Discussing Relationships Unfiltered – Chapter 3 (and beyond)

Your feedback has been invaluable. Thank you all for taking the time to participate in this online forum. I have found myself reading your comments and shaking my head in agreement and thanking God for you as trusted friends and fellow servants to His kids. What an awesome privilege we have to love and minister to young people and their families in our churches and camps!

~Anthony

• Much of the Christian world celebrated the birth of Christ this month. The Word became flesh and he pitched a tent in our neighborhood. Jesus came for his own as one of his own. We celebrate the Incarnation and the undeniable display of love by the Father, Son and Spirit toward humanity. With this in mind, we read Root talk frequently about incarnational ministry. What is incarnational ministry? Is it just a snazzy theological label or is there something much deeper about the way we approach relationships and ministry?

• Root states, "A relational youth ministry of place-sharing is a richer picture of the incarnation and the koinonia of the Trinity." Agree? Thoughts from your experience?

• In the Chapter 2 discussion our friend and brother Karl Reinagel brought up an issue that has touched all of us. Teenagers grow up fast and soon become college students and full-time workers. We have all seen the research statistics that state the vast majority of teens that were brought up in a healthy church environment soon walk away from the "holy habits" they recently celebrated. They no longer pray consistently, attend church regularly or spend time in Bible study. As a youth worker, how do you balance being a place-sharer to teenagers and fight the urge, as many of us do, to put a "full-court blitz" of selling Jesus to them? Coupled with that question, how has a trinitarian understanding enhanced your relationships and ministry to young people?

Discussing Relationships Unfiltered – Chapter 2 (and beyond)

Thank you for the lively discussion on Chapter 1 of Andrew Root's book Relationships Unfiltered. Based on feedback I received, we are going to speed up the process a bit. Most of you have read ahead, understandably, and want to dive into the chapter discussions more than once a month. I will begin posting on a bi-monthly basis and will include questions not only from the chapter at-hand but questions from subsequent chapters that will fit the context of our discussion. Feel free to bring up topics, in your comments, from other chapters that add to our conversation. Bring others into this online meeting place as well. It's a joy to have this dialogue with y'all, especially during the season of Advent. We celebrate the arrival of God in the flesh - powerfully and relationally displaying His solidarity with humanity in Jesus.

~Anthony

1. What is your response to the following discussion from the movie The Big Kahuna? Breaking into the thought, "That means that you preaching Jesus isn't any different than Larry or someone else preaching lubricants. It doesn't matter if you're selling Jesus, or Buddha, or civil rights, or how to make money in real estate with no money down. That doesn't make you a human being; it makes you a marketing rep. If you want to talk to someone honestly as a human being, ask him about his kids, find out what his dreams are. Just to find out. For no other reason. Because as soon as you lay your hands on a conversation to stir it, it's not a conversation anymore - it's a pitch. And you're not a human being - you're a marketing rep." Root says this in response, "When influence (seeing relationships as a means to another end as Root would define it) is the objective of our relationships, the relationships become secondary to moving the product." Thoughts - especially as it reflects on ministry?

2. What is your ministry to young people and how do you describe and define it?

3. How does the reality and relationship of the Trinity with humanity effect how you "do" ministry?

4. Root talks about place-sharing as "sharing (bore) each other's messiness" in relationships. How can we effectively and appropriately share in this type of relationship with young people?

Non-Family Adults in a Kid's Life

This blog entry from Fuller Youth Institute is a quick reminder of the role that non-family adults (youth ministry types, camp staff, etc.) can play in the life and growth of young people. It's being available and developing trust relationships through life-on-life sharing.

http://fulleryouthinstitute.org/2009/12/my-initial-concern-about-reggie-joiners-orange/

Discussing Relationships Unfiltered – Chapter 1

With this post we begin an online discussion of "Relationships Unfiltered (by Andrew Root).  We start with questions flowing out of chapter one.  We encourage you to post your answers to the following questions as comments (click on "comments" below - note that you must first register with blogger).

1. In your own words, what is relational youth/camp ministry?

2. In the camp ministry setting, what is the point of the relationships we have with young people? How do we know when these relationships are successful?

3. Influence and leverage are words we commonly use in business relationships and partnerships. Can these approaches in relationships be an issue, especially in a ministry setting? If so, how?

4. Can you recall a time in your life when a mentor, coach, teacher or pastor stepped into your personal world and was there for you by sharing in your dreams, joys, pains and fears? If you are willing, please share your story.

Ministering with Jesus in post-Christian, post-modern urban settings

One of the challenges we face as Christians on mission with Jesus, is to join the Father, Son and Spirit in the ministry they are doing within our cities - places that rapidly are becoming both post-Christian and post-modern. For ideas on joining Jesus in this urban ministry, click here to download the November issue of GC2 equipper.

2010 GenMin camps and events

We have now posted the 2010 dates for GenMin camps, family events and mission trips (view the list by clicking here).

I'm thrilled to note the addition of another mission trip to the GenMin camp & event family - the mission organization is called Great Commission Trips. In 2010 they are offering a short-term mission trip to the Bahamas. Check it out by clicking here.

The emerging (postmodern) church

GenMin seeks to help churches bring together the various age groups to be what we truly are in Christ - one family. Doing this is no small challenge. As noted in the last post it means ministering cross-generationally. But, increasingly, it also means ministering cross-culturally - reaching across the cultural divide between modernity (which is waning) to post-modernity (which is ascending).  It also means reaching across the divide between a culture dominated by Christendom (the institutional church as a dominant cultural influence) and the emerging culture where institutional Christianity has little influence.

A book that discusses these challenges (and suggests the way forward) is Emerging Churches (creating Christian community in postmodern cultures) by Eddie Gibbs and Ryan Bolger. For video interviews with both authors click here. To download a paper (in Word) from Gibbs that summarizes the main points of the book click here.

I'd appreciate your comments concerning our calling as churches to minister cross-culturally and cross-generationally.

More about the demise of age-segmentation in churches

We have written several times in this blog about the growing trend in churches to integrate the different age segments as one family within the church. Experience tells us that the radical age segregation of the past has not yielded the hoped-for fruit.

Now there is a strong trend toward age group integration.

Christianity Today has a new article on this issue. It's an interviews with Kara Powell (pictured above right), executive director of the Fuller Youth Institute (FYI). FYI is (in my opinion) doing some of the best work in investigating this issue and suggesting meaningful approaches for the journey forward.

Read the full article by clicking here.

Interview with Ted Johnston

Click here for an interview with GenMin director Ted Johnston concerning the trinitarian theology that under-girds Generations Ministries and the ongoing discussion in this blog.

A Church in the Intergenerational HOV Lane

Fuller Youth Institute has a helpful blog post (click here to view) that takes a candid look at a local church that has engaged itself in intergenerational ministry. The blogger, David Fraze, interviews the senior pastor, Dr. Tod Bolsinger, at San Clemente Presbyterian Church about the church's intergenerational iniatives and how that has radically reframed their youth ministry as well as their church-wide programming. Dr. Bolsinger talks about how the notion of intergenerational ministry begins with the understanding of the Trinity and how that relationship flows into an atmosphere and reality of community. As Dr. Bolsinger states, "Once you recognize the essence of God is community, believers relating to one another in community makes perfect sense. The incarnation of the triune God is the people of God, the body of Christ relating with one another in the Spirit of Christ."

Wrestling with the generation gap

John Ortberg (pictured left) has written a helpful article titled "The Gap" - it discusses the challenges churches face in embracing and then connecting together all the generations to form one church family. Click here to read the article at ChristianityToday.com. I like Ortberg's points about intergenerational worship and older adults mentoring younger adults and teens.

Preparing teens for college

Do you have a teen at home or in youth group who enters college this fall? What will you do to help them prepare? A helpful Bible Study is provided by Threads (it's free!). Click here to download "Freshmen Re-orientation."

Interview with Andrew Root

Check out the You're Included interview with Dr. Andrew Root (shown right). Dr. Root is assistant professor of youth and family ministry at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, MN. He discusses trinitarian youth ministry concepts from his book, "Revisiting Relational Youth Ministry"  - I recommended this excellent book in a post on The Surprising God blog.

This coming Spring (2010), Greg Williams and I will be team teaching an online class through Grace Communion Seminary (GCS) - the class is titled "Trinitarian Youth Ministry." We will be using Root's book as a primary text. If you're interested in taking the class, watch for future details on this blog and on the GCS website.

A trinitarian view of human sexuality

A key issue in cross-generational, family-oriented ministries is human sexuality. I have found the work of Chistopher West to be of great value. He writes and lectures about this important, and often confusing subject from a trinitarian theological perspective. I find what he shares to be thoroughly biblical.

You will find helpful resources posted on West's website (click here) including a wonderful audio presentation titled "Theology of the Body" (go to the download page by clicking here).

A New Generation Demands New Categories for Theology and Ministry

Lily Allen is a mostly unknown name in the United States, but in the UK she is ubiquitous. Her picture is plastered all over the daily papers, her pop songs blare from the radio, and gossip of her escapades fill the tabloids. Lily Allen is one the UK’s great paparazzi magnets because she is one of the UK’s most captivating celebrities. And the glow of her fame will soon be as white hot here as it is in the UK (just last month she sold out two shows in LA, her new album It’s Not Me, It’s You sits at 54 on the billboard charts, and the first single just appeared on VH1’s top twenty countdown).

Lily Allen’s celebrity is not only built on her talented song writing and vocal ability but also on her fast living and party girl antics. Lily Allen is the empowered twenty-year-old woman who is business savvy (using social networking like MySpace and Twitter to launch her career), and deep in her lyrical pop songs, and yet is nevertheless obsessed with fame, drinking, and easy sex.

Lily Allen represents the new world of a new generation; a generation that refuses to so easily be categorized, a generation that believes that smart and sexy are not competing realities, responsible and yet hedonistic not complete opposites. Lily Allen represents in her music and celebrity the categorical shifts that are occurring in our culture, she represents escape from old categorical dichotomies as the location for constructing meaning and identity.

By this I don’t mean the overstatement that this pop star somehow represents a radically different ideological or epistemological cultural shift. Rather, I mean something more slight, less dramatic. What I mean is that the categories in which we have often done theology and church have simply changed. Or to say it better, the categories people use to organize and make meaning in their lives are no longer the categories we have used to construct theology and do ministry.

To read more of Andrew Root's article, click here