We are doing a series on Root and Dean’s new book, The Theological Turn in Youth Ministry, and each post is written by our friend, Syler Thomas, a youth pastor of fourteen years. This post concerns the upside and downside of youth ministry trips for service.

In chapter 13 of The Theological Turn in Youth Ministry, Andrew Root offers a concise critique of the youth group mission trip. As someone who has been organizing and attending youth mission trips for over 20 years now, and who has seen the incredible benefit of such trips, I was wary of what it was he had to say.

What about you? Have you seen trips do more harm than good? Do you think there’s a better way?

Root accurately depicts the juxtaposition of youth trips well. A morning is spent in an impoverished village, while the afternoon might be spent sipping (virgin) cocktails on the beach.

Furthermore, when the trip is merely about what you are going to do there, then once you have done it, it’s a memory. It becomes just one more experience that has been consumed, like a piece of gum that has been chewed up.

When the trip is about being with the people, there is nothing to check off the list. [Read more...]

This post is by Syler Thomas, a friend of mine who pastors youth in Chicagoland’s suburbs.

Clearly present in Andrew Root’s theology (co-author of The Theological Turn in Youth Ministry with Kenda Creasy Dean) is a focus on the presence of suffering and pain in the world, and God’s connection to it. This is helpful because any youth minister will tell you that ministry to young people will always involve those who are wrestling with those questions.

Do we have this kind of a theology of suffering in our churches today? Do we point people to the crucified Savior as One who can identify with their suffering? What do you think of his assessment of how we handle those who aren’t healed versus those who are?

Root is at his best when he is urging us as youth pastors to probe the darkness, doubt, and difficulty for God’s presence.

On page 82, he says that “theology starts with a crisis, the very crisis of reality itself. The crisis is the fact that you live, that you have a life to live. …The crisis is the very mystery of our existence and the yearning for there to be some kind of meaning to it.” He then continues the crisis language, explaining God’s crucial role in the crisis. On page 86, he states that a “theologically rich ministry begins with inviting young people to articulate what haunts them.” [Read more...]

This post (and series) is by my friend at Christ Church of Lake Forest, Syler Thomas.

I was talking with a friend recently about my new book Game Plan: Practical Wisdom for the College Experience (co-written by Nic Gibson, foreword by Scot McKnight) and he shared a story about the book he received to prepare him for life in college. He had just come to faith through an experience at a Young Life camp the summer after he graduated from high school, and his faithful leader handed him a book intended to help him with his new-found faith and the struggles he would surely encounter in college. It was Bonhoeffer’s Cost of Discipleship.

If you had one Christian classic to give to a friend who was a newer believer, what would it be and why? You can even answer with Bonhoeffer.

Now there’s no question that the book is a classic. Bonhoeffer should be read, and has plenty to offer in many situations. And given Scot’s deep love for and physical resemblance to the great German theologian, I’m on thin ice even bringing this up. The issue is that Bonhoeffer didn’t live long enough to comment on the challenges of living a faithful Christian life on the college campuses of the 21^st century.

This is why Nic and I wrote this book: to provide practical wisdom for the unique challenges and opportunities that students face on today’s college campuses. It was born out of a desire to share with our graduating high school seniors all the stuff we felt like they needed to know, that we couldn’t possibly tell them in one conversation.

Our chapters are on topics ranging from surviving a secular school, a Christian school, looking at the dating scene, dealing with temptation, integrating your faith and your major, and a whole lot more. Plus one of my favorite parts of the book is a “My Story” section after every other chapter: seven first-person testimonies from recent college grads about their own experiences, that serve to reinforce the messages we’re sharing.

Over the next few posts, I’ll invite you to think back to your college days for your perspective, and those of you currently in college or high school—we’d love to get your perspective, from those who are experiencing it right now.

This situation, I’m sure intended to teach something about faith and persecution, unleashed both some trauma and lots of criticisms. A decade or two back our high school football coach staged a shooting (of himself by another) in order to “teach” the football team something.

The issue today is not to jump on this youth pastor but to discuss this question:

What principles do we need to teach youth pastors so they learn not to exceed limits as was done here? I’d love to hear from some youth pastors what they have learned.

MIDDLETOWN, Pa. — The men burst into the church classroom and ordered the 15 teens in the youth group to the floor.

They covered the teens’ heads with pillowcases and bound their hands. One man waved an unloaded gun, and another yelled, his face daubed with camouflage paint.

The kids gathered at the Glad Tidings Assembly of God Church and had planned to partake in youth ministry activities at 7 p.m. Wednesday (March 21).

Instead, they found themselves face down, hugging the linoleum floor, said the Rev. John Lanza, who described what happened. If they listened, they wouldn’t get hurt, their assailants said.

It sounds terrifying, but there’s a catch: The raid was fake, staged to show the teens the perils faced by Christian missionaries in the world’s trouble spots, Lanza said.

Yet it traumatized one 14-year-old girl so badly that her mother filed a report with the police, claiming her daughter suffered a busted lip and bruised knees.

 

Syler Thomas, who is doing this series on Kara Powell and Chap Clark’s Sticky Faith: Everyday Ideas to Build Lasting Faith in Your Kids is a youth pastor.

Have you had that experience where you’re reading something, and you get the sense that the way you’re doing something will never be the same after you’ve read it? I felt this way after reading chapter 5 of Sticky Faith. While I was reading it, my wife asked me what I thought of the book. My response was: “I don’t think I’m even ready to talk about it yet.” That’s how paradigm-shifting the concepts here are for me.

Chap Clark takes the notion of the 1:5 leader to student ratio in youth ministries (which is the general “rule of thumb” ratio that most of us are shooting for) and turns it on its head. He says we should aim for a 5:1 ratio of adult influence in a single student’s life. This obviously doesn’t mean that each student has 5 mentors who spend regular time with a student, but rather 5 different adults from a church body who have an influence in a student’s life. The easiest way to make this happen is for there to be a small group of people whose families make it a priority to care not just for their own kids’ activities but also for their friends’ kids. So when Marisa has a piano recital, that gets written down in 5 calendars. When Tommy gets awarded his eagle scout, those 5 families are represented at the ceremony. This is not a new program for ministers to implement. Rather, it’s a goal each family should consider.

This comes out of a concept that Powell and Clark have discovered through their research which they claim is the closest thing to a “silver bullet” that they discovered. Students who have a connection to the adult services at their local church (rather than just a connection to a youth group alone) are much more likely to have a “sticky faith.”

Can you attest to the importance of having young people connected to adults in a church? What do you think about the 5:1 ratio concept?

This series is by a youth pastor friend, Syler Thomas, and it on Chap Clark and Kara Powell’s new book, Sticky Faith: Everyday Ideas to Build Lasting Faith in Your Kids.

They provide these sobering statistics:

1 out of 8 churched kids has regular conversation about faith with their moms.

Just 1 out of 20 kids has those kinds of conversations with Dad.

And just 9 % of teenagers engage in regular reading of the Bible with their families.

Clearly, the faith that parents want for their kids isn’t translating into regular conversations, other than the occasional “What did you learn at church today?”

They provide some excellent ideas for engaging in these kinds of conversations. For instance, instead of just asking about “highs and lows” of the day, also ask about how they saw God at work. The parents should also be ready to answer the questions as well, because when the kids see the parents talking about their own faith on a regular basis, it is more likely to stick.

They also talk about the importance of having no topic that is considered “out of bounds.” Whether that’s sex and dating, other religions, or struggles with doubts…children have to know that the home is a safe place to get answers to the questions they’re asking.
What has been your experience for these kinds of faith-filled conversations, whether in your own childhood, or with your own children?

This series on Kara Powell and Chap Clark’s book, Sticky Faith: Everyday Ideas to Build Lasting Faith in Your Kids, is by Syler Thomas.

We are going through some of the concepts developed in Kara Powell and Chap Clark’s new book Sticky Faith. Yesterday, we looked at their main premise that who you are as a person is what shapes your child’s faith more than anything else.

In chapter two, Clark and Powell examine the impact of a “gospel of sin management” (as Dallas Willard puts it) on the life of a young person. They tell the story of a boy named Darrin who seemed on the surface of things to be the kind of young person whose faith would thrive in college. But he never connected to a church during his first year away and began blowing off his youth pastor. His comments upon returning home the next summer were telling: he said he figured he’d “get back into it” once he got out of college. The takeaway for Clark was that Darrin’s faith was a shallow, performance-based faith that was focused more on Darrin’s being “into it” or his “working” to have it make sense.

Darrin’s faith while in high school was more about accepting Jesus to avoid hell and about changing his behavior in order to fit in with the cultural norms in his religious family and youth group setting, rather than an “inside-out” transformation that results in a lifelong relationship with God.

Powell and Clark have this response:

“As parents, then, instead of concentrating on…whether and how our kids are living ‘righteous’ lives, we have the opportunity to help them discover, access, and strengthen their trust and faith in Jesus Christ. In so doing, the righteousness they eventually display will be the product of the Holy Spirit” (37).

Do you think churches today are set up to produce students like Darrin? How do we do things better?

This series on Kara Powell and Chap Clark’s new book, Sticky Faith: Everyday Ideas to Build Lasting Faith in Your Kids, is by my friend and a local youth pastor, Syler Thomas.

What can we do as parents and ministers to help our children find a faith that lasts? That is the question that Kara Powell and Chap Clark address in their book Sticky Faith. The book (along with another aimed at youth workers) is the culmination of six years of research conducted by the Fuller Youth Institute.

Over the past 14 years that I’ve worked in youth ministry, my wife and I have watched and wondered about why certain kids’ faith sticks, while others don’t. And we’ve seen it all: kids from non-Christian homes whose faith thrives years after they’ve left high school and kids from strong Christian homes whose faith struggles or disappears altogether. Is it just random? We have 4 kids of our own, the oldest of whom is 13. What is it that we need to be doing to help our own kids have a faith that lasts?

Powell and Clark’s book’s “big idea” which they share in chapter 1 is that it is who you the parent are as a person that shapes your kid.

“How you express and live out your faith may have a greater impact on your son or daughter than anything else.” (24)

They quote Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith who sums it up this way: “When it comes to kids’ faith, parents get what they are.”

In subsequent posts, I will unpack some of what Powell and Clark say goes into developing “sticky faith” in young people, but today, let’s start with just that big idea.

Do you agree with how Christian Smith has summed it up? How have you seen this play out in your life or in the lives of those around you?