notes from symc

Last weekend, I attended the Simply Youth Ministry Conference in Chicago, Illinois with two of my youth volunteers. I always love these conferences, and here I'll attempt to give a few notes from that great trip. (Note #1: Gino's East pizza is amazing!)
One of the best quotes from the weekend was from Doug Franklin's seminar on student leadership. He said, "Youth ministry is not the church's ministry to students; it's the students' ministry to their world." When I heard it, I realized he had articulated clearly what I've been thinking for years. I love this shift in perspective, and I hope I can instill this in our congregation and students.

The "Branding Your Youth Ministry" workshop gave me a lot to think about (and makes me really wish I was a professional graphic design artist!). The purpose of branding is to build trust and connect with the group of people you are targeting. I know it sounds kind of business-y, but our church can do so much more through images, phrases, music, video, and other medium to speak more effectively to our culture. I sometimes go back and forth on how much to do this in my youth ministry (that, and I'm pretty uncreative), but I think I'd like give significant attention to our youth space in the upcoming year.

Also, we have a youth-led worship Sunday coming up in May, and I have several great ideas for it. Some possible skits and creative things, as well as some themes and thoughts to share with the congregation about our student ministry. I get excited thinking about our students leading in worship.

One of the workshops I attended was related to family ministry, basically supporting and communicating well with parents. I really liked some of the ideas for getting families more involved in my ministry, but an idea that I thought of while I was in there listening is a parent experiential calendar much like the Lent calendar I am following throughout this season. It would have a different exercise each day for parents to do, such as pray with your kids, lead a family devotion, write an encouraging letter, share a particular memory, play together, etc. I might try to do it next year during Lent or Advent, or some other time of the year when I want to encourage parents to step up in their role as spiritual leaders for their children.
Finally, this was the first year I attended one of these conferences with some of my volunteers. We had a great time eating Chicago pizza, hanging out, and talking about working with teenagers. Usually this has been a conference I attend with my wife, or even sometimes I will have been their with my brother who's a youth minister, or have seen other youth pastor friends around. But it was nice to see a few of my adult volunteers experience this kind of atmosphere where 2500 youth workers who love God and have a passion for students come and hang out together. I'm excited about what this might mean for them and what God is doing in their lives.

Random other notes--
* Set up a shared google document with my volunteers to share ideas and notes, especially with my small group leaders.
* "If you add something, you must drop something else." Very wise.
* One Meal One Day event sponsored by Compassion on October 20th, I'm looking at participating in.
* I heard Les Christie, a workshop leader, say that creativity is often tied to location, and so we might need to find other places than our office to spark creativity. I think this is true for me.
* Doug Fields' final thoughts to wrap up the weekend: Lead Strong + Love Stronger = Lasting Legacy (1 Timothy 1:3-5).
* Oh, and here's a little video from the conference for your amusement :)

reclaim the world

Our youth group was challenged to "reclaim God's dream for the world" in 2009. With all the brokenness surrounding us, I'm proud of the many ways that they have done what they could to show love and bring restoration to those they have served. I want to share some of the ways they have done that just this year.

They have--

• Purchased Christmas gifts for a local family of five through the Share the Joy program
• Collected 56 shoe boxes from our church for Operation Christmas Child for kids around the world
• Visited Dover Manor for their Thanksgiving service
• Raked leaves for a senior adult in our congregation
• Went around the neighborhood to invite families to Trunk-or-Treat
• Tutored resettled refugee children in Lexington
• Worked with the resident farmers at Quest Farm to prepare for their harvest festival
• Kandice Kidd organized a blanket party to make and send 65 blankets to kids in an orphanage in Zambia
• Participated in “Sleepless in Lexington” to raise money and awareness for homelessness
• Spent a week in Chicago with CSM serving in soup kitchens and working with urban kids programs
• Participated in the community-wide Serve the City mission projects
• Served lunch and helped out at the Lighthouse feeding ministry in Lexington
• Canvassed the neighborhood asking for food donations for a feeding ministry
• Collected money to buy shoes for girls in a Guatemalan orphanage
• Collected blankets, coats and other warm items for the Elkhorn Association’s Souper Bowl party
• Prayed for missionaries and their work around the world
• Sent cards to many in our congregation

Chicago (part 2)

Sorry about the long delay between posts... I hope to have a chance to update more next week.

In this post, I want to tell a few details about our mission trip to Chicago. Part of the problem, however, is that our team was split into two groups for most of the activities, so you'll have to settle with about half the story... But I do have a few pictures I can share from the other serving group (and maybe I should invite Donna to be a guest writer to share more).

We got to town on Sunday evening (with some minor traffic delays on our way to pick up Kandice from the airport) and got settled at our housing site. On all 4 CSM trips I've been on, the housing has been different. This year in Chicago we were housed on the edge of North Park University in the Albany Park neighborhood. We stayed in a row house that was actually owned by the college and rented by CSM. The other church groups there were in other buildings, except we shared our house with a group from Utah. The house was an old building with little furniture (a few bunk beds), no air conditioning (so we were thankful for mild temperatures all week) and three floors. The guys slept on the first floor and the girls on the second, and sometimes we used the basement for our evening debriefing. Because of the old pipes and large number of people, we weren't able to shower there. We had scheduled shower times in the evening where we walked over to the campus and showered in their locker rooms... which meant community showers for the guys (insert giggles here). We didn't spend a lot of time at the house because of our busy schedule, but we had our breakfast and "quiet time" devotions each morning and we had debrief, showers, "quiet hour" and "cell phone access half hour" each evening. All in all, it worked very well for us.

After we got settled at the house, met our city hosts (Wesley, Dale and Brooke) and had a brief orientation, we headed out for dinner. Each evening we ate at a local ethnic restaurant as a way to experience the culture of the city. On Sunday night we started out with dinner at a Thai restaurant in the Uptown neighborhood. It was great food, and I was pleased with the kids' good attitudes and willingness to try new things. It was served family style, but they only brought out one dish at a time... it was almost like a meal with eight courses.

After dinner was the prayer tour. This is one of the best parts of CSM for me. It's hard to explain, but it provides a powerful beginning to the week by taking us around the city and sharing insights into where God is at work there. What we do is we load up in the vans and our city hosts guide us around the city where we see some the obvious tourist sites... but the impact of the prayer tour is that we pause and think rethink their significance or we will reflect on some not-so-obvious meaningful places. For example, a not-so-obvious point along our prayer tour was the once all-white country club that over the years had been integrated and made open to the public and became a symbol of progress in that neighborhood. Another example was the well-known and brand new U.S. Cellular Field where the Chicago White Sox play baseball. What we reflected on was its positioning in the southside of Chicago and how they tore down all kinds of housing to build it and the resulting strain on the homelessness in the area... all the while, refusing to tear down the old stadium because they didn't want the baseball team to be without a home for even a short time. The implication: the homelessness of the baseball team took priority over the homelessness of the residents of that area. Another powerful illustration from this prayer tour was driving Michigan Avenue. You may know the "Magnificent Mile" and all the shopping and beautiful downtown buildings of Chicago that line that street, but what you may not realize that this same road stretches south and it's the very same road that quickly becomes lined by pollution, liquor stores, pawn shops and other signs of poverty. It may be the same street, but there's a world of difference from one end to the other.

You see, it was on a prayer tour just like this in Philadelphia several years ago I found myself in a park overlooking the city when God hit me with something that has moved my heart for missions in a powerful way. This may seem a little strange to you, but I remember looking up at the bright stars filling the sky and my middle school science coming back to me, thinking about the difference between these stars and the sun. The sun is simply another star (actually it's even a weak star in comparison to the others) and yet it has so much influence over me and the rest of the earth (heat, growth, power, etc.). And looking up at all those thousands of stars in the sky, they are beautiful, but they really don't have much practical influence over my life. The difference? The sun is closer. Proximity equals influence. Sometimes I think I'm not the most beautiful or powerful Christian around, but when I am willing to get close to the broken and needy, then I am able to make the biggest difference. I don't have to be the best, I just need to come near... and then I'll be able to have real influence in their lives.

(the other serving team at CCO)

Anyways, Monday was the first day of serving at our ministry sites. The other team loaded up and headed to their anchor site, Cornerstone Community Outreach (CCO), a women and children's shelter where they ran a VBS program for the children who were staying there. My group headed out to the YMCA to help with a children's program. We were split up to help out in three different areas helping the teacher and giving these children a lot of extra positive attention. We read stories, played games, reviewed lessons, danced around, chased on the playground, and anything else we could do to pour our lives into these young children for the brief amount of time we had that morning. It was the Monday after Michael Jackson died, so I remember one of the teachers bringing a MJ album to play in her cd player while the kids were playing on the playground. Fun memories.

That afternoon, we went over to the Uptown neighborhood and were given a task to perform. We were divided into two groups, given $5 and were told to talk to people in the area and find a way to help someone with that money. I was so proud of Jennifer's group who went and bought a bunch of water bottles and gave them away to people they met as an act of kindness. They really blessed a lot of people through that creative generosity.

Later, we had a chance to visit the CCO where the other team was doing the morning VBS, only we were there to help prepare and serve dinner Monday evening. I love feeding ministries because of the opportunities to actively serve (through passing out meals and cleaning up) and to meaningfully engage the people who are there in conversation. Here I spent most of my time washing dishes, but our students did a great job jumping in wherever they could.

That night, we met back up with the other group at a Lebanese (Middle Eastern) restaurant in our neighborhood, and I got to try pickled radish (not so good) and felafel (not so bad). We went back to debrief, shower, and head to bed.

And that is where I will pick up later... with Tuesday.

Chicago (part 1)

This past week, I led a team from our church on a mission trip to Chicago. It was an amazing week, and I'd like to share a few thoughts about the trip... probably over the course of several posts :).

First of all, I really like working with CSM for several reasons. (By the way, check out their blog here.) CSM is great about offering a variety of ministry opportunities. Whereas on most mission trips, you build a house, offer a backyard Bible club, or do some kind of evangelism campaign, with CSM you get to do several things during the week-- even several things a day! So, when I have a student who complains about having to wash dishes, I can say, "No problem, we'll be doing something different in a couple hours." For example, this past week we had two groups (a group of 10 and a group of 11, not counting CSM hosts), and between these groups we served in three childrens programs (CCO, YMCA and By the Hand), four city "experiences" (the prayer tour, Meet a Need, Immersion and Ethnic Plunge), and four feeding ministries (Living Room Cafe, CCO, CCIL, and Humboldt Park Social Services). On top of that, the students experienced the city's cultures through four different ethnic restaurants (Thai, Lebanese, Indian and Mexican). These experiences expose the youth to a whole host of issues pertaining to the city they are serving... you really get a better sense of "Chicago" because of it.

In addition to the variety CSM trips provide, they are great because they are very flexible and customizable to our group, they do all the legwork, and they provide you with great city hosts to work alongside the groups. And it's nice to know that once we leave, CSM doesn't. CSM has an ongoing presence with these great ministries we work in. It may be short-term for us, but they are constantly supporting and providing volunteers to many of these ministry areas.

I'm also a big fan of doing urban ministry with my students. I've now taken youth to work in the inner cities of Toronto, Nashville, Philadelphia and Chicago. Sitting at a table across from a hungry family at a soup kitchen, kneeling down to deliver a bag lunch to a homeless person on the street, looking into the eyes of kids who are becoming hardened by the streets, driving through neighborhoods where there is no one who looks like them, being confronted by the reality of poverty, hopelessness, and injustice-- these are truly cross-cultural trips that show a part of the world that kids from Kentucky are rarely ever exposed to (without the cost of having to fly overseas). And I believe there is great value in just being exposed to it... to see it with your own eyes and to feel the weight of it bear down on your soul. You can't leave the city unchanged.

Another exciting thing about this year was our student participation. The first year I was at GBC, we took a group of seven to Nashville. Last year, we had 14 go to Toronto. This year, we again jumped by seven and took 21 with us to Chicago (and an extra van). Because we were split up, I missed getting to spend time with Alex and Donna and the nine kids in their group, but Jennifer and my group were awesome! It gives me a lot of hope for the direction of our youth ministry and the priority of missions in the lives of these youth. Along with the attendance, we had a couple of our youth participate by contributing to our morning quiet times. We have a tradition (handed down from my own experience in youth group) of having a half-hour morning quiet time where we have our Bibles, a pen, and a couple written pages to lead us in morning devotions and prayer. Usually I put these together myself, but this year I was excited to have Andrew and Rebecca write one each for our trip (Monday & Wednesday). They did such a great job, and I'm so proud of the work they put into it. Also, almost all of our group prayed out loud at some point during the trip, whether for a ministry site, a meal, or during our debriefing time. They all worked so hard all week. Great participation by everyone!

More to come later...

Chicago

This past weekend I had a great trip to Chicago. The express purpose of the trip was a pre-trip meeting with the city directors of CSM to plan for our youth mission trip there this summer. However, I used this as an opportunity to have some fun, too!

I invited one of my friends, Alex, to go with me (he's going on the mission trip with us as an adult volunteer, too). Alex is a great roadtrip buddy (in January we went to the Liberty Bowl in Memphis together)... we have great conversation for the long car rides and he's up for a little adventure, even we have no clue what we're doing.

We left Thursday afternoon--stopping for dinner, fuel and our first Jamba Juice in Merrillville-- and arrived in Chicago around 9:00pm Central Time. One of the coolest things about our trip was where we stayed. We called a while back and made arrangements to stay with "The Jesus People." The Jesus People USA, or JPUSA (pronounced Ja-POO-za), is an intentional community of Christians who live, worship and work together. Started over 36 years ago, members of JPUSA live in an old hotel in the Uptown neighborhood of Chicago. Currently they have about 450 people living together, and through their faith community they support one another and share resources (like food, transportation, kids' education, bills, etc.) by the money they make through the businesses they run (roofing supply stores, coffee house, skate shop and even the large outdoor music festival, Cornerstone). They also run five shelters in the Chicago area (one of which our youth will be working in during the mission trip). It was great to see the place in action and hear them talk about what life was like living there. Alex and I stayed in the single men's apartments and helped out by washing dishes on Saturday morning.

(cross collage in the cafeteria)

On Friday morning, after devotions at JPUSA, we headed over to the offices for the Center for Student Missions on the edge of Northpark University campus in the Albany neighborhood. CSM is the organization that is coordinating our youth mission trip this summer. We met with the city directors, Julia, Kelly and Tim, and talked about what we would need to know to prepare for our trip. Because this is a larger group than we've ever taken before, our group will be divided into two groups for most of the project sites. So we talked about our city hosts, our ministry sites, transportation, the logistics of picking up one of our students from the airport, other schedule issues, and some things we wanted them to know about our group. They took us by the housing site where we will be staying and explained the challenges of accommodating so many students in the summer (food, bathrooms, fans, etc.). Then they took us over to Cornerstone Community Outreach, the shelter run by JPUSA for women and children, and explained about the VBS we would be running for the kids while we're there. Afterward we ate lunch at a Thai restaurant (one of the features of our trip is that we'll be eating dinner at local ethnic restaurants like this one each night).

After the visit with CSM, we got metro passes and jumped on the elevated train (aka "the L") into the city. It was a beautiful day, so we spent a long time walking around town and people watching. We walked by Navy Pier and eventually found ourselves at a movie theater watching "State of Play."

After walking around some more, we took the train to the Wrigley area, got some pizza, and found another Jamba Juice.

As you know, Saturday morning Alex and I washed breakfast dishes for JPUSA and chatted with people there til lunch. Then, since we needed to kill some time and it was a beautiful day, we headed down to the waterfront and sat and read. After a while, we made our way back into the city to find a good spot to watch the NFL draft (btw, I think Cleveland drafted pretty well overall this year). Right when we were getting ready to head out, there came a downpour. I thought there was a Jamba Juice pretty close so, while Alex went back to the car, I decided to go find it. It was not close. So about an hour later (and a couple miles, a hail storm, and being very cold and wet), I finally got back to the car with my smoothie. We stuck around a little longer to hear our friend, Brad's band "Suzy Brack and the New Jack Lords" play at the Bird's Nest on Southport. They were great, and I'm glad we stuck around to hear them play.

So, finally at 9:00pm (10 o'clock our time) we left Chicago and headed back home. Yes, that's right... we didn't get home until after 4:00am, and I was up for church at 7:30am Sunday morning! My meager three hours of sleep turned into a very long Sunday, but it all worked out and we had an awesome trip. In fact, the trip really got me excited for our youth mission trip, and I can't wait to go back to Chicago again in June with 19 teenagers :)