God is never silent

I know that no matter how loud the outside world is, God is never silent. In fact he is always loud, just sometimes I dont’ block out the noise as well as others so he seems to be quiet. In these times I just try to expand the opportunities God can speak through. I talk to more people about what God is doing, I read some different books, I listen to different messages on line. When God seems silent, I open my ears more to try and find his voice. Nothing matters if I am not pursuing God’s heart for my life. He has a plan for me and my family and my ministry. All of this is way too hard if I cannot hear the voice of God.

So pray for me as I try and open up to hear God and know his will for our students and families as we try to help students and parents belong and become.

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.

A wise man named David

David Putman that is. Yesterday in out team meeting David Putman shared our belong and become time and I was really impacted by what he had to say. He is kind of a Johnny One Note (his words) right now talking about discipleship since his new book came out a few weeks ago. The thing that impacted me the most was his words that we are to make disciples. This is something that God has stuck into my heart before, but God reopened it through David yesterday.

You see my nature is to make converts. I am a go out and draw people into church so we can tell them about Jesus guy, but David’s challenge was to make the people we have, volunteers and students and leaders, disciples of Christ. More specifically he challenged me to make disciples of my own family. This was a huge challenge to me as I raise my boys and love my wife.

So pick up DP’s book if you haven’t and read it along with me as I try to follow Jesus in making disciples.

Orange Conf

I got the “opportunity” to volunteer at the Orange Conf Monday and God rocked my face off with some great info from Chap Clark. He was talking through some of the cultural shifts that have taken place over the last 30 years with students. God really confirmed some things I felt and showed me why some things I had sensed were happening. All in all it was a great experience and I will download some thoughts over the next few days, bt for right now here are the cliff notes.

Culture has abandoned adolescents. They have been left to fend for themselves and become adults on their own. He had ton of research and data showing that, so I will no doubt research this and see how God shapes our ministry as a result.

Hope/Purpose

Is hope and purpose a relevant expression of the gospel? After spending a day with several students who are in danger on not graduating HS I am not sure that this group, who is disconnected from Christ and the church, has much hope or a belief in a purpose. But how do I connect their hearts to the idea that they were created with a purpose and for eternity. How do we share that message with them.

I believe we have to make students missional. That sounds simple, but these students are really disconnected from everyone except themselves so trying to use relational conduits is harder than it sounds. I believe that students are attracted to hope and purpose through a relationship, I just don;t know how to get there.

Music is so available..

I believe that music has become the greatest means of communication of any thought or idea in our culture. With iTunes and the iPod and all the portable MP3 players and the ability to get it on our phones and the fact that everyone plays an instrument and the success of American Idol music has become the way we communicate who we are and how we feel. It helps us process our emotions and develop what we believe about life.

With this comes the fact that music for music sake is not appealing to people, it has to be a reflection of who we are. I was able to see a couple of kids playing at an Open Mic last night and they we expressing the story of their lives. It was great and reminded me that worship is really about finding a way to express the story God is writing in our lives. If that is music or acting or painting or playing a sport, if we communicate our story as God writes it then we can use that medium to worship.

Music is everywhere, so music isn’t the thing that will stir people and move them toward God, it is the story in the music and the heart of those who play that matter.

I love cutting grass

I love to cut my grass. I have a riding lawn mower and for about an hour I get to just drive around my house and think and dream uninterrupted. It is a mindless activity that lets me connect some thoughts and with God. I think about how much I love my family and my house and the life that God is building for us here in North Georgia. I think about students and how to reach them and how much I love being a student pastor. I think about friends and family and who I need to call just to catch up with when I get done with the yard.

All in all it is a way for me to relax and just decompress from a long week. We all need to have at least one thing that lets us rest our minds and hearts. Getting to just push thoughts out of my head is what I need to unwind. So anyway, here is to the first cut of the season and I look forward to MANY more.

Made it Back

Dude, it takes a lot longer to recover from a week out of the country than just a few hours. After being in Jamaica for a week let me share some things that I discovered:

1. We have the greatest students in the world. I fell so in love with our kids and they made me very proud to be their student pastor. They are the reason I do what I do.

2. Jamaica is a great place to serve God and serve people. There is so much need there and working with Ace was a privilege.

3. I need my family. It was very hard to be away from my amazing wife and awesome kids.

4. A heart to serve is greater than any ability I posses.

5. Worship takes place when we place others ahead of ourselves.

Sorry it took so long to get back into posting. Look for some updates on Fuel and the summer to come soon.

Move Series

God has been moving over the last two weeks through our Move Series and I am so excited to see where he takes us. I have sensed and had several conversations with students that God wants to move us toward and with his heart. It is so encouraging to hear that God is working in the lives of our students, both middle and high school. I have had students tell me that God has really spoken to them as well as that they have felt God during our services. That is what this series has been about. I want us to continue to pray and make margin in our lives for God to move. As a quick recap, here is what we have talked about.

Week 1 - We talked through how authenticity and confession lead us to the heart of God. Only when we are honest about our lives can we connect with the heart of God.

Week 2 – Moving with heart of God means that we need to stay connected to God through prayer. Not a list of things we want God to do but an acknowledgement that God is active and moving. We can’t move with him if we don’t know he is moving.

So don’t miss the last week of this series. It is going to be awesome to see how God closes it out.

TV Night

Farah and I for the first time in at least 6 years sat down last night to watch a little TV. I am not talking about the cable version, but the rabbit ears variety that you can only kind of see enough to know what is going on. We watched the end of American Idol because the world is addicted and we thought we would try to see what the deal is. After that we watched The Moment of truth and came to the discovery that the show stinks. It is crap that tries to create drama out of other peoples personal lives for the sake of shock value to keep viewers entertained. It was a show that had no real value and feel dumber for having watched it. Lastly we watched the local Fox news and here is where I realized why I don’t watch TV. The newscasters pretended to be interested in the stories they were “reporting” and they really just wanted people to think and they had some new revelation that people could not live without. They were goofy and irrelevant and the weather guys computer froze up and wouldn’t report the weather so he just told us instead of showed us what the deal was. Nothing about this news team made me believe or want to believe that they had any perspective on the world worth tuning in every night for.

Well, Farah and I went to bed thinking about our experience and I thought, “I wonder of that’s what people experience when they come to church.” A poorly done production with people pretending to convince them they know something or have some valuable info about the world. I am as disconnected as they come from a TV culture and I was giving them one more shot after 6 years and I was not impressed.

I wasn’t looking for the facts of the situation I didn’t want their opinions about people’s plight, I wanted the truth of the matter. There is a difference between fact and Truth. We can talk all day about facts about Jesus, but what people want when then are giving us one more shot is Truth. The truth that Jesus loves them and that they have to make a decision about who they believe he is.

When people encounter us they want Truth, the heart felt kind that they know we have experienced, not a commentary about the facts. God hep me live your truth.