RUSH Concert...

Last night was one of the great nights in life. Just plain fun. One of the parent’s in our ministry whom I have gotten to know in a variety of contexts, took me to see my favorite band, RUSH. We were center stage, second row. What a treat! Now, I know many of you are into music and are exposed to so many newer bands that I have never heard of, and you might just call me old fashioned, but what a great classic band. I have liked RUSH since I was in 8th grade and it’s a hoot that these old guys are still tearing it up and making great music. (here are two really bad pictures from my phone)

Left Behind (The Rapture Song)

This is from our main service this past Sunday. We are in the middle of a series on Daniel, and this week was covering chapters 8-12 and Daniel's visions. Thought this was a funny way to intro the sermon.

YWTD...

August 25th brings our annual YouthWorker Training Day here in KC. This is hosted and organized by YouthFront with the help of some local youthworkers. The idea is to provide a day of encouragement and training for local youth ministry volunteers. It's a great day to take your entire volunteer team to.

I am doing two seminars - the first is "Parents are your Partners." The objective is to help volunteers see the family as their ally in reaching young teens. How can we move beyond the teen as our "end goal" and start seeing the family as the place where lasting ministry moments can happen more frequently?

The second seminar I am doing in tandem with my associate Emily Wilson and another young woman in ministry Jenny Marvine. This seminar will be "Ministering to Middle School Boys & Girls." Our objective in this time is to help volunteers understand ways to better connect with students as they better understand who they are and where they are and why they are. Did that make any sense?

If you have any thoughts that might be good to share in either of these seminars, let me know.

Harder than it seems...

Blogging is harder than it seems. It's difficult to find things to post. Well, at least, things I think someone else will care about. I get tired of going to blogs only to find them filled with Babel and blah. I guess that's just my opinion though. Most would probably say the same things about what I have and will post. Oh well.

Leading and Following

i don't know who was leading and who was following in this situation, but it's safe to say there was a plot by a couple of kids to do something they saw as "fun" and nothing to stop or cause them to think it was not okay. was the 17 year old in charge and did he lead these 10 year old boys to this? that would be my guess. whatever the case, it breaks my heart and reminds me of how messed up our world is and how much in need of redemption we all are.

What are we coming to?

Did you see this last week? What are we coming to? Fortunately, they were banned.

Bravo...

Bravo to Skippy for this effort.

What will they think of next?

Amazing what teens will think of to try and "get ahead" in the world today. The question for me is "what kind of pressure do I place on my own kids that might contribute to them feeling like they must do well all the time?" Read this article here.

Volunteer Training – Community vs. Equipping

One of the things I wrestle with is how to fill our volunteer training times. Now, I’m not saying I don’t have anything to say – I always have plenty to say. Rather, I’m talking about content management. What should our times together look like. I’m wrestling with the fact that so many of the volunteer teams I have seen in the past three months and so many of the volunteers I have talked with seem ill equipped to do what we ask them to do. Let’s be honest here. We desire a relational ministry because it’s through relationships that significant ministry can take place. So, we ask our volunteers to hang out with students in and out of our program times. We desire the students in our ministry to learn, to be discipled, to grow in their faith, and some of that happens in our large groups, but we really rely more on our small groups to accomplish this. Yet, how well trained are our volunteers to lead these kinds of small groups? Is it happening? I would say that in many cases, the answer is “no, it’s not.”

Listening to volunteers has taught me they feel ill equipped to do what we ask of them. The feel like they are failing with their small group. They are stretched thin and need some help and leadership. So, when they come to our training time, what do we give them? The tools they need to successfully lead a small group, or food for their own soul, or both? Question: What would it look like if we stopped giving our volunteers another tool for their ministry toolbox, stopped giving them answers to problem a, b, and c? Instead, what would happen if we met their needs, discipled them, helped them grow closer to Christ? Would they naturally be better at doing this with students if someone did it with them? Maybe!

What role does the rest of the church play in this process though? If the volunteers in your ministry are involved in an adult small group of their own (a healthy thing to be involved with people older than 12) and they found the encouragement they needed and the soul food they needed within that context? Would you need to fill this role? Maybe we need to spend our time trying helping them learn to translate what we have gleaned as adults to the lives of the young teens they work with. Would this accomplish the goal of helping volunteers be better at discipleing students?

Now, the bottom line is there are some volunteers who do this very well (either as a result or in spite of what we have done with them). There are others, however, who may not ever be good at it no matter what we do. There are still others who, with a little push, could become great. The question is what does that push look like? We want to move our volunteers to become better at reaching our overall goal of making disciples, but we don’t want to be trying to move them to an unattainable place.