Youth Ministry and Me

Today I sat down with my supervisor and went through where I'm spending my time as a Youth Pastor.

The results were shocking. I've neglected some big and important things while doing a whole lot of little things keeping me busy and feeling very drained.

Let's hope as I refocus for next year in the coming weeks and months, I can get the big important rocks in place first and then work out what other things can fill the remaining space or be scrapped altogether!

My job could look quite different next year.

An interesting quote:

Hint: Your question to them (when in a job interview and the topic of money comes up) should be, “Since you live here, how much do you live on?” Check what the local school district salary range is for a teacher with your level of experience and expect the church’s salary package to be competitive.)

Is that a good measure? Or is it better to look at the Senior Pastor's wage and work from there?

Ok, so is it just me or is there some sort of large irony in calling a church planting movement, which aims to bring the Gospel to people not currently reached, The Geneva Push? (news story here)

It makes me think of some city in Europe where they discuss human rights and how Guantanamo Bay probably breaches those rights. My brain, doesn't really go to the reformation church historical link that it refers to. It wasn't until I asked someone at the recent National Youth Ministry Convention that I understood the name.

Just saying Church Planting Australia would have been a heaps better name.

(P.S. Despite this, I still think these guys will do great work by the way)

Recently, I've just done an assignment interpreting Luke 4:14-30 for a youth group context made up of believers and non-believers (aka my actual youth ministry). I've left out all the work I did on the text (the exegesis) though this can be added later if people request it to see how I arrived at my conclusions.

What's it all about?
Luke 4:14-30 is the beginning of Luke’s recording of Jesus’ ministry. It starts with this sermon and the response it received. It is a summary and program of the rest of His ministry.1 Jesus begins the era of salvation through his ministry bringing the good news to all people, disadvantaged and oppressed, Jewish and non-Jewish. People must respond to Jesus as if they reject Him, He will reject them. God is at work in Jesus and His ministry through and by His Spirit.

Central theological concepts

• Those who are far off or distant are now welcome in God’s kingdom. It is these people Jesus has come to free. This includes non-Jewish people.
• The result of rejecting Jesus is to miss out on his blessing.
• Jesus acted in and by the power of the Spirit.

Main point of the passage
Luke 4:14-30 demonstrates that Jesus’ ministry marks the start of God’s plan of the salvation of all people, regardless of their background or current situation, if they do not reject Him and His teaching.

Coming up next... A look at what the Bible says about my 3 central theological concepts.


Reference:
1 Stein, Robert. H, Luke. New American Commentary, Nashville, Tennessee: Broadman Press, 1992.

So, I've been thinking quite a lot recently about community in the church. I was reading a chapter in a book called Small Group Leaders Handbook about community in small groups and I came across these interesting statements:

Things Overheard in a Community-less Small Group

I saw this at Koorong in Hobart once. It's almost as bad as Sunday School Musical!



See the hompage

Ok, so before I start my review of this film let me just tell you, it is the worst movie I have ever seen.

Ellisa and I hired it out last night along with State Of Play (starring Russel Crowe and is actually awesome!). Thankfully we mainly wanted to watch State of Play but seeing Sunday School Musical on the New Release stand at Video Ezy we thought this will probably provide us a with a few laughs at church culture. I was also thinking it might be a bit like the movie Saved starring Mandy Moore, which is actually alright. But Sunday School Musical isn't even in that league. In fact, Sunday School Musical is in the same league as the movies we made at youth group last week with no effects on a hand held family video camera. It's better than what we made, but only just!

The Plot:
A young boy is in a choir in the rough part of town. They are good. They and another choir from the good part of town win a regional competition to go to the national competitions. The only thing is the choir from the good part of town sucks and got through by default - the third choir that was meant to enter the competition could come because they had a case of food poisoning from some scrambled egg sandwiches gone wrong (I'm not joking that is actually what they say happened in this movie). This led one of the guys from the good end of town choir to say, "Praise the Lord for Scrambled Egg."

Anyway, it just so happens that the bad part of town choir has this awesome singer in it. His Dad is away at war and his mum loses her job so he has to move into his aunts house across town (in the good part of town). So he has to change schools. Which he does and now he has to join the good part of town choir (who suck). Somehow he makes them good. In the meantime the bad part of town choir has had to close down because they run out of money. Just after this happens the minister at church preaches a sermon about love or something (I was fast forwarding at this point) and this makes the good part of town choir decide to merge with the bad part of town choir.

They go to the state championships and then the judge rules them out, but he lets them sing even though they can't compete. They are so good that the eligible winning choir gives all the prize money to the combined choir and this means they can open re-open their church. Somehow in all that the main characters (the really good singer/dancer boy) and the girl have hooked up. The movie ends with them having a peck on the lips and holding hands.

My thoughts:
The plot is mega lame. Not only mega lame, but mega unoriginal! It was a lot bit like Sister Act 2 and a bit like High School Musical. It also didn't make sense. Why did the star of the show have to move schools? And if he did, how come the two choirs could get together and practice later? Also, the schools had no people at them except the choir. You never saw people at the schools, just choir members. Likewise, no one in this film wasn't a Christian, that's pretty realistic...

Not only that, but the acting was terrible. The guy was clearly mouthing his words but he wasn't singing while he did that. He looked like he was talking while we heard an amazing singing voice. However despite that making the singing parts painful, they were better than all the acting! Slow, awkward. It was so bad. Not only that, but almost every scene went for too long. It was almost like they wanted to make the movie go for 90mins but the plot wasn't good enough to get them there, so they just created overly long scenes. For example, at one point the main girl character is studying for her test when her Dad comes in. They have some clichéd Christian parents care about their kids talk and then he helps her study for her biology test. That's an ok scene until we spend about 45 seconds actually watching them study together. Her Dad asked her a biology question and then she tried to answer it. She couldn't, so he taught her how to remember it. Then she got it and was ready for her test. An attempt to be educational? I think that scene started our fast forwarding stopping whenever it looked like something major was happening.

Also, it was meant to be a musical. But I reckon it had about 5-6 songs in it. That was it, and most of the time that was when the choir was singing, and therefore it made perfect sense for them to sing. It was like they had no understanding that in a musical everything is sung. Every scene has songs in it. Sure there can be some dialogue, but lots and lots and lots of singing.

Summary
In summary then, this was clearly a low budget, low creativity, bad idea of a film. They would have been better off giving the money they spent on making this to poor kids in Africa, saving the planet from all the waste people will make by snapping these DVD's and putting them into their bins.

If I were to rate this movie out of 5 it wouldn't even get 0. It would get minus. Unfortunately you can't even watch it for a laugh. It's too boring to laugh at!

What other people have said:
There is a great review here on Christ and Pop Culture which raises many of my grievances with the film. I also learnt here that this movie was made by a film company that specialises in releasing films with similar names to big movies to make quick money. That is terrible.