I mispell things!
i absolutely love whoever came up with this t-shirt. it’s brilliant.
i can’t really think of a better more honest invitation to church. i like it so much i’ll probably rip it off … uhmmm … i mean borrow it, while giving full credit to the people who deserve it. 😉 anyhow, i’ll probably use it someday.
sometimes what i have in my mind doesn’t come across well when we actually do it. the above “worship station” is one such situation. wednesday night at “the view” i was talking off of james 4:8 about we believers focusing on one thing. soren kirkegaard says that “purity of heart is to will one thing” and i thought that would make for a great discussion. the message was okay – not great, not terrible. as a part of the message i wanted to set up a worship station in the back of the room to help people to consider what (or more importantly who) their “one thing” was. for me looking at myself in a mirror has always been a challenging thing. for some reason looking at myself for an extended time causes me to have to consider what GOD thinks of me and thus what i think of myself and how it relates to GOD’s thoughts. i was hoping to do a station that held the same effect for others. instead the whole thing came across as boring – at least to me. it just didn’t seem to make it from my mind to actual practice. sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.
SIDE NOTE – i think my mother is reading this blog now (which is fine and dandy but strange because i don’t really think that she would find any of this interesting). she usually reads my other blog. if you are reading this HI MOM!
i read aboutlifeway’s survey of top ten issues facing the church first on steve mccoy’s emerging sbc leaders and i was blown away. here’s the list (developed by visitors to lifeway’s website:
i can’t believe that social justice issues didn’t rate at all. how absurd is it that “leadership” makes the list and “taking care of the poor” doesn’t. what is wrong with us? how can we (southern baptists) ever hope to be considered “relevant” when we don’t fight for the needs of those who have been pushed to the margins of the world? i know we do allot of good in social justice issues (providing food, bringing clothing, etc.) but when do we actual fight for justice? maybe our “prayer” and “discipleship” would improve if we were focused on praying for the things that are important to our LORD and the marginalized are important to our LORD.
budget crunches suck. our church is presently going through a small budget crunch right now. it’s not a major shut everything down “money crunch.” no, it’s a “let’s tighten our belt” budget crunch. it means that we need to spend less on what we are doing but we don’t have to stop doing everything. those far it hasn’t been a huge deal. i’ve had change a few things that we were going to do (i.e doing a different less costly mission trip, etc.) but i haven’t had to drop anything that we were going to do. until today.
since, i’ve been at parkview i’ve wanted to change the way we use interns. when i first came here i was given two intern positions. the problem with intern positions is that the intern almost always has another thing that has priority in their life (usually school or another job). whatever it is all that matters is that there is almost always something else (besides GOD, family, and their own being) that pulls at their priorities. because of this my experience has been that interns are rarely completely passionate about the youth ministry and often (but not always) what they do comes across as a job that they enjoy doing but not a passion that they have got to express. to a large extent student ministry is my “voice” (“vocation” comes from the latin word “voca” meaning “voice”). what i do is an important part of expressing who GOD has made me and thus i try to pour myself into what we are doing youth ministry-wise. interns are pulled in different directions and it’s hard to get one whose “voice” is youth ministry (mainly because they are just beginning to discover what they “voice” is). that’s why i moved to get rid of the two part time, year round interns positions and instead we now have alan the assistant youth minister whose “voice” is definitely ministry.
with the above paragraph said i love interns – just not for a full year. instead what i would like to be able to do is “hire” 6 to 7 interns ever summer. the difference between a summer and a year is that being an intern for a summer gives you a good taste of ministry. that taste helps a person to discover if ministry is their “voice” or not. that’s the reason that i would like to have 6 to 7 interns every summer – i want to be a part of helping future ministers discover their “voice.” this summer was supposed to be the first step toward that goal. the personnel committee approved 1 intern for this summer with the understanding of bumping it up to 2 next summer. i told them my whole desire of wanting to give kids a “taste of ministry” and they agreed with it and jumped on board. i even had the perfect candidate ready for the positions – a girl that i know would do a great job. the problem is that the budget went south and now the personnel committee has to focus on other things. so they nixed the intern position (because it had not started yet).
i don’t blame the committee – they were doing what they had to do. but it still stinks.
the youth ministry summer is rolling and i am already tired. this is not a good sign.
on the good side i got to hang with my niece and a member of the youth ministry today as they tried to eat a one pound cheeseburger each so they could get their pictures on the wall. they succeeded and i was greatly impressed. i have been even more impressed with the teens in our youth ministry reaching out to people. they always do a great job of reaching out to the “foreigner” (anyone who doesn’t seem to “fit” for one reason or another). i’ve seen them reach out to new kids, socially awkward kids, kids with terrible diseases, etc. it regularly blows me away. it has been particularly pleasing to experience it first hand. my two nieces have been with our family for the week and our teens have reached out to them in great manners. they been asked to spend the night, go out to eat, go for coffee, go to a movie, and much more. i love watching this and i love my teens.
it’s been a long, enjoyable day with my family (both nuclear and extended since pam’s nieces are staying with us for the week) but i needed to take a second to call a coward a coward. another anonymous postcard concerning the drama that is presently going on in our church arrived in the mail today. previously we have had anonymous letters but now someone has started sending out anonymous postcards. the picture above is today’s postcard which as usual has no return address as well as nothing on it indicating where it has come from. COWARD! i hate anonymous letters and anonymous postcards. i took the picture of the postcard after i had thrown it in the garbage. that’s what becomes of anonymous letters and postcards.
over the past few years i have had the feeling that each year i haven’t done a good enough job of connecting our new 6th graders with the youth ministry. they’ve always seem to come around when they were in 7th grade but i just haven’t been able to get them into everything while they were in the 6th grade. this year i want to things to be different. so the youth staff came up with the idea of “kidnapping” the 6th graders for the first wednesday night of the summer. we sent letters out to their parents explaining that we wanted to come pick up their kids and make a big deal about their first night within the youth ministry. the parents were on board and we were excited. all we had to do was actually kidnap the kids.
so here’s what we did:
the results have been pretty good. thus far everyone who has responded has had very positive things to say concerning it.
tonight we “kidnapped” our new sixth graders (i’ll describe that when i get home in about 30 minutes or so) and brought them to “the view” (our wednesday worship service). i’m trying to do a better job of connecting our new sixth graders in the group. i don’t really feel like i’ve done a good job of it in the past.
we made two videos for tonight: 1) for announcements and 2) for a fun introduction for our sixth graders. they’re real rough since i had only an hour and a half to make them in.
jonny baker mentioned on his blog home’s trinity worship service. i wish i had seen it before we did our service on the trinity.
SIDE NOTE – if you are involved in creating, directing, and/or organizing times that lead to people worshiping GOD then you should actively read jonny baker’s blog. he regularly creates and find the most amazing stuff.
