discipleship | More Than Dodgeball

Josh GriffinMore Posts GUEST POST: Ducks and Disciples

My kids were watching a show on tv and one of the characters told a joke and since I’m a sucker for a good punch line, I tuned in.

How does a duck learn to fly?…

He just “wings” it!

Get it?

Like many things in my children’s lives, it made me think. How do you teach a duck to fly? How does a mother duck teach her little duckling to fly?

I know what you’re thinking. Ducks Brad? Seriously? Hang with me a moment.

Have you ever thought why a duck has to learn to fly? Other than being something that pretty much all birds do, it is critical part of what a duck is. If you live near any populations of ducks, you know firsthand that ducks are migratory birds, meaning that they move from region to region throughout the year for different phases of their life cycle. If they don’t migrate, which involves flying, they would die, or fail to reproduce. Flying is an essential aspect of ducks continuing to be ducks.

You know the phrase, “If it quacks like a duck and waddles like a duck…(you can finish it).” Well, the same can be said in reverse, if it doesn’t fly, it’s not a duck, or at least it won’t be for long.

Ducks have an interesting approach to teach their young to fly. It’s kind of like a guess and test method. There is some modeling, some pushing them out of a nest, and some debrief. They don’t take flying classes, go through long orientations, and get certified in flight. It’s part of who they are to learn to fly.

How do we teach new believers to fly (and by fly, I mean share the gospel)? What we generally do is load them up with a bunch of information that we think they’ll need to share the gospel and mature in Christ. What we rarely do is model for them a lifestyle of evangelism and discipleship. When we do this, we suppress part of our DNA. An essential, and life-sustaining part of what it means to be a Jesus-follower is making other Jesus followers. When we fail to model and teach discipleship, we keep new believers from ever being ducks…or disciples. I’m confused now.

Brad Gouwens is the Student Pastor at Crossroads Bible Church in San Jose, CA. Check out his blog at Revival Generation.

Add Comment February 12, 2012

Josh GriffinMore Posts “The Guide” HSM’s Interactive Touch Screen

HSM resident creative genius Parker Stech is pushing us in some incredible new directions. Here’s one example: this (video above) is how we’re encouraging students to take a next spiritual step through a touchscreen. Working on a way to get something like this out there for everyone to use … stay tuned.

JG

5 View Comments February 3, 2012

Josh GriffinMore Posts Student Spiritual Life Whiteboard

Got this picture mail of a freshman student’s spiritual whiteboard this week – made my day. Just wanted to share it (sorry the pic is so small)!

JG

Add Comment January 25, 2012

Josh GriffinMore Posts One Minute Bibles By the Case

A great way to help students get the New Year started right! Consider picking up a case of One Minute Bibles by Doug Fields, a great discipleship/spiritual discipline resource for students … might be good for you and/or your volunteers to do it alongside them, too!

JG

Add Comment December 28, 2011

Josh GriffinMore Posts Discipleship According to Costco

A while back I was in Costco Warehouse store [read: Sam's Club] for lunch and to stare at the display of magical flat screens that call my name when I walk in. Josh … you NEED a 75″ 3D cinema display…

After drooling over for the TVs for a while I like to head toward the food area, largely because of the incredible amounts of free samples they give out. They allow you to get a taste, see if you like it or the product speaks to you, and encourage you to buy it and then heat it up for dinner. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t – either way it is a good experience and one that I began to think about over the next few days that translates to our youth ministry philosophy.

Youth Group is the sample
The purpose of our large group meetings is to expose students to the Gospel of Jesus and encourage them to see a step they could take in their spiritual life. The message is neither shallow nor deep – it is a sample of the whole counsel of God designed to push them forward i their relationship with Christ whether they are a devoted follower or even hearing about Jesus for the very first time.

Small Group is where pick up the package and inspect it
The large group is designed to give students a taste of what Jesus is all about. Small groups are the next step where students begin to experience Christian community and are surrounded by changed lives and an adult mentor. Small groups are the place for questions, doubts, fears and decisions.

Individual Life is taking it to the checkout and making it your own
Our desire that a student sampled who Jesus is in a safe, relevant way during our weekend services. We’ve challenged them to inspect their faith and examine their lives in community and study the scriptures together. Now we want them to own their faith, that they would grow on their own and express their faith well into adulthood with Jesus. They serve on mission trips, follow Christ’s example in baptism and have a walk with Jesus that is their own.

Costco wants you to sample, inspect and own. We want our students to expose, experience and express.

JG

2 View Comments November 21, 2011

Josh GriffinMore Posts GUEST POST: 3 Dangers from Exposing Your Students to Spiritual Danger

Danger: Trusting everything a student tells you. I know most dads want to think the very best about their student. So, for example, if (insert your student’s name) says that they are reading their Bible, most dads take that for face value. When what the student really may be saying is that they are spending one minute looking at the Bible so that they can tell their dad they are reading their Bible.

Solution: Actually engage your student in conversation. Talk with them. Ask questions. Probe the statement they are making. In every arena. Not just Bible reading, but talk with about school, and other activities. Take time to go have Starbucks, cast a line, or go for a drive time and really talk to them. They need it. You need it! This is a form of spiritual protection…knowing about your student.

Danger: Spiritual health is just another aspect of our busy life. Corporate worship, Christian fellowship, and Christian accountability are just other items on our long list of things that we do. In fact, we typically do those things when we don’t have anything else to do (homework, sports practices/games, family trips, attending sporting events, etc…). Students are taught through this behavior that spiritual health is something that we are ultimately concerned with when we have nothing else to do.

Solution: Make spiritual health a priority for your family and its members. Don’t miss corporate worship. Don’t allow your students to make excuses for missing church (i.e. no one else is going, I have too much homework, I have a game, etc..) There are certainly occasions when families miss church (which should be rare). The idea is to promote the importance of Christian fellowship and accountability. When you are forced to be out of town as a family, find a church to attend on Sunday mornings. Communicate to your students that they cannot be involved in extracurricular activities that draw you as a family away from church by playing/performing on Sundays. This reinforces the fact that our spiritual health is the ultimate priority in your family. This too is spiritual protection!

Danger: Tell them what they should be doing, but don’t model it in your own life. They need to see it in you! When is the last time your students saw you tell yourself “No” to something? Yes, you tell them no to things (which by the way is, in many cases, the right thing to do), but they never see you telling yourself “no” for the sake of the gospel and glory of the Lord. In my opinion, this is the greatest exposure to spiritual danger for students. A hypocrite. If there is one thing that a student can recognize and see instantly it’s a hypocrite. Satan can use that to either push them totally away from the faith or damage their faith significantly.

Solution: Students need genuineness. They need to see you talk a big game and live a big game for Christ. They need you to be open and honest with them. They need to know areas in which you struggle and when you mess up (you will!) they need you to man up to your mistakes, ask the Lord and your family for forgiveness, and commit to doing better for the glory of God. Too many dads either don’t allow their students to see who they really are (which makes them hypocrites in the eyes of their students) or they simply aren’t really who they say they are (which is the definition of a hypocrite).

Tony Richmond is the High School Pastor at First Baptist Church Keller in Keller, Texas.

Add Comment November 19, 2011

Josh GriffinMore Posts GUEST POST: Every Youth Pastor Is An Apologist

Read Part 1 of this 2-part series right here

Anyone who ministers in a city with more than five non-Christians needs to be able to do apologetics and they need to do it well.

The truth is that everyone is an apologist at some point– some are good ones and some are rather poor at it. Many of us in youth ministry are great at loving students, leading leaders, planning events and preaching but we make lousy apologists. I was never offered one apologetics, logic or biology class in Bible School. Despite a lack of training and value in it, I believe that everyone (pastors included) is an apologist because everyone will eventually ask themselves the difficult questions of faith and life such as, “How can I be sure there is a God who created the Earth?”, “How could God allow so much suffering in the world?”, “How do we know the Bible can be trusted?”, “Is it good if my vacuum sucks?” et al. How will we answer these questions when we either ask them or they are asked of us?

Our ignorance in such matters is very costly to your students and the many who struggle with the tough questions being raised today.

In his book, The Weight Of Glory [1], C.S. Lewis gives a prophetic call to all of us, in this case those of us who are interested in reaching and keeping our students in the faith. Lewis calls us to answer the call to engage in the intellectual battle going on in our world,

To be ignorant and simple now — not to be able to meet the enemies on their ground — would be to throw down our weapons, and to betray our uneducated brethren who have, under God, no defense but us against the intellectual attacks of the heathen. Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered.

The role of apologetics can change someone’s life. Jesus tells us, “the truth will set you free” (John 8:32). Truth has a very freeing and empowering element to it. When the disciple Thomas understood the truth of the resurrected Jesus, he believed fully that Jesus was the Messiah (John 20:28) and, according to early Christian tradition, was killed in India for proclaiming Jesus as Lord.

Apologetics can be intimidating, especially for those in ministry who “just love people.” “Save apologetics for the stuffy intellectuals,” they may say. “We just specialize in loving kids.” That’s great, we must love people but doing good apologetics as a form of what love necessitates. In Jude 22, Paul exhorts, “Have mercy on some, who are doubting.” Apologetics, then, is a form of showing compassion to people. This can be an expression of the loving priestly role of a ministry leader.

Ephesians 4:12 calls the work of pastor to love his people and “equip the saints for works of service.” To Pastor Tim Keller, equipping people in a secular world must not just include training them in the traditional spiritual disciplines. These days, to engage the post-Christian world for the purpose of making disciples, we must teach them apologetics as well. Keller writes,

In ‘Christendom’ you can afford to train people just in prayer, Bible study, evangelism– private world skills–because they are not facing radically non-Christian values in their public life–where they work, in their neighborhood, etc… the laity needs theological education to ‘think Christianly’ about everything and work with Christian distinctiveness. [2]

Ways we train our people to “think Christian” in a secular world is:

1. By not assuming that they already think “Christianly”.

2. Taking opportunities to show how biblical truth applies to various modern day events and circumstances in their world.

3. Helping our people think critically about the media they consume.

4. Learning from and providing online resources to quality apologists like William Lane Craig (reasonablefaith.org), Tim Keller, Ravi Zacharias (rzim.com), Greg Koukl (str.org), C.S. Lewis, etc. This act of pointing to others is a very helpful way for any leader to draw from the abundant resources that are available to us today.

It is important to note that not every pastor has to understand how the elements of mitochondria point to intelligent design and be able to teach it to a third year university class. They should, however, be able to point their people to someone who can do that. Apologetics does not have to be intimidating in today’s information age. The rational defense is out there somewhere, you just have to learn how and who to point your people to.

That is our job as Ephesians 4:12 youth pastors.

^[1] Lewis, C.S. The Weight Of Glory. (Harper Collins, New York, 1949). Page 50.

^[2] Tim Keller. “The Missional Church” June 2001. http://www.redeemer2.com/resources/papers/missional.pdf

For the past four years, Jon has served at Coquitlam Alliance Church just outside of beautiful Vancouver, British Columbia. Jon is the young adults pastor in a ministry called Ethos. Check out his blog at http://jonmorrison.ca

Add Comment October 1, 2011

Josh GriffinMore Posts GUEST POST: Youth Ministry in Today’s Church

Life is changing for many modern families and our churches need to adapt. Parents have always wanted success for their youth, but over the last several years, parents and schools expect youth to be involved in activities that might give them an edge in college applications — including events on Sunday mornings. Many families use weekends to travel or engage in recreational activities. Plus, an ongoing commitment to a faith community is declining so parents are less committed to attending church themselves and therefore are unwilling or unable to persuade their youth to attend. The result is that most of our youth (and their parents) hold to a “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism:” [1]

A god exists who created and orders the world and watches over life on earth.
God wants people to be good, nice and fair to each other as taught in the Bible and most world religions.
The central goal in life is to be happy and feel good about oneself.
God is not involved in my life except when I need God to resolve a problem.
Good people go to heaven when they die.

This is the faith of our youth. You might notice that almost none of this is Christianity. There is nothing about Jesus or the Holy Spirit. No belief in the concepts of sin and redemption. No call to bring God’s love to others or serve others in Jesus’ name. No sense of life having meaning or of people being created by God and called into a vocation. None of these core practices and beliefs of the Christian faith are present in the life or beliefs of most of our youth.

The problem is not that teenagers are opposed to religion — they simply don’t care about it very much. Their view of God is as a lifeguard (rescue), butler (provider), therapist (feel good) or guidance counselor (decision/direction).[2] But there is no encounter with a God that is transformative. And Jesus barely gets a mention — he is basically just a “good guy” who taught people about God.

Here are some of the challenges we face:

1) Teenagers are theologically inarticulate — unable to talk about their faith.
2) Parent make the biggest difference in their child’s faith — so youth ministry needs to involve parents.
3) We need to motivate parents because the culture does not encourage them to make church a priority.
4) We need to go back to the basics — most of our youth, and their parents, do not have a relationship with Jesus, may not even know much about Jesus, or they don’t believe much of what the church has traditionally said about Jesus.
5) We need to be authentic — young people can pick out a fake a mile away and will discard anything we offer if it isn’t authentic.
6) We need to think intergenerational — the church is one of the few places in our society where the generations meet.

_____________________

[1] Almost Christian: What the Faith of our Teenagers is Telling the American Church, Oxford Press, p. 14
[2] Almost Christian, p. 18

Linda L. Grenz is an Episcopal priest and publisher of LeaderResources which produces downloadable resources for youth ministry. She recently introduced their new Center for Youth Ministry which provides churches access to 40+ resources including the popular “Journey to Adulthood” – a six-year rites of passage program. Check it out at www.LeaderResources.org/CYM.