In our ministry, we do a pretty good job of planning ahead for our weekend program. We know what we’re teaching several weeks out and we make it a goal to have the entire weekend ready to go by Thursday afternoon. There are very few downsides. Except when I decide I don’t like the lesson I prepared. My lesson needs to be turned in by Thursday morning each week so it can be printed in our little bulletin/handout thingys. But what happens every now and then, as it did today, is that when I go to look at it a couple of days later, I decide I want to change it. I can tweak some stuff, but the basic outline has to stay the same because it’s already in print.

So, needless to say this weekend’s lesson is one of those. It’s okay, but I’ve thought of some better scripture references, a more creative outline etc. I’m sure it will be fine (partly because I’m convinced most junior high kids can’t remember the lesson 30 minutes later…), but this weekend is one of the rare times I wish we didn’t plan so far ahead so I could be more flexible.

It’s been a pretty good day.
I’ve been saving up for a new t.v. for a couple of years. Saving and convincing my wife that we actually need one. Our television turns off randomly, jumps in and out of color…it’s been faithful but it’s old and ready for retirement.

So today, I bought a new one. I Hunted around for a good ‘black friday’ deal and ended up buying a 50″ plasma that my father-in-law helped me mount to the wall. It took us the entire day to get the thing all set up, but right now I’m enjoying the fruit of our labor. I’m in a dark room with a warm fire watching ‘Cars’ with my son.

Funny…even though I’ve been saving and put this money aside, my wife insists that I just bought my Christmas and birthday present! She’s got a point.

-Friends…old, new, best, casual
-Family…rachel, kayla, cole, john, sheila, matt, kathy, rhonda, james and the rest
-Freedom…of religion, of speech, to be who you want to be
-Faith…especially that God allows it to be more of a journey than a destination
-Food…spaghetti, chicken, italian, chic-fil-a
-Football…playing it, watching it, cheering for the broncos
-Friday nights…softball, fun with the family, staying up late
-Fun…laughing, playing, hanging out, surfing
-Fulfillment…as described in john 10:10

I’m looking for your thoughts on this.

Do most churches really think that younger, cooler, hipper people make better junior high youth workers or do we just think they think that?

For years, I’ve taught others and have been taught myself that we need to de-bunk the belief that younger = better. Is it really a commonly held belief? I’m beginning to wonder.

This last weekend at Y.S. during my junior high ministry workshop I began talking about how young most junior high youth workers are….how parents and churches think younger is better…etc. As I spoke my eyes quickly glanced across the 300+ people in the room and I noticed something: There weren’t a ton of super young people sitting in the seats. My hunch is that the average age of people in the workshop was probably early 30′s. Now, early 30′s is certainly young in my book, but hardly the ‘stereotype’ that so many of us have been trying to break!

Talk to me….

I was at Y.S. over the weekend so I don’t have all the information to plug into my normal weekend wrap up template. I talked to some of the people on my team and they said it was a really good, but busy weekend.

Some of the things that helped make the weekend busier than normal:

- we had a ministry fair as part of the weekend program
- we had a special offering as part of our building campaign kick-off
- we had our monthly student leadership program after Saturday night’s program
- we had our monthly ‘Route 101′ (new believers/baptism/what’s church all about) class on Sunday

Kayla, my 7th grade daughter, had a pretty busy weekend herself:
- She participated in a 30-hour Famine program hosted at a friend’s church Fri-Sat.
- She went to student leadership on Saturday night
- She went to the junior high program on Sunday morning
- She went to the Route 101 class on Sunday afternoon
- She went to a meeting for a missions trip to Kenya on Sunday afternoon (yikes, my little girl is going to Kenya without mom and dad!).

All in all….not a bad weekend for me to be away!

Yesterday, there was an unexpected delivery to the convention. Mark Ostreicher and I been working together to write a series of books for middle school students. The series is called ‘The Middle School Survival Series’ and the first two books are ‘My Faith’ and ‘My Family’. They are short, easy to read books made up of 75 little ‘chapters’. The great thing is that students don’t need to read the book in any particular order…they can thumb through it and read a chapter that sounds interesting at the time.

Anyway, they weren’t supposed to be released until January, but they came in early and a couple of cases actually got dropped off here at the convention. I’ve been excited about these because I really do think they are pretty good books to put in the hands of students. I spent about an hour reading through them last night because I hadn’t looked over the manuscripts sent we finalized them several months ago. I know I helped write these things but they are pretty dang good! I think we really managed to hit the mark in creating something that parents and youth workers can put in the hands of their kids that kids may actually read!

The delivery was, in a neat way, a God-moment for the two of us because earlier that morning we had met for about an hour to finalize the topics and writing assignments for the next two books in the series. To be honest, I think we were both feeling a bit overwhelmed and uncertain as we prepared to head into the next writing season. A few hours later, the first two books arrived and we were reminded that this project really is one we believe in and are excited about!

In my previous post, I listed the title of my book incorrectly. The actual title is ‘The Starfish And The Spider…The Unstoppable Power of LEADERLESS Organizations’

I’m currently reading ‘The Starfish and The Spider….The Unstoppable Power of Leadership Organizations’. So far, it is an easy, interesting read that seems to have lots of ministry implications.

Today, I’m teaching the first day of Doug Field’s great critical concern course called “Starting off Right…Your First Two Years in Youth Ministry”. It’s a two day course and I have a hard time thinking of a better way for somebody to start their youth ministry career than getting a firm handle on some of the basics.

Here are my very simple thoughts how to get started on the right foot. Most of these reflect some aspect of Doug’s notes.

I would say that these are somewhat in order…

1) Start with yourself first. Your ministry will flow out of your walk with God.
2) Build relationships with students. Always make people a higher priority than programs.
3) Get help. Recruit, equip, empower and encourage other adults to minister on your team.
4) Have a strategy. What will we do and why? What’s our vision/purpose/mission?
5) Focus on a healthy ministry NOT a big one.
6) Hang in there! It takes time to build a healthy ministry and to become a healthy leader.

Last night, my cell phone suddenly went totally haywire….it would shut down randomly, wouldn’t hang up at the end of a call etc. I’m heading out to Y.S. and just can’t be without my phone so early this morning I tracked down the guy at our church who handles all this technical junk for our staff and shared my delima.

He quickly assessed that my phone had fried and decided it was time for an upgrade. He unlocked some magical, mystery drawer and pulled out a brand new Treo. The thing is crazy! It has way more bells and whistles than I know what do with. I already had to ask my buddy Jaime to spend 20 minutes setting the thing up.

I am a little nervous though, because I recently read this article concerning ‘blackberry thumb’. Hopefully there’s no such thing as Treo thumb.