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I recently finished reading “Engaging the Soul of Youth Culture” by Walt Mueller. Mueller is well known for his work among teenagers. He is the president of the Center for Parent/Youth Understanding, has written numerous books on youth culture, such as “Ministry to Families with Teenagers,” “Understanding Today’s Youth Culture,” and “Youth Culture 101.” He also earned a doctorate in ministry to postmodern generations from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary.

“Engaging the Soul of Youth Culture” is the best work of his that I have read. It basically takes the cross-cultural missions model and applies it to youth ministry.

In some academic and theological circles, postmodernism is seen as the next great evil the church has to face. Postmodernism needs to be defended against and defeated. These circles believe that the church should hold fast to modernism and try to keep the culture from sliding away.

The problem with this approach is that modernism is already mostly gone. Postmodernism rules the day among emerging generations. Postmodernism (which is feeling oriented, experience based, rejects controlling meta-narratives, and rejects absolute truth – just to name a few) already governs the way young people think, act, behave, and interpret the world. It’s their worldview, the soup they swim in every day.

With that understanding, Mueller teaches youth workers how to dig into that culture, examine it, try to understand it, and figure out how to speak truth into a postmodern context. Rather than trying to obliterate postmodernism, Mueller tries to understand it and its grasp on our kids.

When a youth worker actually tries hard to understand youth culture and can relate to youth on their own terms and in their own language, he gains acceptance in their eyes. Only once this acceptance happens can we share the gospel with them. Without it, we appear to be just another controlling authority (the likes of which they’ve rejected countless times before) and have no impact.

“Engaging the Soul of Youth Culture” is an excellent read and a challenge to anyone who wants to try to understand youth culture. If you’re interested in youth or in missions, get this book and read it. Youth workers will be challenged in their approach to youth, and missions people will be intrigued to see the cross-cultural model applied to a younger generation.

This guy is huge. Literally. I stood behind him and you can’t even see me.

Anyway, Aaron Kampman plays for the Green Bay Packers, and Ryan and I got to fly up to GB and interview him! It was a blast. Aaron’s a down home kind of guy from eastern Iowa (my state!), and we had a great time talking to him. I ran a camera on the interview and shot some of the broll. Jess edited the story, Ryan did the color, and as usual, Jonathan fixed up the music.

I’ll be honest – I’m not a big fan of evangelism “methods.” I never got the hang of Evangelism Explosion, I don’t particularly care for EvanTell’s “May I Ask You A Question,” and I’ve never been huge on just handing out tracts to people. So I didn’t really know how to explain myself whenever someone asks me How I Like to Evangelize.

But then I read Randy Newman’s “Questioning Evangelism.” I finally found a book on evangelism that really resonated with the way I was already thinking. Newman’s point is that sharing the gospel doesn’t work when you’re using some prescribed method or set of questions to follow. When you’ve got a memorized sales pitch, evangelism doesn’t work when you run into defensiveness or serious questions that need an answer from apologetics.

Newman’s solution is simply to ask a question back. That is, he encourages people to build relationships, and then have conversations about Christianity. So if there’s a message, it’s simply this: conversation. Ask questions. Listen. Respond. Share the gospel of Christ as you talk.

Newman’s approach isn’t easy. Unlike memorizing a pitch, you have to be prepared for the questions that may come up. That’s why after giving a defense for his “method” of evangelism, Newman spends the second part (the largest part) of “Questioning Evangelism” in a run-down of questions that people are asking, in which he gives example questions and responses. These chapters are less “how-to” response guides, and more like mini-essays about each topic. The point is that you have to know your theology well enough to answer people’s questions.

Two years after “Questioning Evangelism” was released, Newman published “Corner Conversations,” which is simply a series of short vignettes in which people in his imaginary town of Turnerville discuss life’s important questions. It’s meant as a sample-book for those who are curious about what his approach would look like in real life.

All told, I give Newman’s two-book approach to evangelism a solid A. “Questioning Evangelism” has really solidified the way I think about evangelism, and encouraged me to get out – not to evangelize, but to talk with people, get to know who they are, and ask them questions.

So how should youth pastors be trained? I went to Faith Baptist Bible College for undergrad and studied in the Associate Pastor major, with an emphasis on youth.

But even after four years of youth ministry training, I didn’t feel equipped to actually lead a youth group. I mean, I knew I could plan games, schedule retreats, and host the Annual Fancy Pants night, but I didn’t have the kind of theological training that I needed to impact kids in anything more than a superficial way.

So I came to DTS. And while I’m a Christian Education major studying youth ministry, I’m not here for the YM training. I’m here for the theology, for the exegetical training, and for the philosophy. But there are YM classes here, and I’m enrolled in them.

So far it’s nothing different than what I heard in undergrad. But the head of the YM area, Dr. Jay Sedwick, really desires to grow the YM department to compete. Right now Southwestern, right across town, is the place to go. But DTS wants to compete, too.

So the youth ministry group on campus, Pipeline, hosted a meeting to discuss what topics youth guys want training on. Here’s the list we came up with:

-Organization and Planning

-Time management in family
-Integration of youth and culture
-Parent/Volunteer Education
-Physiological and Psychological Development
-Strategies for Ecclesiology (How do Big Church and Little Church Get Along?)
-5/7/10 year planning
-Pastoral Cooperation
-Crisis management/counseling
-Teen culture survey
-Strategy for your 1st year in youth ministry
-Leaving a legacy of leadership
-use of technology in reaching youth today

What would you add to the list?

I’ve always been interested in the Greek version of the Hebrew Old Testament, called the Septuagint (or LXX). There are so many interesting issues that come up in discussions of the NT writers’ use of the OT, and the LXX plays a key role in those discussions.

Anyway, when I got a chance to write a paper on the topic, I jumped at it. So if you want twelve pages of boring paper, click the link below to read!

Septuagint Research Paper

Ouch.

That’s the one word that best describes Dan Kimball’s They Like Jesus But Not the Church.  There’s a reason Lee Strobel calls it a “powerful and passionate wake-up call for the American church.”

Dan Kimball is the pastor of Vintage Faith Church in Santa Cruz, California.  He spent a couple of years interviewing non-Christians. He interviewed both people who have never been in a church, people who were in the church and then left, and those who have recently come into the church.  They Like Jesus is a compendium of his research on the perception of those outside the church of the church.

Kimball is a confessed workaholic. He says that he spent way too much time in the church office. He had succumbed to the Christian sub-culture. Every day was spent inside the church, or with Christian friends, or whatever, until one day when he realized that his calling to reach the world and his practice of cloistering himself with only Christians were mutually incompatible. As he began to get out of the church and into the community, he realized that a large shift has happened in the perception of Christianity by those outside of the church. The perception of Christians in the world had become largely negative.

Now I know some of us would expect that. After all, we’re supposed to be reviled for the faith, right? And while that’s true, Kimball’s research suggests that it’s not our belief system that riles people up, it’s us. It’s the way we portray ourselves to the world.

Kimball outlines six general perspectives that non-Christian, unchurched people in his community hold. They are:

1.  The church is an organized religion with a political agenda.
2.  The church is judgmental and negative.
3.  The church is dominated by males and oppresses females.
4.  The church is homophobic.
5.  The church arrogantly claims all other religions are wrong.
6.  The church is full of fundamentalists who take the whole Bible literally.

His vision is that the church would become:

1.  An organized community with a heart to serve others.
2.  A positive agent of change loving others as Jesus would.
3.  A place that holds women in the highest respect and includes them in the leadership of the church.
4.  A loving and welcoming community.
5.  Respectful of other people’s beliefs and faiths.
6.  A place that holds beliefs with humility and strives to be thoughtful theologians.

Finally, he shares the responses of the people he interviewed when he asked them what they would like to see the church do and become. Interestingly, the responses were overwhelmingly positive! Even non-Christians see a huge potential for the church.

I know that a lot of people will react with responses like, “Why are we even listening to those outside the church? Of course they’re offended by us! If they’re not offended, then we’re not being good Christians!” I’ve heard and read all those reactions.

But let me seriously challenge you by repeating the illustration that Kimball uses. Consider the classic “Bridge” illustration found in a lot of tracts and pamphlets. It pictures Man on one side of an impassable chasm that represents sin, with God on the other side. And the only bridge across the sin chasm is Christ.

Unfortunately, the Church itself has become another chasm between Man and God. This is the chasm of our offensive Christian sub-culture that the church has created. It is only by building relationships with non-Christians (basically incarnating Christ to them) that we can get them over the chasm of our sub-culture. Only then can they be faced by the sin that separates them from God.

I could go on and on about this book, and explain each point Kimball makes even further. But instead, I’d like to challenge you to read the book instead. And if you don’t want to spend fifteen bucks on a book by one of those “emergent”-type guys, give me a call and I’ll lend you mine.  But believe me, it would’ve been money well spent.

There is a big blue minivan on campus. This isn’t your regular old beat up van, though. This one is unique; it’s covered in bumper stickers. And when I say covered, I mean completely plastered. Overwhelmed. Drowning in bumper stickers. Gaudy ones, all over the side windows. “Make Love, Not War.” “Fur is Murder.” “In Case of Rapture, This Vehicle Will Be Unmanned.” “Beam Me Up, Scotty, “There’s No Intelligent Life on This Planet.” “Your Mom Goes to College.”

You can tell a lot about what people believe by what bumper stickers they put on their car. You can tell a lot about their theology, too. For instance, the owner of this van must be a pacifist, green, pre-millenialist who is into sci-fi, pessimistic about the state of the world and dismissive of college education. But that’s just a guess.

This is the kind of theology that Stanley J. Grenz and Roger E. Olson call “folk theology” in their classic, Who Needs Theology? One of my goals in ministry is to begin to help people see beyond their “folk theology.”

Folk theology is defined as “unreflective believing based on blind faith in a tradition of some kind” (pg. 27). Whether that’s blind faith in anything, folk theology is the kind of theology that simply says, “God says it, I believe it, that settles it,” without actually thinking through the issues surrounding a particular topic.

That’s why I want to help students learn to think beyond the platitudes and buzz-words that they have picked up within their Christian circles.

There are a lot of theological buzzwords out there. Pre-mil. Calvinist. Dispensational. Reformed. Arminian. Cessationist. Trinitarian. Missional. Anti-CCM.. Some of these buzzwords are actually helpful (I’m not giving up Trinitarian!). Some of them aren’t (do you really need examples?).

Helping students think past their folk theology involves teaching them to think about what they believe, and not be content to simply repeat platitudes like bumper stickers. Folk Christianity becomes basically a giant old van with hundreds of trite one-liner bumper stickers on it, and that just doesn’t cut it in the real world.

I pray that our students can actually think theologically and articulate their beliefs. The bumper stickerization of Christianity has got to stop with this next generation. We cheat them when we blindly teach it.

Hey everyone!  This blog/website is intended to be a repository of my thoughts, as I begin to develop almost a “systematic theology” of my beliefs. However, it will be more than just a compendium of my beliefs on various topics, but will also be a place where I interact with the others.

So, that means there will be book reviews, movie reviews, articles on what I believe, editorials, posts from my wife as she writes about ministry, and hopefully overviews of each book of the Bible, as well. You can even read some of my boring papers from school, if you’d like (though I don’t know why you’d want to).

Basically, as I go through my seminary training in preparation for youth ministry, I’m going to try to sum up each of my classes in one article of a few paragraphs each. I’ll try to draw out what I think and believe, and how I’ve developed in that particular area.

So you’re welcome along for the ride! Read each post as it comes. I don’t have any grand notions that thousands of people will actually be interested in what I have to say, but for the one or two that want to engage in conversation (and aren’t intelligent to realize that I don’t have much to say), let’s have some fun!

Join the conversation; feel free to post on any article. Hopefully your questions will help me hone my thoughts.

This is definitely our best video to date. Maybe that’s because I didn’t do anything on it? Whatever my involvement, Jess managed to bring this one in at a minute-thirty-eight, which makes it a super compact story. Really cool. Plus, Ryan’s work in Color (which we just got!) is phenomenal.