Of Cosmos and Morning Glories: A Fable of Flowers and Girls (Part 1/9)

“She became the high priestess of self-presentation, and was rewarded for it at every turn.” –Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood One spring I thought I would experiment with growing flowers from seeds, and drawn in by the seed packet’s representation of continual bright colored flowers, I planted cosmos along with morning glories and alyssum [...]

Faithfulness, not success.

Well, I am back from my many trips in November to California for brother’s engagement party and friend’s ordination, Atlanta for the National Youth Worker’s Convention, and then Asheville for Thanksgiving with the in-laws. Much fun, but too many night without my bed! I thought I’d share something I was musing on… It struck me [...]

Shrek the Third

“Help! I’ve been kidnapped by a monster who’s trying to relate to me!” This from Arthur, the teenage heir to the throne of Far Far Away after Shrek musters every bit of slang you could possible cram into less than a minute of screen time in an attempt to “reach” the teenager and relate to [...]

Youth Ministry Discussion

I’ve created a blog for youth ministry discussion based around a recommended syllabus with a reading list, and then there are discussion forums for each of the books as we go along… we can also create topics to discuss, so if you want to join in, come visit! http://ymcafe.org

Philosophy of Christian Leadership

After much thought and consideration on the subject, it seems that the best philosophy of Christian leadership is this: Christian leadership should be two things (1) Christian and (2) leadership.  As utterly inane as that may sound, there is a profound lack of Christian leadership in the church today that is either Christian or leadership [...]

Philosophy of Ministry

This is part of a packet I give to volunteers in the youth ministry at Trinity Church.  It was written as part of a project for Fuller Seminary.  God calls ordinary people to do extraordinary things in his kingdom. If we look at what that looks like, we see Moses (Ex 3:4-12) interrupted in the [...]

Make some noise

A scene from tonight’s high school football game got stuck in my head, and it seems to me to represent the state of teens in general.  Our home team was down by four in the fourth quarter, but they had the ball, and had a good chance of getting some more points, when a sudden [...]

Theology of Mentoring

Mentoring and discipleship are terms that we throw around frequently in ministry; however, too often we don’t have an adequate Biblical understanding of what mentoring looks like, the logistics or thrust of mentoring and what the out come of mentoring should tend to be.  An analysis of the life of Jesus shows the time that [...]

Theology of Youth Ministry

Introduction: As I stood in the back of the worship service this morning at church I watched as the high schoolers filtered in.  Some were early, bright eyed, and more awake than I felt after having come from the junior high service, which despite all of their energy, had failed to wake me up.  There’s [...]

You know you’re a youthworker when…

…fellowship after the Sunday morning service includes the use of squirt guns. Yes, this morning our newsletter staff passed out the monthly newsletter with miniature squirt guns to celebrate summer. The guns, for the record, were empty, but, of course, they stayed that way for less then a minute. After prying one out of an [...]