Month: June 2013

The 5 Best Books so far This Year

It’s June.  Somehow we’re halfway through 2013.  It’s time to talk about the books that have most influenced me so far this year.  In no particular order, here they are…

 

Love Does

 

Bob Goff is an amazing man.  There aren’t many books that can make me laugh, get angry and cry—all within the span of 20 pages!  The first half of this book was so powerful that I could barely stay seated.

I got to see Bob speak at the Orange conference this spring and he is the real deal.  Rarely have I see someone so full of joy and courageous optimism.  I guess there is more than a little Jesus going on inside that guy.

 

BTBFCover

This book didn’t make me laugh at all.  It broke my heart.  If you haven’t read this book, you really should.  The author lived in the slums of Mumbai for 3 years and this book is the story of what she witnessed.

The best word for it is “brutal”.  However it is a story that needs to be told.  There is a cost to development and the cost is usually people who are left in the dust of rapid advancement.

 

start-book

Jon Acuff’s first book was hilarious.  When I read his second book I thought, “This is pretty good.”  While reading Start as fast as I could I kept thinking, “THIS BOOK IS AWESOME!”  If you are stuck, bored, or going through something difficult you should read this book.  This book is the reason I went from thinking I should start blogging to actually starting to blog.  It’s pure motivation.

If you’ve been living in a cave for the last few years, here’s Jon’s blog.

platform

Speaking of blogging—a few months ago I didn’t know jack about blogging and I’ve never been very tech savvy.  Michael Hyatt’s book changed all that for me.  This book is the best “how to manual” for anything that I’ve ever seen.  There’s great stuff in here about building a platform.  If you already know quite a bit about blogging, e-business and publishing you’ll pick up a few helpful pointers.  If you don’t know anything you better get ready for the fire hose treatment.  Platform is a very well written book that I simply loved to read.  If you aren’t following Hyatt’s blog you should be.

Contagious

If you deal with ideas or the spread of information in any way this book is a must read.  The central question of the book is what causes something to go viral?  And, we’re not talking disease.  We’re talking about ideas, You Tube videos, products, restaurants, and blog posts.  It’s a fascination read and the author does a good job of describing how anyone in any field can employ his theories to achieve virality.

 

Honorable Mention

DUCK_C14

Hey Jack!  I know it’s not very intellectual but I just can’t get enough of this show or this family.  They are too funny!  Besides, there are too many odd similarities between the Robertsons and my family…

What books have impacted you so far this year?

Bouncing Back from Betrayal

Some of my most painful moments have come in youth ministry.  I’ve seen terrible things:   eating disorders, abuse, and every sort of family dysfunction out there.  But if I’m honest, nothing hurts quite as bad as betrayal.  A knife in the back from someone you trust is the sort of thing that many people never recover from.

When volunteers, parents or pastors turn against you it’s devastating.  For many who have left the ranks of student ministry, betrayal is what drove them over the edge.  So what do you do when someone close to you—someone you love and trust, throws you under the bus?  Based on some painful experiences and how I managed to pick up the pieces afterward, I have a few thoughts.

1.       Vent

Anger is like poison.  Keeping it inside will corrupt you.  I’ve been fortunate to have close friends with whom I can cry, freak out, and throw things.  I don’t freak out often but when I do I go hard in the paint.

To be in ministry, you simply must have a place to vent.  However, there have been times in which I created more trouble for myself by venting to the wrong people.  If venting is aimed at revenge or winning people to your side of the conflict then you should be careful.

2.       Forgive

This isn’t about the person who betrayed you.  This is about your heart.  You cannot control what people do and say but you can control how you react.  The danger here is bitterness.  Unfortunately, I know many current and former youth pastors who choose to live in an angry darkness.  Somewhere along the way they were betrayed and they never forgave.  Bitter people multiple bitterness in the people around them.  This is destructive and hinders effective ministry.

3.       Protect Yourself

Some people are toxic.  By that I mean that they are emotionally unsafe.  Sadly, I’m sure you know what I’m talking about.  Jesus calls us to repeatedly forgive but He did not call us to repeatedly trust.  There is a huge difference.  In some cases you will need to set up boundaries to protect yourself.  But, don’t you dare pawn that toxic volunteer off on another ministry!

4.       Look Around

Sometimes when you are betrayed it isn’t necessarily you who is attacked but rather your ministry.  You’re too serious, too fun, too unorganized, too seeker, too loud, too…whatever.  This happened to me recently and while the accusations hurt I couldn’t help but look around at all the amazing things that happen in our ministry on a weekly basis.  We are pointing students to Jesus and connecting them with adult mentors who love them.  How dare us! When accused, look around and remember how valuable your work is.

5.       You’re in Good Company

Here’s the thing, we come from a long line of Jesus followers who have been betrayed in every way possible.  We shouldn’t be surprised by opposition.  We have an enemy who hates the work of the Gospel.  Be proud.

6.       Jesus

I have to confess that I forget this one far too often.  I vent to close friends and sometimes anyone who will listen and then I forget to take my pain to Jesus.  I’m talking about the Jesus who said, “Come to me all you who are weary and burdened.”  I’m talking about the Jesus who was betrayed by one of his own disciples—betrayed with a kiss.  So low!

The point is if you’re going to survive the pain and thrive again Jesus is the answer.  Run to Him and rest.  He is the One who rebuilds and restores.  He’s the King of Comeback.  He did come back from the dead after all.  Just sayin.

 

Be Spiritual…Have Fun!

I happen to be an Orange kind of guy.  Our church has a close relationship with the brilliant people over at reThink.  Yesterday, Jon Grunden wrote a great piece for the Lead Small Blog on the importance of fun.

Here’s a clip:

When my students start to wander away from God, or it just doesn’t seem like anybody is paying attention anymore, I have the tendency to run to the to-do list.  The to-do list is safe and it makes me feel spiritual, but most often it just serves to remind me how far I am from where I want to be with my guys.  It’s counterintuitive, but sometimes the most spiritual thing I can do with my guys is have fun. 

When it comes to student ministry, Jon is a genius and he’s a a lot of fun to work with.  He’s taught me at least 73% of what I know about student ministry.  Do yourself a favor and check out the rest of his post.

 

Funniest Video of the Year

Never Say No to Strawberry Sam.  This was our most popular LifeLine video of the year.  In my humble opinion it’s HILARIOUS.

A little context:

  • The video won’t make any sense unless you’ve seen the Panda Cheese commericals.  You can check them out here.
  • The Strawberry Sam costume was discovered in the bowels of the Zondervan Publishing Warehouse and gifted to us.  Best gift ever.

 

Never say no to Sam from LifeLine Student Ministries on Vimeo.

Guest Post: Come Cry with Me

I’m a crier.  If something emotional is going on you will find me sniffling and wiping my eyes and trying to pull myself together.  Emotional things might be – worship, testimonies, baptisms,  watching a touching moment between a leader and a student, and those pet food commercials where a guy comes home from the war and his dog is really happy to see him.

I also cry by proxy.  If you’re crying, I’m crying.  I wasn’t always like this.  Before I started working in student ministry I was much tougher.   Maybe I would get a little misty when Bambi’s mom died, or tear up when George figured things out in It’s a Wonderful Life, but that about covered it.

Working in student ministry changed all that for me.  I found very quickly that if I wanted to connect with kids and leaders, I had to be vulnerable and raw with them.  This kind of openness carries a price tag.  Suddenly the pain that a student feels over a rift with a friend becomes my pain, the struggle a leader was having connecting with her small group becomes my struggle.  At this point, it’s widely known that if you’re sad, you just need to find me and we will be sad together.

Often we’re tempted to hit students with truth when they are emotionally vulnerable but sometimes the greatest gift we can give is crying with them.  Empathy opens the way to discipleship.

The good news is that I get to experience the opposite end of the spectrum as well.  When my people have something to celebrate they seek me out and we have one big slamming happy fest.   It’s just important to understand that you can’t have one without the other.    If you’re the guy who loves to celebrate with everyone but is suspiciously absent when students need to talk through some tough issues, you’re also the guy that no one really trusts.  Wading into messy issues requires you to get…well, messy.

A few nights ago was our last high school meeting of the season.  A group of girls I’ve been close with since 6th grade graduated and won’t be back next year.  We cried.  A lot.  We stopped crying, took some pictures and then we cried some more.  Photoshop will take care of all that smeared mascara right?  Sure, I could have saved myself some grief if I had kept them at arms length, but I would have missed out on some of my favorite moments in ministry.  It’s a fair trade.

Christina Thelen has been involved in student ministry for 7 years.  That’s 49 dog years.  For the last 4 years she has served as the Department Coordinator of LifeLine–the student ministry of Ada Bible Church.

How Realism Can Damage Faith

Have you ever had a genius idea that went south? I’m sort of notorious for this sort of thing.  In my previous student ministry we were very active in the realm of community service.  We were always looking for ways to jump in and do something positive in our city.  We called our service ministry “splagXnon.”  It’s Greek for compassion—the kind of compassion that comes from your guts.  Well, at least I think that’s what it means.  It’s been about 10 years since Biblical Greek 201.  [Side note…yes, I was that guy who used random Greek words to name everything from bible study groups to Dixie cups.]

So, I got this idea that we would clean up the town. OK, that’s kind of a lie.  The truth is I was really annoyed by how much trash was in the vacant lot across the street from my apartment complex.  I kept thinking to myself, “Someone should clean that crap up!”  Then I came up with the brilliant scheme that my students should clean it up.

So, at our next service project I split the group into teams and told them that whoever came back with the most trash would win something awesome.  And by the way, there was a ton of trash in a specific vacant lot on Snow Rd.  Whoever cleaned up that lot would probably win the competition.  Oh, and it just happened to be across the street from my apartment.  Total coincidence.

Now, in my head I was imagining groups coming back with only two or three garbage bags of trash.  I mean, there was a ton of trash in that vacant lot but only of the paper and plastic variety.  What actually happened blew my mind.  My students came back with couches, tires, discarded recliners, ginormous rolls of carpet, paint cans for days and a quarter million trash bags.  I’m not exactly sure what happened but I’m pretty sure the winning team broke into a landfill.

In the end there was a small mountain of trash decorating the lawn of our church.  Why the lawn?  Well, I may have overlooked the need for extra dumpsters.  I’m the guy who comes up with the big idea and forgets to cover the critical details—like dumpsters for example.  Needless to say, my senior pastor was not a fan of my “splagXnon”.  It probably wouldn’t have been that bad but the “splagXnon” lawn ornament stayed for over a week.  You can always count on trash removal guys to ruin your relationship with your senior pastor.  Psh…jerks.  Worst of all, the students didn’t clean up a single thing in the vacant lot.

Basically, nothing good came out of that experience, well other than that it helped to reshape how I think about students and serving.  I learned that students think big. Not only that but they hope.  Unlike most adults, students still believe they can do something huge–like clean up an entire town or change the world.  In other words, our students still believe that the Gospel can do what Jesus said it could.

There are times when we as youth pastors and volunteers are guilty of forcing our students into a box–the box of what we’re comfortable with.  At some point we stop believing that God really can use us to change the world.  And then we somehow think we’re doing kids a favor by reigning in their passion.  What if, when we do this, we are fighting against what God is doing in that student’s heart?  I wish I had a DeLorean so I could go back in time and change every, “That’s a cool idea Johnny but it will never actually work” into, “That’s a cool idea Johnny.  Go for it!  I’ll be right behind you cheering you on.”

And yet, with all that said, couldn’t they at least have cleaned up that vacant lot across my apartment?