Bonhoeffer on youth ministry

Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes these words on Christian community, which are rather applicable to smaller youth ministries:

In the Christian community thankfulness is just what it is anywhere else in the Christian life. Only he who gives thanks for the little things receives the big things. We prevent God from giving us the great spiritual gifts He has in store for us, because we do not give thanks for daily gifts. We think we dare not be satisfied with the small measure of spiritual knowledge, experience, and love that has been given to us, and that we must constantly be looking forward eagerly for the highest good. Then we deplore the fact that we lack the deep certainty, the strong faith, and the rich experience that God has given to others, and we consider this lament to be pious. We pray for the big things and forget to give thanks for the ordinary, small (and yet really not small) gifts. How can God entrust great things to one who will not thankfully receive from Him the little things? If we do not give thanks daily for the Christian fellowship in which we have been placed, even where there is no great experience, no discoverable riches, but much weakness, small faith, and difficulty; if on the contrary, we only keep complaining to God that everything is so paltry and petty, so far from what we expected, then we hinder God from letting our fellowship grow according to the measure and riches which are there for us all in Jesus Christ.

Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Life Together. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1978. 29.

Words that are just as convicting as when they were penned 71 years ago.

May we have the courage and humility to give thanks daily for the ministries we find ourselves in, however modest.

FREE and easy group texting for youth ministry with Tatango

Those involved in youth ministry understand that communicating effectively and easily with teenagers and parents is one of the most important parts of the job. Even though a perfect solution to the communication conundrum doesn’t exist, Tatango makes the process significantly easier, and best of all — free.

Before I say any more, I’ll let the CEO of Tatango describe their utility for youth workers. Check out the video below:

Like Derek said, Tatango lets you send out group text messages and voicemails for free, which for youth workers might as well be manna from heaven. Although the free version is supported by ads, they are unobtrusive and the message you send is still communicated, so who can complain?

One of my favorite things about Tatango is the different ways available for you to promote your group and get members to join. You can embed a widget in your website where users can type in their information, and every group you create has a unique web address where users can sign up as well. But the greatest tool, in my opinion, is using customizable keywords. For example, I set up a customized keyword of “EIKON” (the name of my high school ministry). All I have to do is tell students to text the word EIKON to a five-digit shortcode number, and they’re immediately subscribed to any updates I send out for that group.

Of course, Tatango has paid subscriptions ranging from $5/month to $100/month, which give you some benefits, such as using customized widgets and personalized keywords, but it’s an expense I think many youth workers will easily be able to justify.

On top of everything else, the guys running Tatango are great people, and they have offered readers of JakeBouma.com a 10% discount on any of their paid subscriptions. Just enter the word Tango in the “Coupon Code” box on the payment page, and you’re all set.

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. And, in the interest of full disclosure, I am not receiving anything from Tatango in exchange for blogging about their company. I simply feel strongly about their services and believe that other youth workers could benefit from them as well.

How can theology transform the church?

Here’s a better question: How couldn’t it?

If you could open my brain, peer inside, and see what has been happening there the past month or so, it would be a loop of this video.

The entire video is fantastic, but here are a couple of money quotes:

“[Pastors] are saying, ‘Theology doesn’t preach. And I only seem to connect with my congregation when when I do psychology, contemporary affairs, aesthetics, novels, comparative religion, lectures on this and that topic.’ So the starting point is just to let folks do theology today.”

“If we then can say every one of us who picks up a Bible, or, for that matter a newspaper, and tries to wrestle with the relevance of the Bible for the contemporary world, or a Christian response to the events on the front page of today’s newspaper — that person is already doing theology.”

“Theology is when Christian folks engage the contemporary world in a vital way; when they ask the hardest questions and then they sit down and try to get some answers.”

I think this is what Tony Jones was getting at when he named a chapter “It’s the theology, stupid.” in his book The New Christians.

Theology alone will not save the church, but if it can be wrestled away from the ivory towers of academia, it will undoubtedly have massive transformative power. And my contention is that the starting point for theological thinking is precisely where it has been avoided — youth ministry.

More on that later.

• The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy has released Sex and Tech, a survey which seeks to answer the question “What is going on with teens, tech, and sex?” This is a must-read for those who are raising teens and/or work with them. “Q: How many teens are sending or posting sexually suggestive messages (text, email, IM)? A: 39% of all teens / 37% of teen girls / 40% of teen boys / 48% of teens say they have received such messages.” They have also provided helpful flyers for both parents and teens (both link to .pdf files). HT: Living Sexuality 12/11/2008
• Matt Cleaver ponders The Bailout, Education, and Youth Ministry. “What should youth ministry’s role be in situations like this? When significant things are happening in our society aren’t being covered by the schools should we step in? Why aren’t school addressing this?” 09/26/2008

1 Corinthians 13 paraphrased for youth workers

If I speak using the language of Rob Bell and Doug Fields, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.¹

If I have a years of youth ministry experience and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have hundreds of students in my youth group, but have not love, I am nothing.

If I give all my time to my church and surrender my body during youth group games, but have not love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

Love never fails. But where there are empty programs, they will cease; where there are hollow relationships, they will be stilled; where there is indifference, it will pass away. For we know in part and we hope in part, but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me. Now we see but a poor reflection as in the bumper of a 16-passenger van; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

And now these three remain: faith, hope and love… and overnight events. But the point is, the greatest of these is love.

1. I got this idea from James McGrath’s 1 Corinthians 13 paraphrased for academics. I also found this video later, and any similarities are totally coincidental. ↩

• A Peek Into the Mind of the Average College Freshman. “Each August, Beloit College publishes its Mind-Set List to help professors and administrators understand the average incoming freshman’s frame of reference by describing how things have ‘always been,’ or at least how they’ve been for the past 18 years… #44. Caller ID has always been available on phones.” Last year I made a reference to Hootie and the Blowfish during a youth group gathering and no one had ever heard of them. [HT: Exploring Our Matrix] 08/19/2008

How I use Evernote to organize my youth ministry

Since switching from PC to Mac, I’ve flirted with several desktop note-taking and organizing programs, including Yojimbo and Journler. In the end I settled on Evernote because, in my opinion, it is by far the most feature-rich of them all.

If you’re totally unfamiliar with Evernote, it might be a good idea to read their Getting Started guide or watch the Overview Video. You’ll be glad you did, because the advice below will save you time and make you better organized in your ministry.

But before we get into the glorious details, here are a few tips to make Evernote work harder for you (and your ministry). First, install one of the Evernote Web Clippers. I use the official Firefox extension, and it’s great.

Second, add your personal Evernote email address as a contact in your phone. After you’ve signed up and logged into your account, your email address is located at the bottom of the page in “Settings”. This is where you can send pix and text messages which Evernote will convert to notes you can access later.¹

Third, set up a new Notebook in Evernote specifically for Youth Ministry. If you’re like me (or anyone else with a pulse), you’ll use Evernote for myriad things outside of your ministry as well (I even had this blog post outlined in Evernote).

Saving devotion ideas and teaching illustrations

If I come across a cool, inspirational, or spiritually edifying story on the internet, I simply use the Evernote clipper to save it for later. For example, a while back I came across a blog post called 18 of The Most Insane Journeys In Recent History, and I clipped it to my “Youth Ministry” notebook. If I’m writing a devotion or message about overcoming trials or something similar, I can refer to this post for some good material. Better yet, I tagged the note with “devo” “trial” and “journey” so I don’t have to remember it at all — I can just type one of those words in the search box or browse through my tags to find what I need. Here’s a screenshot of the entry.

Saving informative ebooks and PDFs

This is similar to the above implimentation, but I wanted to point out one of my favorite features: Evernote can search for text contained within pictures and PDFs. When I come across great ebooks or handouts, I clip them to Evernote for future reference. For example, I have 40 Icebreakers for Small Groups from Insight saved, and if I search “icebreaker”, Evernote quickly reads my mind finds what I was looking for. Here’s a screenshot of the search in action.

Keeping track of signups and payments

As a note-taking tool, Evernote is really handy for jotting things down that don’t legitimate their own Word document. I used it this summer to keep track of my junior high VBS sign-ups and payments. You can add “checkmark bullets” anywhere within a note, so whenever I received a payment, I simply checked off that student’s box. Simple as that. Here’s a screenshot of the checkmark box in use.

Collect those pesky receipts

I hate doing receipts — it’s one of my least favorite components of my job. I’m always losing them or forgetting them and getting ticked when the first of the month rolls around. When I’m at brick-and-mortar stores, I just put the receipts in my wallet, but when I buy things for my ministry online, it’s not that easy. Usually, a receipt is emailed to me, and I just save it to Evernote. If it’s a PDF, I drag and drop it into a new note, and if it’s text, I just highlight all and copy/paste.² Here’s an example of a note containing a receipt from my local Apple Store.

Prayer

Prayer isn’t one of my spiritual fortés, but I’ve managed to leverage Evernote to help me. I try to regularly ask students how I can be praying for them, and now I keep a list in Evernote with their names and what they want me to pray about. When I pray, I can focus on a specific student or go down the whole list — you get the point.

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Those are just a few of the ways that I’ve managed to take advantage of Evernote in my youth ministry. I’ve only been using the program for a few months, but I know that the longer I use it, the more indispensable it will become (especially if when I get an iPhone). What are some other creative ways to use Evernote in youth ministry? I’d love to hear your ideas — please leave a comment and let me know!

1. If you have an iPhone, you can just download the Evernote app and bypass this step. ↩
2. If you do this, you probably don’t want to make your “Youth Ministry” notebook a “Public” web notebook — don’t want people snooping around your receipts. ↩

A brief hiatus

I am leaving in 7.5 hours with thirteen students and two adult volunteers for a week; we’ll be doing mission work in Red Lake, Minnesota. I won’t be anywhere near JakeBouma.com until after the 20th of July, but if you’re interested you can follow along at the St. Mark Student Ministries blog, YouTube page, and Flickr page.

See you on the other side.

Why I do youth ministry

“So, why do we call Jesus the Passover lamb?”

Several hands reached for the ceiling and I called on a blonde, spirited seventh-grade girl named Kara. Like many of her peers, she had raised her hand before actually formulating a response.

“Because, um, Jesus was… like…”

I waited patiently for Kara to finish her thought. Her face was starting to wrinkle and contort in hopes that the answer would soon arrive. It didn’t. I looked around the room for another vertical fleshy stick, and as I began to point at another student, I was abruptly interrupted.

“OH!” Kara blurted, with her eyes lighting up and back her straightening as she experienced her eureka moment. “So. Just like how they used to sacrifice a lamb during Passover and put the blood on the doorposts to, like, protect them from evil [Exodus 12:1-13], that’s like how Jesus sacrificed himself and gave up his blood to, um, save us from sin [John 1:29]. And that’s what Jesus meant when he said ‘This is my blood, shed for you’!”

I nearly broke into song as I said, “YES! That’s exactly right.” And I thought to myself, This is why I do youth ministry.

Shift conference: Complexity and simplicity

Brian McLaren, originally uploaded by jakebouma on flickr.

It’s day two of the Shift conference at Willow Creek in Chicago, and it’s been going pretty well. Yesterday there were three main sessions, with Brian McLaren, Mark Yaconelli, and Shane Claiborne, and they were all great. At points throughout the sessions, I laughed, cried, and gained some insight and wisdom.

I’ve decided to not post any of my notes from the past day and a half, because much of what I’ve been mulling over boils down to the question of the seemingly simultaneous complexity and simplicity of the gospel and its implications. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, keep reading. This morning at Brian McLaren’s Onramp to Postmodernism discussion, there was a Q&A session in which I decided to go up and ask for his insight into the matter. I really liked his response, and I recorded both the question and his answer for your listening pleasure.

Click here for the mp3 of my question and Brian McLaren’s answer (03:58, 3.7mb)

I looked up the quote he’s referring to (read: “Googled”), and it comes from former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. He said, “I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.” Do you know what he’s saying? Do you understand how awesome that is? I totally dig that.

Anyways, there are several people blogging and Twittering from the conference; Gavin has a roundup (actually, I met the guy thanks to Twitter). I started using hashtags to track tweets from the conference, so check the hashtag page for #shift08 to see all of the various comments and perspectives, and be sure to keep up with my Twitter feed as well.

JakeBouma.com hits the bigtime! (thanks, Ken Silva)

A while back, my friend Josh Brown pointed out that Ken Silva is a great watchdog. He even presented him with the snazzy image/award at the top of this post. Well, he was absolutely right.

Josh’s basic beef was that Ken scours emergent-ish blogs for fodder on his own fundamentalist, anti-emerging “blog” (I use quotes because he doesn’t allow comments), where he warns “believers” of the cancerous effects of all things emergent.

Anyway, this is all to get to the point that Ken recently wrote a post entitled “The Emerging Church Swallowing Youth” (I won’t link to it; he doesn’t deserve the Google juice) in which he links to the interview I did with Tony Jones and then claims that “the Emergent Church has been using your young as spiritual guinea pigs”. Woohoo! I hit the bigtime - a link from Ken Silva!

Oh, and then he gives his warning:

Well, know this: In the eyes of our Lord, by your not speaking up at your local churches, you are responsible for allowing this Emergent rebellion against the Bible to swallow up a whole generation of evangelical young—a kind of spiritual abortion—in their “fertile training ground” for this man-centered emerging church apostasy.

So in the name of full disclosure, I align with many of the theological and philosophical underpinnings of the emerging conversation. Indeed, my spiritual journey has been decidedly enriched by it. However: If you’re reading this — and you go to my church — please, please speak up and do something about my heretical tendencies. All of the 40+ students in my ministry are in grave danger.

Oh yeah, and thanks again for the link, Ken.

Four must-see documentaries about teens (or, How to fully understand teenagers in under 8 hours)

Okay, okay. The title of this post is admittedly hyperbolic. But my point is that there are some fantastic documentaries being made about teenagers - four of which are listed below. Please leave a comment if there’s another documentary that should be on this list!

Frontline: Growing Up Online (2008, whole program online for free)

A tip of the hat to Brian at Rethinking Youth Ministry for this one. I have yet to watch it, but I plan on doing so once this post is finished.

In “Growing Up Online”, FRONTLINE takes viewers inside the very public private worlds that kids are creating online, raising important questions about how the Internet is transforming childhood. “The Internet and the digital world was something that belonged to adults, and now it’s something that really is the province of teenagers, ” says C.J. Pascoe, a postdoctoral scholar with the University of California, Berkeley’s Digital Youth Research project.

Frontline: The Merchants of Cool (2001, whole program online for free)

I first saw this documentary during my student ministry internship in the summer of 2005, and it impacted me so much that I referenced it two years later in my senior thesis. Even though it is a bit outdated (which throws many of the figures and facts out of whack), the gist of the film is still quite relevant - alarming, even.

They are the merchants of cool: creators and sellers of popular culture who have made teenagers the hottest consumer demographic in America. But are they simply reflecting teen desires or have they begun to manufacture those desires in a bid to secure this lucrative market? And have they gone too far in their attempts to reach the hearts–and wallets–of America’s youth?

Soul Searching: A Movie About Teenagers and God (2007, DVD)

I ordered this documentary after reading Tony Jones’ review. It’s sitting on my desk waiting to be watched.

Based on the book, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers, by Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton, which reports on research conducted over a seven year period by the National Study of Youth and Religion. Featuring interviews with the books authors, youth pastors, and teenagers from around the country, this compelling documentary illustrates some of the major themes and findings of the book, and goes behind the book in depicting the inner lives of a sample of American teenagers. Find out what these teenagers really think about God and religion, what their hopes and aspirations are, and what the research says about the effects of religion in their lives.

American Teen (2008, not yet in theatres)

This documentary just debuted at the Sundance Film Festival. The folks at /Film gave it a review that totally piqued my interest.

Set in the small typical midwestern town of Warsaw, Indiana, American Teen follows a self absorbed Cheerleader, a loser video game playing band geek, the basketball star, and the artsy outcast. While at first glance, these descriptions serve as cliche social stereotypes, you will be surprised at how three dimensional these kids are. The drama that is their senior year is both fun, emotional, and at times horrifying. This observational documentary plays out uncensored, giving an surprisingly accurate look at a group of TRL-generation teenagers.

• While we’re on the topic of adolescent brain science, Andrew (from Faith’d) provides some fantastic thoughts via this comment:”Keep in mind that over interpretation is the danger in utilizing brain science, and new research helps us to temper what we think we know. My concern for youth ministry is that we don’t over-do the credence we give to the tentative findings of brain science. The science is generally credible, but the conclusions we draw are often severely overblown. Grab Epstein’s article “Myth of the Teenage Brain” [.pdf] and read this article on the seduction of neuroscience.” 12/10/2007

Encouraging a growth mind-set in students

A great new article in Scientific American, The Secret to Raising Smart Kids, discusses human motivation and encouraging a “growth mind-set” in children and adolescents. Lots of good stuff in there:

This belief [that intelligence is innate] also makes them see challenges, mistakes and even the need to exert effort as threats to their ego rather than as opportunities to improve. And it causes them to lose confidence and motivation when the work is no longer easy for them.

There is clearly a link here to youth ministry and encouraging/equipping students to grow in their Christian faith. Some students are just better at being “students of Christianity” than others, which means that the onus is on youth workers for teaching our students to have a “growth mind-set” as the article says. Check this out:

In the growth mind-set classes, students read and discussed an article entitled “You Can Grow Your Brain.” They were taught that the brain is like a muscle that gets stronger with use and that learning prompts neurons in the brain to grow new connections. From such instruction, many students began to see themselves as agents of their own brain development. Students who had been disruptive or bored sat still and took note. One particularly unruly boy looked up during the discussion and said, “You mean I don’t have to be dumb?”

Now, some of you might be saying, “We [youth pastors] should just be loving on kids and teaching them that Jesus loves them.” First of all, please don’t ever use any form of the phrase “love on” ever again. Second, teaching kids that Jesus loves them approaches pointlessness if they have no grasp of context. Context within the biblical canon (How does Jesus’ teaching relate to and interact with the Old Testament?), context within history (What was the first century C.E. like, and how did it influence Jesus’ ministry?), and so on.

Obviously there’s much more that can be taught, but I’m just making a point that youth ministry involves quite a bit of straight-up teaching. This has become a stark reality to me in the few short months I have been teaching Lutheran confirmation. It follows, then, that articles like the one mentioned above should make us think critically about youth ministry.

For more on adolescent brain science, be sure check out The Primal Teen.

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