I remember when I got my first mobile phone. I was told it was really important to charge it all the way up to the maximum, and then run it down until it was completely flat, and then charge it all the way up again. If you didn?t, your battery wouldn?t have its upper and lower limits properly established. It would learn that it?s ok to only give 80, and that it?s ok to give up early. It would never operate at its full potential.
I wonder if the same thing applies to youth ministry?
Filling up to the max ? Are your young people confronted with the rich, deep, passionate prayer lives of people who walk intimately with Jesus? Are they thrown in to environments of extended, humbling worship? Are they exposed to others who flow in the supernatural and who can testify to real-life miracles?
Running completely flat ? Have your young people actually witnessed injustice (as opposed to just hearing about it)? Do they regularly find themselves in situations where they are completely out of their depth and need to rely fully on the Holy Spirit? Do they know what it feels like to sit with someone in need and feel powerless to do anything to help?
The consequences for getting this wrong with a mobile phone are reduced potential and decreased effectiveness. Are they any different for a young Christian?
(My fear is this: We get this wrong, and the result is Christian adults who are cynical of the supernatural, apathetic for justice, and lazy in their relationship with Jesus.)
Jarrod Newton is a regular contributor at The Salvation Army?s Youth Leadership Blog.
- After spending the better part of 3 days with middle school youth workers at SYMC, I am (once again) convinced that many of the sharpest minds in youth ministry are found in middle school ministry!
- At a conference like SYMC (or YS or any other large gathering of youth workers) you meet lots and lots of people. It’s always such a great reminder to me that God uses an amazingly vast array of people to pour into students. I’m so thankful that the stereotypical youth worker (young, cool, plays guitar, surfs, rides skateboards, has a tattoo….) is no longer the “norm”.
- We are starting a 3-week series this weekend called “STUFF”. We are using household stuff as object lessons to teach a biblical truth. It’s a series we have done once before with great success. This week’s lesson: Take Out The Trash!
- Quite a few people tracked me down at the conference to ask me about regional campuses (basically church plants that are still part of the mother ship). Questions about how we structure etc. My simple answer: “Treat them like a franchise with freedom” They are a franchise in that there are certainly some things that they have to do in line with the main campus because they are the same church. But there shouldn’t be an overly large amount of control…they need freedom to tweak the ministry to their context.
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If I had a dime for every time I heard someone in ministry say that they did not pray as much as they thought they should, I’d be doing ministry in the Caribbean somewhere or maybe a cruise minister. Permanent vacationing aside, most of us really do want to pray more. My bet is that you feel you’d do it more if you just had something like, say, a text message to jog your memory.
That is exactly what Echo Prayer Manager does: it reminds you to pray via email or SMS. After signing up for the free account, you enter your prayer requests choosing how you want to recieve the reminder (email or SMS) and how often (more, normal, less, or non-random). Then you go over to the reminders area and decide when is the best time in each day for you to be reminded to pray.
Here’s the genius thing, unless you tell it otherwise, it reminds you of a random prayer request from your list at that time! Of course you can ask it to remind you to pray for your friend at the exact moment he is getting his appendix removed, but the real genius is that once you decide when you want to remember to pray, you don’t have to also decide which prayers to pray at which moment.
There’s also [...]
We have another city of our CollegeLeader regional training tour set up now. Pittsburgh, PA will be on Friday July 17th at Robert Morris University. There will be two seminars and lunch served in between. For more topic and registration info click here. We also have a tentative date for Atlanta, GA – April 28th (exact location TBD).
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