YM Jen

God on Campus?

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 15:01:00 +0000

“State colleges corrupt people's morals and weaken Christians' faith.”

Though, in the interest of full disclosure, I'm not sure I've ever actually heard someone utter these exact words, I suspect that this is the underlying belief that drives many of the comments I hear from my fellow Christians about public colleges.

Let's face it, we've all heard the nightmare scenario: The devout Christian gets to college and finds herself in a freshmen philosophy class with an atheist professor who, day after day, attacks and belittles her faith until one day, she gives into reason and abandons her faith.

I don't doubt that on rare occasion, this scenario actually happens. But I have a hard time believing it's the norm. For this reason, whenever I hear Christians, many of whom went to Christian rather than “secular” universities, attack the ills of state schools, I get a little queasy.

Undoubtedly, my discomfort with this idea stems from my own experience. After all, I'm the product of a public university and rather than corrupt my morals and weaken my faith, my four years at the University of Illinois prompted some of the most intense spiritual growth I've ever experienced.

Why?

Because in college, by coming face to face with beliefs that differed from my own, I was forced to wrestle with my beliefs, compare them to what I was hearing from others, investigate Scripture, ask questions, and decide for myself what I believed and why. This was something that I could do, not because my high school youth pastor made me memorize a list of reasons why God existed or why Jesus' resurrection was real, but instead, because she taught me how to think for myself, ask questions, seek out answers, and respect the opinions of others, knowing that their opinions did not have to change mine.

Additionally, my college experience strengthened my faith because during it, each Sunday, I had to choose to get up and go to church and serve, knowing that plenty of my peers were still sound asleep. I had to choose to seek out a Christian community to participate in, not because anyone was forcing me to but because in high school, I had discovered the power of Christian community and so I desperately wanted to experience more of it in college.

As a result of wrestling with beliefs and intentionally choosing communities, I left college, not with a weakened faith, but with a strengthened one. As an added bonus, because my public university cost far less than a private, Christian one would have, I also left college with no debt, something that has, in my adult life, enabled me to be a better steward of the resources that God has blessed me with. What's more, I left college knowing that to maintain my faith in a so-called “secular” world, that while I need not fear engaging with it, I had best surround myself with a Christian community to help me grow and experience the deepest kind of friendship I know: That which is centered on Christ.

Despite this, I'm not actually advocating that every Christian student needs to attend a public university. What I am saying is that as youth workers, we need to recognize that while Christian students don't have to attend public schools for their faith to grow, they also need not avoid them like the plague in order to protect their faith.

After all, isn't God present and at work in both public and Christian universities? As Romans 11:36 says, “For from him and through him and for him are all things.” If that's the case, isn't God sovereign over all things, even both public and Christian universities?

And if God is sovereign over all things, then we need not fear public universities. Indeed, God is there, just waiting to be encountered.

Missions: Forming Your Team

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 02:19:00 +0000

A few years ago, I met Steve, a high school kid and professed atheist. He and I spent a week together on a mission trip, visiting old people and leading a Vacation Bible School for kids. Without meaning to, in the midst of serving, Steve encountered Christ, so much so that that week he came to believe in Christ.

Read the rest of this article here.

Worship is Not a Spectator Sport

Sat, 24 Dec 2011 22:18:00 +0000

This Christmas Season, the Christmas story characters that have most captivated me have been the shepherds – the riffraff to whom the angels first announced the birth of Jesus in Luke 2. As part of their announcement to the shepherds, the angels invited them to participate in worship, to go and find the baby who was “wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.” This invitation prompted these lowly shepherds to set out on an adventure, to “go to Bethlehem” and see the thing that the Lord told them about.

However, seeing Jesus was not the end of worship for these shepherds. Instead, seeing Jesus sparked even more worship, causing them to go forth, eagerly spreading “the word concerning what had been told them about this child.” For these shepherds, worshiping the King literally changed how they lived from that day forward, prompting a lifestyle of continual worship.

So it is with us – or at least it should be. In fact, I believe that if we let it, worship has the power to change our lives today. Worship teaches by doing. It's in worship, that we participate in the story of who we are as a people of God – singing, praying, reading Scripture, dancing, healing, sharing the peace, and participating in the Lord's supper. By participating in this story, we slowly but surely are transformed into the people God made us to be, something that enables us to go forth and be His image-bearers in the world around us.

Undoubtedly, the power of worship lies in its participatory nature, without which, worship becomes a mere performance, not unlike one I might see at the theater. While I might be moved by such a performance, seldom will I be changed by it. Not so with worship, which has the power to change me and in so doing, change the world around me.

I think that's why this Christmastime, I've been amazed at how many times I've been invited - not to come worship - but to come see a Christmas Eve service; To be a spectator, rather than a participant in the greatest story ever told. While such performances – which is what a Christmas Eve service that does not invite people to participate in it becomes – might, in fact, draw crowds and even move said crowds to tears, I fear that such a performance will never transform people in lasting ways.

So please don't be offended if I don't invite you to come see our Christmas Eve service tonight. Know that you're always welcome to join me at this service or any other throughout the year. But know that if you do, you're invited not just to come see, but to come participate. And then to go forth and live differently, both as a result of and an act of worship.

$3 an hour

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 22:19:00 +0000

A few weeks ago, my high school ministry hosted a Parent's Night Out at our church in order to raise money for our summer trip to my denomination's youth gathering. Over the course of 3.5 hours, 17 high school students and four adults watched nine kids between the ages of five and 11. We played games, made crafts, read stories, and decorated cookies. At the end of the night, my students totaled our proceeds, exhausted. We raised $190, which means that each teen and adult who attended that night earned approximately $3 an hour.

If you measure the success of the night based on how much we earned, this event was far from successful. In fact, it probably would have been a whole lot easier to just ask each trip participant to pay an additional $10.50 and forget this event all together. But sometimes, numbers don't tell the whole story.

In this case, $3 an hour or even $190 for the night don't tell the story of a high school freshmen and a five year old who spent the entire night together, having bonded over the fact that they share the same name. Nor do these numbers tell the stories that our pictures from the night capture: Of smiles on the faces of both the big and little kids alike; Of secrets shared and connections made between two groups of people who rarely get the opportunity to interact in any meaningful way. Nor do these numbers tell the story of grateful parents, thankful for a night off during a busy holiday season or of how our church's high school teens willingly served them.

Too often, we in the church allow numbers to tell our story – even if they're not telling the whole story, or even the right story. Yet, it's often the story behind the numbers that actually speaks to who we are as a community of faith; As a place of belonging where connections are fostered and valued between people of any age simply because God designed us to be in relationships with each other.

Sometimes the value of doing things – even fundraisers – can't be measured in numbers. Sometimes, $3 an hour just doesn't reflect how truly priceless a night's value really is.

Safety on Mission: Addressing Parents' Concerns

Tue, 01 Nov 2011 15:39:00 +0000

"What kind of irresponsible parent would send his or her child to Africa on a mission trip?"

This was the question that echoed in my head this past fall as I lead my ministry's informational meeting about our summer mission trip, a meeting during which I did, indeed, announce that our summer trip would be to Africa.

Read the rest of this article here.

Who determines what you teach?

Mon, 19 Sep 2011 15:14:00 +0000

A few weeks ago, in his blog, "Who Determines What Your Ministry Looks Like?", Kurt Johnston posted this quote by Steve Jobs, the recently retired CEO of Apple:

“It isn’t the job of the consumer to determine what they want.”

That quote was still rattling around my brain when I found myself in an interesting conversation with another youth worker a few days later. This youth worker expressed her frustration over the fact that when she allows her students to choose what topics her youth ministry explores, inevitably, they talk about only three things: Sex, Drugs, and Alcohol. As a result, she's concluded that she can't entrust her students with this responsibility.

No doubt, this youth worker would agree with Jobs: “It isn’t the job of the consumer (in this case, our students) to determine what they want.”

Instead, I think this youth worker would argue that it's our job, as youth workers, to determine what students want and need to know (and when the appropriate time to teach it is.)

That is, after all, why they pay us the big bucks in church work. Right?

I think not.

Jobs' mantra may work just fine for businesses, but I'm unconvinced it's transferable to churches. After all, shouldn't we, as churches, be cultivating something other than consumerism in our students? And if so, then as youth workers, don't we need to do something other than just teach youth to come to our ministries and consume whatever it is we're feeding them?

Wrestling with these questions over the past several years has led to a radical shift in how I do ministry. It wasn't that long ago when I, too, wouldn't allow my students to choose what we talked about because I believed that they didn't know enough to know what they didn't know, let alone what we should be talking about. Instead, I developed a comprehensive teaching calendar filled with key Bible stories and theological ideas that I believed were critical to my student's faith formation. The result? A teaching schedule that I cared deeply about, but that my kids cared nothing about.

Oh sure. They sometimes found what we were talking about interesting. On rare occasions, they even learned something that did, in fact, help them grow in their faith. But my students weren't invested in our teaching calendar and they certainly didn't own it because unfortunately, it rarely connected with the things that were truly impacting them.

This changed for me about three years ago, when conflict with some of the oldest students in what was then, a new youth ministry position for me, caused me to step back and reevaluate what I was doing. Before long, I realized that what I had mistaken for spiritual apathy in my kids was, in actuality, a disconnect between what I was teaching and what they were interested in. This caused me to actually ask my kids, "What do you want to talk about?"

And indeed, their first response was sex, drugs, alcohol, and world religions.

So I braced myself, and one by one, we started tackling those topics.

But I did so in a way that intentionally created additional questions. We looked at Scripture passages that were confusing and hard to understand. We explored seemingly contradictory teachings in the Bible. We read things by people with whom we disagreed.

The result? My students learned about the topics they cared about... But as they did, they started to realize how much they didn't know. This realization left them wanting to learn more - not just about sex, drugs, alcohol, and world religions, but about a whole bunch of other topics, too. Those topics showed up on our list the second time I asked my students, "What do you want to talk about?", something that resulted in a much different list of topics, and I would argue, a much more theologically important list than the first one we produced when I asked students this same question. Slowly but surely, we got to the topics that would have made my teaching calendar anyway. Only now, when we did, students owned those topics and were interested in them. They wanted and needed to talk about them. As a result, they listened and participated in those conversations in a way they wouldn't have before; In a way that's impacted their faith much more profoundly than had I explored these same topics before my students were ready to engage with them.

Since then, asking students "What do you want to talk about?" has evolved into an elaborate brainstorming session that I do each fall with my student leaders. The results always surprise me, as they include random topics like faith and Facebook, faith and Harry Potter, refugees, world issues, and sex. But surprisingly, my students also always include Bible stories on this list that they want to learn more about, as well as theological concepts that they don't understand - things like the Holy Spirit, hearing God, and discerning God's will.

What I've found is that the topic list that results from this yearly brainstorming session is thorough; Engaging - for both my students and I; And far more diverse than any teaching calendar I've ever created sitting in my office, alone.

So while Jobs may have had it right for Apple, he doesn't have it right for the church.

In the church, it is most certainly the job of the consumer (in the case of youth ministry, our students) to tell us what they want. It's our job, as youth workers, to listen and respond in order to meet their real needs. But it's also our job to do so in a way that creates a knowledge gap that helps ensure that students don't just get stuck wanting to learn about one thing.

Some may say the difference between what I just said and Jobs' “It isn’t the job of the consumer to determine what they want” is only semantics.

But let me assure you, it's not. It's a profound difference that influences not just what we teach, but how we teach.

Which Organization?

Wed, 07 Sep 2011 13:01:00 +0000

This time of year, my work mailbox gets clogged with one thing: advertisements from mission trip organizations, all promising a "life-changing experience" for my kids. With so many organizations out there, how can you sift through all the information and choose the right organization to facilitate your youth ministry's trip?

Read the rest of this article here.

Divided and United

Wed, 10 Aug 2011 16:37:00 +0000

Over the last week, several friends have sent me a link to this article from The Christian Post. Among other things, this article declares that youth ministry is a 50 year experiment that has failed and as such, suggests that youth ministries should be “disbanded, calling the common practice of separating congregations by age for worship and Bible study ‘unbiblical.’”

As a self-proclaimed “lifer” in youth ministry, I found it difficult to read this article without taking offense. In many ways, it seemed to be attacking both my livelihood and my calling. Despite this, I’ve found myself pondering this article in the two weeks since I first read it, though I have not watched “Divided,” the movie that it references.

Though I disagree with much of what this article says, it does bring up a valid point. Many congregations do – intentionally or unintentionally – segregate people by age. Such segregation robs us of valuable opportunities to learn from people who are different from us and who, therefore, view life and faith differently than us and can, as a result, challenge our faith in ways that few others can. In many cases, such age segregation also robs us of much needed wisdom. Instead, it leaves youth trapped inside what I’ve heard others refer to as the “youth ministry ghetto.” When this happens, inevitably, the body of Christ suffers.

Despite this, the truth is, adolescence is a unique time in a teen’s physical, emotional, cognitive, and spiritual development. As such, there’s a place for age specific ministry within the church. Teens need to be able to come together and share what they’re struggling with – a set of problems that inevitably is different from those that a 40 year old mother of two is struggling with. They need to do so in a place and context that then points them to the God who’s at work in and through those problems. Teens also need to be able to discuss and learn about their faith in an environment that deals with the stories of our faith in an age-appropriate manner, recognizing where teens are in their own ability to think and wrestle with issues – many of which deeply impact our understanding of faith.

For those reasons, I am (and hope that I will always be) an advocate of “youth ministry.” Yet, effective youth ministry requires not an either / or approach but a both / and approach. We need age specific ministry in the church, but we also need intergenerational ministry that allows teens to learn from the Saints of our congregations, to wrestle with their faith together, to try things and fail, and in the process, to discover and use their gifts to serve the Kingdom. We need this, not just because it’s valuable for the faith formation of teens, but because it’s valuable to our faith formation as well. After all, teens have an uncanny ability to touch, inspire, and challenge our faith journeys.

Among other things, that’s why I continue to be thankful for my church.

I was reminded of this a few weeks ago when our youth held our Shareholder’s Dinner to thank those from our congregation who bought stock in support of our summer mission trip to Rwanda. The night was a powerful one – in so many ways – as people joined us to hear stories of how God worked in and through our students during our time in Rwanda.

At the end of the night, the time came for me to thank our congregation for their support of our students and this trip. When it did, I could not contain the tears.

In that moment, I flashed back on the last year: To people’s generosity at our very first bake sale after announcing we’d be going to Rwanda, something that allowed us to raise $600; To people’s continued generosity throughout the year as we surpassed our goal of raising $22,000, an amount that allowed students to participate in this trip regardless of their family’s socioeconomic status; To the ways in which our congregation rallied behind our Rwanda team throughout the year; To the prayer buddies who prayed for and wrote letters to our team to encourage us while we were abroad; To the people who showed up early the day we left in order to lay hands on us and bless us; To the hundreds of people who read our team’s blog each day of our trip in order to journey with us; And to the warm welcome we received upon returning home.

The result is that this summer, our teens got to participate in a truly life-changing experience but so did our congregation, something that would not have been possible without both an age-specific youth ministry and a congregation who values not only it, but also our youth’s full participation in the life of our community.

Why Should Youth Do Short-Term Missions?

Sun, 31 Jul 2011 17:05:00 +0000

Three years ago, as I interviewed for a new youth ministry position, regardless of the size or type of church I was interviewing at, I always knew one question would be the same: “How important do you think short-term mission trips are for youth ministries, and what experience do you have leading them?”

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The Most Important Thing in Developing Student Leaders

Fri, 22 Jul 2011 22:43:00 +0000

On Tuesday, one of my students walked into our Student Leadership Team Meeting and promptly informed me that she had to leave at 4:30, a full half hour before our meeting was slated to end.

As I’ve spent a great deal of time with this team emphasizing the importance of their presence at our meetings and other youth ministry events, and even worked together to schedule these meetings at times my student leaders chose, I was immediately frustrated with this girl.

In fact, I was downright annoyed by this so-called leader.

Unfortunately, things went from bad to worse in a matter of seconds because the next thing out of this girl’s mouth was, “Might I suggest that since I have to leave early, we start with planning and then you guys can discuss ‘Relearning Jesus’ after I leave?”

“Relearning Jesus” is the book our team is reading and discussing together, to grow us as both leaders and followers of Christ and thus far, our discussions surrounding it have truly been phenomenal.

Because of that, I just about lost it when this girl suggested that I alter our entire schedule to suit her needs. In every way, that’s contrary to the model of leadership we’ve spent the last two months learning about (and this from a veteran student leader, who’s already spent a year with me!) Despite this, I bit my tongue and rather than respond hastily or harshly, simply asked, “Why do you think we should change things around?”

To which she responded, as though I were an idiot, “Well because planning is way more important than the book discussion.”

Inwardly, I wanted to scream but again, I refrained from doing so and instead asked, “Why’s that more important?”

Her answer?

“Because that’s when we actually do stuff.”

And that’s when my anger and frustration subsided, as I momentarily reflected on how counter-cultural what I’m trying to do in my leadership team meetings and teach my student leaders through those meetings, really is.

Our society tells students that they must go, go, go; That the more they do, the more worth they have.

This particular student’s schedule attests to that. On any given day, you can find her sprinting madly from one activity to the next, each designed to boost her grades, increase her ACT score, or give her the competitive edge on a sports team that might, in turn, lead to a college scholarship at a prestigious university where she can then fret over her grades for the next four years, constantly doing more and more in order to succeed.

In contrast, when this girl enters my meetings, we consistently start with prayer and a time of sharing, followed by a 90 minute discussion on our book and 30 minutes worth of planning. We do this because I believe that sometimes being is far more important than doing – especially when it comes to following Christ.

And what I want more than anything in my leaders is for them to consistently grow in their relationship with Christ; For them to always be wrestling with what it means to live everyday as a follower of Christ.

On Tuesday, I told this leader just that.

And then I stuck to my original schedule – prayer, sharing, discussion, and planning.

As promised, this leader left before we got to the planning. She left before we “did anything.”

And yet in reality, she was there for the most important part of the meeting. She was there for the part of the meeting that has the potential to shape and to continue to shape who she is and who she’s becoming – As a woman of God, a leader inside and outside of the church, and a follower of Christ.