Youth Ministry
- What happens with a youth group prays in a mall?
- Tim Schmoyer does youth ministry all wrong. Or so he says.
- Social media and youth ministry. Adam McLane is qualified to speak about such things.
- A Lutheran pastor has some good thoughts from the ELCA Youth Ministry Extravaganza (think NYWC for Lutherans): post 1, post 2, post 3.
Mission, Church, & Theology
- Mark recommends reading a missional classic from 1976.
- Another theist vs. atheist debate challenge has been thrown down. This one actually looks interesting.
- Is the purpose of theology to help us pray better?
- Drew speaks out against certain atonement theories.
- Nothing lasts forever. Including denominations?
- Brad Cooper has a short, important quote from C.S. Lewis. Great reminder.
- Does your church have lots of activity or make an impact?
- Ben Witherington points us to 10 New Testament Books from 2009 that you should have read.
Tech & Other
- Google reader can now alert you to changes in websites without an RSS feed.
- Car and Driver has the best I’ve read on the whole Toyota fiasco.
So, it may not be the best prose or the kind of book that makes you want to curl up next to a fire with a cup of coffee, but the latest book by Christian Smith sure is fascinating. It reports on the next phase of the National Study of Youth and Religion (the first phase of the study is detailed in Soul Searching) and is called Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults. It takes the same group of people studied five years earlier as teenagers and follows up with them as emerging adults, 18-23 year olds.
An interesting quote on the prevalence of young adults saying that they have “no regrets”:
Many of these young adults, it seems, are too young to name and own the unalterable disappointments with life that admitting regrets might entail. Instead, the stance of “no regrets” puts a good face on matters that are in fact problematic, frames the difficult past in an encouraging light, and keeps all of life’s energies moving forward in an upbeat and constructive direction. It also helps to protect a sense of personal self–which seems sacred to emerging adults–against threats to the ultimate good of “being yourself” in a world in which the self is central, since actually having regrets implies that the self one has become embodies something that is wrong or undesirable. (41)
A little while ago I wrote a series about using Wordpress to build a church website. Since then, we’ve come up with a quick and easy solution for posting our worship team schedule. We have a lady who coordinates and schedules our various people who assist during Sunday mornings. She wanted to be able to post this to our website as a reference for people to be able to have at their disposal.
When she emailed me asking if there was a way to post this to our site, I knew we could do it. I just needed to find the fastest and most efficient way to get it done. Since she always types up the schedule in Microsoft Word, the solution was pretty easy: Google Docs. Google Docs lets you create, upload, edit, and share documents online. For this I was interested in uploading and sharing a document.
It takes me about 3 minutes or so every month when she sends me the worship team schedule for the month:
- Upload the file to my Google Docs account.
- Go to the document and click the share button and “Publish as web page…” then “Publish document.” This gives that document it’s own URL that anyone can see as long as they have the address, like this.
- Copy the URL of the document.
- Log in to the back-end of Wordpress and go to the page where you want the document to appear.
- Paste the URL into an iframe. (I talk a little bit about using iframes here)
The finished product looks like this. From a design and layout standpoint, there might be better solutions. But from a speed and simplicity standpoint, this gets the job done in a way that we are happy with. You could do the same thing or something similar to post PowerPoints, Excel documents, or PDFs in a way that people can view on the actual page of your website.
I hope this gives some of you some ideas for possible solutions to your needs with your own Wordpress church websites.
Over the past few weeks I have been listening to a lot of podcasts from William Willimon, who is currently the Bishop of the North Alabama Conference of the United Methodist Church. I didn’t know much about Willimon much before this recent spate of listening, except that he was dean of the Chapel and professor at Duke University. And that he’s written books with Stanley Hauerwas (a good thing in my opinion).
He comes across as a down-to-earth guy who has a deep understanding of theology and church history. He’s just the kind of guy that I think we need leading churches today.
There is something in his leadership that just doesn’t sit right with me, though. It makes me quite uncomfortable, actually. Willimon puts quite an emphasis on growth in congregations. No, not metaphysical, intrinsic, personal, spiritual growth. I’m talking about numbers, attendance, giving, things-you-can-count growth. He recently published a blog post entitled, “Anything worth doing for God is worth counting.” In that post he explains that since becoming bishop he has instituted the use of the Conference Dashboard, which is a way for congregations to log in every week and report their numbers. He describes it this way:
Every church logs in on Monday morning and reports their numbers for that Sunday’s attendance, baptisms, professions of faith, offering, and participation in mission. Anyone can see the numbers for any church in our Conference over the past three years.
As you might expect, he has received a lot of push-back from congregations about his use of these metrics. People are skeptical about making Christian faith “all about the numbers” and “just putting butts in the pews” (I think I would probably be among them). He responds out of his own theological heritage:
There may be something to be said for some of these slogans. Except not in the United Methodist Church. We’re Wesleyans. That means we believe in the growth of the Kingdom of God. John Wesley had friction with the established church of his day, not only because of his vibrant Trinitarian theology, but also because of his refusal to limit his ministry to the moribund English parochial system. From the beginning, Methodists were inveterate counters and numbers keepers.
I have personally been averse to counting, mainly because I have seen it abused so many times. There are ways to grow a congregation or a youth group that have nothing to do with the gospel. You can bribe people into doing anything. (i.e. Come to youth group and get a free iPod!)
My stance has always been that growth is tangential: it is a result of healthy congregations, but you can never hit it if you aim for it. Growth happens as a result of proclaiming and living the gospel, not as a result of targeted marketing and growth strategies. We see that in Acts: in quite a few places the Bible tells us how many people were added to their number.
Have we swung the pendulum too far away from counting? Should we start counting again? Is there a better way to count? Should growth be the thing we are aiming for or is it only a second-order sign of health and maturity?
Or is “grow” a four letter word in ministry?
Did you know that the U.S. donates almost $1.4 trillion dollars to charity every year? Or that the charity that has the highest revenue is Lutheran Services in America at $16.6 billion? I didn’t either.
All this is according to Mint.com, which I found over at Adam McLane’s blog. Go there for lots of more interesting statistics.
How do we deal with the resurrection of Jesus within our youth ministries? Of course, we talk about Jesus’ resurrection quite a bit (hopefully). But what does that mean? Do we get to experience resurrection now? Do we get to experience resurrection only in the future? Or do we somehow get glimpses and tastes of resurrection throughout our life? In chapter six of his book Relationships Unfiltered Andrew Root reminds us that we cannot speak of resurrection without also keeping in mind that it is an eschatological event–it is something that we look forward to in the future, something that we hope for.
If you’d like to hear some further thoughts on this topic, I will be on Andrew Root’s liveBlog today at 3:30 PM CST. It’s a quick fifteen minute show that you can listen to it live, or you can listen to an archive of the show later on the show site or through iTunes.
Alright, so my digital slumber (hibernation is more like it) has finally come to a close. A few people have noticed that I haven’t blogged, tweeted, facebooked, et cetera, in the past few weeks (months). And the reason? Well, there isn’t really a good one. During October I just didn’t feel like writing, so I didn’t.
Sometimes you just need to take a break from things. Back in April this year I set a goal to write a blog post every single day and see what happened. It was a good exercise at first as I disciplined myself to write every single day. That carried on pretty much through June. But I don’t think I’ve found a good balance between discipline and freedom, so I keep swinging between the two poles of writing frequently or not at all. Maybe one day I’ll figure out where I need to be.
Anyways, look for some more posts to come in the near future.
I listened to a lecture for class yesterday by Dr. Walter Sundberg that included some great quotes that give a hint of Luther’s ecclesiology. The radicalness of his vision for the church, especially considering the authoritarian hierarchy of the day, is remarkable. Does the ELCA want some suggestions for a way forward, a way of changing the trend of decades of declining membership? Perhaps it should look back to Luther.
The local church may call and ordain who it wills, whether or not they done their “Lutheran year” at an ELCA seminary or not even gone to seminary at all, as long as the pastor has been properly examined:
Neither Titus nor Timothy nor Paul ever instituted a priest without the congregation’s election and call. This is clearly proven by the sayings in Titus 1 [:7] and Timothy 3 [:10], “A bishop or priest should be blameless,” and, “Let the deacon be tested first.” Now Titus could not have known which ones were blameless; such a report must come from the congregation, which must name the man.
Again, we even read in Acts 4 [6:1-6] regarding an even lesser office, that the apostles were not permitted to institute persons as deacons without the knowledge and consent of the congregation. Rather, the congregation elected and called the seven deacons, and the apostles confirmed them. If, then, the apostles were not permitted to institute, on their own authority, an office having to do only with the distribution of temporal food, how could they have dared to impose the highest office of preaching on anyone by their own power without the knowledge, will, and call of the congregation? (LW 39, 312)
To ordain is not to consecrate. Therefore if we know a pious man, we bring him forward, and by the power of the Word which we have, we give him authority to preach the Word and to give the sacraments. This is to ordain. . .On the basis of ordination it is established as a result of election that, for the sake of order, not everyone should have the desire to preach. Thus they have the obligation to perform their ministry, but not perpetually. Today we can commit it to him, tomorrow we can take it away. (Sermon from 1524 in WA 15, 721 (3) Quoted in Werner Elert, The Structure of Lutheranism, p. 347, note 13)
Anyone may preside over communion, baptize, and administer pastoral care according to the will and call of the local congregation:
. . .whoever has the office of preaching imposed on him has the highest office in Christendom imposed on him. Afterward he may also baptize, celebrate mass, and exercise all pastoral care; or, if he does not wish to do so, he may confine himself to preaching and leave baptizing and other lower offices to others—as Christ and all the apostles in Acts 4 [6.4]. (LW, 39, 314)
On small groups, house churches, and cell churches:
a truly evangelical order [that] should not be held in a public place for all sorts of people. But those who want to be Christians in earnest and who profess the gospel with hand and mouth should sign their names and meet alone in a house somewhere to pray, to read, to baptize, to receive the sacrament, and to do other Christian works. According to this order, those who do not lead Christian lives could be known, reproved, corrected, cast out, or excommunicated, according to the rule of Christ, Matthew 18 [:15-17]. Here one could also solicit benevolent gifts to be willingly given. . .Here would be no need of much and elaborate singing. Here one could set up a neat and brief order for baptism and the sacrament and center everything on Word, prayer, and love. (LW 53, 63-64)
The local church may allow anyone to preach:
St. Paul gives every Christian the power to teach among Christians if there is a need, saying, `You can all prophesy one by one, so that all may learn and all be admonished’ [I Cor. 14:31]. Again, `You should earnestly desire to prophesy, and do not forbid speaking in tongues; but all things should be done decently and in order’ [I Cor. 14: 39-40].
Let this passage be your sure foundation, because it gives such an overwhelming power to the Christian congregation to preach, to permit preaching, and to call. (LW 39, 311)
And if the ELCA continues to require structures that are hindrances to the gospel, the quote below gives direction for churches:
[W]herever there is a Christian congregation in possession of the gospel, it not only has the right and power but also the duty—on pain of losing the salvation of its souls and in accordance with the promise made to Christ in baptism—to avoid, to flee, to depose and to withdraw from the authority that our bishops, abbots, monasteries, religious foundations, and the like are now exercising. For it is clearly evident that they teach and rule contrary to God and his word. (LW 39, 308)
Why do I think the above guidelines for congregations are helpful? Because I believe they will locate authority in local congregations, which will in turn make them more nimble, allow them to be more contextual, empower the laity, and free the church for mission. Many of the current structures hinder these things. It’s time to quit doing everything for the sake of order and to start doing things for the sake of the gospel.
Youth Ministry
- Make a paper youth directory using a free program. I’ve never used this, but it looks interesting.
- Joel is rethinking big events.
- Is this what youth pastors will look like in 2019? I hope it doesn’t take that long.
- Halloween and the sexualization of evil.
- Adam McLane is starting a new youth ministry.
- Kevin refuses.
- Facebook pages are the way to go for youth ministries (not groups). Here’s why.
- Another resources full of great, practical ideas: Tear Down the Walls of the Youth Room.
ELCA
- An interesting study published at Pretty Good Lutherans reveals that women and laity struggle for voice in ELCA news.
- Why Erik is Luthermergent.
Church and Theology
- A thought about conversion theology: Why I am NOT an Evangelical.
- Will Willimon on whether you need to be a REAL church or not.
- Are we getting to the point when we need to choose bi-vocational ministry over large church ministry?
- The Dark Side of Bible Reading.
- Adam says that if all church staff are equally valued, then they should be paid the same.
- Good thoughts by a college student.
I preached this past Sunday, and due to certain circumstances I started writing my sermon on paper. My wife Alicia was interviewing on Friday for a residency next year and I went with her (mostly for the free meals). There were four separate interviews scheduled, so I thought that would give me some good time by myself. I took with me the notes I had made about the text for the week and some paper and a pen so I could write my sermon while she was in her interviews.
Usually, I write my sermons (like most people, I ‘d expect) on the computer. Computers are so much more efficient, right? You can cut and paste, move things around, look up a verse real quick and insert it into the sermon with just a few clicks. So, I wasn’t looking forward to writing my sermon on paper last friday, but I wasn’t going to lug my computer around all day.
When Alicia went into her first interview, I put my head down and started writing my sermon. Her first interview ended up being really short, probably 20 minutes, but in that period of time I wrote, mostly in outline form, over half of my sermon. There was something about putting the pen on the paper with no distractions–no internet, no email, no twitter–that allowed me to focus and think clearly. I wasn’t able to finish the sermon while I was there, so I took what I had written home.
I decided that I would finish writing the sermon on paper, even though I was at home. So, I sat down and cranked out the rest of the sermon in almost no time. Later, I transcribed what I had written to the computer and made a few minor edits, but for the most part I really enjoyed writing a sermon on paper. I’ve heard it said that poets should never write poetry on a computer; it makes the process too technological and removes the organic creativity that comes when stroking a pen across a sheet of paper. Perhaps sermon writing is the same way.
Have you tried writing a sermon in a different method than normal? What were the results?