Over the past year I have experienced more death than I ever expected at this point in my life. Within the past 12-14 months I have seen my grandfather, a friend of my best friend, my grandmother-in-law, and a few weeks ago my grandmother pass away. I think the most terrifying thing about death is the feeling of helplessness and being alone.

For me, being exposed to so much death confirms that we are not meant for this world. This world is full of pain, and suffering, and death, and sadness. Sin has taken hold of this world and corrupted what God intended to be perfect, and beautiful, and full of life. Now, instead of life, we have to deal with pain and suffering. Now, we experience death. That is until we are finally taken from this broken place and brought into the arms of the Kingdom. It is a beautiful thing to realize that we are not meant for this world, but for a better place, which our Father has prepared for us.

Shortly before my grandfather passed away, my dad overheard him say to my grandmother with failing breath, “I will look for you.” I think this is a beautiful picture of someone that knows that we are not meant for this world, but for a better place where all of our hurt and pain will be no more.

Scot McKnight, in his book, Jesus Creed for Students, invites students and young adults to critically look at the simple truth that Jesus commands his followers.  He invites students to live life before God, now.  McKnight explains that what he calls the Jesus Creed is Jesus’ command to love God and love others.  He stresses that the Jesus Creed is the very thing that Jesus wanted his disciples to practice.  Throughout Scripture if you look at all the commands you see that each command either comes down to loving God or loving others. Jesus wanted his followers to see that by loving God and loving others our lives will be dramatically different and we will be amazed at what we will see if we focus on these two commands.

It is important for students to understand that if we are to be disciples of Jesus, we need to obey what he commands us to do, and from Scripture, we see that we are called to love God with our heart, soul, and mind and we are to love others as ourselves.  This is where it starts if we are to become disciples of Jesus. In my experience both in my teenage years and being around teenagers, loving others as ourselves is one of the hardest things for students to grasp.  The world that we live in today tells us that we are to be the best and do what we can to get ahead of others.  However, as we see in Scripture, Jesus is calling us to a radically different lifestyle where we put others above ourselves.

McKnight goes on to talk about how most people are searching for happiness in life, it is what our culture is searching for. People do this through a number of different ways be it traveling, sports, music, and love to name just a few.  McKnight references a study that concludes that fifteen percent of the world’s developed countries suffers from depression.  The researcher of the study concluded that the cause of this depression was that we have

“abandoned the example of previous generations of living for something greater than themselves and instead sought to live only for their own happiness.”[1]

In today’s culture, it does seem that happiness is what everyone is striving for, however, maybe we are striving for the wrong thing.  Maybe instead of living for happiness, we should be living for God. Maybe we should be living to love God above all else and living to love others like we love ourselves. I think we as a culture (especially students) have our priorities mixed up and it is time that we get them back on track, the Jesus Creed track. By being the kind of people that God wants us to be, we will find happiness in the radically different life that Jesus is offering us.  Maybe we should stop trying to be happy, and start trying to be blessed (not in a material blessed way), or better yet, bless others.  McKnight says that it is better to be blessed than happy because,

“blessed carries us through the bad days while happy is only good on good days.”[2]

I think that students need to be challenged to live a life that is focused on God and by doing so, they will be blessed and be able to bless others.  The Jesus Creed offers us a revolutionary lifestyle that will change student’s lives if they commit to practicing loving God and loving others. We as student ministry leaders must commit to living the Jesus Creed ourselves as well so that we might be able lead students into a lifestyle of loving God with their heart, soul, and mind and loving others as they love themselves.

One of the things that I like about our church is the community it is located in.  It is located in an area of town that is home to many different ethnicities and has a very large refugee population.  Much of this neighborhood is made up of the people in poverty, people whom society has deemed an outcast, families that struggle to put food on the table, and children without adult figures in their life.  It consists of people who want/need somebody that is going to come along side of them with no agenda other than to show love to them.

This last Sunday our church family went outside of the church building walls and served the community.  Jennifer and I had the opportunity to be site coordinators at one of the apartment complexes in the neighborhood.  There we would have food (bags of rice, beans, bread, etc.) for families and games and fun for the kids.  We got there early in the morning to begin setting up and unloading the truck.  Within the first 5 minutes, 3 hispanic kids came running up to us asking our names, telling us their names, and asking what we were doing there. We told them that we were there to hang out with them and that later in the morning there would be food and games.   As we began hauling boxes from the truck to the area we were setting up, the kids asked if we would let them help us carry some boxes.  I found it very interesting that these kids just wanted to be by us.  They didn’t know us or if our games and food would be good/fun, they just wanted to hang out with us and help us with anything that they could.  As we were getting closer to having things set up we asked them if they had any friends in the complex that they could invite to come hang out with us.  They ran off and came back about 10 or 15 minutes later with more kids.

One of the things that I enjoyed most about the day was just getting to hang out and spend time with these kids. We played some games, carried boxes, kicked a soccer ball around, learned what school they went to, and got to see a little bit into their lives.  We learned that some of the kids lived with two parents while some of them lived with one.  Some of them had older brothers or sisters that had gotten into drugs.  Some of them didn’t have many friends at school. Some of them loved school.  The thing that caught my attention was that they all wanted to somebody to love on them.

One of the things that I liked about the way that they day was set up was that the members of our church went out there with no agenda other than to give those that needed food some food and hang out and show love to the kids.  I think St. Francis of Assisi said it best, “Preach the gospel at all times, and when necessary use words.”

A few pics from the day.

I have read McKight’s “The Blue Parakeet” and Chris’s “A New Kind of Student Ministry” and really enjoyed both books.  They challenged my thinking and have helped me begin to develop my philosophy of ministry.

Lord, keep us from speaking of love while hoarding the gifts you have given us. Make us full of discontent as long as there are brothers and sisters living and dying in hunger. Amen

-Shane Claiborne, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgorve, and Enuma Okoro in Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals.

• If you work hard enough you can/will be successful.
• Success is measured by many things: money, comfort, status, etc…
• Look out for #1.

What does Jesus say?

• Sell all your possessions and give to the poor. (Matthew 19:21)
• Feed the hungry, care for the sick, clothes the naked (Matthew 25)

The more you look at what Jesus’ words say, the more opposite they are to living the American dream.  We have put a Christian spin on the American dream where after we have achieved our success, then we might throw a little bit of our left overs at the poor and needy.

It seems to me that scripture is pretty clear when it comes to the Kingdom.  Jesus commands us to sell all of our possessions and give to the poor, and then follow Him. (Luke 18:22)  The problem with this is that it goes against everything our human natures wants.  To give all of our possessions away means that we would completely rely on Him for everything.  I don’t know about you but I like having my things.  I like that I don’t always have to worry about how I am going to feed my family.  And that is the problem.

I recently heard our pastor give a sermon on this subject and two main things stuck out to me.

• No one will enter the Kingdom by their obedience, but no one will enter the Kingdom without obedience.
• He wants us to see that it isn’t hard to obey Him, it is impossible.  We depend fully on His grace.

So what now?  If we are to sell all of our possessions and give to the poor, why am I still sitting in my apartment surrounded by all of my stuff?

I want to talk a little bit about his whole idea of the American dream and how it fits with Jesus and His message (if it fits at all). The more I read Jesus’ words in the gospels, the more I am convinced that they do not fit together, not even a little bit.

I would summarize the American dream to be something like this:  to become culturally successful, with life wrapped up nice and neat so that we are comfortable.   Another way to summarize it could be the promise of success and prosperity.  No matter how you define or summarize, certain words will always be involved.  Words like prosperity, success, and comfort will always spill across the page.

But when you look at the gospel of Jesus, you don’t see those words as much.  Instead of words like success, comfort, and prosperity we see words and phrases like give up everything, abandon your comfort, and sell all your possessions.  The more I look at these two lifestyles/concepts, it becomes so clear that the American dream is not what Jesus was talking about in the Kingdom of God.

Over the course of this blog series (not sure how long it will be), I want to break these two lifestyles/concepts down and take a look at what each one of them focuses on.  I’m not really sure where I want to go after that and I welcome comments, critiques, and input from anyone (if anyone reads this!!).

As of right now, I am closer to living more of an “American dream” life than I am a Kingdom life, and something about that makes me very uneasy.  I want to be someone that lives a life in, of, and for the Kingdom of God, but man is it hard.

This last Sunday our Pastor had a lady from Traffick911 come on stage and talk about something that was very hard to listen to… slavery.  Most of us have probably heard of stories about children in third world countries being bought and sold for profit and pleasure, but that sort of thing doesn’t happen in the U.S. right?

In reality, the U.S is one of the leading demand countries in facilitating in this slavery, and Texas is one of the leading states. Human trafficking is the fastest growing crime in the world and is a multi-billion dollar industry.  It is a modern-day slavery. Women and children, both boys and girls, are being taken as slaves and sold for profit and pleasure of others.

When I heard this I felt broken.  We live in a world that is completely lost and in desperate need of Christ’s love.

Who is going to show this love?

Here are a few of my notes…

Today’s church has found itself in the middle of a transition zone, trying to learn how to best reach people in a postmodern culture.  Brian McLaren, in his book The Church on the Other Side, offers some great insight on how the church can best make its way from yesterday’s modern culture to today’s postmodern culture.  McLaren begins the book by saying that today’s world is not the same as it was yesterday.  If the world is not the same, then why do we think that we can do church in the same way.  “If you have a new world, you need a new church. You have a new world.”[1]

He argues that the way that church was done during the modern era is not as effective in the postmodern era that we live in and because it is not as effective, we need to be open to the idea of changing the way that we approach church.  In order to make this change, we need a new framework for our theology.  When McLaren speaks of a new church, he does not mean new in age but in kind.  A new church, according to McLaren, “is one designed for the future, reinvented and reintroduced for the other side.”[2] Part of being a new church is knowing and respecting what needs to change as well as what needs to stay the same.

The new church develops a new philosophy of ministry that prepares it to meet any future changes that may come.  The new church commits to a change in attitude rather than searching for “quick fix” or simply changing styles.

If the new church is to truly be “new”, then it must start with the leaders of the church.  McLaren points out several characteristics of these new leaders.  Characteristics such as personal authenticity, team development, takes on new approaches to training, and leading through love are several of the characteristics that McLaren points out.

“If we are to be effective on the other side, we ourselves will have to become less modern and more postmodern – not completely of it, of course, but more completely in it,”[4] says McLaren. Just as Paul in 1 Corinthians 9 talks about entering into “their” world without taking on their way of life and keeping Jesus Christ as his center, we as Christians in a postmodern culture must enter into the postmodern world while keeping Jesus Christ at our focal point.

Brian McLaren does a good job of illustrating his view of what the new church is about.  He does not box in what the new church specifically should look like, but does a good job of illustrating some key characteristics as well as explaining the new church in light of the old church.

From my church experience, I have been a part of many of the “old” churches that McLaren talks about.  These churches were not always bad, but the thing that they all had in common was that they were all not very relevant in today’s postmodern culture.  It was almost as if they tried so hard to shelter the people of the church from the evils of postmodernism, that they were missing out on a great opportunity to minister to a very lost and needy postmodern culture.

As I move forward in my ministry, I want to be a part of a “new” church.  A church that is not afraid to be in the postmodern culture, but not of it ,with our faith firmly grounding in Jesus Christ and His gospel.  A church that seizes the opportunity to become knowledgeable of the postmodern culture, even though it may not agree with it, so that it can be intentional with its mission to reach a culture that is in desperate need of Jesus Christ.

While there is much that can be critiqued about the postmodern culture, especially as Christians, I think that we should view it as an opportunity.  We have the opportunity to reach our world and have an impact on them for Jesus.  The ways in which we used to do this are not as effective as they once were and this is because the world has changed.  We cannot expect to be relevant in the new world by using old world’s ways.  We as the church need to learn how it is that the new world operates and thinks so that we can best reach them.  We need to start thinking of our culture as a mission, just as over seas missionaries do not go into foreign cultures and attempt to minister to them in the same way as their home culture, we must not make that same mistake.

---

[1] Brian McLaren, The Church on the Other Side (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House), 11.

[2] Brian McLaren, The Church on the Other Side (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House), 21.

[4] Brian McLaren, The Church on the Other Side (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House), 168

Q: When did you realize that you were called to student ministry?

At first, this sounded like a normal question that I have heard answered hundreds of times over the years (not specifically about student ministry but ministry in general).  The answers that we got were what stuck out to me.

One of the student pastors (who was probably in his 40′s, was wearing a t-shirt and jeans with a blazer, had a cool looking tattoo on his wrist, and was rocking a sweet long ponytail) said somethings along these lines…

A-1 : Many people have asked me that over the years and I always answer them the same way.  I say that I never had a choice.  It is what I am wired to do.  It was the way that God created me.

I thought this was a pretty cool answer.  Growing up in the Bible belt and around church people you always hear about “calling”. Being “called” to this, being “called” to that, but not “called” this… and the list goes on and on.  I don’t know if I’ve ever heard someone say that it wasn’t that they were “called” to a position, but it was that God created them to do it.  I liked this answer and I may have to use it.

The second and third student pastors each said something along the same lines but said it a little differently…

A-2: I don’t know when I felt “called” to youth ministry, I just know that I am “called” to love God.  What I enjoy doing and what I feel led to do is youth ministry, but in the big picture, I am just called to serve Him.

This is what got me thinking.  So often I think that we (Christians) get so caught up in what we are or aren’t “called” to do or what type of ministry we are “called” to for life.  When we do this we lose sight of what really matters here.  We, as followers of Jesus, are called to serve Him.  He created us the way that we are so that we can be used by Him.  Whether that is in a specific type of ministry for life or for just a few years, we are called to serve Him.

I used to say /think/believe that I was going to be in student ministry until I retire.  While that is my goal and desire as I feel that I was created for that type of ministry, I want to shift my focus to serving Jesus the best that I can.  If in 20 years that is still student ministry then I will be just fine, but if He leads me down another path I want to embrace it with the same desire and passion as I currently have for student ministry.