Generation Me

I am reading a book right now that anyone who wants to impact this generation needs to pick up. It is titled Generation Me by Jean M Twenge and it is blowing me away. She has some great cultural research to where this generation is coming from and where they are going. I picked it up at Barnes and Noble in the Social Science section. From what I can tell she is not a believer so the data is not skewed toward Christianity.

Pick it up and let me know your thoughts. It is rocked my world and will change how we reach and communicate to students.

Connecting an Affluent Culture

I am processing some thoughts on what it looks like to connect an affluent culture to Christ. You see affluence replaces relationships. We as humans have a hard time accepting that we are broken and sinful so most people present Christ through the light of relationships and love. In an affluent culture people replace relationships with stuff so the message of Christ is a tough one to communicate. It is not that I am trying to soften the gospel because the truth is we are terrible sinners and Jesus is the only hope of our life, but I do want to have a relevant expression of who Christ is to today’s culture so that they understand the value he holds in our lives. So I am prayerfully seeking how to communicate Christ to a culture that has it all.

Worship

God is really speaking into my life right now about my personal worship of him. I had a great lunch yesterday with Dave McNeeley from Perimeter Church who is one of the smartest guys on the planet and we spent a little while diving into the idea that we need to create a culture of worship among our students. But what Dave pointed out is that worship only comes out of a heart of repentance. Humility and worship and recognition of sin are all connected. I am not sure where all of this is going in my life, but I know that God is moving and working as I need to have a heart that humbly realizes my sin and is motivated to worship the one true GOD. I am pumped about where God is taking me.

Learing from some Great Ones

Last night I went over to Crosspoint Community Church to check out some amazing growth things that we heard about through the grapevine and man I was blown away. Buck Webb, Crystal Corn, Terry Douglas, Nick Pirtle, Chad Ward and I were amazed as we walked in and were warmly greeted by HS students. Everyone one of them looked us in the eye and asked us our name very genuinely and specifically. This was a culture of acceptance and true desire to have new people be a part. I was truly humbled by these kids because they were inviting people into a relationship with them and with Christ each time they came up and introduced themselves to us.

These students also had a true heart of worship. They were no inhibitions as they sang and worshiped to music played by a CD with no worship leaders. These kids were making it “cool” to worship God and allowed others to experience the presence of God no matter what point they were along in the journey.

All in all Jason Motte, the student pastor expressed a deep humility about what God was doing, but I believe it is his leadership and that of his teams to develop such and effective culture among the students to create the kind of environment where disconnected kids would love to come in a be a part of what God is doing.

I still have more to process, but several things I “knew” about student ministry were challenged and changed by the results and work of the guys over in Birmingham.

Connecting with Students

Connecting with students is hard!! They are a culture unto themselves that generally defy all rules of previous cultures. As soon as you discover something that works the rules change and the paradigm must shift again. But for now as we are preparing to relaunch our HS ministry I am putting all my eggs into the basket of students connecting students. I am praying that God will make our students cultural missionaries and connect students who don;t know God to our ministry so that we might connect them to Jesus. There is no plan B, I we cannot get our students excited about the vision of connecting their friends to Jesus we will fail. I am confident though that God will complete the work he has started. I know that his will is to reach and love students. I want to se his will come to life at MLC.

August Rush

Dude, great show. I had the pleasure if taking my wife out on a date last night and we went to see the movie August Rush and I thought it was great. If you don’t know the story it is a little weird because it is about a kid who finds his unknown parents through music that he hears and experiences in the world. Strange I know but here is why I liked it:

1. The music is great – Some of the musical pieces strike such real emotions you easily felt what the characters were feeling.  It was real raw emotions displayed in different beats and movements. It was great.

2. It makes you believe something is out there – During the movie you really believe there is something in the music moving him through his life. You feel and know that he is living in a reality that we don’t see.

So overall a great movie and has a real spiritual tone about as he is moved by something greater than himself to the heart that he has for his parents. It is a great display of how God can move and work in our lives.

Truth

Truth is constant. It is true whether we believe it or not. It also should influence the way we live and behave. Truth is the greatest pursuit and the most frustrating adventure we can live. It is inconvenient and most often avoided at most turns in life. But at the end of the day, truth is truth.

This is interesting in light of the statement that Jesus makes when he says he is the truth. If Jesus is the truth than wouldn’t all pursuits to that end lead to Jesus. I believe the answer is yes and this is where we must lead people, particularly students. I believe our mission should be one to expose truth so that students might find Jesus. They are so hungry for something real that the only way to lead them to Jesus is on a quest for truth.

Pocket Evangelism

I am big fan of pocket evangelism. That is where you try to reach students in pockets rather than individually. The reason for this is that students naturally cluster by interests so if you find something that resonates with one in the cluster it will resonate with the others. The great benefit in this is that disconnected kids cluster with disconnected kids. The best way to reach disconnected kids is through another disconnected kid. Students who are influences in their pocket are the greatest because they bring multiple kids at a time. Some of the students hung out at my house last night with me and the family and some kids I met at a coffee shop brought some friends with them. It was great to meet some new people and begin a relationship and possibly earn the right to invest in their lives.

Students bringing students

I am going to conduct an experiment tonight about the possibilities of students bringing their lost friends. I have been talking to more kids and running that through a filter of where I think the current culture is and I want to see if students at MLC can identify a core need in the life of other students. I think this info is valuable, because if they don’t see a core need of humanity to find redemption in Christ than what motivation do they have to invite them to church or share Christ. I think students have the mentality that none of them need anything, so they don’t offer anything to anyone else. We will see what we find tonight.

Student Culture Shift

I believe that there has been a shift in the culture of students. There I said it. This is what God is showing me and confirming in the hearts of others as I discuss the issue with them. Shifted to what you might ask, well there in lies the real question. I don’t fully know, but here are some things I think they have shifted from:

1. A theistic world view – If you ask a student what they believe these days I think you will get a myriad of answers and non answers. I believe we live in a day and age where students do not have to confront the truth of God and therefore don’t have to have any belief system that engages theism. I think the major reason for this is that they no longer have to face consequences in their life. One of the greatest agents of truth is a consequence, so if there are no consequences, you don’t have to engage the reality of truth and if you don’t have to engage the truth you do not have to consider if their is a being that set that truth into motion. I am not saying they are atheistic, but rather unconscious to the existence of God.

2. Relational defined identity – This one is hard to articulate, but I believe it is important enough to give it a shot. I used to define my identity in High School by the people I was in relationships with, brothers/sister, parents, girls, teams, etc. These kids lack terms to define who they are because they feel that relationships don’t give them significance so they communicate who they are in individualistic terms. This is interesting because we still communicate Christ in relational terms, Christ is interested in a relationship, but kids don’t feel that is significant because they have learned that relationships are expendable. Talking with my friend Paul Peterson the other day he kept asking if they still felt the pull of wanting to be known and have relationships. My answer to this is yes they do, but they don’t trust their heart because they have been conditioned to believe that relationships end and they hurt when they do inevitably end. So the meaning behind the relationship is lost in translation.

3. A hope in a future – Because of a lack of a theistic world view and a loss in a relationship defined identity students have no concept of hope or a future. Without a consideration of God or a sense of permanence in relationships all that matter is what they can get out of this moment. Therefore pleasure and entertainment become the highest aim. Each day has its own pursuit but their life has no direction. 

As I am typing this, what if teenagers became the activists of showing other students how to make today matter and count by investing in other people as the greatest pleasure. What if we built a model that facilitated an in the moment ideology to make the most of every moment by showing kids the value of people. We need to teach kids to define their lives by who they invest in. This would mean that we create experiences centered around the value of humanity. Not missions/small groups per say, but a consistent experience that utilizes an in the moment concept that gets them investing in people and then processing that experience with them.

This might get interesting……