Questions my teens asked me at youth group tonight

Hello Everyone,

After a long silence (during which my hit count has mysteriously gone up?) , I finally have something blog-worthy to write about: the amazingly complex questions teenagers ask when given the opportunity. Naturally, few of them are directly addressed by the Bible:

• Can demons die?
• In John 8 when the Pharisees try to "trap" Jesus by asking him what to do with the woman caught in adultery, we assume that the pharisees would have used either the "yes, stone her" answer or the "no, spare her" answer against Jesus. But how could they used the "yes" answer against Him if it lined up with the law?
• I had a frightening dream. Was it caused by a demon?
• Can demons kill people?
• Could satan be forgiven if he repents of his sins?
• Does God hate satan, or just his sin?
• Could there be angels and demons fighting right now in this room? (They got really freaked out when I said yes.)

Somewhere along the way I got the idea that the only questions I would ever be asked as a pastor were questions addressed by the Bible. Obviously some of these questions are, but the ability of teenagers, especially young ones, to ask questions that I don't even have categories for, amazes me. If you have any good out-there questions you've heard, I'd love to hear about them too.

Miles per gallon of milk

So maybe someone's done this before, but I've never seen it. A prof at my alma mater has calculated the approximate number of miles per gallon that you can get from milk while riding a bike. It surprised me a little to see that it may be cheaper to fuel some cars than to fuel your bike! Of course, the calculations only work if you drink only milk . . .

The reason you keep wishing you could integrate your high schoolers into adult discipleship ministries.

If you're like me, for a while you've had a nagging sense that it would be good for your high school age girls and guys to participate in adult small groups, retreats, and activities. But you haven't really gotten very far in making it happen, perhaps because you're not sure if it would really be a good thing. After all, some of them might end up in the same group with their parents! Isn't the whole purpose of youth ministry to separate adults from their kids so that both can grow in their faith away from the other's critical eye?

Um, no. The purpose is discipleship. Total separation is a tool we've been using. And it isn't working that well.

Today I ran across this link for an excerpt from a real book written by people who know what they're talking about who say what our guts have been telling us all along - older teens do need some degree of integration in adult ministries to help mentor them into adult faith. It's not just our imagination.

So now that we know there's a book out there to back us up, maybe we'll have the courage to try it. And yes that includes me.

(Thanks to Rob at the Youth Pastors Only Facebook group for the link)

Excellent point from NNYM

Soooo much has happened since my last post that I should blog about, but I keep putting it off until I have time to write a "good" post about each thing. Unfortunately, that means that a lot of good stuff never gets blogged about. So today, I'm writing a short post about the most recent interesting thing that has crossed my mind.

You need to check out the most recent issue of Take5, the monthly "five minute" devotional from NNYM. It's called "Trying vs. Training," and basically points out that, like running marathons, being successful in ministry requires training, not just effort. I think it's an interesting point, because many times we do tend to think that "book learning won't help you much in this job" and "all the stuff you learn in school will never prepare you for what you'll face in ministry" and "you don't have to be educated to be a good minister." While all of those statements are partially true, I think the article is right too. Why should we expect to be effective in ministry without taking the time to learn vital skills and key information related to our task?

It also makes me think about how in many small churches most of the ministry is done by people with no training for their task. Sunday school teachers, youth workers, children's workers, and sometimes musicians serve regular roles of responsibility without ever having attended a class, seminar or single training session about what they do.

Then, when a church decides that they need to step up the quality of their ministries, often their first thought is that they need to hire paid staff, if only part time. But sometimes the small salaries they offer attract only untrained people. Perhaps for many small-budget churches, the better investment would be to spend the money on training for their volunteers rather than on paid staff.

Congregational mourning

Recently, a teen in our youth group passed away. It's been incredibly difficult for the church and youth to cope with the loss, but that's not what I'm blogging about. I try not to blog about stuff that's too personal or too specific to my church, because (1) I don't want to bore you with my private life, (2) I don't want to compromise the privacy of my church or it's members, and (3) I don't want to post anything in the midst of an emotional situation that I may regret later. However, I mentioned it because it does relate to what I am posting about, and because it's so huge to me right now that I just didn't want to leave it unmentioned. Mostly the latter. I don't want to blog about it, but I would appreciate your prayers.

What I am posting about is that I've realized that we're lucky that the grieving process is relatively well laid-out in our culture. You hold a viewing and funeral, you visit with and bring food to the family, you donate money to help with unexpected expenses, you talk to each other and to pastors and teachers and group leaders and counselors about your memories and your feelings, and you create memorials - tombstones, scrapbooks, journal entries, photo collages.

I realized this yesterday when I was at our local ministerial association meeting. One of the pastors there had just taken a position as the interim pastor at a church that has recently lost about half of its congregation to a church split. What got me thinking was when he said that when a church goes through a loss like that, often there's an experience of mourning. That made sense, but what I realized was that I don't have the first idea of how a congregation could effectively mourn the loss of people who are still alive.

Holding special services to "celebrate" the time you had with the absent people would be absurd in our culture. So would holding meetings to share our memories about the way things were before they left. So would establishing any kind of monument to the people and the effect they had on a church while they were there. To focus any attention on the time before the loss would seem to us to be dwelling unwisely on the past rather than looking constructively to the future.

It seems like the only kind of "mourning" that we accept in that kind of situation is expressions of anger. Often we villainize the people who left, and talk about what terrible things they did and/or how glad we are to be rid of them. Sometimes we bolster our self-esteem by declaring that we are the faithful ones, and we will carry on regardless of who betrays us or abandons the cause. The leavers may truly be villains in some cases, but surely a healthy response to church loss should involve more than just anger and/or gratitude that they left. How do we acknowledge the good things they did while they were here? How do we acknowledge the good times and good relationships that were had, and the goodnes (whatever there was) in the people we've lost? It seems that if it's worth doing in the case of a death, it should be worth doing in the case of a split. Even in the case of someone who chose to die, we look for the good in that person. Shouldn't we do something similar in the case of one who chose to leave? But what could be done that wouldn't seem absurd?

So I really have no answers for this one. But I hope that someday we figure it out and find a good path for churches to walk when they need to acknowledge the grief of a church split or group exit.