The death of the American Dream happens when the dream no longer exists outside the walls of your bubble -Lars
It's not often that I quote myself. But today seemed like the right time to do it.
I live in a neighborhood where we get really comfortable. The schools are great. The community is great and life is pretty easy. Tonight just before dinner one of my sons teachers stopped by to drop off some things for him since she knew he wasn't going to be at school tomorrow.
Yesterday my wife flew in a float plane to a remote village and delivered medicine to people who have never been to school. She had lunch with them which was fresh coconut milk and smoked Piranha. She's 10,000 miles away.
Danielle sent me that message telling me about her day in Papua New Guinea visiting her sister I thought to myself as I read it that she is quite possibly the only mom in this neighborhood that has ever experienced that story. She's 10,000 miles away.
So where do our dreams die? I love to travel and I have a huge heart for people in great need. But I think my dreams die every day when I walk to work. For me I walk across a simple street to my office. It doesn't take any sort of challenge for me. I'm living a life that is "safe" and "comfortable" but maybe isn't what Jesus meant when he said "come follow me."
America is not 10,000 miles away. It is right here. We have expectations about what we think life should look like here. You may live in Ohio, Washington, New York or Arkansas but the same thing is expected in all those places. We have an expectancy here of what life should look like.
I tried to explain to my kids today when we looked at Mom's photos that there are places in the world where people don't wear clothes. Where they don't have the same schools situations or the freedoms. Where having enough to eat is really a big deal. They just didn't understand because they've never experienced it.
So here's my question today. What are your dreams? What do you wish you could do? What are things that you would love to check out?
I'd love to kick around ideas. Do you know yourself well enough to be able to pick the perfect place for you to go that would challenge you? I'd love to help put you in a place that would really encourage growth.
Mom's a special message to you. I love my wife and I love our kids. Danielle has never been away from them longer than 7 days. This time she's 10,000 miles away and living something amazing. It's great for her. My encouragement to you is to talk to your husbands and work out what it means for you to live your dreams. Yes it's really hard for me to be working full-time and with my kids for 2 weeks but I also think it's the best thing ever for my wife and ultimately for our family. She's going to come home with such a different perspective and thoughts about what we should value.
What are your dreams? How can I help you make them reality? I don't say that in any sort of jest. For whatever reason God has given me an amazing network of people in my life. I'd love to help you dream bigger than you can right now.
Recently I've been thinking a lot about how I interact with students and the depth of our conversations. I've had a few students who have shared some pretty tough things with me and I've been a part of some conversations with parents about consequences.
The more I've thought about these situations the more I've wondered what it must feel like as a student to approach someone and share a struggle. It's got to be so hard to admit things especially because in so many cases the consequences seem the same if you admit it or get caught.
Here's my goal the next month. To make sure students who come to me and want to talk feel supported and encouraged in their honesty.
I want to make sure that anyone who comes and admits something knows that I will care for them and do everything in my power and the churches power to help them. I want them to feel cared for in their struggle and not rejected because of it.
I'm not calling anyone out particularly in this post but myself. But maybe it's something we all need to think about in the Youth Ministry world. How good of a job have we done creating a safe haven for students to talk about struggles, fears, doubts and pain?
Is. 1:18 “Come now, let us reason together,” says the LORD. “Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red as crimson, they shall be like wool."
I'm wondering how much teenagers really believe us when we try to teach them this verse. Consequences seem to have such longer tails these days as things end up on the internet and are stuck there forever. It's almost as if the "sin" gets stapled to their chest or "profile" like a scarlet letter that they don't know how to get rid of.
What extra steps do we need to take now to help them truly believe they are "white as snow" in the LORD's eyes. Especially when many of those "sins" will follow them around online for quite a while. Information that gets put up in places on the internet is so hard to get rid of. How does a student who makes a mistake where pictures are taken deal with being told they are "white as snow" when those pictures continue to follow them.
Bottom line we have to show so much grace and mercy and care for students who both come to us and admit sin and those who end up getting caught in sin. But, I believe that we need to do a better job of making sure those who come to us and admit things are taken care of.
It's time to brag a little bit. My wife has a pretty amazing family. Her sister Kirsten and brother-in-law Mark are part of an organization called Samaritan Aviation. When Mark was in college he and his friend Gary began talking about what it would look like to go to Papua New Guinea where Gary was born and start a missions organization. Their vision never wavered although it did take quite a while for it to come into reality. In the meantime the last 13+ years Mark and Gary have been creating a support network, raising funds, doing quite a few mercy flights in the US, engaging in missions work in Mexico and learning all about how to fly and maintain float planes.
Mark and Gary have made multiple trips to Papua New Guinea and have built a pretty amazing infrastructure there. Mark and Kirsten left to be the "on the ground" missionaries last January. Gary and his wife LeAnn are spearheading support raising right now in Colorado and also continuing with Samaritans work in the United States. They spent a big chunk of time in PNG last summer and will be relocating soon.
Much of the work that Samaritan Aviation is doing in Papua New Guinea at this time is providing emergency medical evacuations from remote villages. Since they have the only float plane in that area of PNG they have a big opportunity to help. They plane is flown to locations where it would usually take 4+ days for people to canoe out to get medical care. They are able to land on remote rivers and airlift people to hospitals.
I think The Palm family and the Bustin family are pretty amazing for following the LORD, his dreams and utilizing their gifts and passions to serve.
So back to the title of this post. On Friday my wife Danielle, her mother and brother flew to Papua New Guinea to visit her sister and family for two weeks. It took about 33 hours for Danielle and 5 take-offs and landings for her to get from Dallas to PNG. She arrived last night at 3:45am tired but so excited. I'm so excited for her, proud of her and again amazed at her family for the commitment they have made to serve the LORD.
Last year our youth staff team decided to try something new in presenting the Nativity Story to our students. Every year we do a month long event we call "Club Christmas" where we try to change things up and do something they don't expect. This video got a bunch of hits last year but I'm assuming not all of you saw it so I'm putting it out there again.
Here's ours.
For those of you who aren't quite so hip to pop cultures you might want to click this link and watch the video we were spoofing.
I was with a group of youth workers today in Dallas at something we called the "Unconference" which was basically just a time of prayer, dreaming and talking about Youth Ministry without any paid experts in the room or any venders present. The goal was to engage the youth ministry community of Dallas (and a few people who flew in) to see what topics we needed to talk about and just jump in. The format was to allow for 4 one hour long conversations about topics that were brought by the participants.
I was fully prepared for us to talk about Dallas and dreams for youth ministry and had my standard "If we could dream big and money was not an option what would we do" idea when someone flipped it around on me. In one of our discussions my friend Mark Riddle encouraged me to think about what it would look like to give students the freedom to dream. All of the sudden a switch flipped in me when I realized that I hadn't asked any students what their dreams were in a long time. It would change my role to not be in charge but to instead be put in the position of helping to empower them dream bigger and make their dreams happen.
David Grant the Youth Pastor at Irving Bible Church told a story about how some girls in his group were given the freedom to dream big and they decided one day that they were going to make a 700+ sandwiches to give away to a homeless ministry. One of the girls called him and asked for his credit card so that they could go and buy the supplies to get this project going. He gladly handed over his card and supported something that involved a bunch of students showing up at his church one afternoon to make sandwiches.
Are you willing to do hand an 11th grade girl your credit card?
We talk all the time about discipling and growing students closer to the LORD but I don't always feel like I do a very good job of providing them resources to take some of their dreams and make a reality.
So here's my challenge today. Think about what it would look like to both challenge your students to dream bigger and how you can provide them the resources to make those dreams happen. Maybe you are like me and haven't created a culture of that in your youth ministry. Maybe your first step is to give them opportunities to dream and share those dreams. If that's the case start there.
I think teenagers are pretty amazing and have great ideas. Sometimes they have crazy ideas but those are often fun too. Our job needs to be helping to encourage and to release dreams.
We are often the keepers of the keys to make dreams a reality. Are you wiling to make things messy in order to lovingly make those dreams come real?
Christian Endeavor and organization with the longest roots in youth ministry that I know of has taken on this challenge at the core of who they are. Tim Eldred recently published a book called the "4 Hour Youth Ministry: Escaping the trap of full-time youth ministry" which I think shoves us in this direction. He is passionate about releasing students to be leaders and to engage them in real activities with meaning not just entertain them with Youth Ministry Games. I've had some opportunity to sit with Tim and have been very impressed with the team he's put together, the complete overhaul of that organization and the focus that they have to empower students. I'm really looking forward to seeing what they are going to lead us to in the future and think you should check out some links and get to know them.
I've been thinking a lot about Mult-Generational Ministry lately. A couple of years ago my church decided that one of our values was to be an "Intergenerational Blessing" to each other. We have had a difficult time figuring out what this looks like for our youth department. We're a "community" church so there are many families involved and our Youth Staff team does a really good job of interacting with them. We take a lot of parents on our summer trips and missions events. But, I wasn't feeling like that was taking it far enough to really be "Intergenerational" it's easy to do "family" stuff but to reach out to the "whole" church is a different thing. I want us to be a youth ministry that values young adults, senior adults, parents, single people. I want us to expose our students to the "Church" and the "Church" to our students. I want the older congregants to know that we care about them and need their history, wisdom and faith to be shown to our students.
Last year we took a group of HS students to Israel and while we were there my High School Director Kevin and I talked a lot about what it would look like to have more than just students with us. Sitting next to the stream where Gideon's army was shrank we made the decision this year to open the trip up to anyone in our church that wanted to come with us. At the time we had a conversation about the difficulties of what this would look like. We decided though that we would go ahead with this idea and deal with any potential issues when they came up.
Is it going to be messy? Yes. Is it going to be amazing? Yes. We're so stoked to already have 7th graders and 70 year olds coming with us. We've got full families, young adults and individual students. We've told everyone that this will still be a "youth" trip so we will have more active type of things to do but we're going to try and cater to everyone.
I'm really looking forward to what the training for this trip will look like. We want everyone on the trip feel a part of the team and not give any more leadership, authority or deference to any particular age group. We have one student coming who was with us last year and we've already told him we will expect him to do some teaching at Holy sites. I'm really looking forward to seeing what it will look like to have a senior in high school be the expert teaching older adults.
So much of this Israel trip involves being on a bus with our group. I can't even begin to imagine what it's going to look like next summer to have that diverse of a group on the same bus.
What Multi generational things do you do in your Youth Ministry and what works for you? If you could dream big what would it look like?
Yesterday I wrote a post that generated a lot of traffic. Not everyone was happy with it but it was something I really felt needed to be said. I was angry about how a group of pastors decided to boycott a bus company because the busses had a slogan on the side that they disagreed with.
I spent a lot of time today reflecting on the comments that were made about my post. There were a couple of people that commented who were self proclaimed atheists or non-believers. I loved what they had to say. But, it also shook me up because I realized that most of them had never had a pastor free them up to admit their doubts and concerns. And most of them had never had someone like me just sit and dialogue with them about spiritual things.
Here's the truth: I am tired of talking to Christians.
Let me explain what I mean by that statement: I'm a huge fan of people who believe in Jesus and are living a life following him. I get to be with a bunch of those people every day at my church. There are some amazing families and students who are walking with Jesus. I also work with an incredible church staff that love Jesus too and are reaching out to the world. But, there is a difference between claiming to be a "Christian" and following Jesus with your life.
My friend Adam wrote a blog post a few weeks back that rocked me pretty good. He is a youthworker and a dad and wrote a blog to his church telling them essentially to go and reach the lost and not to worry about his kids because they were growing up in a home with parents who loved Jesus.
So here's my challenge: We are entering a Holiday season that is all about Jesus and his birth. But, we have to be really careful in the Church that we don't make make this season about us. Our Christmas programs and events are often inward focused. So, how can we look outside the walls of our churches and ourselves? I am a fan of reaching out to Christmas/Easter Christians and want them to know that we'd love to engage with them the rest of the year. But, I'm less interested in them because they've at least heard the good news. I am mostly hoping we can engage people who are willing to admit they don't believe.
I want to be fully honest here and say I know that I'm a failure in this area. I'm really good at talking to Christians. I'm great at propping myself up with my education, degrees and knowledge. But, I'm just not as comfortable sitting next to someone on a bench and asking them what they believe and why. Have I become that which frustrates me? Probably. But, I hope that these blogs will force me out of easy simple world. I'm thankful that people who don't believe what I believe read this blog. I want us to stay in dialogue.
I ended yesterdays blog with this statement:
So if you don't need God I'd love to talk to you. Not to "convert" you or "change" you but to just have a conversation and to share some of my honest thoughts about all of this. If you want to get on a bus and go for a ride I'm cool with that.
Here's a challenge to the Bus company with those signs. Let's actually fill a bus with people and have a dialogue about faith. Let's provide a place where those who fully doubt all of this to be free to express those doubts. I hope that I can be a person that they will want to talk to. I love Jesus but I also realize that many of them don't and I'm ok with that. But, let's talk. I promise to listen and to think and to engage. It's not my goal to covert you. But, I do want to listen.
I saw a news report tonight that a group called the Dallas-Fort Worth Coalition of Reason is sponsoring an advertising campaign where they are putting signs on busses that say "Millions of Americans are Good without God"
The reporter was interviewing a Fort Worth Pastor who said that he encouraging Christians to boycott the bus line during the holiday season. I did some research after this and found this quote.
“We are offended byy the anti-God signs and we are very disappointed that The-T Transportation Authority would approve this, especially during the season when Christians around the world are celebrating the birth of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ,” said Bishop B.E. George, with Ministers Against Crime.
Stay with me on this but I'm a pastor and I'm not offended by the quote at all. In fact, I am encouraged because I believe that millions of Americans probably think it's absolutely true and I'm glad that they are willing to admit it especially here in the Bible Belt where "Christianity" is linked to culture, the Republican party and the Country Club.
I just don't know how boycotting people who don't believe in God is something that we are taught anywhere in scripture.
I work in a mainline denomination that has really struggled in the past 5 years. We've lost a couple million members and those who have stayed are struggling with some very tough issues about Biblical interpretation, the role of Jesus and the authority of scripture.
I don't believe that rejecting people who don't believe in God is the right way to go about loving people.
Back in September the Christian community was slammed pretty good by the Pew research study that showed that "Atheists, Agnostics, Mormons and Jews actually scored higher on a religious knowledge survey" I don't remember the Christian community being so pissed at that survey. We were embarrassed and we should have been but we didn't point a lot of fingers at ourselves. The spiritual maturity of many Christians in the United States now is not something that I think the "millions of Americans who are Good without God" are looking at and feeling compelled to follow.
So my take on this. Let's ride the bus. I'd be way more comfortable getting on the bus with people who don't believe in God and ask questions to find out why they feel that way. I'd like to ask questions about what that statement means. I'm guessing that for many of them that what they are not rejecting God so much as they are rejecting the Churches in the United States. And if we want to boycott anything as Christians let's boycott the churches that are teaching an incredibly skewed version of God that honestly I don't need either.
So if you don't need God I'd love to talk to you. Not to "convert" you or "change" you but to just have a conversation and to share some honest conversation about all of this. If you want to get on a bus and go for a ride I'm cool with that.
