Tag: mission

What Exactly Are Students Walking Away From?

We’ve all read the numbers.  We all get a little panicky when we think about how many students are walking away from church.  If the numbers are true, we’re facing a very serious problem because what we’re doing as parents and youth workers is not working.  We must grapple with one very difficult question:  why are students walking away from church after high school?

Maybe I’m over simplifying the issue but I think the answer is very easy.  Students aren’t walking away from church.  It’s not that the statistics are wrong.  Barna and Fuller have their numbers right.  That isn’t it at all.  And yet, I believe that students aren’t walking away from church.  They never belonged to church in the first place.  They’re walking away from something else entirely.

 

WHAT IS CHURCH?                                    

What is church?  That’s a really good question.  Personally, I think it’s best to define church by what I read in the New Testament.  Church is the Jesus community.  It’s a people bonded together by the presence, love and mission of Jesus.

The church is marked by the presence of Jesus.  There is something to be experienced in the church that cannot be experienced anywhere else.  The experience is different because Jesus is Immanuel.  The presence of God is with us.  Lives are being transformed.  Light is shining into darkness.  Life is breathed into death.  Hope is breaking forth in the midst of tragedy.

The church is defined by love.  The Jesus community shocked the world and overthrew an empire with love.  The Jesus community transformed the world in a few short centuries through inclusion, radical service, and care for the oppressed and forgotten.  Where the Gospel is preached and lived the world can never be the same.

The church is defined by the mission of Jesus.  The church is inviting people to follow Jesus.  It’s not asking people to join a club.  It’s not trying to fill seats in a building.  It’s inviting people to follow the most compelling person who ever walked the soil of this planet.  The church is inviting people into the restoration of the world through the Gospel of Jesus.

 

WHAT ARE STUDENTS WALKING AWAY FROM?

This is the church.  Students aren’t walking away from this.  People don’t walk away from the church.  It is far too magnetic.  The true church—defined by the presence, love and mission of Jesus is incredibly compelling.  It transforms lives, communities, cultures and nations.   Our students are walking away from something else entirely.

Maybe the problem is not that students are walking away.  In fact, they might be doing us a favor by pointing out the real problem.  Perhaps the problem is that we aren’t being the church.  Maybe we as parents, pastors and church leaders need to look in the mirror and ask ourselves some hard questions.  What exactly are we doing anyway?

 

Influencing Boys Toward Greatness | Purpose

Many of the young men I’ve talked with lately are all feeling the same crippling emotion:  aimlessness.  I believe that most of this generation’s men are lost.  They don’t know what their purpose is in life.

Great men know what they are about.  They know why God put them on this earth.  They have a sense of destiny and direction.

Today, I’m finishing up a week of blogging about raising great boys.  If we want boys to lead significant lives, they must know their purpose —they must know what God made they to do.  So, how in the world do you help a boy figure this out?  You must uncover it with him.

BOYS NEED TO BE TOLD

When God created Adam, He placed him in the garden, told him who he was and why he was on the earth.  He gave him a name and a job.  I’m almost certain that without being told, Adam would have been thoroughly confused about what he was supposed to be doing.  “I didn’t know what else to do so I invented the tropical fish tank…”

Like Adam, boys need to be told who they are and why they are here.  It’s just not in our nature as humans to figure this stuff out on our own.  As a parent or youth worker, it’s your privilege and duty to become a student of the boys under your care and to help them uncover their wiring, gifting, passions and ultimately, purpose.

EXPERIMENT

No one expects you to be able to diagnose a boy’s life passion and purpose overnight.  These things are like science experiments.  You develop a hypothesis and you test it.  Most of the time your hypothesis is wrong but it moves you one step closer to the truth.

As boys progress through life, let them experiment.  Push them to try all kinds of stuff.  Somewhere along the line a boy will experience something that awakens something buried deep within him.  He will light up.  Take note:  these experiences probably have something to do with his wiring, gifting, passions and purpose.

MISSION

As a follower of Jesus, I believe that life is most meaningful when our passions and gifts are aligned with what God is doing in the world.  It’s crucially important that we as parents and youth workers help our boys understand the compelling and life altering mission of the Church.  It’s vital that our boys understand what God’s mission is in the world and how we can join in.

When a man finds himself at the intersection of his passions, purpose and the mission of God in the world, he will find life and meaning—and more of it than he ever imagined was possible.

EXIT THE MATRIX

We need to be honest for a second, rich and meaningful lives are not easy to come by.  In fact, it is hard to live a life of purpose.  There is always immense opposition within and outside of us, pushing us to accept mediocrity.  This is part of the reason that boys find video games so compelling.  Without a whole lot of actual work, he can be the hero.  He can create, battle evil, save the girl, or even conquer the world.

The temptation so many young men fall into is retreating into false worlds where they can live rich and meaningful lives of purpose while accepting mediocre or worse in their real lives.

Look, I love video games.  I really do.  However, far too many guys are OBSESSED with video games—playing them for hours and hours every day.  Meanwhile the real world is suffering.  The church needs young men who will run after Jesus and partner with him in bringing heaven to earth every day.

If you are a parent, build boundaries around video games and help your son uncover who God created him to be and what he is calling him to do in this world.  If you are a youth worker, model boundaries with video games.  If you are a young man, unplug and dive into the Kingdom.  There is so much work to be done.  There is far too much injustice on this broken planet for us to keep shooting each other over and over on the same Black Ops maps night after night.

We need to help boys build boundaries around video games so that they don’t overtake and ultimately replace their lives.  Like most everything, video games can be used in a healthy way but it is difficult, especially for a young teenage boy, to find the balance.

 

 

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?