Author Archives: Matt

Stop Kony 2012 in your Youth Ministry

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If you’ve been in the youth ministry world for a while, it is likely that you were aware of Invisible Children before the #StopKony campaign blew up the internet yesterday. I didn’t know anything about the campaign until one of my youth posted the video on FaceBook yesterday at about 7:30am. A few clicks of the mouse and it was obvious this thing was taking off, so I decided we would talk about it last night. Unfortunately, we have a truncated schedule due to Lent, and over half of my kids hadn’t actually seen the video. But they had heard about “this  Kony thing.” So, I took up thirty minutes of our time and watched the video, which I hadn’t planned on doing. After that we had a brief discussion and then had to dismiss. Hopefully we will pick it up more later.

Until then, I have some random thoughts (sorry this is long… there are other good links to read at the bottom):

  • Sometimes white people can do good things in Africa. I’m well aware of the history of colonialism, racism, and oppression in Africa. I don’t take it lightly, and I think we have done harm in many places. I’m also wary of thinking that only (white) America can save the world’s problems. But to say that because we are Americans and because we are white (this is being touted as a white movement) that we are unable to do good in the world is myopic. It does mean we need to carefully weigh what we are doing and act thoughtfully, rather than triumphantly. But I am reminded of a man who once said, “To whom much is given, much is required.” It’s hard to sit idly by when we do have resources at our disposal just because we have a history of colonialism. The question is not “should we use our resources?”, but “what is the best way to use our resources?”
  • It’s “cool” to be on either side of the issue. Of course, most people are jumping on the Stop Kony bandwagon. And then there are others who are jumping on the bandwagon against people on the Stop Kony bandwagon.  So, don’t let yourself, your teenagers, or people you know think that they are sophisticated, thoughtful, and measured because they are opposing this campaign. Essentially, unless you don’t know anything about Kony, then you are on a bandwagon. Sorry, that’s just the way it is.
  • I wish I was a pacifist, but I’m not. Some people are making a big stink over the fact that Invisible Children supports military action and that some of their leaders were photographed holding guns. The reality is that we live in a complex world filled with evil, and sometimes evil has terrible consequences. We’ve seen those consequences for 26 years with Kony. It’s been far too long already. He deserves to be held accountable for his actions. There will be likely be collateral damage, but I don’t see how inaction is the correct solution to the problem.
  • This isn’t the world’s biggest problem. It’s horrific, Kony needs to be brought to justice, but there are other things out there that kill more people and affect more lives. On the other hand…
  • This is one guy’s cause. God bless him for not resting. This is as much about the filmmaker, Jason Russell going to Uganda 10 years ago, making a promise to a young boy, and following through as it is about anything else. For Jason Russell, this is not an overnight sensation. This isn’t something that he found one day on the internet and decided it was worth changing his Facebook profile picture. He has dedicated his life to this. Many people would have given up long ago and thought that a regular person can’t help catch one of the world’s most-wanted fugitives. But he decided that he was going to use the skills and talents he has to try and bring about good in the world. And he’s been working at it for ten years. We have much to learn from him in that.
  • Pick a cause. Don’t rest until you’ve seen it through. That’s what Jason Russell did. It doesn’t have to be Kony. It can be malaria in Africa, economic development in India, workers rights in China, evangelizing Muslims, whatever. Just don’t bounce back and forth between all these great causes but never actually commit yourself to helping make something happen. So, if you are going to support this campaign, don’t rest until Kony is arrested, the LRA is gone, and there are structures in places to help rehabilitate those who have been affected by Kony. It’s about more than wearing a bracelet.
  • Awareness is good. Some people have said that raising white people’s awareness of Kony doesn’t do any good. I would say in general, that is correct. I would venture to guess that 99% of the people who did not know who Joseph Kony was until yesterday won’t do anything measurably constructive as a result of this. But, when you are educating millions of new people on an issue, chances are that a few hundred of them will own this as their cause and work with their lives to make it right. That’s a good thing. Sometimes the only way to reach the few is to broadcast to the masses and see what sticks.
  • Speech is an act. On the other hand, awareness and communicating what is going on does do something. I’m a subscriber to speech-act theory. Basically, it says that when something is said, it causes something to happen. It isn’t just an empty transfer of information, like moving data from one computer to another. Instead, there are effects of a speech act, and this video is definitely a speech act. So, to those who say that this video “doesn’t do anything,” I would disagree. But it’s probably too early to tell what it is actually doing.
  • Read up. As you are probably aware, there are detractors. And there are euphoric supporting teenagers. And famous supporting tweeters. So, do your homework. Here are some good articles:

I’m interested how you are approaching this in your ministry, what you plan to do with your group, and how you may participate on April 20.

Reinventing Seminary: The Goal

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This entry is part 6 of 6 in the series Seminary

What is seminary for, really? It seems to me that the typical goals have been things like: maintain accreditation with Association of Theological Schools (ATS), hire world-famous faculty, be a leader in scholarship, maintain denominational standards of indoctrination, and have a beautiful campus. These must be the goals because seminaries seem to do these things quite well.

Seminaries are failing at one important thing: training effective leaders in the church. There are different anecdotal and research-based evidences that point to this. The most obvious one is that the church in America is declining–effective leaders generally grow and multiply churches and other leaders.

Seminaries need to re-orient their goal: sustainably training people for leadership in the church. That’s it. Everything else is subservient to that. Is ATS getting in the way of your innovative new training program? Forgo accreditation. Are you spending too much maintaining a campus infrastructure to keep tuition costs reasonable? Sell the buildings. Have too much money tied up in full-time faculty? Get rid of them. Enrollment down? Jettison the denominational boundaries and make outsiders feel welcome.

Sustainability is the key. Seminary costs are rising. Congregations are shrinking. It doesn’t take a lot of fancy math to know that this is not a sustainable long-term game plan. The easiest way to make seminary sustainable is to decrease costs for students. When it is already difficult for a full-time pastor to pay student loans, it’s just going to get more difficult as church leadership turns ever more in a bi-vocational direction.

Notice I said seminary is for training “leaders,” not “pastors”. Ecclesiology is shifting, and for the better in my opinion. Ordained, denominationally-sanctioned ministry will become a thing of the past (and already is in evangelicalism). Local churches will be the ones who call people into ministry, and their roles will be diverse. Many potential leaders need training, but they will never preach a sermon. Maybe they will never teach a Sunday school class. But they will coordinate the church’s mission outreach, lead the discipleship ministry, or coordinate massive projects between churches and community organizations. Churches need well-rounded leadership, and if the leaders are going to be bi-vocational, then there will have to be more leaders. Seminary training will need to be flexible enough to train this diversity of leadership.

Seminaries have one goal: to sustainably train people for leadership in the church. I have some ideas what it might look like if a seminary seriously embraced this goal and will share it with you over the coming weeks.

What do you think a seminary would look like that relentlessly and sustainably trained church leaders?

Reinventing Seminary

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This entry is part 5 of 6 in the series Seminary

About two years ago, I wrote a little series of posts about why seminary is irrelevant, and it was mostly a critique without a lot of constructive thoughts. Since then, there are a lot of significant voices weighing in on the subject recently trying to discern a way forward:

All the recent talk has made me start thinking about this topic again, so over the next few days (or maybe weeks), I’m going to try to post some constructive thoughts about where seminary education needs to move from here. Seminaries are currently products of a certain kind of underlying ecclesiology, so it stands to reason that if our ecclesiology is shifting, then seminaries must follow suit.

If you have thoughts about the future of seminary, post a comment or write your own blog post and drop me a comment with the link (yes, I’m telling you to promote yourself!). I want to know what other great ideas are floating out there.

High School & College Faith

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My friend Noah is writing a book about transitioning your faith as you graduate from high school to college, called Face to Faith (you should go check out the website… he is posting blogs related to the book, and the best comments will be incorporated into the book). It got me to thinking about my personal transition from high school to college.

I’ve read the statistics: Sticky Faith, the National Study on Youth and Religion, Barna, and others. For me, there were two main things that seemed to make it a seamless transition from high school to college:

  • The expectation that Sunday was a day for church.
  • Getting involved in ministry.

Sunday is a Day for Church

This isn’t a very theologically or missionally rich idea, but I think for me it really kept me connected to the Body in college. Growing up, Sunday was a day for church. We rarely missed church. It wasn’t even really a question in my house growing up. There wasn’t sleeping in, there wasn’t going out to the lake, there wasn’t spending the night at friends’ houses and missing church (if we did spend the night on a Saturday, we either went with our friends to church or my parents picked me up Sunday morning).

It sounds a bit legalistic, but it wasn’t for me. It was an expectation. And I just grew to feel like Sunday was a day when I met with other believers, studied the scriptures, and worshiped. So, when I got to college, the most natural thing for me to do on Sunday morning was to find a church.

Get Involved in Ministry

During freshman orientation, an upperclassman shared with me about a youth ministry she was involved in with a small local church in a low-income town nearby. She asked if I’d be interested in being a part of the ministry, and being a youth ministry major I jumped at it. So, that first Sunday, I found myself in a nearby town of about three hundred in a tiny Southern Baptist church with a preacher who preached only from the King James Bible. On Wednesday nights, about seven other high school students and I helped out with their youth ministry program. I thought it made sense to attend worship there on Sundays, so I did.

It wasn’t a church I “liked”. It wasn’t a church that I would have sought out. It wasn’t a church that fit my mold or fed my needs. But it was a church where I was an important part of their ministry. I knew the kids, I knew the youth minister, and I thought that if I was going to be involved on Wednesday nights I needed to be involved on Sunday mornings.

Because of these two main factors, Sunday stayed a day of worship while I was in college. They say the first few weekends of a college student’s life will determine their churchgoing habits throughout college. If you want them to hit the ground running, then getting in a habit or weekly worship during high school and committing yourself to ministry were great starting points for me.

What I’m Giving Up This Year

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I said a few days ago that the key to focusing is willing to give up and cut out some things in life. So, with that, here’s what I’m cutting out in 2012:

  • Personal: Reading non-Bible stuff. As I said, this year is the year of the Bible, reading-wise, for me. So I will do very little reading that isn’t related to scripture.
  • Personal: Miata & Autocrossing. I bought a 1994 miata a couple of years ago in hopes of tinkering on it and doing some autocross events with it. When I bought my road bicycle last year, I spent so much time on my bike that I didn’t have the time to work on the car. Instead of feeling guilty for not giving it the attention it deserves, I’m going to sell it.
  • Personal: Motorsports on TV. When I was in high school I considered being an engineer, for one reason only: to design and work on racecars. I thought that auto racing was the most exciting display of engineering and have never lost the awe of watching cars scream around a track. My DVR is usually filled with hours of racing from March-October. Giving this up will keep me from sitting in front of the TV so much.
  • Personal: College Basketball on TV. Last year, thanks to my parents, I crossed something off of my bucket list: going to the NCAA Final Four & Championship game. I watch quite a bit of college basketball in the winter months and during March Madness. Now that I’ve made the pilgrimage to the Final Four, I feel like I can cut back on that.
  • Ministry: Administration. When I requested that my hours be cut back at the church, it really didn’t leave time for me to do a significant amount of administration. Instead, I’m focusing on teaching and discipleship. The size of our church and ministry really doesn’t make it that big of a loss. Looking back, I’m not sure how effective it was to spend the time I did on administrative matters.
  • Professionally: Continuing Education. I’m not cutting this out entirely, but I am scaling back. Last fall I spent a ton of time learning about business, marketing, and web development and design practices. I feel like I needed to do that, because I learned a lot, but those things don’t pay the bills. With that foundation behind me, I’m going to scale back on the continuing education and focus on things that actually grow my business and pay the bills.

I’m content with giving these things up, because I know it will allow me to focus on other things that I already enjoy and that will be productive. And if a year from now I want to cut something else out in order to add in something above, then I’ll do it. This isn’t a permanent decision, but one that I think makes sense in my life right now.

Are you giving up anything in 2012 to focus on something that you think is important?

What I’m Focusing On This Year

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Taking into account the questions I asked myself to help me focus this year, here’s what I want the next 12 months to be about:

  • Personal: Reading the Bible. I love to read and have lots of interests. My default reading genre is theology (but recently I dabbled in lots of business, marketing, and financial crisis reading), but this year I am going to narrow my reading down to scripture. Quite honestly, I didn’t take enough advantage of great Bible classes in college and I want to go broader in my exposure to scripture. So, this year I am using the M’Cheyne Bible Reading Plan to read through the Bible this year. I like it because you read one chapter from four different books of the Bible every day, so you don’t get bogged down in certain difficult books for months on end as you would reading it straight through. I will also limit most of my reading to Biblical-type material rather than theological and philosophical. Do you have any good biblical studies books to recommend?
  • Personal: Cycling. I took up cycling last year and was surprised by how much I enjoyed it. It’s a great hobby because it allows me to spend time with my wife, meet new people, stay in shape, see the countryside, and tinker around with keeping my bike running in top form.
  • Personal: Baseball. My wife and I both enjoy watching baseball, and the recent success of the Rangers has made it even better. 2012 should be another good year for the Rangers, and we both look forward to taking in the season. Spring training will be here before you know it.
  • Personal: Writing. I haven’t written much in the past year, and I miss it. The blog has suffered for various and sundry reasons, so I will likely re-energize myself towards blogging.
  • Professional: Specialize & Systematize. Since starting my own business last October, I have taken on almost any and every project that has come my way. I’m seeing the need for specialization in order to better systematize and speed up my productivity. I have a few ideas for how to specialize and will be testing a few different areas out in 2012. Then hopefully I can pick one or two and really start to master them.
  • Ministry: Teaching. Teaching is something I enjoy (and people say I am good at it), so I’ve reworked my job to do almost nothing but teach. My ten hours a week are generally spent teaching or preparing to teach. In addition to my job, I am entering into a new venture as a presenter with a non-profit organization, Call Incorporated. I will be co-leading a two-day workshop next weekend; depending on how that goes, it may blossom into something more.
  • Ministry: Discipleship. However, I know teaching isn’t the end-all of discipleship, and I want to form some more relational discipleship structures in 2012. I want to intentionally be discipled and to disciple others.
  • Ministry: Mission. The church exists for the sake of those outside of the church, but quite honestly, I haven’t participated in much mission over the last few years. I want to get in a better regular rhythm of mission in 2012.

What are you going to focus on in 2012?

Tomorrow I’ll post the things I am giving up to make room for the things I think are most important.

How to Focus

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I ran through a list of questions in my mind to help me decide on what to focus in 2012:

  • Is it pleasurable? Things you spend time on should, if possible, be pleasurable. Yes, there are certain tasks and responsibilities that you can’t get away from, but I bet you would be surprised how flexible some of them can be (I like the book Go, Put Your Strengths to Work for this). And, if they aren’t pleasurable, maybe you can systematize them in such a way as to minimize the time you spend on them.
  • It is productive? Some things are simply frivolous. Certain things that I read or watch on TV ultimately have no value, so there’s no real reason to continue such things (don’t forget, my first question is about pleasure, so it’s not like I’m advocating asceticism here). “Productive” has different meanings in different areas of life, for example:
    • Personal: Does in bring your closer to other people? Does it help you to order your life? Does it build you up?
    • Ministry: Does it help in discipling others?
    • Professional: Does it enhance a critical skill? Is it billable time? Does it expand your business?
  • Does it use your strongest gifts? I’m a big fan of maximizing your strengths, because the research is so compelling. You are more productive trying to build up your strengths than your weaknesses. The best tool I have found for defining your strengths is the StrengthsFinder 2.0.
  • Does it help you accomplish a goal for your life? I’m twenty-eight, and while that is by no means old, I’m closer to thirty than twenty (and closer to forty than fifteen!). I really don’t want to wake up at fifty and ask “what have I done with my life?” There are things I would like to do, and unless I am moving towards them day-by-day, they will never be achieved.

If yes, then:

  • Is it addictive? Things that are potentially addictive are dangerous, so I try to stay away from them.
  • Is it expensive? All things being equal, I’m going to choose things that are less expensive.

If no, then:

  • Is it something I can do with my wife? When it comes down do it, I have lots of interests, and so does my wife. Some of them overlap. When possible, I want to maximize the time I spend with her doing things we both enjoy.

Are there other questions you use to help you focus?

Tomorrow, I’ll reveal what asking these questions has shown me and on what I am focusing my energy in 2012.

Focus in 2012

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A new year is upon us and so I am inclined, like most, to reflect a little bit on the past and make some adjustments moving forward into the future. First, some observations about the past.

Time Creep

My makeup naturally makes me want to learn about anything and everything. I buy lots of books, read a slew of blog posts, website and magazine articles, and am constantly trying to learn more about topics that I find interesting.

Over the past few years I’ve noticed a similar trend with my hobbies as well. I will latch onto something new and add it into my life. About three years ago my wife and I discovered we both really enjoyed baseball and started watching and attending Rangers games regularly. A couple of years ago I bought a 1994 Mazda Miata for a few thousand dollars to tinker on and enjoy driving. Last year I took up cycling. This is in addition to longstanding hobbies of mine: watching college basketball and motorsports on TV, reading good theology books, and cooking.

Professionally, my life shows the same trend. When I decided to reduce my hours at the church to 10 hours a week and start my own business, I had a blank slate before me. While I knew that, generally, I wanted to help people use the web to market their businesses and organizations, I had no particular focus, yet. I have had about fifty different ideas in the last few months about how to focus my business and specialize in a particular area, but I haven’t committed to any one of them. I’m building websites from scratch for some clients, search engine optimization for others, email marketing for another, website redesign and optimization for others, all while being open to whatever comes my way.

Given that my days still only have 24 hours in them, I have noticed over the last few years that as I have added things into my life, I have not taken many things away. I’m not overwhelmed, exactly, but I do feel like I am lacking focus in many areas. I’m flopping around a bit, and I don’t much like it.

So, some adjustments in 2012 are in order.

Focus

I want 2012 to be a year when I focus. The key to succeeding is not in choosing what to focus upon, but in deciding what to cut away.

Tomorrow, I’ll post about how I decided on what to focus on and what to cut away.

In the meantime, how do you decide what to devote yourself to? How do you decide what to cut out?

Help Me Win $500

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My blog post “10 Things Youth Ministry Needs Less” was nominated for the best blog post of 2011 at YouthMin.org! Now, it is up to a vote to narrow down the 32 nominees to the best post of the year, with the winner receiving over $500 worth of goodies in “Books, iTunes gift cards, Starbucks gift cards, an Exclusive Deal for Orange Conference Registration, Web hosting and blog design, and who knows what else!”

Here’s how you can help: Go to the page, and if you think my post is worthy, vote for “Matt Cleaver” in the poll. The first round of voting closes Thursday, so get your vote in today!

Thanks!

I’m Now a Part-Time Youth Minister

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I’ve maintained blog silence for a little while because I knew a change in my job was imminent, but I wasn’t sure how it would turn out. Effective October 1, my status as an employee at my church was reduced from full-time to 10 hours a week, at my request.

Now that I’ve gained a little distance from the decision and had some time to adjust and reflect on it, I decided it was time to make that public. I still have thoughts about youth ministry, and I still want to be a part of the conversation about the future of youth ministry. My decision has nothing to do with my commitment to youth ministry, but it does have to do with my convictions regarding the future of the church. More on that later.

In the meantime, I’ve started my own business as a freelance small business website developer and designer. I have a handful of clients so far for whom I’m building websites and helping with their Facebook presence and their email marketing. We’ll see where that goes, but in the short-term it has kept me busy.

So that’s where I’m at. More later on the reasons behind the decision and what I think it means moving forward.