Saturday Night

Saturday night is normally a pretty late night for me. Usually we go out and do something and don't get home until later on in the evening. Then I have to review and adjust my message for tomorrow morning. I love speaking weekly again in a large group setting, but Sunday morning is a tough time to do it. Although, I guess it just means I stay up a little bit later on Saturday night. Hence, it's 1:00 am on Sunday morning, and I just got done finishing up doing my final prep for tomorrow. Time for bed. JM

Information Vs. Inspiration

A lot of people in youth ministry are talking about what needs to be done to stop graduation high schoolers from leaving the church. Usually the focus is on information: We're not teaching enough apologetics so when students leave for college they feel that Christianity won't stand up to scrutiny.
I don't think that's the problem. The problem isn't information. The problem is inspiration. Kids don't care. They don't see Christ as being relevant in their lives. They're not inspired or awed by Jesus. That's the problem.
We shouldn't be wondering how we can give kids more information, we should be wondering how we can inspire more students to fall in love with Jesus. JM

Crucible Recap

Man, Crucible was awesome again this year. Crucible is our 8th grade guys rite of passage event. We spend 7 weeks covering what we say are the 7 attributes of manhood: faith, responsibility, integrity, faithfulness, courage, self-control, and care and protection for the weak and unlovely. They are basically just modified versions of Rick Bundschuh's characteristics that he gives in Passed Thru Fire.
So we have a week of devotions for each characteristic, then a lesson on it, then they memorize a verse from the story and they memorize the definition of the characteristic. We also make them read a book. This year it was In A Pit. We test them every week and track their progress.
They don't have to have any percentage done to go on the weekend retreat, but in order to participate in the Saturday night initiation ceremony, they must have it all completed.
The weekend was awesome. I was worried that I wouldn't connect as well with these guys as I have in year's past, but this event really provides plenty of opportunities to do that. It's got a camping, military, prison feel to it. Basically it's all high stress, high expectation situations. We have an activity for each characteristic where the students are challenged to demonstrate their understanding of the characteristic. We don't tip our hand on the front end, but rahter put them through the activity, observe their behavior, and then debrief it afterwards.
The coolest part is on Saturday night we have an initiation ceremony. The students dad's come out, and we all eat dinner together. Then we have a prayer service where the student explains the characteristics to his dad, prays for himself, and then his dad prays for him. At the end, our senior pastor prays with each of the students.
Then we go outside and we give the dads the opportunity to symbolically recognize their son as a man. It's an awesome, emotional, spiritual time.
I love it, and the students respons so well to it. JM

Connections

I got to hang out with another youth minister from our area tonight. Carson Thaxton is the youth minister over at First United Methodist Church Of Fayetteville. Our daughters are about the same age, so we thought it might be cool to get our families together. We had them over for dinner tonight. It was cool to be able to hang out and meet his family, talk about ministry, but mainly just have fun, eat and get to know him better. Carson's a really cool guy who I'll hopefully get to know better.
I love being able to hang out with other guys doing ministry. It helps me reduce my stress level. It's also cool just to be able to hang out and talk ministry and other stuff with no agenda. JM

Dancing Game

Saturday night during the last Disciple Now worship session, they did a game. They called up like 5 students. Then the youth minister that was running the game said that since I had been abusing the students with my game that morning that he was going to have me do the game with them. Fair enough.
Turns out it's a dancing game. We were all blindfolded and told to do our best dance moves and that they would kick somebody out until they declared a winner. Blindfolds were placed on all of the contestants. Then they were removed, except for mine. Turns out it was a joke on me. So I have to dance (which I am no good at) and impress people more than the other people who may or may not have been dancing. Around midway through the game I figured out that I was the only one blindfolded. I could barely see out the bottom of my blindfold and noticed the shoes of another contestant. I reached out my fist to "pound fists" or whatever that is called, and she reached out to hit mine. I'm dumb, but I'm not that dumb.
The joke was on me. I wasn't the greatest person to use for this game, though for a couple of reasons. First, I'm not overly goofy. I struggle in situations where I'm supposed to be the goofy youth minister. Second, I'm not easily embarrassed. So at the end of the game I pretended to be, but I don't think I pulled it off too well. JM

Stupid Lists

It seems as though there has been a proliferation of lists running around the internet ranking churches and ministers and such. What a stupid concept. How do you determine who the "most innovative" is or the "most influential". While I can see some merit in these (study what these successful churches are doing and see what you can learn from them and apply to your context), the vast majority are simply incredibly inane. The ultimate prize winner for pointless lists seems to be this one ranking the top 20 youth ministers, and no, I'm not just ridiculing it because I'm not on there. The list basically just pulls the youth ministers from large, fast-growing churches and dubs them as the top youth ministers. While I do not doubt that the ministers who serve in those contexts are exceptionally gifted and being greatly used by God, they are simply working within the overall context of a large, successful church. They have been adept at taking the purposes/ministry process of the church and programming it out for students so that they can participate in the process. Certainly some gifted individuals, but to rank them out and say they are the "top youth ministers" is a ridiculous notion, one that probably even those named on the list would be embarrassed to be associated with. (ht to Mark Riddle) JM