Making A Splash

Last weekend I was at Momentum2010 and one of the breakout sessions was led by Kevin DeYoung. In case you don’t know him, he is a pastor and has written a few books. I’ve read one of his books. It was great and I highly recommend his books.

Anyway, his session was called and described as this:  How to Reach the Next Generation: It’s Easier and Harder Than You think – Too many people think the secret to effective ministry lies in our styles and cultural relevance. But the secret is there is no secret. Fruitful ministry is more about our character and passion for God than any gimmicks or tricks of the trade.

Here are my not-so-great-notes:

• Grab them with passion (your teaching and preaching should be personal, passionate pleading)
  • People want to see our zeal, our faith; style matters less
  • We can’t pass on what we don’t feel ourselves

• Win them with love
  • Culture is important but not as much as love
  • Stop preaching the false gospel of cultural identification

• Hold them with holiness
  • People need your personal holiness more than anything
  • Do teens see your personal zeal and passion?
  • Parents have the biggest influence on teens and your ministry should have an emphasis on them

• Challenge them with truth
  • Bold meaty teaching is part of the solution, not the problem
  • Moralistic, therapeutic deism – refute this!
  • Can we explain the doctrines of the faith ourselves? If not, it’s hard to teach.

• Amaze them with God
  • NOT moralism
  • Are we trying to amaze them with our own cleverness or God?
  • Reach the next generation for God with God

So there ya go. A hour lecture boiled down to 5 simple points. I may not have captured everything completely but I think you can get the big ideas.

I enjoyed his lecture tons and I’m wondering what others who are in youth ministry think?

I wonder if Jesus really meant for us to…

…have a big house in the suburbs

…have so much food that we are unhealthy and overweight

…have so much “stuff” that we can’t find room for it

or have we distorted the word “blessings”? Is the current standard of living among many of us Christians pleasing and acceptable to God?

I’m just wondering when we as Christians have big houses that are painted to perfection, have big LCD panels hanging from our walls, a boat, a cottage, laptops, shelves and shelves of food, overflowing dressers, two cars and a house  for them (aka garage), a Xbox, a Wii, and a PS3 to entertain us, cable  and satellites to watch mind numbing TV and DVR’s so we don’t miss any TV – I’m just wondering, are we actually believing in the prosperity Gospel to some degree?

When I was a kid I was taught in church that these things were sinful but as a thinking adult I see things differently. In no particular order, I am unable to find these sins in the Bible:

• All drinking
• Using different translations other than the KJV
• All swearing (even reading the word H**l in the Bible was done with TONS of hesitancy)
• Music with guitars and drums (even if it was “Christian”)
• Going to movies (but not renting or buying movies)
• Playing cards
• Not going to church on Wednesday and twice on Sunday
• Mowing the grass on Sundays
• Work of any kind on Sundays
• Not wearing a shirt and tie to church
• Wearing jeans to church
• Guys with hair past their ears or collars
• Tattoos and piercings

These things I now find ridiculous and actually hilarious that they were taught or implied. Can you add to this list?

Oh, and thank Jeff for the inspiration to write this.

I was sitting at home the other night and it was bed time for my youngest three kids.  I was in one room and they were in another and I was telling them to get ready for bed.  They sorta listened so I repeated myself.  A few minutes later as I was still sitting in the other room, I noticed that they still had not done the three bedtime things: pajamas, teeth, & potty. At that point I got off my lazy rear and went into the other room to follow up on the bedtime routine.  I then proceeded to tell them they were taking too long and were not listening very well.

So I know you never have this problem and your kids always obey the first time without delay.  Mine do too. Sometimes. But not always. But they always obey better if I make just a little effort to physically go to where they are and then instruct them. It’s still not 100% but the percentages are much higher.

Anyone have a boss like this?  Just sends emails but never actually talks to you?  Hmmm….

And don’t get me started on my dog. He does everything I want if he is within arm’s reach. With every additional foot from me, he delays 30 seconds.

In a military sense, this is called power projection. Or something like that.  I’m not exactly an expert in military matters. But for the military, putting an aircraft carrier off the shore of some country keeps many things in check. The farther away the carrier gets the likelihood increases that things will happen that they don’t want. I think I’m mostly right in that example.

Right or not, that is how my kids sometimes act towards me. The farther away I am, sometimes they are just not that thrilled about listening to me and doing what I want. And that is how I act towards God many times. I perceive that he is far away and that I can get away with things. How ridiculous is that? It’s like a fish pretending there isn’t any water around him. Just really dumb.

God doesn’t manage from the other room. He doesn’t have to. He doesn’t have to go to the other room to be in it. He already is everywhere all the time. Admittedly, I do sometimes wish I could get out of arms length for just a bit so I could get away with things.

Can you relate?

I still hate all chick flick movies, soaps, most sitcoms and chick flick books. I already posted about this once and really nothing has changed. While I’m on this rant, I really don’t like most movies aimed at young kids.  I lump those movies in the same bucket as chick flicks.

What is it that I can’t stand? The constant bombardment of the fairly tale love story.  It’s everywhere and many times it’s the whole point of the movie/tv show/book.  And really, that is the last thing I want my kids (no matter how old) to learn from Hollywood and the entertainment biz. The boyfriend & girlfriend junk  in kids stuff might only be there subtlety but go ahead and look for it.  It’s there. I mean really, why does kid stuff have to have a romantic angle to it?  I can’t stand it. So count how many movies are completely absent of it. Count how many movies where the love story is more than just a bit part. I bet you are surprised.

I think that most Christians have their heads in the sand on this issue.  Yes that is harsh. Flame away. But tell me, how many Christians follow the same dating & marriage model that is pushed on them from all the media? I think the percentages are high. Way high. And in case you have missed it, the model does not begin with God and have a foundation of making Jesus king in every area of your life.  Why do we want to model our lives on anything but biblical values? I fear that so many want to have both; the fairy tale love story and then mix in some spirituality. I’ve seen how that ends too many times. Oh, and don’t get me started on how bad most Christians date. I posted about that already too.

Okay so I know I am making HUGE generalizations here and I will leave some wiggle room for the exceptions.  There are some. I don’t think I am way off in left field though. And I’m not defending guy movies as there can be just as much junk in them (like Transformers 2). I just think people have a lot harder time distinguishing between real life and chick flick love stories. It’s just not that hard to blur real life with a multimillion dollar love story  production created to tug at people’s hearts at just the right spot.The message gets absorbed knowingly or not and it is influencing everyone exactly as designed. Relationships are not better because of it. Most of this leads to dissatisfaction in relationships. It’s pretty tough to live up to a Hollywood story.

Do you agree or do you think I’m nuts? And what is the answer? Really I’m not pushing for boycotts. I would be lying though if I said I wasn’t pushing for people to be much more choosy. And to be conscious of what is going in their brains which inevitably impacts their hearts.

P.S. I saw Avatar the other day and while the 3D technology was incredible and the special effects stunning, I could have done without the love story sub-plot in it. Just trying to be consistent here.

Here is a partial list of people I have at some point in my life put in the bucket of “People that I never thought that mattered”…

1. Waitress/Waiters especially when they check in too little or too much
2. Fast food cashier/drive thru person
3. People driving that I think should not be
4. Telemarketers
5. Unhelpful sales person (you pick the store)
6. Gas station cashier
7. Person serving you $4 coffee
8. Anyone I want to call stupid, ignorant, moron or jerk

I listened to a sermon from Matt Chandler a few weeks back and he made a statement along the lines of “their souls matter so act like it”.  That stuck.  What do you think?

Actually if you are counting books, there are 39 that do not mention Jesus. And if you just look at content, it is almost 70% of the Bible that does not have anything to do with Jesus.  Or that is what many believe.

How many times have you heard the stories of the Old Testament but never heard them connected to Jesus?  Okay maybe once or twice as an adult MAYBE. So how about when kids are taught? Almost never and it just kills me.

Too many times Old Testament stories are taught as great moralistic events that we should internalize as examples to learn things from. They are taught disconnected from the New Testament and unrelated to Jesus and have little redemptive value. Most of the time they are presented as random stories that might or might not be historical but are fun to read because they are entertaining. Murder, sex and money. It’s all in there.

Truth is, there is a metanarrative. As one pastor says, some people fit the Bible “… somewhere in between Aesop’s fables and Joseph Campbell’s myths. But Christians don’t believe that. We believe the Bible is the metanarrative. It is the overarching story under which all of history is to be understood and interpreted. We reject reducing the Bible to yet another good story. It’s the story of who God is, what God has done, what we have done, and what God has done to save us.”

If you don’t teach and preach Jesus, you are just another religious zealot trying to hopelessly convince people they need to stop doing certain things and to do other things better. If that is you, cut it out. Don’t leave Jesus out of the Old Testament. Or the New Testament for that matter. (Yes I have heard that done too).

Without Jesus, we have nothing and conversely Jesus is everything.  I want to do and say nothing that tries to proves that otherwise.

Our relationship really moved to a whole new level when Amber moved in with us after graduating from high school.  Autumn moved in a little over a year ago. Another memorable event was when I drove Amber down to college for her first year.  It’s funny, I remember telling Melissa she was going to do it the next time because it was too hard for me to dump my kid 1100 miles away and leave. This coming year though we look forward to celebrating graduations for both of them. While I throw that out as a simple one line sentence, don’t lose the magnitude of those two events.

So how do you inject two girls into your lives and do it well?  I have no idea. I don’t think you can.
We didn’t plan on it but God certainly moved us along a path.  That’s the miracle part.  We are not that good and we are not that special. I am constantly reminded of how little I know and how much I do not control.  One thing I know is that our bond is strong and our well of love is deep.  Sounds mushy but it’s God given and God sustained.

It has been an incredible journey with them and in many ways we have only just begun.  I would not change the journey for anything. I cannot believe I get to be part of their lives! I often wonder why God picked us for this whole thing.  We often feel rather inadequate and unequipped but we don’t question the fact that our hearts are knit together

Most of all, today I am proud to call them family, specifically daughters.  I told them both recently, it is a short list.  There are only five names on the kid list and they are on it.  They are on the list.  You don’t just get on that list and you don’t just get off it.  That list is controlled by God and because he is full of love, mercy and grace, he put us all together.  And I am forever grateful.

As our relationship grew, the trust they had in us also grew.  Many times they would call us in the middle of the night when things didn’t go quite right at home.  Even in those early years we had tears for them and through them our bond became stronger.

I personally got to play a bigger role when I picked Autumn and Amber up every day for school one semester.    I knew that they did not attend every day and really wanted to encourage them to go.  So during that fall semester I made sure they at least got to school. They didn’t always stay but at least I knew they got there.  The next semester of that year we allowed Amber to drive our spare car and so she then drove them both to school after that. Previous to that we got to teach Amber how to drive and put her through driver’s training.  Why is it that she always liked to hug semis?!?!?! I think that was the beginning of my gray hair.

Together we have shared many life moments.  From parent teacher conferences to the births of all three of our younger kids.  We took them both to camp. We celebrated with Amber when she graduated from high school. When we got the news of the death of Melissa’s brother, they were with us.

5 kids. If you would have told me 10 years ago I would have 5 kids I would have said you were on crack.  But here I am in 2009 with 5 kids.  And it’s incredible.

I have never really written publicly about our experience and I am very conscious of Jesus’ words in Matthew chapter 6.  That being said, I think there is room to brag on God and to tell a story of life, love and miracles.

This is the story of how God brought two young girls into our lives and how our lives have never been the same since. Oh, and this is the short version.

Our relationship with Amber and Autumn began over 9 years ago.  Honestly we were not looking to begin a relationship with them but God in his sovereignty brought our paths together and planted a love for them in us even back then.

It all began with a phone call from another family asking us if we could pick the two of them up for church on a Wednesday night.  At the time we were youth leaders and without kids so we quickly agreed. It’s amazing to me to think what impact that one phone call has had.

After that first call we picked them up almost every Wednesday for youth group and then over time we began picking them up for Sunday church services as well. Honestly in our minds it wasn’t this great thing we were doing; we were simply providing rides to a couple of girls who wanted to come to church.

Our picking them up on Wednesdays soon turned into them coming over for dinner most weeks and many times this included friends of theirs.  It was not unusual for us to have several teenagers around our table week in and week out. During these times, we had great conversations and got to know them well.  Our conversations would pick back up on the rides home and it was not too long until they started confiding in us about their home life.  Over the years it was also not unusual for the girls to spend the night at our house during weekends so that they could attend church and not have to get up so early.

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