It must take an amazing amount of unconditional love to accept the fact that Chris Farley has been reincarnated as your three year old daughter.
(SO to my sister-in-law, Rhonda)

Last night I sat down to glance through Jim and Casper Go To Church, and didn’t put it down until I was finished.

It’s an easy read with lots to say.

However, I do have one critique that, in my opinion, makes this book much less valuable as a practical ministry resource: The fact that Casper is an atheist.

True atheists make up such a small part of our population, that a book based on an atheists initial impressions seems to miss the mark. How many practicing atheists are visiting our churches? I think somebody who is open to the idea of church but hasn’t attended in years for all the usual reasons, or has never been, may be a better candidate. It seems to me that many more people in the ‘I’m kinda open’ category visit our churches than do atheists. It’s possible that some of the observations and reactions would have been the same, but I can’t help but wonder how they’d differ.

A little while back, Josh Griffin had a post listing 10 questions to ask before taking a youth ministry position. You can see his list for himself here.

While I agree with his list, I think I would add one more, very important question:
“Can you please share some of the unwritten expectations I would be expected to fulfill?”

Most churches have a few written expectations that they will measure your success by, but EVERY church has just as many, if not more, unwritten expectations that you are being measured by as well. The failure to meet unwritten expectations is just as dangerous to your job security as the failure to meet written ones….the scary part is that most youth workers have no clue what those unwritten expectations actually are. And they vary from church to church. Some examples:

- The youth pastor always makes the hospital visits to students and would never ask a volunteer to do that in his place.

- A good youth ministry is one that has something for students at least 3 times a week.

- Pastors kids should be given special privileges.

- If you don’t teach verse by verse, the lessons aren’t deep enough.

- The youth pastor should be in the office as much as the executive pastor is.

My hunch is that few, if any, of these would be discussed in a formal interview. However, these are classic examples of the type of unwritten expectations that every church has of it’s youth pastor.

We had a great weekend. Attendance was up (Summer is finally over) and excitement was high. We are in week #2 of our “Old Timers” series and this week our lesson was on Shadrach and his two friends. For the first time in a real long time, I ditched most of the message after the first service because I felt like I really missed the mark. I think it was the right move because the next two lessons seemed to be on target.

This is the first Monday of the school year which means date day! To kick off our date day season, I’m going to surprise Rachel with brunch at a mystery location that Leigh Sarti recommended. Should be fun.

Tonight also kicks off our Monday Night Football rotation. Tonight, dinner and the game at Ron and Katie Edward’s house.

Wow…I really love the Fall!

The following story is 100% accurate.

Today, I returned to the gym for the first time in about 3 years. While not grossly out of shape, I have put on a few pounds and developed some lazy habits that are bound to catch up to me as I head into mid-life.

Having not lifted a weight in 3 years, I decided it would be a really good idea to ‘ease back into it’.

as my buddy (who is also ‘easing back into it’) and I were working on our triceps, a woman in her mid 60′s looked at the amount of weight I had on the machine and said, “Wow, if you go any lighter you’re going to have to trade beds with your wife.”

Her statement caused me to think about three things:
1) I can’t believe a 65 year old lady would actually drop a zinger like that….hilarious!
2) Apparently 65 year old married couples sleep in seperate beds and assume the rest of us do, too.
3) I’m weak.

Had a couple really busy days on Tuesday and Wednesday and just couldn’t find time for a post. So, although this post is probably a couple days too late in coming, it’s on my mind.

The Church lost a good man in the passing of D. James Kennedy.

About 20 years ago, I was a brand new youth pastor in a church that was implementing Evangelism Explosion, a door-to-door follow up program created by D. James Kennedy. The basic idea of the program was that church members would visit people who had visited their church and, by asking two very simple questions, determine the direction the conversation would go. The focus of ‘E.E.’ was to train lay people in how to share the gospel and lead somebody to relationship with Christ. As a staff member, I was required to go through the program.

It was a canned, 20-minute presentation that covered 5 key areas: Grace, Man, God, Christ and Faith. I’ll be the first to admit that the program had more than it’s fair share of problems and the idea of sharing a canned presentation makes my skin crawl. However, to this day any time I share my faith or my journey with Christ I almost always use parts of the E.E. presentation.

I’m not a fan of television church ministries, and I’m not a fan of canned evangelistic programs. D. James Kennedy was a master of both. But I was a fan of his and I’m sad we’ve lost him.

Attendance: Above Average
Lesson Topic: Week 1 of “Old Timers” (King Saul)
‘Fun Factor’: Above Average
Volunteer Involvement: Above Average
Music: Above Average
Lesson Quality: Average
Length of Lesson: 21.5 minutes
Student Response: Above Average

As you can see…it was an above average weekend in just about every way. Every way, that is, except my lesson. To be fair, teaching on King Saul isn’t super easy and I struggled a bit during our first service. I fine-tuned a few things in between services and feel like the rest of the weekend went pretty well.

We did a great job building a theme throughout the program. We played a silly game called “The StacKING of the burgers” and the winner was king for the day and got to sit on a throne on stage with snacks etc. We played “King, Sword, Dragon” and gave away little Lego castles as a prize. We had a fun King Saul video to set up the lesson. All in all a pretty good kick0ff to the series.

- We had our end of Summer beach baptism last night which was really neat. A funny highlight was losing a tiny, very slippery, 7th grade boy under a massive shore-break wave that caught us off guard. Talk about baptism by immersion!

- This weekend, we’re starting a series called ‘Old Timers’ and we’re going to take a look at a different Old Testament character each week. This week we’ll be looking at King Saul. A fun element is our weekly video in which we got John Allen, our 77 year old volunteer, to dress up in a bible costume and share the story of the person of the week. He dressed the exact same for every video and just changed his opening: “Hi, I’m Saul”, “Hi, I’m Shadrach”, “Hi, I’m Esther”….should be pretty funny.

- Got turned on to a website called www.highrisehq.com yesterday. It looks like it could be a pretty cool tool for managing volunteers, students etc. It’s sorta a database meets outlook meets personnel manager.

- On December 1, we are hosting our first Global Youth Summit on Aids. It’s being tagged on at the end of the adult summit. I’m super excited about the potential to raise awareness and compassion in the students of So. Cal.

- My wife refuses to let us sleep with the air conditioning running (she has some crazy sense of financial responsibility, or something….) and the last three or four nights have been brutal. Windows open, fan running and a wet wash cloth by the bed to keep me cool!

This is a follow up to the post and discussion from a couple weeks ago regarding regarding the importance of junior high relationships. Here’s a follow up thought:

As your ministry grows, the ability to be relational with students becomes both more important and more challenging at the same time. I think there are probably three strategic ways to keep the relational touch in a ministry that is growing:

1) Recruit more adult leaders to help thus keeping the student-to-leader ratio small enough to ensure relational ministry.
2) Implement some sort of small group structure that allows the big group to feel smaller and helps emphasize the importance of relational ministry.
3) Create systems that help the ministry ‘feel’ smaller and more relational.

I think strategies 1 and 2 are probably getting most of the effort and attention (at least I know they are in our ministry). But what about strategy number 3? What systems can and should be in place to ensure kids don’t fall through the cracks? What type of follow up strategy? How do you track kids? Do you take attendance? Do you have a database software and if so what is it (this is an issue for us right now)?

There’s nothing sexy about systems, but certainly they are the third leg of the relational stool.

Thoughts?

Most of you would have no interest in this, but….

Our church offers 2 year internships, and our junior high team has a couple of spots opening up soon. If you are a college graduate looking to get some incredible, hands-on, experience we’d love to talk to you about the details of our internship program. You can read a little bit more about it for yourself here.