- Kenda Creasy Dean has a new article in The Christian Century titled Faith, nice and easy: The almost-Christian formation of teens. “Young people will not develop consequential faith simply by being absorbed into a so-called Christian culture as an alternative to the culture at large; churches are quite capable of developing deformative cultures of their own, while washing down the gospel with large gulps of rationalization. Consequential faith is the result of doing ministry, and not simply being ministered to.” The article is a distillation of her new book Almost Christian: What the Faith of Our Teenagers is Telling the American Church which Tony Jones is blogging his way through. 08/10/2010
Get your free copy of Andy Root’s “Relationships Unfiltered”
July 26th, 2010 | 
A quick message from Andrew Root:
Hello Youth Ministry friends, I’m sorry to interrupt your regularly scheduled blog reading, but I have broken transmission to offer you an opportunity.
I wanted to get before you the chance to get a free copy of my book Relationships Unfiltered. As the new school year approaches and you think about volunteer leader meetings and trainings I would like to suggest you take a look at Relationships Unfiltered. It’s written just for this setting with discussion questions and chapters filled with illustrations and stories–but also promises to get you and your team thinking theologically about your core practice this coming school year: forming relationships with young people.
Here’s what I can do: If you’ll email me I’ll send you a free copy of the book so you can look it over and decide if it would be of help to you and your volunteers. If you’re interested in using it you can then go to Zondervan.com or Zondervan.com/ministry and type in the code 980752 in the “source code” box. Starting August 1 this will give you a 40% discount on as many books as you’d like.
And I’ll also offer this, if you do use the book with your team, I’m willing to do a select number of Skype or iChat conversations with you and your team after getting through the book.
If you’re in youth ministry and don’t already own Relationships Unfiltered, you’d be a fool not to accept this offer.
I’ve written previously about the book here (which includes a nice little video) and had the opportunity to interview Dr. Root, which you can listen to here.
Audio interview with Andrew Root, author of “Relationships Unfiltered”
| Relationships Unfiltered: Help for Youth Workers, Volunteers, and Parents on Creating Authentic Relationships |  |
Last Friday I had the privilege of spending some time with Andrew Root (@RootAndrew on Twitter) on the campus of Luther Seminary in Minneapolis, where he serves as Assistant Professor of Youth and Family Ministry.
In addition to hanging out and attending one his classes, I was able to interview him about his newest book, Relationships Unfiltered. Relationships Unfiltered is sort of like a condensed, more practical, and less scholarly version of his first book, Revisiting Relational Youth Ministry, which I have called the “absolute best youth ministry book out there right now”. Although less heady than Revisiting Relational Youth Ministry, Relationships Unfiltered definitely doesn’t disappoint.
Anyway, you can listen to the interview below and/or download it for listening on portable devices. Enjoy.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Click here to download the interview in mp3 format [39 minutes | 17.1mb]
Click here to download the enhanced interview in m4a format [39 minutes | 34.5mb]
Dead simple group texting for ministry with Tatango
A while back I wrote a gushing blog post about a company called Tatango, whose aim is to make it dead simple for anybody to harness the useful technology of mass or group text messaging. Those of us involved in youth ministry are undoubtedly aware that text messaging is an indispensable tool for effective communication with our students, so I wanted to give another push for Tatango and the services they offer. And because I love you so much, at the end of this post you will find a code for 15% off of any plan Tatango offers.
Below is a short tutorial video that covers the basics of Tatango. Since the service has recently gone under a moderate redesign/update, I’m sure that current users will find the video helpful as well:
Let me say a few quick words regarding other youth ministry texting options.
If you’ve bought into Doug Fields’ Simply Youth Ministry Simply Txt, then I laud you for knowing that texting is important, but I promise you that Tatango is a better bang for your buck. Just compare Simply Txt’s $30/mo plan with Tatango’s $20/mo plan. For $10 less per month, you get 280 more group messages, unlimited more contacts, and two keywords (which, as far as I can tell, Simply Txt doesn’t offer).1
I’m also aware that TXT Signal was all the rage in youth ministry circles for a while, but it simply can’t keep up with the services Tatango offers. A quick comparison of pricing plans for TXT Signal and Tatango will convince you more quickly than I could here.
Anyway, if you’re still on the fence about whether or not Tatango’s group messaging service is a good fit for your ministry, try it out free for 30 days. When your trial is over, the good people from Tatango have offered readers of JakeBouma.com a code good for 15% off any plan (The 15% is continuous, and is good for the lifetime of the plan). Just enter K7D0TRCL when you check out and enjoy the savings!
If you have any questions about Tatango’s services, be sure to check out their Frequently Asked Questions page, follow them on Twitter, and/or leave a comment below.
- Keywords allow you to choose words that users can text to join the group. For example, I have “EIKON” set up as the high school keyword ↩
- MailChimp, an email marketing company, recently announced that their free account, which formerly cost $10/month, now lets you send out 3,000 emails a month to up to 500 subscribers. If you’re not using this communication tool for your ministry, you no longer have a valid excuse. Here’s an example email I sent via MailChimp last year. 09/01/2009
- Countering conventional wisdom, a brain-imaging study finds that, in risk-taking teens, the brain’s white matter looks like that of an adult. “After reviewing all of the neurodevelopment stuff, I couldn’t really find any link between brain development and adolescent risk-taking. Nobody denies that the brain develops or that teens take risks, but how the two got intertwined is beyond me.” Related: The Primal Teen. 08/27/2009
Andrew Root’s new book, “Relationships Unfiltered”
| Relationships Unfiltered: Help for Youth Workers, Volunteers, and Parents on Creating Authentic Relationships | |
Last week I shared a quote from Andrew Root’s book “Revisiting Relational Youth Ministry” (RRYM) and added, “for my money [it] is the absolute best youth ministry book out there right now.”
Good news: He’s got a new book coming out on September 1 titled Relationships Unfiltered: Help for Youth Workers, Volunteers, and Parents on Creating Authentic Relationships. It looks to me like Relationships Unfiltered will be two things: 1) a more accessible version of RRYM, which leaned heavily on the theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer; and 2) an answer to the question that all youth ministry leaders want: “How!?” (Root does answer the “how” question in RRYM, but Relationships Unfiltered seems aimed solely at that point).
If you’ve never read any of Root’s material, here’s a quick YouTube video of him explaining the “third way” (and if you’re hungry for more after that, the full interview is available here):
Dr. Root has graciously agreed to an interview on this blog, which I’ll post as soon as I finish the book and write some questions. If YOU have any questions for him, leave a comment and I’ll see what I can do!
What is youth ministry?
How’s that for a loaded question?
But seriously, I’d like you to ponder a quote from Andy Root’s Revisiting Relational Youth Ministry, which for my money is the absolute best youth ministry book out there right now.
[Youth] ministry is not about helping these kids be better Christians; it is about helping them be what God created them to be — human.1
What’s your reaction/response to that? Leave a comment and let me know! I’ll post the paragraph the quote is taken from to provide a bit more context if there’s interest.
- Root, Andrew. Revisiting Relational Youth Ministry. City: IVP Books, 2007. 15. ↩
- God and Majors from Inside Higher Ed. summarizes some new research about the correlation between college majors and religious observance. “Being a humanities or a social science major has a statistically significant negative effect on religiosity — measured by either religious attendance and how important students consider the importance of religion in their lives. The impact appears to be strongest in the social sciences.” 07/30/2009
- I’m in New Orleans this week with my high school students at the ELCA Youth Gathering. We’re posting daily highlight videos on the blog and group-updating our Twitter account. Check it out! 07/24/2009
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