Archives for October 2012

Last week I got the chance to be part of “Point Break“, which is a ministry of Campus Life and Youth for Christ.  We hosted it at our church for 150 or so students from a middle school campus we partner with.  The goal of the day, as near as I can figure, is for the students to meet together and break down barriers between one another that often lead to prejudices, bullying, and division.  To this end, the day is surprisingly fun and engaging and often results in a very emotional response before it’s over.  In that regard, it’s almost identical to another program- challenge day– that I participated in at a local high school last year.

In our staff meeting today we talked about the constant need as pastors to make good decisions. However, the need to make not just good decisions, but great decisions, quickly leads one to realized that the power to decide stuff is highly overrated.  The real money is on discernment, which leads you to the wise choice every time.

So, as I thought about it, I think we need a new word.

enter “DISCERNISION”.   It’s the best of both words.

Discernment, like theology, can become book smart irrelevant if not applied to life.  Discernment is the ability to know the wise choice to make.  It doesn’t necessarily give you the gumption to do it.

Decision, like merry-go-round-ology, can keep us moving in circles instead of towards a real goal- making decision after decision that leads no where and everywhere at the same time.

Discernision, is best.  It is a wise choice that discernment has lead you to act on.

Here you go all you English majors.  I used it in 3 sentences.  You’ll see it’s a noun and a verb cuz it’s got a bias for action in it’s etymology 🙂

• “Dear God, please give me discernision today!”
• “It’s time for some serious discernisions cuz I was accepted to all 5 colleges I applied to.”
• “A great coach doesn’t just make decisions about players on a field.  They descernision them into the best place for them and the team.”

There you go.  Have fun.  May the Lord give you a spirit of discernision as you try and use discernision in a sentence today.  Move over “fo rizzle”, a new fake word is in the house.

Discernision.

100 points for you if use it today.  

A friend sent me this link last June.  It sat in my inbox for 4 months.  Probably because I generally dislike graduations.

Long lines. Endless lists of names. Clapping and attempts to out hoot the next guy’s family for who is the coolest graduate. The hot sun in little or no shade.  Mostly an uncomfortable and forgettable experience filled with long speeches and cliches.  If I go as a pastor to them, it’s super easy to be a name in the crowd and not even be noticed.  Parking is ridiculous.  Many times you need a ticket that is all but impossible to get. Families that I know are hard to find. We have students from at least 9 high schools. That’s a lot of ceremonies.   Perhaps if I was in the one stop town where there’s one ceremony, it’d be different.  But I’ve never been a pastor in one of those situations.

I never miss a graduation party I’m invited to though.  Just the ceremony.  At least at the graduation parties I can say hi, take a picture, share a gift, speak a word of encouragement and meet the family, hang out for a few, etc.  At the graduation ceremony however I smile, move through the crowd to try and find students I know, take pictures, and celebrate with them as best I can.  But I’m pretty sure they’ll forget i was there in like 10 minutes and I’ll commit endless hours to being there.

Lest you think I’m just a bitter youth pastor, I even missed the one from my own 4 years at U.C. Davis because I graduated a quarter early and couldn’t see why I should drive back to do the above paragraphs.  My mom is still mad at me for that.  I would skip the one from seminary this June however they have required it as the final pre-requisite for graduation and my wife is making it mandatory too. Booo!  I say let’s ditch it and go on a cruise.

So anyway, I watched this link today.  The truth is, if all graduation speeches were like this one I’d probably never miss one.  It’s funny, wise, whimsical, not too long, and insightful. This one is worth watching once a month at least… or whenever you feel like sitting around wasting your life, patting yourself on the back for being the best in the world, or wallowing in self-depricating acts of depression due to losing the American game I like to call “compareanoia” which I find myself sucked into all too often.

So, if you have 12 minutes and 46 seconds, go back in time to high school and give this speech a listen.    1,736, 321 people already have when I posted it.  Maybe you’re one of them.  If not,  then put on a cap and gown if you want and turn up the volume.

Seriously, sit down and enjoy the speech you likely didn’t get, or won’t get, at your graduation.  It’s so worth a few minutes.

If you’ve been around youth ministry long enough, then you’ve seen a youth room or camp that has risers of some sort in them.  I love risers.  They are versatile, functional, and great for getting a lot of students in a compact space.

When I designed my last youth group room in Nor Cal, I built permanent ones in the back.  They worked perfect! So when it came time to design a new room on campus for our 7th and 8th grade ministry here at Journey and Christina- our junior high pastor- asked for risers, I was all in!  So along with a team of some volunteers, we recently built some.

On a personal level, I sometimes love the diversion of a construction project from the work of ministry because the honest truth is… it’s easier.  The materials are static, the progress is obvious, and when you’re done, you’re done.  Youth ministry is about none of those things.  So a little construction project escape is soul rebuilding for me from time to time.

Here’s a pic of 2 of the finished product side by side.  We made 4 moveable risers in all, allowing for a lot of room configuration possibilities.  This week it was set up with half the crowd facing the other half.

front view of 2 risers

side view, notice the front of the risers at like a 15 degree angle

THE BIG PICTURE:
Each of the four moveable risers are 6 feet wide by 7’3″long by 36″ tall.  They are built strong enough so that students can stand, jump, sit or lay on them without the stairs flexing.  They are essentially impossible to flip or break, no matter how many students you put on them.  They are carpeted and padded for durability and comfort.

I didn’t design them with plans… just did it off of a sketch.  So a few people since have asked how we made them.  I didn’t want to take the time to draw out plans and such, but I did takes some pictures and try to explain the process here in case you want to sorta copy them.

START WITH SOME SKILLED LABOR & MATERIALS:  
This is not the hardest project, but it will take some experience and confidence with building things to get r done right.  You might try grabbing your basic carpenter or hiring some help if you’re unsure. 

Now give this instruction set to a carpenter at your church and print out the pictures.  

BEGINNING THE LAYOUT.
Lay down three of the 2×6 boards for skids cut to 84.5″ Long.  (This is the width of 2 stair treads at 39.5″ plus the width of the 2×6 wall)  Lay them flat on the ground and parallel to one another with the outside skids 6 feet apart and the center skid 36″OC.

BUILD THE WALLS: finished height (including the 3/4″ plywood tread on top and 2×6 skid below) will be 12″ for the lower step, 24″ for the middle step, and 36″ for the 2×6 back wall.  All walls will be 72″ long.

The breakdown looks like this:

Build 3 short 2×4 “walls” w/16″on center studs. Each wall will be 72″ by 9.75″ high.

Build 3 medium 2×4 “walls” w/16″on center studs.  Each wall will be 72″ by 21.75″ high.  Also, you may want to use a 2×4 brace to permanently square up at least one of these walls to keep the riser plumb in the center.  You can see the angled brace in the pic below.

Build one tall 2×6 “wall” w/16″on center 2×6 studs. It will be 72″ by 34 1/2″ high.   This wall has no plywood on top and serves as the back and last step of sorts as well.  It’s finished height including the skid is 36″.

bottom of risers showing 2×6 back wall, 3 middle step walls and 3 front step walls- all mounted on three 2×6 skids.

Riser on edge. Note 3 skids and various “internal walls”

MOUNT THE WALLS TO THE SKIDS:
Per the above pictures, and after you ensure the skids are square, mount the walls to them with screws and liquid nail (especially if you’re going to be moving them around).  The 2×6 tall wall goes on one end and a 2×4 short wall on the other.  Each stair tread is 39.5″ deep by 72″ wide and has 3 walls under it.  One wall on each tread edge and one down the middle for support.

SHEET THE BACK WALL:
Now sheet the outside of the tall 2×6 back wall with 1/2″ plywood.  This is the finished riser back.

MOUNT THE RISER TREADS:
The stair tread or riser treads are 3/4″ plywood.  I cut the plywood to 39 1/2″ x 72″ wide.  This will leave you with with a 36″ x 72″ finished riser tread.  3 1/2″ will be lost due the the 2×4 wedges we add to create the back rest angle to each step face.  Wedges are described next…

MOUNT THE ANGLED WEDGES TO CREATE THE STAIR TRED BACKS.
Cut 2×4 wedges the height of your various steps.  If you did this right, they should all be identical, about 12″ high.  I simply cut them and then tapered them from 3 1/2″ at the bottom nearest the tread to nothing at the top.  The use a finish nailer and glue and mount them to the top of the 3/4″ decking and the front of every stud in the walls, including the front end of the bottom step so people can sit on the floor and lean against it comfortably too.   The angle is not as critical as it is that they are identical.  The angle in this design will be about 15 degrees and is a nice angle to lean against however.

bottom of middle stair tred wall.  You can see one of the wedges in the center of the picture here and the plywood sheeting too.

FINISH THE SHEETING:
Sheet the remaining surfaces with 1/2″ plywood.  First sheet the front of the 3 riser treads and then the outer 2 sides, paying attention to keeping the riser plumb and square as you go.

PAINT: Stain or paint your exterior plywood as you desire.  This is really hard to do if you wait till after your carpet and will likely get paint on the carpet in the process if you do it last.

CARPET THE RISERS:  
Using a pneumatic stapler, staple down a thick pad, running it up the front of each riser and across the top of each tread, leaving it back about an inch from all edges so the carpet can be flush mounted.

Now cut the carpet to width, leaving an extra several inches on each side to fold under.  It’s also ok to leave it long and do this as you go.  But regardless, beginning at the top of the finished 36″- 2×6 wall, turn the carpet under itself and staple it like crazy every 2 inches along the edge.  Carefully begin to work your way down the front edges, pulling the carpet tight and stapling and cutting the carpet as needed as you go.   NOTE:  Never put a staple in the open field of the carpet, only along the edges or the seem between the 2 stairs.  Because of the pad, you’ll see every staple you leave in the field and it will look bad. Trust me.

carpet turned on itself and stapled

view of the carpeted edges.

MOUNT SOME WAY TO MOVE THEM:

Ok.  Well I hope that was helpful.  If you have questions, feel free to drop an e-mail or question in the comments and I’ll be happy to help out if I can.

Good Luck and happy riser building to you!

This past sunday we were talking about friendship in our high school ministry; and specifically, friendship with God.  We talked about facebook and how culture has redefined things like who we call a “friend” and the way we use it based on phrases like “you have a friend request” and such.

Jesus actually chooses friendship as the means by which he wants to interact with us in John 15 when he calls his disciples to a radical kind of love that would die for someone.

(John 15:12–15)
“My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command. I no longer call you servants, because servants do not know their master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you.”

As a big idea, I was challenging students that we all need to own this idea:  

In the process, we discussed that our understanding of what it means to be a friend of God or how to be in close friendship with God is jacked up because we read stuff backwards into that concept from our culture.  So if you have a weird understanding of earthly friendship, you end up with a weird understanding of a heavenly one.  The same way that many have a really hard time with the phrase “Father God” because their only upfront image of an earthly father is one of absentee or abuse.

As I pondered this message and thought of what we think of when we think of friendship with Jesus, I was reminded of the pop-culture phenomenon of “Jesus is my homeboy”.

If you’re unfamiliar with it…

• Here’s the official t-shirt and whatnot website that went viral after several pop culture icons wore the shirt in the early 2000’s I think. 
• Here’s the urban dictionary post on homeboy that makes the phrase among others to define the term homeboy- which is an interesting cultural exegesis note anyway.  
• Here’s an blog post I ran across that shows lots of the ways that Jesus has been used in pop-culture lately, including “Jesus is my homeboy”. 

LAST SUPPER

EVIDENCE OF A MIRACULOUS EVENT

ANOINTING