This isn’t the most “upbeat post” I can think of, but it’s pretty important stuff in our ministry as we get the school year started. Our church’s pastoral care area has been a huge help to us in student ministry when it comes to prepping our volunteers to navigate “high risk conversations” with students.

Throughout the course of the year, we’ll have hundreds & hundreds of conversations with students. And some percentage of them will have some drama associated with them. (I’m not commenting on which gender might produce more drama … ☺ ) But there’s clearly a difference between a high-drama conversation, and a conversation that moves into the area of “High Risk”. Over the last few years I’ve been introduced to some language that not only helps me, but also helps us to prepare every one of our volunteers who work with students.

Around here, we talk about listening for one of The 3 Harms.
Being Harmed – This can include physical or sexual abuse, but also any kind of neglect or exposure to harmful materials or circumstances
Harming Others – This includes threats or abuse of other people, or even threats about it.
Harming Self – Quite a range here, from self-injury, suicidal thoughts, drug/alcohol abuse, and more.

In each of these cases, we tell our volunteers not to hesitate to call 911 if immediate safety is a concern. And then, we let them know how they can reach out to someone else on our team for help. Handling situations like this alone is never a good idea!

As we’re training our volunteers in our middle school ministry, we like to remind them of a couple of things. First, we’ll never leave them on their own in dealing with a situation like this! They’re likely to be the first one to find out about an issue, though, from a student in their group, so we want them to be prepared. And secondly, we’ve found that the chances of one of these things happening with their small group of 6-10 students is actually fairly low… because we don’t want to freak them out.

When I do run across these high-risk situations, my other rule-of-thumb is to never handle them by myself, either. I always involve other pastors from our church as we try to help students navigate tough times like these.

Okay, there’s no controversy at SYM (other than the ongoing debate about Jason Ostrander’s skinny jeans).
But I’ve noticed that controversial blog posts seem to entice readers (in fact some of you decided to read this post simply based on the title), and while this tactic is usually denied by those who write in such a way, it was admitted the other day by a blogger I read who stated that he was afraid his week-long series about missions would hurt his stats due to lack of edgy material.

Since I’ve never been edgy or controversial….I thought I’d give it a shot! These random thoughts truly are about as edgy as I get:

* I think bloggers who post controversial topics for the sake of driving traffic to their site lack integrity…unless they admit that it is part of their strategy.

* Without question, junior high ministry is the most important (but not hardest) ministry in the church.

* I went to see the documentary, 2016, Obama’s America because I love stuff that is conspiratorial in nature. My conclusion: Tough to argue with the facts of Obama’s background and upbringing, but drawing conclusions about what his past means about his plans for the future is tricky (maybe dangerous?). But the dude has an interesting history!

* I’ve never been so tempted to stay home on election day. I can’t see myself voting to put Obama back in office, and I can’t see myself voting to put Romney in his place. If I stay home, it wouldn’t be a statement of “I don’t care”, but rather one of, “I care too much to lend my vote of approval to either one of these guys”.

* Men and women in full-time local church youth ministry ARE the experts. There I said it…and it feels good! No, you don’t have to be in full-time ministry to care about students, to make a kingdom impact, to have opinions and a level of expertise; but let’s be honest for a minute: The people who spend 50 hours a week neck-deep in the local church youth ministry world do have a little bit more to say on the subject. Let me tweak that statement. They may not have more to say, as there is obviously no shortage of stuff being said about youth ministry, but what they do have to say carries more weight….especially the stuff said by people in average-sized churches doing average stuff! Sadly, most of these youth ministry experts don’t have a way to voice their expertise!

* I would describe myself best as a “Big Tent Christ-follower”. Here’s what, to me, matters most:
- Salvation through Jesus’s grace alone by faith.
- Authority of Scripture.
Ummm….and that’s about it. Almost every other debate about doctrine, denominations, etc. bores me.

* The biggest sin I see in Christian Leadership circles? Pride. By far. In a landslide. I see it every time I look around, and every time I look in the mirror.

Okay, here’s your chance: Push back, agree…or post something controversial of your own in the comments!

Since he was 9-years old, Austin Gutwein has been raising money to help children in Africa who are orphaned due to HIV/Aids. In addition to raising over three million dollars (yes, you read that correctly), he speaks to thousands of teenagers each year challenging them to use their gifts and passions to make a difference in the world.

Austin, now an 18-year old about to enter college, just released his second book, Live To Give. Austin’s story is unique, but he really isn’t; he’s a pretty normal teenager who decided years ago that he wanted to help people who were hurting.

In a time when society seems to be lowering the bar of expectations for our teenagers, Austin is a great example the “different way” Jesus calls us (including teenagers) to. Buy a bunch of his new book and make them available for cheap to your students….or just buy one and use it to create your own “Live To Give” teaching series.

Let’s rally behind teenagers who are breaking the mold!

Our family returned last night from a week-long trip that consisted of four days camping with friends followed by three days in Yosemite with Rachel’s side of the family. On the long drive home, I started thinking of some cheesy vacation-to-ministry analogies that I thought I’d share. On the “Kurt should have been thinking of other things on the drive home” scale of 1-10….these might be an 11.

- Rumors Of Bears Swirled Through Our Campsite, Making Everybody Nervous, But There Were No Sightings: Makes me wonder how much time we spend in our ministries worrying and fixating on stuff that, at the very best has little chance of manifesting, or, at the very worst ZERO chance….we worry about stuff that has no impact on the day-to-day realities of our ministry.

- My Family Caught One Fish….ONE! We were so excited to spend four nights fishing at the lake, only to be almost completely shut out. Fish were biting; just not our bait. Kai Hall was the big winner bagging about 6 fish over the course of the trip. Kai is 6 years old. How do you respond when ministry disappoints? You plan a big event and hardly anybody shows up? You get excited about a project, but can’t get others on board? How do you respond when you get “shut out”….but other ministries seem to be getting all sorts of “bites”?

- Almost All The Waterfalls In Yosemite Were Dry: The source of their water, in this case snow-melt, had completely vanished. With no fresh source to fill them, the waterfalls quickly dried up. No explanation needed for this one!

- Our Condo In Yosemite Was, To Put It Nicely: Ghetto Fabulous. As we were all busy complaining about various short-comings of our condo, I (like a typical dad) suddenly interjected: “We are spoiled, aren’t we….how generous must God be to us day-to-day that we would complain about a vacation condo?” How often do you find yourself comparing your church/ministry to the “nicer” ones in town? How quickly do you complain about stuff your ministry is lacking instead of thanking God for his incredible generosity?

It was a great vacation. I’m well rested and ready to jump back into the saddle(back).

Like Kurt, I’m coming off of some family time – hope you’ve had some rest this summer, too!
And like lots of you, I’m gearing up for THE NEW YEAR!

Most of our students go back to school this week or next… I can’t believe it, because I’m not ready to say that summer is anywhere near “over”. But as the school year begins, it’s also a crazy-huge opportunity for us to help students connect to our ministries… and to people who care about them, and will point them towards Jesus!

Whether you’re a part of a ministry with 1 volunteer or 100, I’m a big believer in doing some kind of “kickoff” as the school year begins — without any students there! From my first days in youth ministry, I’ve needed some kind of Kickoff to launch me into the new school year. Two key components stuck out to me this year:

Vision! I really think that even the most passionate people in youth ministry need fresh reminders about “why we do what we do”. And often times, those reminders come in stories. At our kickoff last week, I told of a high school student who I’d reconnected with recently … she’d disappeared from our ministry after 7th grade. Well… she didn’t really “disappear”, as she was still connected with her volunteer small group leader. But she wasn’t able to come to our weekly gatherings anymore, because of some crazy family circumstances. And as I talked to her this summer, for the first time in a couple of years, she told me about how her 6th & 7th grade years in our ministry were crucial for her following God into HS – even though she wasn’t able to come to church anymore. It fired me up! And it motivated our volunteer leaders, too.

Prayer! Gathering together at the beginning of the year, to pray for students, for parents, for our connection to God, and for His way in our ministry… what a great way to launch a season. We decided to devote more of our kickoff gathering to prayer, and someone on our team said “Not Prayer-to-End-a-Meeting, but Prayer-to-Launch-a-Season!”

I’m lifting a prayer for you right now, as you dive into this new school year … let’s serve this students with all our might, and point them towards the One who loves them most!!

I apologize for the slow blogging week(s). I’ve been at summer camp, out at Group Publishing headquarters in Colorado with 30 youth workers, and now off to a week of family vacation.

We’ll be spending 4 days with about 30 friends up at June Lake near Mammoth Mountain. We’ll be camping, fishing, hiking and lazying about. Then we head to Yosemite for 3 days with just our family and Rachel’s parents.

Soooo……I won’t be posting for the next week, but Scott will likely have a post or two while I’m away! Hint, hint, Mr. Rubin!

I consider myself a risk-taker…especially in ministry contexts. But this past week reminded me that a more accurate statement may be, “I am a highly calculated risk-taker…I mostly take risks I’m fairly certain will succeed.”

Last Friday night, in our high school ministry, I witnessed the results of true, “never-done-that-before”, risk-taking. And it was in the form of a Zombie Apocalypse.

Several months ago, one of our high school Pastors had the idea of creating a massive capture the flag meets, tag, meets hide ‘n seek meets amazing race meets air soft wars meets zombies type of event. Josh Griffin said okay…..and they were off to the races. One guy had a vision in his head of how it would all go down, and worked diligently for two months to make it happen.

On Friday night, over 400 high schoolers….dressed up as zombies, survivors, medical personnel and military peace keepers roamed our campus for 4 hours. It was CRAZY, it was AMAZING, it was FUN…..and it almost worked like they planned. There were a few key mis-steps here and there that kept the massive, highly complex, game from unfolding exactly the way they wanted.

Hearing about the idea, watching how hard the team worked to pull it off, seeing the “buy-in” from our students and leaders, and watching the event as it unfolded Friday night left me with a TON of random questions about risk-taking.

Here are a few I’m pondering:

* Why don’t we take more risks of the “I’m not really sure how this will turn out” nature?
* Is it because our churches have created atmospheres where only a home run is celebrated? Is a foul ball never acceptable? Our Zombie night wasn’t a home run…but at least they “got a piece of it”.
* Am I, as the leader of our ministry, creating an environment that encourages or discourages risk-taking?
* If I knew I wouldn’t fail miserably, what is a new ministry idea I would try?

As the summer wraps up and fall peaks around the corner, lets determine to try something new; to take a risk. I highly doubt it will result in a zombie apocalypse!

Not many people would disagree with this statement: “The Best Fuel for youth ministry is Time Listening for God’s Voice.”

But lots of us (definitely including me) have trouble with that.
Things move so fast. If it’s not my schedule moving fast, it’s my brain. (sure, maybe that’s some ADD… but that’s another issue)

Last weekend, I got to go to a Father/Son camp with my 12 year old. The camp program was ok, the camp facilities were good, and time with my son was fantastic. But one of the best “benefits” of this camp is that for nearly 4 full days, I was out of cell-phone and internet range!

When’s the last time you unplugged for 4 days? It’s been a while, for me.

An obvious highlight was time with my son… climbing rock walls & launching off rope swings into a river. He won’t leave my side since we’ve been back home. ☺
But another highlight was the hour every morning when the camp staff organized games with the sons, so that the dads could sit by the river and listen for God’s voice.

I realized that even when I slow down… it’s hard for me to slow down all the way.
And as I sat there by the river, breathing deep, I looked up & saw the clouds slowly drifting by.
They were moving!
You might say “duh” … but I was struck by the fact that I hardly ever notice that.
Mostly because I’m going too fast.

So — since I’ve been home — I’m taking time every day to get slow enough to notice the clouds moving. And it’s been a great catalyst for me to Really Listen for what God wants to say to me.

If slowing down is a challenge for you… give this a try!

- I really liked Rachel Held Evans’ entry concerning the Chick-Fil-A quagmire. I think she makes a level headed appeal to folks on both sides of the issue.

- Red Dawn, the 1984 cult classic, is making a comeback….specifically, they are re-making it and the updated version is set to hit theaters in November!

- This upcoming weekend, I have the honor of speaking in our main worship services at Saddleback. My assigned topic: “Facing My Insecurities”. Kind of a bummer that I don’t have any personal experience on the subject.

- On Monday our junior high team, along with about 400 junior high students, will head off to summer camp. This week they are in full blown “getting ready for camp” mode. Because of various other responsibilities and prepping the adult sermon, I’m totally unable to chip in. I’m actually missing the “all hands on deck” frantic pace of pre-camp week more than I thought I would.

- Have you seen the latest episode of the Simply Youth Ministry Show? Somehow I’m unable to upload the video directly into this post…but you can watch it right here. While you’re there, why not sign up for the Simply Youth Ministry Today newsletter to get some short encouragement every day PLUS the SYM show delivered right to your inbox!