Youth Ministry and Me

Tomorrow I am giving our youth leaders a new framework for thinking about how we do youth ministry and how we measure success. I believe that this is something that God has shown me over summer as I've listened to the leaders and their joys and frustrations, prayed, read and thought about our youth ministry. It's below.

Please leave comments with your feedback!


Our Goal
To be a community that thirsts for God
With all our heart we desire to be constantly seeking to grow in our love and knowledge of God above all else.
We want to cultivate this desire of our hearts in those we pastor.

Our priorities
Pastoring people - our main job is to care for and lead our people
Praying people - we cannot do the first without God, so we pray

Our Danger
Becoming solely program planners - the nature of the Youth Ministry beast is to run programs and we will have plenty of them in 2010.  However, we must remember that the majority of our focus, energy and time should be spent on our priorities.


How does this mindset help us?
Our priorities affect how we measure success. If we see ourselves as program planners then we will be constantly obsessing over who is coming to our programs. If we get 20 kids to something we have been successful. If only 4 show up we have failed. If however we see ourselves as pastors and people of prayer then we will measure success by the quality of contact we’ve had with people and the amount of time we’ve spent lifting these people up in prayer to God. For example if we’ve rung the youth directly assigned to our care and asked them how they’re going and prayed for or with them then we’ve been successful.

Check out this interesting post here which notices how the Saddleback buildings (Rick Warrens megachurch) are a lot like the Google buildings.

Very interesting!

HT to Matt Perman

Only problem is... it's not racist.

That ad depicts an Australian cricket fan (the same guy from all the other KFC cricket ads this summer) sitting in a crowd of West Indian supporters who are dancing and singing.  They are dancing and singing because they are West Indian cricket fans and that is how they watch the cricket.  I think that most Australian cricket fans think this is a cool part of West Indian cricket.  I wish it was a part of watching Australian cricket, but we are too reserved for anything like that.

Anyway, in order for the Australian fan to watch the cricket in peace he gives the crowd a bucket of KFC chicken, when they start eating they quieten down.  This is the apparent racist part, see this quote by an American radio announcer for example:

"These people, they're so unruly and uncivilized and so rowdy, jumping up and down," U.S. radio announcer Ana Kasparian said, in her criticism. "They just can't sit down unless you give them some ... fried chicken."

But actually Ana Kasparian has severely mis-understood the ad.  They are West Indian cricket fans having fun watching the cricket.  But our Australian fan can't focus so he gets KFC which quietens them down.  This is just like what the same guy has done in all the other KFC ads this summer.  He has given his girlfriends parents KFC so he can change the channel on the TV and watch the cricket, he has given a security gaurd KFC so he can sit on the other side of the fence as a fake security gaurd and get an uninterupted view of the cricket.   Now, in this ad, he gives chicken to the West Indian crowd so he can watch the cricket.

It's not racist, it's cricket.

It's also not America, it's Australia and I think that racism probably has some cultural elements to it.  What's racist in America, due to past cultural history, could be not racist in Australia because we don't share that same cultural history.  It probably works both ways.

Here is an American news story on the ad

This story from the Australian is well written and sums up much of what I think.

Here is the actual ad


and here is one of the other KFC cricket summer ads for context and comparison.

Anyone out there know of a good speaker I could get to speak at our annual youth camp in August/Sept this year?  Or are you interested in speaking at our Youth Camp this year?

I can't pay much/anything, except covering costs for the trip.  I may be able to offer my services to you and your youth ministry for a weekend camp in return...

Comments and applications appreciated! ;)

Recently I've noticed that often people who have slightly different opinions on something don't actually engage and argue properly. Rather they tend to ignore what their opposition is really saying and take the other person to be more extreme and then argues against that non-existing extreme. That's called building a straw man (i.e. someone who doesn't exist) and then killing it because you kill a point of view that doesn't really exist.