Community Impact

Our church’s name is Pointe North COMMUNITY Church.  The name is no accident.  We are here for a purpose to care for our community.  We need to provide clean water in Africa.  We need to rescue girls from slavery in Thailand.  We also however, need to take care of the needs in our own backyard.

Part of the way Alive Youth Ministries is going to be Organic this year is participating monthly in our churches local missions opportunity called Community Impact.  Every second Saturday we will participate in Neighborhood Blitz – going to low income neighborhoods and grill hotdogs and have a blast with kids w/ jump castles, face painting and frisbee.  We also provide baby clothes, food and diapers for needy moms.  The other ministry that we will participate in is Hope Repair – a small construction project to help repair someone in needs home.

By the way another ministry that Community Impact does is a food pantry.  We hand out dozens of boxes of food to the needy every week.  Alive will assist in this ministry through our Food Fight for Hunger.  Bring a box of non-perishables on Aug 28th to the PNCC parking lot to join in the largest mashed potato food fight you have ever seen.

This is our way to BE the church on a regular basis in our community.  It is messy, it is alive, it grows, it’s ORGANIC.

Thoughts on Ecclesia

Alive Teaching Series: Ecclesia – Reclaiming the Church

Sermon recap – Invitation from Jesus that leads to Salvation always includes compassion, generosity and humility.  Used Luke 19:1-10 as reference.

Sermon length – 30 min

Worship Set list – We will worship you, Reign in us, Glorious One

The jist – Through this series I want to reclaim what the church was supposed to be and debunk what it has become for many of us.  Last week we concentrated on the need to tell the story of Jesus and this week was about denying our selfishness to allow the invitation of Jesus to soak into our hearts.  Then and only then will true life change take place.  Zacchaeus climbed the tree = Jesus is impressed with desperation.  There is no such thing as a selfish Christian.  I then challenged the students to become the church by being selfless with their time, money, talents and heart.

Creative Element – My wife found a video put together to the song “Solution” by Hillsong United.  It is powerful.  We opened the service with it.

Overall – A good night.  Numbers were down, school open houses and Hootie was in town so we were back below 250 but the word was well received and I believe the challenge resonated.

To God be the Glory!

Here is the video we showed…enjoy.

Pulse

Tonight I relaunch a bible study that we tried last year with very lackluster results.  Last year we launched a High School bible study called Pulse that met on Sunday nights.  It was just me, a bible and some students.  The problem is that Sundays just don’t work for our church.  No matter what the program, meeting or system…if we meet on Sunday nights it will fail.  That is simply our culture.  But I have done more than change nights, I have changed the very spirit of the study.  For one thing, it is a closed study (invitation only).  This is a small group of 8-12 students that will be poured into for a specific time.  10 weeks.  After this is done I will plug them into one of our other small group studies or if they showed the stuff they will begin their own.  I will take a week or 2 off and then pick 8-12 more students and start all over.

We will be studying scripture using the Lectio Divinia.  I will also use the time to teach some theology and big picture stuff.  It will be very much going back to my small youth ministry roots.  I am very excited about what can happen in this study.

Sometimes if something is not working you have to kill it and revamp it so that excellence can prevail.

Ecclesia

This month is my first month speaking strictly to High Schoolers.  My middle school pastor Sean Gajda officially takes middle school duty this month.  We are gearing up for students to get back to school and use their campus as their personal mission field.  This has been a remarkable summer that has been filled with inspiration and revelation from God.  This is going to be the greatest year so far for Alive Youth Ministries.  We took over 150 students to camp this summer with over 30 of them being baptized.  We have seen students step up in leadership and volunteer roles throughout the church but it is time to get these ideas in motion.

Ecclesia means Church.  This month we are going to look at an aspect of what the New Testament church should be with an action step to coincide with it.

Week 1 = Sharing the story of Jesus / praying for 5 students to share the story of Jesus with this year.

Week 2 = Helping the poor / we are going to work on a Habitat for Humanity house and participate in a Neighborhood Blitz.

Week 3 = Care for the hurting / we are going to launch a ministry called Life Hurts God Heals.

Week 4 = Feed the hungry / we are going to have our first Food Fight For Hunger, a massive 500 gallon mashed potato food fight to raise awareness for the hungry (entry fee is canned goods for the food pantry)

I want our students to begin this school year radicals knowing that THEY ARE THE CHURCH!  Join with me as we pray that students all over take that same cry.

Satisfied

Well if I am going to blog again I may as well get personal from time to time.  If you don’t know me I am a bit of a pain in the neck because I am never satisfied and I tend to act like everything is messed up.  Yesterday at our staff strat opp planning session for 2011, we were asked to determine if our ministries were ascending, peaking, descending or tanking.  I spoke up and said the youth ministry was descending on the way to tankin. (Now we r making adjustments…see yesterdays blog).  My pastor went a bit nutty on me.  You see we have a youth ministry of 300 in a town of 6000.  It is nothing short of a God thing.  But I’m not satisfied with mere numbers.  If we r not seeing drastic transformation after 4-6 years in our ministry should we be satisfied?  By the way we r only 6 yrs old so I am also dealing with my first crop of kids who have completed the full cycle with us.

Within this first cycle of ministry there have been some successes.  We went from 15 students to over 300.  We have made an impact on our school campuses, seen 5 students surrender to a call to ministry.  However, as I see our students graduate after 6 years of influence from Alive Youth Ministries I don’t see near enough transformation.

We have to do a better job of getting students to…

– live missionally (less selfishly)

– live passionately (sharing the gospel)

– live holy (striving for a higher standard)

Anyway, I believe we should always evaluate.  Never be satisfied (especially when it is in regards to numbers).

what is your take?

Organic Discipleship

We are taking a new direction in our church when it comes to making disciples.  The church is calling this “Trader”.  In the realm of youth ministry we are calling it “Organic”  It really is nothing new but I wanted to share with you a bit of what I will be sharing with our Small Group leaders this weekend.

In a churched environment there are words that are thrown around a lot and because of the loose way they are used the meaning has been clouded and diminished.  Discipleship and Evangelism are two of those words to me.  Discipleship has been relegated to a series of classes that teach doctrine and lifestyle do’s and don’ts.  Evangelism has been relegated to raise your hand and repeat after me…and oh yeah sign the card.  Now, the terms are fine but it is near impossible to separate the terms from their false meanings, so I am going to switch the terms and I am sure that I am not the first nor brightest to make these observations.

For the purposes of our ministry (and this blog) I am replacing the term “Discipleship” with “Followship” and the term “Evangelism” with “Surrender“.  The apostle Paul made the audacious statement “Follow me as I follow Christ” – 1 Cor 11:1  How many of us live in a way that we can say, “follow me and you will have it figured out.”?  However, as you read about Paul’s ministry he was the ultimate discipler.  Whether it is he and Barnabas or he and Timothy or he and the dude that chained himself to Paul in prison, Paul got it!  To create disciples you have to do life WITH them.  You have to have people to follow and who follow you.  Our youth ministry small group philosophy used to be here are our small groups, go sign up for one of them and go.  Now, I am training our SG leaders to go to the students and pour into the students that naturally gravitate toward them and lead them closer to Jesus…Followship.

I woke up a while back terrified with the thought of all the students that I would be held accountable for because they are walking around with a false sense of salvation because I relegated it to a raised hand, recited prayer and a signature on a card.  God forgive me.  Accepting Christ is not in the Bible however Surrender is.  A life of a student who has surrendered their life to Jesus will be obvious and there will be marked shifts in desires, pursuits and passions.  Why can’t we get people to attend a New Believer’s class?  Could it be that they are NOT a new believer?  I don’t think we have to raise the bar for students to get saved, I don’t think we have to make it harder.  I think we need to allow the Holy Spirit to draw students to himself and cultivate the decision the student has made by providing an environment for a surrendered student can fully express and discover their spiritual journey.

In Matthew 13:1-23 Jesus tells the parable of the sower.  In our context, I am the sower, the SG leader is the waterer and the Holy Spirit causes it to grow.

As disciplers we need to…

Pray – for those who are following you and that you are bringing along in the faith.

Organic Structure – There is no 8 week program and it is not always cookie cutter perfect.  It takes time and is often messy however it is pure.

Utilize Tools – We need to teach how to use the Bible not only read it.  I love what YouVersion.com is doing with their reading plans.

Raise Disciples – When the students are ready, release them into the wild to find their own group to lead.

I recognize that none of this is new or even that cutting edge but maybe just maybe some youth pastor out there is ready for a change.  I hope it helps.

How are you doing “Discipleship” and is it working in your environment?

Thoughts from an OLD youthguy part 4

You don’t have to be cool

I am 36 years old.  I just bought my first PS3 and I don’t play it very well.  I don’t skate.  I don’t watch Twilight, MTV or any reality TV.  I don’t know the latest Lady gaga song, the latest Kanye or the latest Beiber.  I walked into a Holister store once and got looked at like I was looking for my daughter!  However, somehow teenagers still want to talk to me.  They still listen when I bring the word and they still come up and talk to me when I visit them on campus.

Somewhere in youth ministry we thought to be relevant to their lives meant we had to blend in with their lives.  I stay in touch with trends dealing with teen suicide, abuse, cutting and families.  My knowledge of culture doesn’t require me to become immersed in it.  You know why?  Because you look ridiculous as a grown man dressed like you are 14.  Teenagers don’t think that a 30 year old man holding a skateboard and covering his male pattern baldness with a USC cap is cool…usually they think it is lame.  By the way when their families fall apart it is going to be hard for the parents to take you as a pastor seriously and then you have the audacity to complain about how the parents always bypass you for the senior pastor.  Maybe, just maybe if we concentrated on the ink in God’s word as much as we did on the ink going on our skin we would find a way to be relevant to their hearts not their style.

I once had a youth worker that so desperately wanted to be cool and part of the group that one day went out with some students and spent the entire time ranting and spilling f bombs and s bombs and d bombs to the point where the students felt they needed to counsel her.  She went on and on about how she partied and selling her cool card and in so doing completely destroyed any effectiveness for the kingdom of God.

My best youth workers are in their upper 30’s to their 60’s.  Rusty is in his 50’s and every student in our ministry (over 300) loves him.  He knows most of their names (can you flippin believe that!?)  He writes their names in his bibles along with something about them and studies and prays over them.  The kids feel that care and they love him for it.  Barbara and Al are in their 60’s and the youth call them grandma and grandpa.  They get calls at all hours from kids needing counsel and advice.  I can’t imagine Rusty, Al or Barbara in skinny jeans and messy hair.

Now, if you have been blessed with the gift of cool then by all means use what your daddy gave ya.  However, if you feel you need to use cool to leverage the love of Jesus to students.  Allow me to give you the freedom to dork it up.  They already think you are anyway…run with it.

Lessons from an OLD youthguy part3

Something keeps popping up in conversations lately with pastors, youth pastors, lay people is what is wrong with the world.

Youth Pastors can I beg you to stop ranting on twitter and stop ranting on Facebook.

  • Rather than bash Twilight and the sin it represents use your pulpit and communication skills to talk about the value of righteousness and living a Holy life?
  • Rather than talk about the evils of Lady Gaga could we use our gift of oratory to inspire creativity without sacrificing holiness?
  • Rather than point out how gay Glee is and it’s support of homosexuality can we have a honest compassionate conversation about sexuality?

It is easy to rant and it is easy to point out what is wrong with the world but coming up with solutions and alternatives is much more difficult.  Whoever told you that youth ministry was going to be easy?  If they did, go find them give them a hug and punch them in the mouth.  They lied to you.  The conversations that need to be had on the issues teens face are incredibly difficult and deserve to be handled with compassion and respect not rage filled rants that simply make you look over emotional and under educated.

I am not a guy that believes we must keep ourselves removed from culture…quite the contrary I believe we must engage culture.  I believe we need to engage in the conversation with wit and wisdom.  Holding fast to the scripture in the spirit that it was written.  To use it as a sword not a club.  To aspouse the love communicated by our Savior as opposed to the anger filled rants.

What do you think?

Lessons from an OLD youthguy part 2

Lesson #2 – Study – Don’t be lazy in your prep

Chances are you have some game when it comes to presence, leadership and speaking ability or you wouldn’t have been hired by a church in the first place.  However, the more talented you are the easier it will be for you to fall into seasons of laziness when it comes to message/Bible study prep.  At times I have tended to reach into my “bag of tricks”  rather than spent the time seeking the Lord, planning the message and preaching/teaching a fresh thought.

Back in the day the youth pastors time was spent on the campuses and playing ball and that led to Wednesday afternoon cramming for a Wed night talk.  However, we had “TalkSheets” from Youth Specialties if we needed help.  Today, our time is spent putting together state of the art programming that would have put 80’s concerts to shame (thinking about the KISS concert I went to right now).  We spend time on intro videos and countdowns and light cues and transitions and put it all in our Mac’s so we can run the program then Wed afternoon comes around and we are like, “Crap!  I have to preach tonight!”

I speak not in judgement but out of experience.  This actually happened to me this past Summer at our summer camp “CHAOS”.  I worked so hard to make it memorable, powerful and creative that I forgot to work on the messages.  The result is that the part of the week that COULD have made impact didn’t.  How Jesus must have been so impressed with my creativity.  All the while leaving him (Jn 1:1) out of the equation.

My ministry has been the most effective when God has controlled the agenda and message not me.  So, over my years here are a few tips to help you stay prepared.

1) Plan ahead…if you are working this week on this weeks message then you are going to be in trouble.  Distractions happen.  Someone dies, kids get sick, Senior Pastors call emergency strategy meetings…who knows but you need to be at least 1 week out.  Also, Plan your message calendar out.  I would say at least 3 months but I plan 1 year out.  I know each month what my focus is going to be.  This helps my creative team, my worship team and my leaders know what our focus as a ministry is going to be in the coming year.  Saddleback and Simply Youth Ministry do some awesome work with this.  If you plan that far ahead put 1-2 months in there labeled OPEN to make up for your Pastor calling for a church-wide campaign or an unforeseen circumstance that may take place that you may have to spend time teaching on.

2) Use Series…Most Youth Pastors that I have met have a bit of ADD in them and have the attention span of a 7 year old.  So, to say we are going to go through the book of Romans this Spring is probably not realistic.  You and your students will get bored with it.  So plan in 3-5 week series.  Get creative with it (however, not too creative or that will be your focus rather than the content).

3) Don’t rant – teach…this is going to be the focus on tomorrows blog so I won’t go too far into it rather than to say when preparing your talk don’t spend your time ranting on what YOU think is wrong teach on what the Bible says is right.  Use the pulpit and gifts God has availed you with.

4) Over prepare…I throw away have of what I prepare each week so that what is left is usually just the good stuff.  I speak about 30 minutes a week.  I have to chisel that down usually and boil it down to the best points (the best points by the way aren’t usually the smartest ones but the clearest ones).

5) Oh yeah by the way PRAY…spend time each day in your personal worship time asking God to make you a better teacher.  Lean on him to direct you as you prep for talks.  This should be done before you open your Bible, journal, iPad or whatever.

There is nothing worse than listening to a podcast of a youth service and hearing a youth pastor stammer through platitudes and weak theology simply because they didn’t take time to study.  I am also tired of the excuse of well that is how youth guys teach.  No, that is how BAD youth guys teach.  If God has called you to be a pastor to students there is no greater calling in all the world.  Respect that calling and know that the greatest weapon in your bag is the Word of God.  Teach it well.