Ok, still mulling this around.

Vanilla Baptist is a church with a fairly stock standard approach to mission and ministry. It revolves largely around getting people to attend the Sunday morning service. The more there, the better we are doing – the fewer there the worse we are doing. While this sound like a crass oversimplification this is the mindset most people are operating on.

Where does a youth pastor start whose goal is to equip young people to be disciples (and by implication missionaries) in their own context?

A few quick thoughts on how we can influence young people and churches and areas we would need to consider:

Preach It?… – Ask me a few years back and I would have said ‘preach it!’ This is based on an interesting asumption that people listen to preaching and are changed by it. Some are… but… many fall asleep even during the most compelling speaker’s presentations. Speaking about it would definitely be a part of the process – a public platform with a fairly captive audience is a nice thing. BUT let’s just not overrate its power. After 3 years of preachng the same stuff at my previous church, with people nodding, saying ‘yeh yeh’ the actual transformation of culture was fairly minimal. I put a lot of eggs in the preaching basket and I don’t believe it paid off.

Living It – There is absolutely no question that the most powerful way to influence people in my opinion is to do what you speak about. No action = no credibility. There are way too many people who like to talk and too few who like to get on with it. By doing it people will both have a working model and will listen when you speak.

Yeast – To borrow from Jesus analogy, yeast is a powerful substance despite its relatively small size. I like the idea of developing a small team of people who I will spend a lot of time with and will invest heavily into. A small group of people can significantly impact a large group if they capture a vision and follow it. I’d be spending my first year finding the people who will be the key players for the 5 years after that and spending large chunks of time with them talking about the core issues of discipleship and mission.

Exposure – So often we don’t know what we don’t know because we have only lived in a very small world. The most transformative experiences for me have been when I have gone to settings where I have been unfamiliar and had to process new information. I’d be taking this small group and any other takers to events and activities where their thinking will be challenged and reshaped. If I were a youth pastor now I’d be tapping into the Forge intensives and using them as food for discussion. I’d be trying to get a few parents along as well.

Programs – I said before I don’t think I’d (personally) change anything immediately. I’d be inclined to keep the ship sailing a fairly safe course on the surface, while talking with the crew below deck about navigating a new course. If the time spent in close contact and in exposure to new thinking doesn’t catalyse thinking about ‘why we do what we do’ then I’d be very surprised. If it came to the point of closing some programs or starting some new more effective ones then I’d like to do that because the initiative has come from the young people. Again I’d like to do all this in consultation with parents – not as permission givers – but by way of keeping them informed of developments. Parents don’t handle surprises well (‘Mum – there’s no evening service as of next week’ – ‘What?!’) so by keeping them in the loop we do in sense have their permission anyway.

Structure – I am strong believer that any functioning living organism has a healthy structure. I’d be looking at the structure of the youth ministry and asking ‘where is it healthy and where is it sick?’ I’d be looking to develop a strong yet flexible structure that would help us do what we want to do without binding us up in meeting mania. I believe people need to know that there is a sense of order to what is happening if they are to believe in it.

In many ways it is plotting a course for change but in a way that has people thinking they dreamt it up themselves and as such own it more strongly.

I’m not sure if I’m out of steam on this one yet – we’ll see!download monsters inc free

I’m still pondering this question of youth ministry especially in light of our calling to live as missionaries in a post-christian setting…

Here’s a typical scenario:

Vanilla Baptist Church has employed me 3 days a week as their youth pastor to ‘oversee their youth ministry’. They are a church with a ‘contemporary’ morning service where around 150 people come to worship. They have a craft group, a men’s ministry, small groups etc etc… you know the place don’t you?

They have said ‘we want you to oversee the youth ministry and grow young people into disciples’. I think that sounds like a pretty good goal, but I’m not sure we are talking about the same end product.

If by disciple they mean a nice, well mannered middle class boy or girl who doesn’t rock the boat, attends church and small group weekly, serves in the church, doesn’t drink, smoke or swear then I’m probably not your man any more.

I hope any disciples that come out of a youth ministry would be well mannered, would be committed to a group of people as their church, but I’d like to shoot for more than a cosmetic behavior change package. I’d like to see some serious change happening in the heart that shows itself in the radical lifestyle Jesus speaks of.

So where would I start…

(Remember I am still ‘thinking out loud’ and this is a relatively unedited spiel!)

* I think getting to know the young people in the church and their families would be a critical place to start. These guys are the ‘missionary team’. They are the people I will be seeking to weld into an effective group, so it makes sense to really get to know them. I’d give a year or so to start that process.

* I’d probably meet with the young people partly in private and partly in the family room of their homes so parents can ‘listen in’ and hear what is in my heart – what I am dreaming of. I sense that if we are going to get parents on board with a missional paradigm of youth ministry rather than a clubby one then they will need to capture the vision and have the opportunity to interact with it.

* I think I’d have a camp/retreat pretty early on to sense the vibe in the group. You can only take people from where they are at. If they are a disconnected, unhealthy group then you would start in a different place than if they were a healthy group. A camp will reveal a lot about a group!

* I think I’d be sharing my own dreams right up front. This is a debatable issue. Do you provide a dream/vision or draw it out of them? I think the answer is both, but my guess is that they would be looking for leadership and wondering what I am on about as a person. I woud share my own sense of calling to be a missionary and then look to see what that sparked in the group. Its here that I believe communication is an essential component of good leadership. Bad communication can see a group saying ‘ho hum… so what?…’ Passionate communication no matter how clumsy may just inspire them to explore some new ideas.

* I wouldn’t dissasemble anything. As tempted as I may be to completely reshape a traditional youth mministry I wouldn’t touch it. In fact I would look to support the leaders as they ran their youth groups, small groups or whatever. There’s plenty of time for reshaping, but to crack the heads of their sacred cows too early would only bring unnneeded tension. This is just one approach. I have a friend who upon entering the church made 40 changes in 40 days. It rocked the boat seriously, many people left, but it set it on a new trajectory. Personally that’s not an approach I prefer as it requires a level of authoritarian leadership that can at times veer into bullying.

* I’d be meeting with the parents as a group and then one to one/two wherever possible. Yes, that’s time consuming and laborious, but, if I have their trust and respect then its like an open cheque book. I’m not concerned to keep their ‘salary paying $$$’ I refered to in my last post, but I am concerned that I have their support because they trust me. I think I’d be pretty up front with them about my core ministry philosophies and values and might discuss some possible implications.

So far I haven’t really ‘done anything’ in terms of developing a ministry have I?… I guess that all depends on how you view ministry.

In a recent newsletter for our backyard missionaries team I mentioned that we as a team are in the foundational stages of our development. If were a house we would be at slab level. The reality is that no one ever looks a concrete slab and says ‘wow nice slab!!’ but exorcism of emily rose the online without a rock solid foundation the rest of the structure is destined for endless problems. It might not fall down, but it will always have cracks and problems.

What come after the slab?…

I might keep writing on this tomorrow.

I’ve go to confess a reticence to use this term as it would seem to mean so many things to so many people and often those things are quite disparate.

It also seems to be a tribal term which has the potential to discredit or antognise those not of an ’emerging’ mindset.

I don’t feel what we are doing is ’emerging’ in any kind of funky innovative way and yet it definitely does fit the parameters of the EC construct quite nicely.

My preferred way of framing what we are doing is quite simply as a ‘missionary team’. Will we develop an ’emerging church’?…

I don’t know.

And quite frankly that is not a key question.

Will we be effective missionaries developing indigenous faith communities? I sure hope so. Emerging or non emerging I really don’t care so long as we do what we say we are doing.bud abbott and lou costello in hit the ice dvd