Clear the Clutter

Have you ever been to a different church than the church you go to? Have you ever snooped around? Sneaking into rooms that are closed and lights turned off? Trying to find the lights so you can get a glimpse of the sanctuary? Trying to break into the sound room so you can see their sound board? Searching for a key to get into locked offices? Oh- right, yeah I would never do that.....

If you're anything like me you've done your fair share of "research" at other churches.

Have you even been to a church and met for small group Bible study, gone to a Sunday school class, or sat through a service?  Do you ever notice those things, those cluttered things that seem out of place? They are the elephant in the room to you, but everyone around you seems to completely ignore the elephant. Sitting on his lap. Ducking out of the way of his swaying trunk. Walking underneath it. Dodging its massive hooves (is that what you call an elephant's feet?) They even named him! Elroy. Elroy the elephant. They have a place reserved for him in the sanctuary. It's an aisle seat, he's a big guy. Meanwhile you're intently focused on him to the point that whatever study or sermon is taking place is the absolute last thing on your mind.

Often times this is what our youth ministry meeting areas look like. Elroy the elephant's bedroom. Yet we are baffled by the fact that no students come back to visit our ministry!

When I first started at the church I am currently serving the student ministry met in a garage. Well the side room attached to a garage. We still meet there, but it looks completely different than when I began.

When I started there were four massive industrial grade shelving units sitting back to back with a blue sheet Velcroed to the shelves in order to cover up everything on them but it was fairly obvious that something was stored underneath them because there wasn't enough storage and items were stuff on-top of the shelves and protruding out from the shelves making huge bulges through the sheet!  Additionally at the end of these "covered" shelves there were some more shelves chalked full of old game resources for youth ministry like pencil cases, Styrofoam cups, and get this, a beaten up, formerly wet, now dried roll of toilet paper!

Now it has been painted, and mostly removed of the clutter.  We aptly call it "The Shed" and you know what? We love it out there!  It just took some sprucing up.

Clutter often times becomes invisible to us.

Andy Stanley wrote a book called Deep & Wide and in that book he addresses clutter:

"The messages your environments communicate have the potential to trump your primary message. If you don’t see a mess, if you aren’t bothered by clutter, you need to make sure there is someone around you who does see it and is bothered by it. An uncomfortable or distracting setting can derail ministry before it begins. The sermon begins in the parking lot."

Though we are in youth ministry, this principle still applies!

Clean up your area. Let your students be proud of where you meet. Do you keep dried up toilet paper rolls laying around on visible shelves at your house, next to Elroy? Then don't do it in your youth rooms! Make Elroy pick up, behave himself! Visiting students aren't as comfortable with Elroy as you and your regular attending students are.

What are some areas or things that you have successfully decluttered in your youth rooms?

Thursdays

If your big night is Wednesday night, which for most youth leaders out there it is, Thursdays are usually a pretty big recovery day.

I try to clean up everything on Wednesday so Thursday I can do actual work, not the janitorial aspect of it.

I also try to plan a meeting with a student that day. Whether it be my leadership team meeting which meets once every 3 weeks, or a meeting after school with a student at a local coffee shop or ice cream place.

I find if I don't plan it, it doesn't happen.

Thursdays tend to be a little more relational, so I ramp up and prepare big time Monday-Wednesday and I take my foot off the gas a little bit on Thursdays to coast into the weekend
.

What kind of stuff do you do on Thursdays to recover from your big ministry night?

The Voice

I'm not so sure that I'm not letting the cat out of the bag by informing all of you that I watch the Voice. I'm not sure if that lessens my manly-ness (I'm also not sure if that's a word, as you can see I'm not very certain starting this blog today).

Despite all the uncertainty, which we've already established, there's a lot of it, I watched the voice two nights ago on Monday.

The show started at 8 pm, which Monday night at 8 pm I was at my church's Growth Group playing football and dominating the other team (take that Jake, Megan and Kenzie!), so I actually missed the "live" beginning of the show. Thank goodness for DVR, right?  I know I've had a lot of uncertainty earlier, but one thing I am very certain of is that I love our OTA DVR that allows us to watch TV on our time! However, this is not a blog post on the beauty of DVR.

The show kicked off with Blake Shelton's team member Holly Tucker. Holly is a country/gospel singer from Oklahoma (thoughts and prayers go out to Oklahoma, by the way), and she was planning on singing a Hymn that is traditionally sung in Christian circles.  Holly said during her rehearsal with Blake Shelton and Sheryl Crow that to not sing this song would almost, and I'm paraphrasing here from memory, be keeping a part of her from the audience.  Her concern was that she would not be showing the audience who she really is, she would be hiding her beliefs.

This is a tension that we all experience, right? I mean growing up a believer, when you're put in a situation, you want to "not be ashamed" of your faith, you want to use the platform that God has given you, to make an impact. You also walk the line of not being too overbearing or too "preachy."

Holly has been given an incredible platform, and decided instead of blending in that she would be different. That she would take that risk. I thought it was an amazing performance. Don't take my word for it, check out her performance below:

The reaction by the judges was borderline comical, they had no idea what to say, but as an evangelical Christian, who finds it of the utmost importance to be forthright with your faith, not aggressive and overbearing, but just unashamed of who you are in Christ, I thought her performance and step of faith was an amazing witness and testimony to the person that she is.

I hope that as we as parents, students, and youth leaders are out proclaiming and declaring Christ in our day to day lives. I pray that we can have the same kind of courage and boldness that was on display Monday night during the Voice!

What is your biggest obstacle to sharing your faith regularly?

Midweek Blues

It's the middle of the week.

Do you know what you'll be teaching on for Student Ministry this week?

If you work another job, you don't have the luxury of sitting in your church office to study and prepare for it.

In fact many youth workers aren't even paid by their church, and they work another 40-hour a week job, and as Wednesday hits, though you're excited for youth ministry, you're also scared spit-less because you have no idea what you're going to do!

Rest assured, Balanced Student Ministry already has a plan for you!

With minimal preparation required, you can download lessons from our website to teach from! And if you want to pay the cost of a Subway, $5 footlong, you can buy a teaching series chalked full of graphics, outlines, game ideas, and video suggestions that will set you up for the MONTH!

Check it out below!

Night of Worship

I have literally taken almost a year's leave of absence from this blog. What a slacker!

I've expressed with you, in the past, how I despise inconsistency. I could have conceivably written on this blog on and off at different times since my last post, but if I don't do something consistently, then I refuse to do it.

It's like working out. I know I'm supposed to work out, and not just hit the weights hard once, but I'm supposed to go back, and hit them again in a day or two or the results aren't as solid. That always just leaves me with, in my mind, excellent excuses to not work out.

Another reason I've abandoned my blogging ambitions was because if I couldn't do it the way Jon Acuff suggested, then I must not be doing it write (is that a bad play on words right there?) Jon suggests hustle. If you want to live out your dream, then wake up early, before the birds, and the sun, and the world, at 5am and spend time on your dream. My main issue was I had a job that required me to be at work at 5, so if I was to get up before I needed that meant 3 something. Despite the countless efforts to actually do that (yeah, call me crazy but my alarm went off a couple times at 3:30, my wife wasn't too pleased about that one) I failed miserably when sleep kept calling me back into bed.

Needless to say, I am trying to start this back up, mostly for fun, but also to keep you in the loop about what's going on in my life and student ministry.

On Saturday, my good buddy, Brandon, drove all the way here from Illinois to spend time with a bunch of my students and I.

This wasn't just any sort of "hanging out." He came across two time zones, three states, and 5 plus hours in the car, to help lead a band of students in a night of worship.

This night of worship was to help raise awareness (awareness not money because we weren't allowed to take a love offering, I didn't get it approved at the last business meeting in time, yeah I was bummed, and felt like a terrible youth pastor) for our summer missions trips.

I didn't want to invite the entire church (which we did) to a poorly produced event (which it wasn't!) To combat that, Brandon, and I set out, at 10 am that morning with all our students in the band, 6 to be exact, to spend a day working on this night of worship.

It was long. It was exhausting. It was tiring.

But it was AWESOME!

The day turned out to be incredible, and not only did we work on, and perfect these songs, but we almost did like a worship "workshop."

We taught the students about how worship is more than singing, it's more than sitting in pews on a Sunday morning, it's more than we typically attribute to the word worship.

We also expressed to them the importance of knowing the song very well, so that when you are upfront leading a congregation you can focus on worship, not on remembering the nuances of the song.

The event went off without a hitch, media worked, music was loud (very loud, good thing it was a student event) and people genuinely worshipped!

To top it off we raised an awesome amount of money for our missions trip by selling cookies (Who knew you could sell a cookie for $100?! I need to get the recipe for the benefit of my own bank account!)

Saturday was a great day!

What experiences have you had with student led worship events?