the Buzz – Elevate Info
June 8, 2009
Here’s what you need to know.
1. Baptism Wed night 6-9pm at Sherwood Rec Center (4900 N. Norton, Kansas City, MO, south of Penguin Park just off Vivion Road). Bring your own picnic dinner at 6 pm. Swimming is available from 6-7 pm for $4/person (please pay at the gate). The Baptism will start at 7 pm. This is probably the coolest most celebratory night of the year for Shoal Creek, please come!
2. Kids Adelante Camp Info- On June 15th, 16th, and 17th, our Elevate students are going to run a kids camp for Mission Adelante’s kids program. You and/or your student needs to sign up for one of those nights (the least full are the 15th and 16th) and you need to call me, Justin, (816-792-2992 x27) or send me an email at justin.talley@shoalcreek.org letting me know which night you want to be a part of. We’ll meet at the church (in the front) and leave at 4:30pm each evening, travel down to Mission Adelante Headquarters (aprx. 18th and Central, KC, KS), and be back by 10pm for you to pickup/go home. Students will eat at Mission Adelante, then we’ll travel as a team to a nearby park to play, perform skits/dramas/songs, and then travel back to Shoal Creek.
This is going to be a really cool, extremely fun way for our students to live out their faith and serve a poplation that needs help (Hispanic children of immigrants)! It’s going to be a blast, and I know it’s going to give our students an amazing opportunity to see how God is at work in our worlds!
Please:
- Let me know if you/your family/your students wants in! That’s #1 priority!
- Let’s talk to see which night works best. (email: justin.talley@shoalcreek.org, call: 816-792-2992 x27)
- Consider giving money to help us pay for the dinners we need to provide, or…
- Consider driving down with us and providing rides for the night, or…
- Consider showing up between 3:30-4:30 to help prepare the dinners we need to send down with the students each night.
“Getting Out of the Bunker”
June 5, 2009
Point blank, we have GOT to engage our students by getting out of whatever comfort zone we are finding ourselves in. I get the opportunity to deliver the message at “big church” on July 5th, and heads up, maybe I’m going to be leaking the ending, but this is what I’m going to hammer like a freakin’ railroad spike in the foreheads of whoever shows up that Sunday.
Engaging our youth in their journey means we have to figure out what our personal barriers from doing so are, and pursue overcoming those barriers. Those barriers may be time, desire, or plain old uncomfortability. Walt Mueller targets the “Christian Bunker” mentality as being a barrier that keeps many youth workers and parents from pursuing an understanding of teens.
Simply put, the “Christian Bunker” mentality is refusing to enter the world of teens, listening to their music, watching their TV shows and movies, to avoid every hint of evil that could exist in their world. The Bunker mentality is like Christian preventative fire control from the damages of sin.
But in a sin stained world we do live, and a determination to avoid as much fallenness as we can will only lead to a physical separation from the world the Jesus did not call for (John 17 if you are a Christ follower that doesn’t believe me.)
What stuck out to me the most in this chapter of Engaging the Soul of Youth Culture was a personal testimony from a Christian educator, who was able to attend a seminar with Walt, rejected what he had to say about getting into the teens’ world, and fought through the confusion into where God was leading her. Here it is. Her name is Leslie.
“I always discounted the effect that ‘culture’ has on the students I teach on a daily basis. I veteran of youth work and education in Colorado for fifteen years, I was always confident of my ability to relate to teens on a certain level. I know that God is able to work above all the worldly influences teens face. I saw no real need to know anything about the culture of the kids I taught or worked with.
These are a few of the reasons ‘avoidance’ had always been my philosophy when it came to youth culture. I would consciously steer clear of youth culture I did not understand or was afraid of. My story is evidence that you can teach an old dog new tricks, and that we always need to be ready for lessons God may want to teach us.
My re-education started back in the Fall of 1998 when I first became acquainted with Walt Mueller and the Center for Parent/Youth Understanding at a national youth conference. The intense, eight-hour seminar I attended was titled ‘Understanding Today’s Youth Culture,’ an area in which my expertise was complete…or so I thought. In this class we were challenged to realize that today’s effective youth ministry is done from ‘inside’ the youth culture. We were introduced to the idea that culture presents a ‘worldview’ that youth are increasingly vulnerable to. During much of the discussion I was scratching my head as these thoughts were in contrast to the way I had approached teens and their culture. Even through fifteen years of youth ministry, these were issues I considered irrelevant. Cultural influences had always been a remote, outside influence that did not directly affect the lives of students. As a result, I stayed away from what I didn’t understand.
I was resistant and skeptical, but it became obvious this was worth a try. This seminar was unsettling. Yet the class was one of basic ministry philosophy that was different from anything I’d ever heard. Fighting my fear of compromising personal holiness, I spent the next six months diving into my students culture and swimming in the confusing soup of sights and sounds. It wasn’t easy, but I started to feel better prepared to address my youth in areas that had formerly been uncharted territories.
Then it happened. The Columbine tragedy shook our town of Littleton to the quick, and my students put my newly developed sensibilities to the test. As our community was struggling to find answers to the violence, the teenagers in my classes where providing plenty of clues of their own. The said, ‘Look at our home life and the materialism we are surrounded with. Look at our unmet needs. Look at why we’re angry and why we’re lonely. Look at how we express ourselves and how we think. Look at what we listen to and what we see.’
In the aftermath of Columbine, Walt visited my school to meet with some of my students. The discussion focused on their world and the issues and struggles these kids face. It was exciting to see how easily these young people opened up when the conversation revolved around the influences in their lives. I was again learning how to build deeper relationships with teens by knowing their world.’ “
Elevate Students and Mission Adelante Video
June 4, 2009
Here’s the video of the workday our students volunteered for at Mission Adelante’s HQ in March. Finally got it done! Show your students!
Understanding Our Place in Culture
June 2, 2009
We can either: Accomodate, Alienate, or Infiltrate and Transform. Those are the three responses that Christ followers can choose from when deciding how they will choose to relate to the world. (all taken from Walt Mueller‘s Engaging the Soul of Youth Culture)
Jesus very clearly calls his follows to be in the world, to see themselves as sent, just like he was sent by God. Just as he was sent to redeem us, we are left to bring redemption to others through a relationship with Jesus.
This is another cry from Walt Mueller, and youth ministry workers everywhere, to see our young adults as a mission field, just like Jesus saw the human race as an entire mission field. Our place as missionaries to the young adult/adolescent culture was modeled by Jesus’ time on this physical earth.
One, Jesus did not accomodate the world. Meaning, he did not stand in the middle of right and wrong, judging neither. It’s easy for me to accomodate the things I see and hear from the youth culture I’m immersed in. It’s easy for me to listen to a teen who clearly is not thinking from a God’s point of view, and then now what to say right after that. It is easy in that moment to “let it go,” thinking a better opportunity to speak truth in love will eventually come around. That makes me not like Jesus at all.
Two, Jesus did not alienate himself from culture, and never wanted his followers to separate themselves from culture (cleary noted in his prayer recorded in John 17). How am I not propogating the “Christian Bunker” mentality? How am I really entering into the world of teens on a level that they feel I really “get” them? I like being present in a teen’s world, but do I really want to do what it takes to get to know them on their deepest levels? Do I really want to risk them sharing a relational bomb with me, then risk not knowing what to say back? It is far easier to just do my typical youth group thing, put on a hangout, relate shallowly, and hope everyone has a good time, than it is to enter deeply into the real world of an adolescent.
Three, what Jesus did do, was infiltrate and transform. He chose to “be there.” He chose to show up on this world and relate to some pretty broken people. He chose to spend important chunks of time with people who needed redemption. He chose to ask tough, uncomfortable questions to people who didn’t really know the answers. And he did it all to bring these people an awareness of their brokenness, an awareness of their need for him. Now I’m left, along with every other Christ follower, to help the broken people of this world become aware of their brokenness.
I wonder if that should be the question I should ask when I enter the world of teens and spend time with them. “Do you ever feel broken? D0 you ever feel like their are pieces in your life that are jagged and cutting you inside? What do you think God’s plan is for the brokenness in your life?”
Will a teen hear me when I ask that of them? Will they let me in, or will they blow me off? Will they think I’m serious? Will they think I really care about their well-being, or will they think I’m just trying to sell them on something because that’s my job?
Whenever I end up being done with youth ministry, if ever, I hope that I can look back on the time I have spent with teens and know that I was a fraction of enough like Jesus, that the teens I knew were able to reach out to Jesus with a faith of their own.
I hope you parents and other youth workers can too. I hope you ask them “what feels broken?” I think that’s what I would’ve wanted someone to ask me.
Details of Mission Adelante Kids VBS
June 1, 2009
Here are the details for you parents. This is the info I passed out at the parents’ meeting on Sunday. What I told everyone then, and what I’m making sure I communicate right now, is that these details are wet clay. We’ve NOT moved into the concrete phase yet. So don’t let all the details scare you away from beign involved. If you have a question or concern, ask me to clarify! We’ll figure it out together. I just need to know one thing: who wants to be involved in running a VBS for Mission Adelante? If you want to be involved, work out the details with me.
Where: Mission Adelante, Central and 18th Ave, KC, KS. Mission Adelante is a faith-based organization that reaches out to Hispanic immigrants and families located in their neighborhood.
When: Each night will be run by a different grade level according to the schedule below.
· June 15th – Crash (10th-12th Grader’s Night)
· June 16th – Buya (6th -7th Grader’s Night)
· June 17th – Buya (8th – 9th Grader’s Night)
On their assigned night, students need to meet in the back (west) parking lot at Shoal Creek ready to leave at 4:30 p.m. Students will arrive back at the church at 10 p.m. for pickup.
Mandatory Student Rehearsal: Sunday, June 14th, from 12:15 – 1 p.m.
Students participating in any of the nights need to stay after church to practice the songs, skits, drama, or message they might be delivering on their night of the camp.
Parent Volunteers Needed: We can’t successfully pull off this week of camp unless our parents volunteer for one of the following opportunities:
· Drivers – each night we need parents to transport students down, back or both.
· Dinners – Each night we need to feed however many students are going, plus 15 Interns. We need parents to prepare, package, and deliver the food to the Drivers by 4:30 p.m. for transport to Mission Adelante.
· Giving – You may not be able to drive or prepare food, but consider giving $20 to help pay for the lunch/dinners that need to be provided.
Please contact Justin Talley at justin.talley@shoalcreek.org or 816-510-3859 if you have any questions or to sign up for one of the volunteer spots above.