Unpackthis

I serve in an ELCA congregation.  Our nationwide church recently had it’s every other year assembly.   A number of ministry initiatives were voted approved including an HIV and AIDS Funding Proposal Adopted, Development of the Lutheran Malaria Initiative , Carlos Peña was Re-elected Vice President,  and Full Communion with the United MethodistChurch was Adopted.  All of these items are great, but the assembly will be remembered for the adoption of a new Social Statement, “Human Sexuality: Gift and Trust,” and the approval of Ministry Policies Resolutions that will allow LBGT people in lifelong, monogamous, committed relationships to serve as pastors of a church.
For more information on these resolutions go to elca.org.  Some insightful thoughts from a pastor can be found here.

I’m working on a plan for processing these actions with the high school students at my church.  I would like to do so in a very transparent manner, being respectful of all who feel differently (respecting their bound conscience).  These are some things I’m thinking will shape our conversation.

• The high school kids will probably fall passionately on one end of the spectrum or the other.  It will be necessary to set a culture of respect that also honors their passion.
• Generally the kids (like most Lutherans) don’t know much about the Bible.  If we’re going to have a theological discussion we are going to have to provide some tools for them to engage the Bible in this discussion.
• As adults, we will need to work hard not to “put a bow” on the conversation at the end with our point of view but rather let them live in the tension of there not being easy answers here.
• As the youth director, I plan on presenting the Lutheran heritage of Biblical interpretation.  This means I understand scripture reading through the lens of the Gospel, and understanding reading scripture as a conversation more than reading words on a page.
• Understand that what we discuss will be reported to parents, which is great.  Should I be doing something to frame the conversation with parents as well?
• I wonder if young people will be able to articulate the arguments?  Should I write out the different arguments on the spectrum and ask them to choose one to argue?

Our ministry is centered on small groups.  This works really well, but I’m not sure it’s fair to put a volunteer in charge of these conversations.  At the same time, I don’t want to have a big event where I bring all the small groups together, I’m afraid I’ll make a mountain out of a molehill.

One theme that keeps coming up through this conversation is that the discussion is not so much about sex as much as how we interpret scripture.  This is a great teaching moment for our community to teach our young people about reading scripture and using it to continue to better understand God’s love and role in our lives.

Do you have any thoughts on having this conversation with young people?

A number of leaders from our community recently attended the Leadership Summit at Willow Creek church.  They came home ready to process and share, and they asked me to create a blog as the means for them to do so.

These folks are all email savvy, some have facebook, but for the most part I would not describe them as super techie.  They were comfortable asking for a blog, and I think that is pretty remarkable.

Thus far they’ve done some nice reflection.  Our hope is that this blog we’ve started is eventually opened up to our entire leadership team at church.  This would be quite a shift in our leadership teams, to be able to communicate about some higher level things rather than our every other month meetings, which tend to be more check-ins than real leadership development.

The idea of a user generated site where we grow in discipleship is quite an experiment for this group.  Like all blog projects, the great test will be whether or not we can constantly use it as a resource.  I’m hopeful, but I also realize not everyone sits in front of a computer all day and this will take more effort from some than others.

For now I’m holding off on sharing the website, since it’s still in “beta test.”  Hopefully we’ll have some great stories to share a few months from now.

I’ve recently been working on increasing the visibility of our ministry at Bethlehem.  One suggestion was to post more pictures of our young people around the church.  This seemed like an obvious step for us, but I wanted the pictures to really stand out.

The great news is that we literally have tens of thousands of pictures of our kids, hundreds of which are worthy of framing and hanging.

Years ago I found a deal online to get 8X10 photos printed online for $1.00  I searched for some similar deals and stumbled on to shortrunposters.com  This service is great.  They do one thing really well, print 18X24 photos.  The minimum charge is $2.00 per poster, but you can do upgrades that make it more expensive (not really necessary if you ask me).   Shipping is a flat rate of $10, so keep that in mind when you think about ordering photos.  I’ve ordered prints twice and they turn out great.  Here’s a picture of our new “gallery” at church:

As you can see, we added some 8X10’s off of our color printer to spice up the layout (big face pics work for that one).  The large 18X24 frames were not cheap, but they look great. Another option is to mount the photos on cheap insulation foam from the hardware store.

Give shortrunposters.com a try, great pictures at a great price.

Here’s the Worldle (wordle.net) of my twitter feed over the last month

I’m at a Learning Lab/”Un-conference” led by Mark Riddle.  These are the flip charts from our time together. Some of them turned 90 degrees, deal with it.  If you did no’t attend the week they won’t make sense, I’m mostly sharing them with the folks from the lab.

I recently read through Mark Riddle’s Inside the Mind of Youth Pastors. This book is written as a guide for Senior Pastors and others involved in leading or hiring a youth pastor, but my guess is that it’s being read by more youth pastors than Senior Pastors.  I was curious as to what Mark thought was in my head.

Was he right?  Well, he didn’t talk as much about what’s in my head as much as he gave advice to churches as they worked to hire a youth pastor and shaped their expectations.

Rather than giving an overall review, I would like to take a couple of posts and talk about some great sections.  Generally though, I think youth pastors, senior pastors, and other church staff folks should buy and read this book.

In chapter 22, called the vacume Riddle writes:

The weaknesses of your church as a whole will almost invariabley be present in your youth ministry as well.  If your church struggles with finding volunteers, lack of follow through, laziness, or consumerism, you’ll find those same traits in the youth ministry.  LIkewise, the stregths that characterize your church will be found in the youth ministry, too.  If your church gives sacraficially, then it’s likely your youth ministry will give sacraficially too. -154

So often youth ministries are looked to as a place where the energy or change is going to come from.  I think Mark is really on to something here, that the youth ministry does not exist in a vacume.  The other point that he is making here (though he doesn’t do so explicitly) is that the young people in our youth ministry have and are learning more about faith from their parents than from the youth minister.  Therefore, the students in the youth ministry are going to reflect the faith of their parents very strongly.

I hope I don’t come across as complaining or whining.  This is actually quite the advantage.  Isn’t it good news that our kids are going to reflect our faith?  I think this is also an important insight for us to keep in mind as we seek to build a program, to not be discouraged when there seem to be unexplainable forces holding developments back.

Finally I would say that I have seen examples of this being untrue.  One of the great joys of youth ministry is that it can serve as a miniature labratory for ministries or developments of the larger church body.  There is often an enthusiasm and close community that is present in the youth ministry simply because of their developmental place or the time spent together.  So, sometimes the youth ministry can be a catalyst to change the congregation.  I have seen this happen when young people begin finding the joy of community or the joy of service and tell their story to the congregation.  The rest of the congregation then gets excited and follows the lead of the students.

While I have seen this to be both true and untrue, I think it is important to keep this at the center of your consciousness as a youth minister.  Youth ministry does not and should not exist in a vacume or silo.

I’ve just stumbled on a new piece of software that I plan to use a lot.  Freemind is a mind mapping tool.  It’s free and very powerful.  I heard about this program from various GTD (Getting Things Done) sources.  One of the practices of GTD is to map out your project as much as possible and then your next step will be clear all the way through the project.  I find this to be a very important practice in ministry projects (sometimes i execute this better than others) as it’s easy to loose sight.

Here’s a screen shot of my brainstorming for a Bible studies series.  Click on the pic to make it bigger.

These “nodes” are created very easily, simply by hitting “insert” or “return.”  I prefer to do things like brainstorming on the computer because I type faster than I write and it’s legible.  I obviously will develop the above mind map more as I work on this project.  I’m not a “neat” writer, but I like to visualize things in a neat way.  This is why Freemind is a great tool for me. Besides my own brainstorming I can see this being very useful in a meeting.  Hook up your computer to a projector and this becomes a great tool, and the team notes are preserved.

Another great function of this software is that the map can be exported on some neat ways, from simple text, to JPG, to a clickable web document.  Check this one out here.

There are many many uses for this program.  I plan on mapping out all my projects with it and setting up a check in with it on a regular interval.

Here’s a great YouTube tutorial that tells you about some of the features

I first heard some of the lyrics to this song one one of my student’s facebook statuses. Little did I know these words came from a popular song. Watch here:

Walt Mueller of the Center for Parent Youth Understanding turned me on to this video.  I think this is a fantasy of what college life is for young people and for those that remember back to our college days.  Do kids really live like this in college?  No, this is maybe one night of a college year, but this is not a typical weekend night.

However, I think the issue is that we continue to give young people seemingly limitless license to do whatever they like in college.  Most of the stuff that kids manage to avoid in high school (drinking, sex, drugs?) seems to happen on a regular basis in college (however, I would argue it’s not as glamorous as the video portrays).

I am at the ELCA Youth Ministry Network Extravaganza in New Orleans. The theme is shift. This morning I did a workshop on ministry with the millennial generation. If you came, thanks for the conversation. Below you will find my slides how and some links and resources we talked about in the workshop.

I’ll be blogging a little bit about the Millennial Generation over the next couple of weeks. Come back to continue the conversation.

Slide Deck
PPT: ministry-with-the-millennial-generation

Here’s three links to the video
WMV: http://www.mediafire.com/?53tmxlzznw2
MOV: http://www.mediafire.com/?3xbhmdmsfmd
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGCJ46vyR9o

Here’s one of our polleverywhere.com questions

Here’s the second poll everywhere question. Feel free to continue voting

I’m on my way to the ELCA Youth Ministry Network extravaganza. This is an annual gathering of youthworkers, pastors, and various other folks involved in ministry with young people. The event has been called the town square, where people come to meet and talk shop with others living in the same worlds.

I’m presenting a workshop called “ministry with the millennial generation,” I’ve enjoyed researching and thinking about the unique characteristics of this generation of young people and the hope they bring to our future.

I’ll be blogging about the event and posting notes and graphics from my presentation.

UPDATE: My apologies for the numerous spelling (typing) errors in an earlier version of this post. I originally wrote it on my iphone and didn’t edit carefully enough.