This guest blog post is from Nate Hultz, Pastor of Student Ministries at Stonebridge Church in Findlay, Ohio.
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The danger in mayking assumptions in youth ministry [Guest post]
Guest post by Nathan Engman, Director of Youth and Family Discipleship, Memorial Lutheran Church, Katy, Texas.
I have heard it said that just because you have the church, it doesn’t mean that you are making disciples. However, everywhere you are making disciples, you have the Church. This speaks to a large assumption that churches have adopted over the last several decades.
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Assessing youth ministry: The Death of Chubby Bunny? [Guest post]
Guest blog post by: Eric Kelly (@yfcjjm), National Juvenile Justice Director, Youth for Christ USA
I was a 90’s youth group kid, I admit it. I spent many nights wandering in the dark looking for a mob of people who did their best to hide from me. I was only an “eight”, the amount of marshmallows I could cram into my mouth and still mumble “Chubby Bunny”. “Underground Church”, “Manhunt”, and “Mafia”, yup I did them all!
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Overcoming the “just getting by” barrier
The microphone waves in front of the athlete’s face, the question posed by the reporter focused on the efforts of his teammates. He wipes sweat of his forehead with a towel and without hesitation he nods and says, “Yeah, everyone came ready to play. They gave it their all. They left it all out there on the field. They gave it 110 percent.”
Perfect. 4-4 on the cliche meter and all smile in approval as they recognized an important goal in athletics goal was met. (Uh, the goal was not saying cliches after a game. It was giving the game one’s all.)
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Being ‘under authority’. Is it what’s good for you?
(This week I’m performing some summer cleaning of my ‘draft’ column on WordPress. The result is a series of dusty thoughts that may have marginal value.)
A year or so ago, the group of adults I was with that evening were discussing whether a church should ‘have authority’ over us or not, and what that exactly meant. Strangely, it got rather heated. I found myself on the affirming side of the conversation while others I respected were less so. The other longtime believers were expressing their dissatisfaction with local church structures. The question was “why do you go to church?” We discussed what is a church and then what is the church? And the answers were varied, as you can imagine.
The fundamental issue is the freedom that faith in Christ gives (see John 8:32). But we also have authority, earthly authority, that we have to, well, obey. And this seems to be more difficult for our current culture to grasp. Further, I think it’s one of the main tripping points for young youth pastors who enter a church setting with people who are, well, human. Andy Stanley, in his book The 7 Checkpoints, discusses the issue: read more…
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We eat out a lot: A cultural and economic shift
My recent travels provided one of those perspective-giving moments regarding our culture and economy: We love to eat out. We even blog about it. The number of restaurants that dot our country is staggering when you consider what it looked like 50 years ago. Our culture has made a substantial shift toward dining out more than just a a few times each week. Some folks eat out in restaurants every day. That’s a big change – to our lifestyle, our own budgets, and for our national economy.
There are a few implications this dining trend creates, a few are probably exaggerated (but, hey, it’s a blog so I can do that. Once it’s on the Internet, then it must be true!): read more…
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Editing ‘bumper sticker’ sentences
I’ve discovered a new writer-ism this year, a variation of slang that looks like a full sentence, but sounds like a bumper sticker. Perhaps another name for this is slogan writing. Slogan writing takes place when the writer uses a sentence that reads more like a headings. And that’s it. Nothing more. When the writer uses them, he or she has a full picture or scene in mind. When they read it, they fully understand its depth and significance. When the reader reads it, however, that meaning is lost. The reader lacks the background, insight … if there was any at all in the first place.
The solution for writers is to a) slow down and b) look for single sentences that are loaded in meaning and implications, but stand alone without support. Then c) we can make that into a paragraph rich with clarity and detail.
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