Robert's Blog

after four weeks of waiting my shofar finally arrived. it’s great. i ran around the church today shouting “A sword for the LORD and for Gideon!” and blowing the shofar as loud as i can. if only i had brought some clay pots with me to church today. i could have smashed them and made the image complete. i’m not sure if anybody else thought it was funny but i did.

wednesday, we are going to celebrate a very CHRISTianized version of rosh hashanah. i’ve been researching the “days of awe” as much as possible. i am finding the whole thing fascinating. if it wasn’t for the fact that it is impossible to follow all 613 mitzvot i would want to be jewish. the tradition is so amazing.

the beauty of being a follower of JESUS, the jewish messiah (besides for the salvation and freedom and such) is that i am able to somewhat enjoy and participate within the jewish customs that HE would have participated within during HIS time on earth.

the parent organization (pbs – parents backing students) of the church’s school put on a 5th quarter tonight after the football game (we played lawless and it wasn’t much of a game – pbs 42 / lawless 0). pbs put the 5th quarter on taking care of all the details and i got to just walk in and say hey to my kids, meet some new ones, and basically just visit. i loved it. i didn’t have to organize anything, take care of details, order any pizza, or stay to clean-up. it was their ballgame and i was just a guest. i thought they did an excellent job with the whole thing and the kids seem to have a good time.

youth ministry wise parkview has been going through another attendance boom. when i first arrived at parkview we had between 15 & 25 teens showing up on wednesday nights for the view. they had gone through a rough time with the old youth minister leaving and the interim youth director. the group had shrunk from 100 – 140 showing up on wednesdays. slowly but surely things began to change and after 3 1/2 years we are averaging over 100 again. the great thing is that we’ve done it without gimmicks. we are not the “fun” youth ministry in town. in fact, i sometimes wonder if we might be boring. sure we change everything around all the time but we don’t do alot of “youthy” stuff. we worship, serve, and enjoy each other. that’s about it.

anyway here’s what sparked this trip down memory lane. tonight at the 5th quarter i had a senior in high school tell me he was going to start coming just because of the message series we are doing. this is the first time this has ever happened to me. here’s the kicker. the series is not a “youthy” message series. over the next 4 weeks i’m talking about the jewish “days of awe” and their relation to CHRISTian belief and practice. i would suspect a kid to come just to hear about relationships or GOD’s will for my life or something else like that. yet this is the first time i’ve ever had a teen say they were going to start coming to church just to hear a certain message. it’s not even like his a “spiritual giant” that we’re stealing from another church (which i hate). he doesn’t go to church anywhere on wednesday night because his home church doesn’t have a service. so he’s going to start joining us for the midweek service. not because it’s fun, not because of games or gimmicks, not because of a light show, or rocking music. nope because of a message series. i also tend to think that he knows that our kids and our adults love each other because of their love for GOD. i love my church and i love the youth ministry that i get to work with.

the title says it all (except i would add their parents to the list of greatest also). yesterday one of my kids and her mom came by my study with a huge frame in their hands. the frame contained a matted collage of pictures from our recent nicaragua mission trip. it is absolutely amazing. i can’t come close to figuring out how much time they spent on making this 3′ x 4′ montage. there was a card with it telling me how much they appreciate me. of course, they don’t realize that it was attitudes like theirs that made the mission trip so tremendous.

i love my kids (and their parents)!

i’ve recently started cyber-visiting the youth specialties website forums and found some of the conversations quite good. i have also realized that two other things:

1. i don’t like a large percentage of youth ministers.

i actually found this out at a youth ministers’ meeting. i know this sounds odd but i simply find that a large number of youth ministers are overly concerned with numbers, have large egos, and strive to be hip. i am definitely not cool and i have no desire to be cool. in fact, i probably have the desire to be even less hip than i already am. i do not constantly try to know my students’ lingo, or what the top bands are, or dress in the latest fashions. i pretty simply love teens. i’m also not real concerned with how many kids we have (thought we actually have one of the largest youth ministries in town). i get fed up with people telling me how many they had for “such and such” event and then pressing me for how many we had. i think i am going to just start telling people that i’ve run all my youth off and i’m about to be fired. maybe that will shut up the talk about numbers. it might be fun to watch how they respond.

2. some people on this board have way too much time on their hands.

i was able to keep up with a few of the threads over the weekend but then tuesday came along and work began again. it was hard but i stayed in the conversations. that is until today. how in the world youth workers continue posting at the rate they do boggles my mind. i haven’t posted once today because i’ve been trying to catch up with the parts of the discussion that have gone on since i’ve been working. wednesday is one of my busiest days, with the view and such. it takes me all day to get things ready for the worship service that night. how can these other ministers manage such a large commitment of time with these boards. it blows my mind.

i am now officially old. this is true because today i bought a “micro-trimmer“. the micro-trimmer is one of those devices used for shaving hair in hard to reach places. i had to buy one of these “miracle” devices to groom the forest of hair that now grows within my nostrils. the hair within my nose has simply grown to dense to stay within the confines of my nose. therefore, it now tries to grow outside the confines of my noise and is viciously poking out into the open air. i guess that is good in some way. it probably indicates that my nose is well fertilized or something similar. i guess i should be proud of my growth of nostril hair. the problem is that these hairs often grow so long that it sometimes appears as if i have brown tusks coming out of my face. i don’t want to be known as the elephant youth pastor.

when it was only a single tusk or two i would pluck these overgrown hairs out. this was by no means an enjoyable experience. who could imagine that such a relatively small hair (small for scalp hair but monstrous for nose hair) could produce such an amazing amount of pain upon it’s removal. removing one of these beasts was like trying to pull out your tongue with a pair of tweezers. i could restand this pain when it was only a couple and merely took a few minutes. if i tried to pluck out all the extended nose hairs now it would take a full day and i would need psychotherapy afterwards to deal with the post-traumatic shock of all the pain it produced.

that is why i finally decided to give in and purchase a nose hair trimmer. i bought it this afternoon and immediately used it with fear and trepidation. i was frightened stiff. after all, what if the “micro-trimmer” wasn’t up to the task of harvesting and thinning out my forest of nostril hair? what if the micro-trimmer became tangled within the growth within my nose? i knew that was not going to be a pretty sight. yet i kept seeing pictures in my mind of the tusks growing from my nostrils. i knew that if i didn’t do something about it one day i would be running away from people screaming “i am not an animal … i am a human being.” i just couldn’t go there. so i started that sucker up and plunged it into my right nostril.

i’m proud to report that all went well (except for a tremendous amount of nose tickling) and the terrell nose hair forest has been thinned out.

we did another announcement video last night for the view. click here to see it.

now here’s the rant.

i’m fed up with youth ministers thinking it is cool to trash on the church. it seems like right now it is hip to be disenfranchised with the church. i hear people talk more and more about how they are fed up with the institutional church but not with CHRIST. this then leads to youth ministers complaining about how the church is so broken. i end up finding this in the blogs of allot of younger youth ministers (not that i’m very old – i’m only 36 and have only been doing this since 1989). it seems to me that their posts are basically saying “if only all the church members were as well rounded as i am then it would work right.” their vast experience of two churchs and four years of youth ministry has taught them how screwed up the church is and now they have decided to try and write about it like mike yaconelli. they write in their blogs as the “old sage” about how messed up working in and with the church is and how they have to go accomplish “real ministry” in other ways. they constantly grip about how much they have lost by working in and with the church (and never reflect on how much they have gained). every time i read a 24 year old writing this crap i laugh myself silly.

so i have only one thing to say … “GET OVER IT!”

the church is screwed up! everybody knows that. it’s full of bitter, mean, vengeful, backstabbing, adulterous, stupid, sinning, gossiping, fallen people (of which i am definitely one). these people will hurt and lash out at the very ministers who are trying to help and shepherd them. every CHRISTian should know that the church is full of screwed up people merely by the fact that they are allowed into the community. we are a community of the screwed up.

yet, the church is also the bride of CHRIST and HE is passionately in love with HIS bride. JESUS has chosen to work in and through really screwed up people like we have in the church and sometimes that sucks. but that’s who JESUS has chosen to love and use and therefore because of my love for HIM and my sense of call from HIM i choose to work with and in HIS bride. being a minister means working with and loving difficult people (rob bell refers to them as “human sandpaper”). that’s simply apart of the job. it’s fine and dandy (i like that phrase) to vent every now and then but goodness don’t set your personality around doing that all the time. you’re talking about the bride of CHRIST after all. amazing things happen within the bride of CHRIST and ministers get paid (sometimes at least :)) to have a front row seat for much of it. what could be better than that. we get to see CHRIST forgive and renew the bitter, mean, vengeful, backstabbing, adulterous, stupid, sinning, gossiping, fallen people within HIS. sometimes HE has to forgive and renew us allot of times before we understand how new HE has made us and before we see how much HE loves us.

kind of ironic that i just vented about people venting. 🙂

btw, don’t get me wrong about yaconelli, i loved him. he was a much needed voice within the body of CHRIST. it’s just that it bugs me when “young en’s” try to sound like yac. he had earned the right to speak like that. he had been through years of ministry and hardship and he was definitely still very much in love with the bride of CHRIST. it merely seems stupid to me for 20-somethings to try and talk like that. wait until you’ve “earned (your) spurs” through more than 4 years of ministry before you try to talk like a 30 year veteran. i’m not there yet and thus i’m still learning how this whole thing works.