mechanics business in North India trains and equips men AND WOMEN to repair their region’s water wells. Instead of drilling more wells, we’re using our charitable gifts for something revolutionary – to train and employ handpump mechanics. The mechanics earn an income, bringing themselves out of poverty, and they save lives – turning water back on for thousands of people each year.  This is HUGE ground breaking opportunity for us to partner with them.

LETS DO THIS THING!  This blog gets about 100 readers a day.  Surely 9 of us can do this. Just say so in the comments and then give them your $20. 

Write in the comments, “I’m in” and then GO HERE NOW AND click the DONATE button anywhere on the page and GIVE YOUR $20.

If you work with students, I can’t recommend highly enough the value of gathering parents together for training.  They are the most influential force in a students life.  Virtually every study ever done continues to prove this again and again.  Like this one will prove the point nicely.  As a result, training parents is one of the very best investments I can make into what is “normal” for the lives of students.

Our annual event was last Saturday in our JCC Parenting Summit that actually tries to connect with not just parents of teens, but of all ages in order to get a running start at what can be very trying teen years for many. You can read about session one here.  Our essential bottom line was… we as parents all need to be on the same page and to rally around our mission, “inviting a generation to understand, own, and live out a life changing faith in Jesus.”

Our second session was all about what stands between us and success in this goal as parents. The question we posed is, “What is the biggest hurdle we have in raising children into young adults who are passionate about following Jesus with their lives?”  I invited Mark Oestreicher to turn a rock over and reveal the problem of extended adolescence.  A big reason we are having trouble raising adults in this culture is cuz someone keeps moving the finish line. To this end, Marko passionately challenged parents that not only have the teen years begun to become a lifestyle instead of a lifestage, but that both the life stage and the lifestyle are creations of our American culture at large.  For the vast majority of our human history, there were two stages: child and adult.  Check out this chart that shows how this hiccup between childhood and adolescence has been changing over time as puberty ages drop and pressures to become an adult extend.

But, the good news is, “IT DOESN’T HAVE TO BE THIS WAY.”  But if that’s true and with adolescence extending indefinitely in our culture, how do we as adults make a difference?

We challenged parents that one of the key contributors to extended adolescence is the distancing and separation of adults from the lives of kids.  So an answer for us comes in this value:

CORE VALUE #2. I am my kids greatest influence.  

We cannot minimize this fact or dismiss it.  We must begin to leverage our influence against this rising tide. We need it to be normative that as a parent at Journey, we stack hands on a common mission and that we all meet weekly in one-on-one contexts with our kids.  If absentee adults are contributing to the extension of adolescence and parents are the single greatest indicator of a kids health in the future, then we need healthy parents meeting weekly with their kids.

Seriously!  Could you imagine how RADICALLY OUR YOUTH MINISTRY CONTEXT WOULD CHANGE if every student in my ministry was meeting one on one with their own parent once a week? WOW, what a difference that would make!!

Here’s a brief video we made of several of our staff’s kids and the influence meeting one-on-one with them makes.

I’m really praying this takes hold in our church and that we spark a revolution in Adult to Child connection points. 

Every once in a while you stumble into a God thing.  The Journey Parenting Summit this last Saturday was one of those.  We were praying for a game changer- a literal shift in what is “normal” for all parents at JCC and the essential ethos of our culture to change in 3 key ways.

With my new job change last January, job number one for me was to try and get infants through twenty-something adults all operating under the same vision.  The chief way to do that outside of my staff team was to expand our annual student ministry parent’s day into a Generation Ministries Parenting Summit.  Last Saturday was the culmination of months of planning and dreaming.

I was going to pump the 4 hours of material into one brief blog post, but I decided I’ll do 3 instead: one for each of 3 sessions we had during the day.  Each session was taught by a team and served to build upon the last.  Each one tried to get us to stack hands on one of 3 values we were trying to champion.

We spent the first session driving home what is our generation ministries banner cry which over the last 3 years since we wrote it, has become my own personal motto.  This is not only what I try and do as a pastor, but it is the essential core of all of my parenting.  If you asked me what I’m trying to do as a Dad, I’d tell you this vision.  I believe it to the core of my being.  If you cut me, I bleed this.

THE VISION:

I believe we are called as a ministry and as parents in this:  “inviting a generation to understand, own, and live out a life-changing faith in Jesus.”  Here’s how this breaks down.

• INVITING:  not challenging, not pushing, not demanding, not calling, not urging.  As parents, we are inviting our kids to go on a faith journey with us.
• GENERATION: this is not a kid thing.  this is not a teen thing.  this is not a part time thing.  this is a long haul, big time, massively epic calling as parents.  We’re passing a baton onto the next Generation and if we screw that up, we screw up our kids and our kid’s kids and beyond.  I have no other higher calling in life than to entrust my faith to my kids.  (ie: 2 Timothy 2:2 vs. Judges 2:10)
• UNDERSTAND: in a largely Biblically illiterate society, it is of critical importance that we stop simply teaching kids what to think and we start teaching them how to think.  To this end, we must become masters at the craft of asking and responding to questions.  Too much parenting is essentially about behavior modification, which is NOT understanding, it is compliance… and it is a short term win and a long term loss I simply cannot afford.
• OWN: nothing. I repeat. nothing changes between 17 as a senior in high school and 18 as an “official adult”.  If we expect to raise young adults that honor God for the long haul, we must give them the reigns of their own life and faith long before they “become adults”.  We must steadily shift from a control mindset to an empowerment one.  
• LIVE OUT A LIFE-CHANGING FAITH: talk is cheap. I want my kids to make wise choices with how they live and implement their faith into their daily lives.  I want to model that for them and live it out with them.
• IN JESUS: if I help students or even my own kids place faith in me, then this ain’t gonna work.  Our lead pastor put it like this, “We must be very careful that we don’t lead our kids to a Jesus we’re going to have to unlead them to later.” As parents, we are sometimes the Jesus we have to unlead them to later.  I’m not called to be Jesus.  I am called to be like Jesus and lead my kids to Him. There is a massive difference between the two.  

So, here’s CORE VALUE #1: parenting is communal.


If we are to accomplish this vision, we must acknowledge two things about this massive task.

1. THIS MUST BE A ME THING:  This mission must become MY mission.  I cannot expect the church to do this while I’m doing something else.  There’s NO WAY that an hour on Sunday is gonna cut it! We all must bleed this in our homes and daily lives. 
2. THIS MUST BE A CORPORATE US THING:  We must help each other do this.  My kids need other voices.  We cannot do this by merely providing childcare to kids on the weekend.  We cannot do this in our kids ministry when we only have enough volunteers to keep the kids “safe”.  Safe is not my goal.  Safe is the lowest bar I have available.  If we’re going to see our kids, our students, and our young adults embrace these values, then we need an all in, all hands on deck mindset. We need help!