Youth Ministry and Me

If you hang around evangelicals for long enough you will start to here things like, 'Hillsong songs are all Jesus is my boyfriend type songs'.  This critic seems to apply to any song where if you replaced the word Jesus or God you could perhaps imagine singing part or all of the song to your boyfriend/girlfriend.  For example a song might say, I love Jesus or You (clearly implying God) are my everything.

I would now like to make a radical suggestion.  At least a suggestion that is radical to my mind.  What if this so called 'Jesus is my boyfriend' critic doesn't actually reveal a shallowness in the songs lyrics but an idol in the heart of the person criticizing.  Our society is filled with false ideas about how one person (your boyfriend or girlfriend) can fulfill all your wants and desires, can make you eternally happy, will love you no matter what etc.  That's what pop culture sings about all the time (mind you actually mostly these days pop music sings not about relationship but random sex so the critic may also reveal a lack of cultural awareness?).  The critique, I can imagine singing this song to my boyfriend, might actually just mean you have bought a lie.

Jesus is the only person who can fulfill all our hopes and dreams.  Jesus is the only person who can really love us no matter what we do unconditionally forever.  It seems entirely appropriate then to replace the idol of our boyfriend/girlfriend relationships with Jesus who loved us and who we love.  That we should make Jesus the object and centre of our love, affection and desire not our boyfriend or girlfriend.  Your boyfriend is going to fail you.  Jesus will never fail you.

A week or two ago I posted some of my  reflections on going to the Men's Shelter run by the Salvation army called the Anchorage.   There were a number of comments including some recommended reading.

Just the other day two new books arrived in the mail from the Book Depository for me.

Really interesting bunch of stats on porn on the internet over at Youth Ministry Geek

Check it out

From Google's CEO:

"If you have something you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place"

When we started the church we invested in a designer to develop our stationary and website. Communicate Jesus mentions this often but a good website will drive bodies to your church! Think about it  this way – if you spend $1000 on a website (for example, with Clover Sites) and you pick up one member who gives $20 a week, you pay for that investment in one year…oh and they get eternal life and get to go to heaven.

I've seen this video in a couple of places recently and it got me thinking... (watch the video below before continuing).


"Sunday's Coming" Movie Trailer from North Point Media on Vimeo.


Anyway, it got me thinking a few things.  But mainly I thought it was a reminder that if we're striving for creativity and relevance and freshness in our services (which we may or may not be) then we actually need to do better than simply modernising the liturgy and dressing cooler.  We should also avoid copying another churches culture into our services (i.e. lets meet like Hillsong because they are large).

How do you work out ways of worshiping as a community, particularly of young people, that are relevant and culturally contextualised to your group?

An interesting video I watched over on Michael Hyatt's (CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishing) blog.  I found it interesting because I think even though it's primarily about book publishing it has a lot to say about Gen Y in general and the way they are perceived vs. the way they actually think and behave.

(RSS readers may need to click through to the site to see this video)


I wonder if this says something for the content and nature of our youth ministry programs.  Do we sometimes focus on youth assuming the first run through is true and forget there is great potential for deep things in Generation Y?

What do you think, do you agree with the forwards or backwards way more?

Came across this free e-book by Tim Challies today called Sexual Detox (HT to Mikey). There is one for single and one for married guys.

I highly recommend it and just finished reading it. Only took me about an hour to read.

It had some pretty good things to say about sex and it's purposes and our need to focus on God and his plan and purposes for sex. As someone who sadly is coming into my upcoming marriage with sexual baggage I found it both a challenging and encouraging read. I'm thankful for God's grace to us and I pray that He will help my past not mess up my future too much!

I think the last paragraph sums up the book nicely:

The fact is, God does not give young men free passes when it comes to sin; he does not allow you to run wild for a time and just “get away with it.” Sin carries with it consequences whether you sin at eighteen or eighty. Turn from your sin today. Pursue freedom. Pursue Christ.

Even if you have no desire to have sex, have sex for your spouse’s sake. Even if neither you nor your spouse have a desire to have sex, have sex for God’s sake out of obedience to him.

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



See the hompage

So recently it was announced that churches could continue to 'discriminate' and only hire people who hold the same religious convictions as they do to work for them.

This is surely mostly a big debate about nothing. The reason it is heated is because churches and their associated organisations wont hire gay people and the law says this is ok. Melbourne's flagship paper, The Age, has been pretty biased against the church on this one (what's new?). Here are all of the recent articles, I could find, that they've published on the issue. I've categorised them into Anti-church and Pro-Church by which I mean Anti the right for a church organisation to discrimate on the basis of faith or pro that position:

Anti-church: A Betrayal of Faith: The Bishop of Gippsland writes one of the worst articles I've ever seen from a Bishop. Totally hopeless and he'd be doing everyone a favour if he resigned and never spoke in public again.

Hulls lack of courage leaves discrimination entrenched: Editorial piece slamming the churches position.

Government bows to religious right: news article which is totally biased

Church can reject gays, single mums: news article which is... also totally biased. It includes this lovely quote from Rodney Croome (a Tasmanian gay activist), "the right to employment and education is more important than pandering to religious prejudice."
Hang on Rodney, the church isn't saying gay people can't have jobs or get educated. Just that they won't employ them. Surely when the gay lobby hire someone they ask if they believe in the cause?? If I went for a job to work with them and said, by the way I don't agree with you I wouldn't be hired. I'm then discriminated against because of my religious views. Why is it fair for you to do it but not the church?

Balancing religion and rights, the case against discrimination: More of the same from The Age opinion pages.



Pro-church:
Why the Bishop is wrong on faith and rights: A response to that hopeless Bishop's article I mentioned earlier.

Freedom of religion is also a basic right: This article begins with, "Telling a church or a mosque it can't employ people who share its ethos is a bit like telling the Labor Party it must employ Liberals." Hurrah!

Plus there were also some Letters to the editor with 1 pro and 2 anti.

(NOTE: These were all I found when searching theage.com.au with the word discrimination so I might have missed one or two but I think it's a pretty complete list)

Anyway apart from a clearly biased paper. Here are some of my other thoughts:

First of all, churches are still allowed to preach the Gospel and so I can't see why a gay person would want to work for an organisation that says you're lifestyle is opposed to God's plan for the way humans should relate to each other. So that's why I can't really understand why they are so upset about this. It's like I said earlier about me working for the gay lobby. I don't want to and they would never employ me because of my religious beliefs. I'm happy to be discriminated against in that case where we clash ideologically.

Secondly, Jim Wallis makes an interesting point in a recent article on this subject of discrimination. He talks about the difference between providing services and receiving them. He says you should be able to select people who agree with your organisational beliefs but then not discriminate against who receives your services, that is a church based group that finds people jobs should still find gay people jobs but shouldn't be forced to hire someone who totally disagrees with their position. (The first "Pro-Church" article I list argues along similar lines to this!)

I think my view would be similar to Jim Wallis and co.

Here are some statistics about the digital world we now live in to blow your mind!!



HT to Michael Hyatt

Thanks to a friend on Facebook I saw a link to this article about Society, Marriage and God.

"Marriage is part of an earlier notion that women were dependent on men. Women were saying 'if I am going to invest in you by bearing your kids, then you have to commit to me in marriage'. But with women able to earn an equal income, that contract has been weakened."

Seth Godin says:

"All the evidence I've seen shows that positive thinking and confidence improves performance. In anything"

So a lot of people laugh at me when I talk about or tell people that I use and enjoy Twitter.

The biggest criticism I hear of Twitter goes something like this, "I don't want to know what you had for breakfast". First of all, this shows a major misunderstanding of Twitter - Twitter is more about conversations and passing on interesting websites and ideas - and second, for some famous people or Christians who we look up to it can actually be interesting to get an insight into what their lives look like. I know a whole lot more about people like Mark Driscoll, Ed Stetzer, Michael Hyatt, Max Lucado, Don Miller and Doug Fields, because they tell me about their lives on Twitter. This is actually both interesting and refreshing to see lots of what they do is just like me, hang out with their family, friends etc.


Putting this aside there are three other great reasons I like Twitter. First, I've been able to interact with people I would never have if it wasn't for Twitter. I've had conversations on Twitter with John Piper (or the guy who twitters for him at least), David Allen, Alan Hirsch, Lifeway Student Ministry, Rick Smith, Guy Mason, Communicate Jesus (aka Steve Kryger), the Youth Ministry Blog people, to name a few.

The second great reason for my love of Twitter is that I've had consumer problems fixed because of Twitter. Back in March, I was seriously annoyed with The Commonwealth Bank for something they did. I wrote this on Twitter, and then they rang me to sort it out! (I have blogged about that before). Then just last week I tried to reformat my first computer hard-drive. This was going very badly and I tweeted that I needed to find the Drivers for the Medion computer I was playing with. Medion UK replied to that tweet and told me where to get the drivers from. And now that computer works fine!

The third reason is because I have also won a CD through Twitter. It was from Lifeway Student Ministry when I entered a competition on the pastor ran on Twitter only for Youth Pastors.

So I would encourage you to stop bagging twitter, or stop wondering about it and make a commitment to try it out for a month (aiming for 2 tweets a day). And see what happens.

Twitter is all about followers, so at the end of this post I'll give you a great list of people or organisations who are worth following on Twitter. Start interacting with them. You will enjoy it. It's also fine in Twitter land to follow and unfollow (stop following) people. So follow someone, and if they are boring or annoying, simply unfollow them. I have done this several times.

The other thing that most people who use Twitter do is use a 3rd party program. This makes Twitter better. I use TweetDeck. It's the best one I've found. You can download it here

If you want to learn more about Twitter, check out the Mashable Twitter Guide book. It lays out everything you need to know to get started!

So why not head on over to twitter and sign up now?

People worth following:
Me (Chris Bowditch)
HTD Youth (The Youth Ministry I run)
Michael Hyatt (CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers)
Mashable (The latest info in the world of social media)
Communicate Jesus (Steve Kryger talks Web 2.0, social media and harnessing it for the church)
Rick Warren (Senior Pastor and Founder of Saddleback church, Author of Purpose Driven Life)
Tim Schmoyer (Youth Pastor in USA. Great websites - www.studentministry.org)
Jetstar Airways (Find out when there are cheap flights)
Virgin Blue (Find out when there are cheap flights)
Wayne Schuller (Assistant Minister at Holy Trinity Anglican Church)
Jono Smith (Assistant Minister at Holy Trinity Anglican Church)
Louie Giglio (Founder of the Passion Conference)
Desiring God (John Piper's ministry)
ESV Daily Bible (The Bible is good)
Ed Stetzer (Christian researcher in the USA. Into church planting)
John Piper (Needs no introduction, dead set legend)
Mark Driscoll (Howdy Mars Hill, Pastor of Mars Hill Church Seattle)
Matt Chandler (Pastor of Church in Dallas TX)
Don Miller (Author of many books, eg. Blue Like Jazz, Searching for God Knows What)
Max Lucado (Christian Author)
Rick Smith (American speaker to youth, and theology student)
Google (search engine)
Google Books (cool part of the web, they tweet cool quotes)
VictoriaPolice (Find out all the crazy things that people do in Melbourne)
Victorian Premier (Doesn't really know how to use this, but he might one day)
Kevin Rudd (Australia's Prime Minister, actually really interesting, writes his own tweets too)
Bob Kauflin (American worship pastor)
David Allen (Getting Things Done guy)
Alan Hirsch (Australian Missiologist, founder of FORGE)
Will Briggs (Tasmanian church planter)
Doug Fields (American Youth Pastor, Author of many Youth Ministry books)
Creative Youth Ideas (Tweets ideas about Youth Ministry)
Guy Mason (Melbourne Church planter)
Youth Ministry Blog (A good American youth ministry blog - multi-authored)

You can also go to the Twitter Suggestions section and look for some people there.