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Have had lots of ministry related thoughts running through my mind in the past 24 hours or so. No answers, just observations and ponderings:
- Should Christian businesses be more “christian” or “business”? Why do business decisions often seem so un-christian? Is it fair to expect a christian owned business to act like a ministry….obviously there is a difference, but there are also similarities.
- Got a phone call from my friend Gary Hunt, a junior high Pastor in Florida who just celebrated his 60th birthday! Can I still be an effective junior high pastor at that age? He certainly is, but surely he is an exceptional case.
- Highly relational youth ministries don’t seem to grow much and growing youth ministries don’t seem to be highly relational….do the systems and structures that help contribute to, and organize,growth also serve to hinder relational approaches? Of course, this all depends on how one defines “relational”.
- When and how did the term “fundamentalist” get hi-jacked? It hasn’t always had such strongly negative connotations.
- The verdict is in: Francis Chan is my favorite author and speaker. He is both simple and brilliant.
- We had 10 students at our Saturday night (Halloween) JH service….it is usually our largest gathering. We knew we would take a hit, but nobody suspected something like that.
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Thadd, because our Saturday night Junior High program usually has several hundred students in attendance, it was suprising to see that # drop to 10 on Halloween. Having 10 students at church is still a wonderful thing, it was just very interesting to see such a big “hit” in attendance.
Good thoughts, questions, observations as always.
I also have enjoyed reading/hearing – and being challenged by – Francis Chan recently.
Pondering the “highly relational” with you – yeah, it prolly means different things to different people. Beyond the definition, the question that comes to my mind is ‘highly relational with whom?’ When I was leading our youth ministry one of the goals was that each student had three adults involved enough in their lives that they would feel comfortable sharing a joy, concern, or challenging situation with them. This obviously required having a pretty strong volunteer presence – and I can’t say we were ever successful in reaching that goal…..but that is part of what we strived for. (Beyond being guides along their journey of faith in Christ, etc.) So, our ministry was going to have a choke point based on volunteers as we strove (is strove a word?) for this goal….amd certainly may have limited our numerical growth.
As always – thanks for challenging my thinking with great questions!