I found this on my computer recently. I shared this in 2015 with a staff team that wanted to get to know me better and hear what God was doing in my life and ministry.
I’d like to weave together a journey that I have been on for a good long while. In this we will look at some scripture and I’ll share with you some of what I am working on in my job with the diocese and beyond. To start, let’s turn the clock back a very long ways.
In my first youth ministry position, I regularly invited a guy from Youth For Christ to bring some gang members from inner city Chicago to speak at our youth group. We did this nearly every year. The YFC staffer that brought them was a member of our congregation. His work was through the juvenile justice ministry of YFC and involved sharing the gospel with gang members and following up with them on the streets. Gordon Mclean was his name and he and I used to meet regularly for lunch. Gordon often said my work was harder than his because the teens he worked with knew their need for God and the students I worked with did not. It was the late 1980’s, complete with bad hairstyles and flashy music groups; I remember one particular night when several gang members came to share their testimonies. We did our typical youth group meeting of playing some games and then we introduced Gordon and his guys. They shared their testimonies of having come to faith on the streets of Chicago where violence and drug dealing were part of every day life. The stories usually went along these lines. Someone met Gordon in the county jail where they heard the gospel for the first time, gave their life to Christ and then invited Gordon to meet their fellow gang members so that they too could hear the good news. Gordon had an amazing ministry where he led people to Christ on a weekly basis. Yet that evening after all was done, one of the gang members got in my face and confronted me about something. He asked “why do you spend all that time playing games when these young people need to be getting into the word?” I was shocked. I simply said, “Well, that is what we do. We play some games and then get into the message for the night”. His reply was stern. He simply said “they need to get into the word if they are going to survive as believers”. He was right and I have never forgotten that night.
A few years later, I became friends with someone on staff at Willow Creek Community Church. It was at the time the largest church in America and it also just happened to be founded by the nephew of the pastor of the large church I was working for. One day in a conversation, Tony shared a simple truth with me that I have witnessed to be accurate. He said “What we win people with is what we win them to”. It could be put another way as “how people start is how they continue”. The point is that the type of ministry in which a person comes to faith is what they will seek to continue to grow in their faith. I ran across this statement again years later when I met the founder of Christianity Explored. He wrote an evangelistic course that is based on that premise and so the course is driven by the belief that if people find Jesus on the pages of scripture, they will turn to the Bible to learn and grow more.
Fast forward to the late 1990’s. I was in England working for a Church of England congregation. I decided to take my youth group to the Keswick convention, an annual Bible teaching conference that run for three consecutive weeks each summer in England’s Lake District. My wife and I divided our time between sitting under great Bible teaching in the adult place and observing what our students were doing in the youth tent. I remember being in awe as I watched over 400 teens in the youth tent open their Bibles hungry to learn the truth of God. They were tracking with verse-by-verse expository teaching of scripture. I’d rarely seen this in youth ministry before. They were hungering for it! I myself as a college student and beyond had loved great Bible teaching but so few did this with teens that I did not expect to see the response I witnessed there.
What propelled my own spiritual growth in college and ever since then was when someone opens God’s word and really brings it to life. I’m not sure I fully understood the significance of that and the universality of it as well. Psalm 1 says:
Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked,
nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers;
but his delight is in the law of the LORD,
and on his law he meditates day and night.
He is like a tree planted by streams of water
that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither.
In all that he does, he prospers.
The wicked are not so, but are like chaff that the wind drives away.
Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment,
nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous;
for the LORD knows the way of the righteous,
but the way of the wicked will perish.
This Psalm opens up an understanding of the whole of the Psalms. It tells us that when we are rooted in God’s word, we will grow and thrive. The Psalms reach a pinnacle in 119 where the whole chapter is about the devotion to God’s word. Verse 105 proclaims: Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.
Fast forward to about 2003… I knelt nervously at the alter rail wondering if anyone was going to pray over me. It was the Wednesday evening service at St. Andrew’s. Being something of a skeptic when it came to charismatic practices, I was curious what was going to happen. Yet there I was up front and curious to know if God had something for me tonight. Kneeling, I sensed a person come up behind me, felt his hand land gently on my shoulder, and heard him praying quietly. I could not make out his words. Perhaps they were whispers or just the sound of lips moving and air passing between them. Maybe he was speaking in tongues. I did not know nor was I concerned to hear. I just received his prayers and waited on the Lord. When he finished, he knelt down next to me and shared something that has never left me. “I had an image come up as I prayed for you. It was of dry bones dancing like in Ezekiel. I think the Lord wants me to encourage you that He will use you to breathe life into youth ministry through his word.” With that he got up and left. I remained at the rail pondering these words. They resonated with me and were not so broad and general that they could apply to anyone. Had I just received a word from God? …a specific encouragement and perhaps a hint at something in my future? I drove home that night just buzzing with excitement. What all did it possibly mean?
Several years later, my colleague Peter Rothermel had been bringing in a speaker named Rob Reinow to some of our churches. Rob had been teaching parents how to disciple their kids. I asked Rob to speak to our youth ministers. What Rob did with that was to take us from Genesis to Revelation with one question to be answered. What is God’s plan for making disciples? Everywhere we turned the answer came out the same. It’s most clear in Duet 6:4-9
“Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.”
And Psalm 78:1-8
Give ear, O my people, to my teaching;
incline your ears to the words of my mouth!
I will open my mouth in a parable;
I will utter dark sayings from of old,
things that we have heard and known,
that our fathers have told us.
We will not hide them from their children,
but tell to the coming generation
the glorious deeds of the LORD, and his might,
and the wonders that he has done.He established a testimony in Jacob
and appointed a law in Israel,
which he commanded our fathers
to teach to their children,
that the next generation might know them,
the children yet unborn,
and arise and tell them to their children,
so that they should set their hope in God
and not forget the works of God,
but keep his commandments;
and that they should not be like their fathers,
a stubborn and rebellious generation,
a generation whose heart was not steadfast,
whose spirit was not faithful to God.
God has a plan for making disciples. It is the family. And where the family does not do the work it is for the church family to pick it up. And when we notice what it is that must be passed from generation to generation we realise the role that the Bible plays. Where else do we turn to show the next generation the wonders of the Lord, the works that he has done? Where else do we see the greatness of God but in his word?
But we had a problem. Many of the parents of teens in our diocese were not about to start discipling their kids. No one had ever told them it was their job. They were usually not equipped to do it either. The church had for decades fallen into a pattern of subcontracting the task out to the church. In our society we don’t educate our children we send them to school. Likewise, we don’t give them a spiritual education we take them to church. So, how do we change a pattern that we seem to be stuck in?
I was at a conference in Louisville where in each session we received free books. In fact, the value of the books was greater than the cost to register for the convention! I got this little book, written by an Anglican in Australia called “The Trellis And The Vine”. I had a good look through it and it resonated with me. Much of what they were suggesting was how we go about getting people in churches to dig deeper into scripture. Then I got an invite to attend a two-day workshop on the concepts in the book. The book was written for pastors, so I did not think much about attending it. Yet it kept coming back to me. It popped into my mind regularly. So, I finally mentioned it to my wife and said, “I don’t know why but this workshop thing is troubling me. It’s going to be filled with pastors of churches and that’s not me but I cannot get it out of my head.” She suggested that maybe I needed to attend it. So, off I went to a two-day workshop for people other than me. I settled down into the first session and said a prayer. “God, whatever has led me to be here you are going to have to show me”. I don’t think I was more than a few hours into the thing when it suddenly hit me. This was the bridge. This was the connection between Deut 6 and the predicament that our youth ministers face. They were teaching a simple plan to train people in churches to read the Bible with others and thereby help them grow in their faith. If we could just do this with teenagers, they will know how to pass their faith to the next generation when they get married and have families. It all made perfect sense. How people start is how they continue! If teenagers are discipled by someone who opens the Bible with them to study it, pray, and figure out how to live it out, they are then equipped to do that as parents.
A few years ago I began to put together a plan for small and rural churches to engage in ministry to teens without starting a youth program per se. Two years ago I did a workshop before convention where I shared this plan with a dozen church leaders. Several of them have taken up the challenge and are now ministering to teens in a small group setting where they are simply building relationships with teens and opening the Bible with them. We have two groups coming to The Jesus Weekend this year that are able to do so because we taught this plan and empowered some folks to reach out to the teens in their parish.
Meanwhile I have been working with an organization called the Young Anglicans Project. We are a small group of youth ministry leaders from across North America who want to see churches engaging with teens and ministering to them. Most of the Anglican Churches in North America are small and unable to hire a youth pastor. So, we have been teaching this strategy across the country for the past several years. It started to catch on in New England, the Midwest, in Texas and in the Pacific Northwest. Last weekend we led our first diocesan training day in Pittsburgh where in a diocese of 20 churches nearly 50 people attended who are committed to engaging with teens through the simple pattern of talk, study the Bible, and pray together.
I had the opportunity last summer to share this strategy in Ireland through our partnership with the Diocese of Kilmore, Elphin, and Ardagh. I met with youth leaders around their diocese and shared what God is doing here in South Carolina in seeking to get every congregation engaging every generation. What we are doing with teens is developing with other age groups as well. They were deeply encouraged by the prospect of such a simple and effective plan to engage with teens – an age group that their churches are severely lacking.
That young gang member was right. What people need most is to get immersed into the Bible so that they can grow in their faith. And through a series of events that I never could have anticipated, God has showed us how he wants to breathe life into youth ministry through his word.
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