JH Summit 2005

April 4-6, 2005

Bay Club Hotel, San Diego, CA
Tuesday PM

What do we want to talk about?

- Implications of “one teacher” comment
- Assimilating kids into the church
- Where is the healthy bar
- Content vs. feel
- Inevitability/setting them up for “success”
- Markers of EA spirituality
- VAST/parent/advisory council
- Communicating “the world beneath” & what to do about it
- Rites of passage/5 Strategies
- How do we train volunteers in this, select them, & rethink their role
- Synergy with children’s and HS
- Pre-teen

Markers of EA Spirituality/Spiritual Development

- Descriptors:
o “I made a decision when I was 5, but summer camp in 7th grade I
finally got it.”
o New ability to understand spiritual things
o New way to understand spiritual things
o Open & impressionable
o Experience trumps information
o Beginnings of plurality – “patchwork faith”
o Faith crisis – questioning/challenging the faith they’ve been taught
 Deconstruction
 Can formulate questions better than understand the answers
 Can lead to seeing our faith as idealistic
 Reliant on others to develop faith and understanding
 Can truly believe something but act in a very different way
• Haven’t connected belief with behavior
o Compassion for/awareness of lost friends
 Desire to include friends in their cluster (beginning awareness
of self-concept)
 Maybe not motivated as much by compassion as above point
 Students invite friends because they want to hang out
 Non-believers even inviting their friends
 Very boxy
 Not really a general descriptor
o Enthusiasm (or potential for enthusiasm)
 With new self-awareness, enthusiasm means something
 different
 Enthusiasm to be part of a caring community
 A desire to believe in something
• Shift from building a belief foundation to connecting
pieces together of what is true into a web
• 8th-9th grade – shift from foundational faith to convictional
web faith
• How they are being taught that faith plays into it
• The foundation is what allows you to question and
wrestle with things and have a place to rest
• Maybe have a desire to be told…
• Willing to adopt the beliefs of someone who gives them
attention
• Shift from “what I want to experience next?” to “what do I
do with what I see?”
o Their needs, friendships, etc. trump faith-stuff
 Guys especially don’t seem affected by sway of pre-clusters
• Don’t have significant social groups
• Rise above it
• March to own beat
o Students respond to faith on an emotional framework
 What feeling they can walk away with
 Process on emotion
o Don’t recognize hypocrisy in themselves but aware of it in others
o They’re watching and imitating

- Implications?
o Less telling, more teaching through showing
 Teaching through lifestyle, which requires more from us
 Need to spend more time with fewer students
 Incarnational modeling
o How important is it to have them “pray the prayer?”
 Rethink the process of inviting students to salvation?
 Importance of one-time decision for Christ?
 Not presenting the Gospel to get kids’ butts into heaven
 Ultimate goal is to have them following Christ 10 years from
now…
 Some students are ready for the ask, others need someone to
ride out the journey with them.
 People we report to are in old school
 What is the salvation decision?
• When you ask, “have you thought about what this
means?” what are we saying?
• Kingdom is all around us mentality vs. one-time personal
 savior going into sin management to inherit heaven
mentality
• Theological difference vs. semantics
• Discipleship before salvation? (Nate R.)
o Jesus called disciples then they became life-long
followers
• We’ve boiled down the story to fall and redemption
o We leave out creation and new creation
o Need to start with Genesis
o They are redemptive agents in God’s story
• What about when it comes down to checking the box?
o Can we rewrite the boxes?
o We don’t know what really happened behind the
decision, the attitude
• Can we do it without “the prayer?”
o Confessing with your mouth?
o Isn’t it about the presentation of it?
o It solidifies it in their mind, it becomes a thank-you
process.
o Savior vs. Lord
• For Marko, not an issue at own church, but when
speaking at a one-time event outside of community when
he’s asked to do a response time because he believes
those decisions are important.
o Have students go talk to leaders if they want to
discuss
o When graduate, flip the tassel…are you graduated
if you don’t? yes.
o Need spiritual markers…
o Rethink what it means to have a relational ministry
 If they’re in faith crisis and experience trumps information,
then we can’t solve their crisis with info.
 They are impressionable and information can help
 They are asking questions they can’t answer, so they need
someone to help them wrestle with those issues
o Quality vs. quantity time
 Adults want quality time
 Students want quantity time
o Really create a safe place to ask questions
 Do they think we will be open to a discussion?
 “I know what _____ is going to say.”
 Sometimes there are students who just don’t (John W.)
 Nate R – chat rooms (with HS students) that give students
opportunities to realize that they can have conversations with
 adults
 How do we know when to tell them? When are we wrong in
withholding that answer?
 Eric – ran small groups where leaders were facilitators and
building up capital so their answers meant something more.
Sometimes a students would arrive at the answer before the
leader needed to…
 How do you train your volunteers (esp. young ones) when to
know and read the situation about giving the answer?
 Heather – Forums with 9th graders where students have 13
minutes to discuss a topic and leaders can’t talk. Leaders have
last 2 minutes to give input as they want.
 Students will talk about stuff that is concerning them. (Eric)
• We need to balance having structure and an agenda with
letting them pick the topic

What is our bar? What are we calling them to?

- What drove that? (Kurt J)
o YW’s say we need to raise the bar. Are we justifying our call?
o Does it need to be raised?
- Have we ever set it too high or too low? (Kurt J)
o Putting evangelism on students – form of abandonment (Chap)
o Maybe that bar is too high…evangelism (KJ)
o Don’t think we ere on too low… (KJ)
o If it’s just a fun club – too low?
o Just praying the prayer – too high to understand all that includes?
too low if just point is to get the prayer done?
o It’s way more about the journey than we let it be…
- The bar is the journey.
o We’re part of this 6-10 year process.
o What we value most is the bar that we set.
o If this is true, should the bar be set for us as disciplers? (Trae)
 Instead of where should my guys be, what do I need to do
within my relationship with them to foster this faith
development?
 Makes sense but is a different question…
 Don’t know that we want to stop there. (Marko)
o Going to have to be personalized bars for each student.
- Define the journey:
o Growing to know God more intimately
o Becoming more like Christ
o Identity questions – finding it in serving
o Us to lead like Jesus (different with Peter than John)
 Not cram it all into our 2- or 3-year window
o Does it have to be so measurable? Can’t it be fluid?
- So, without those methods, how do we know that we are succeeding, even
with individual kids? (Marko)
o We can know if we’re doing what God’s calling us to do with them.
o Would you try to quantify the relationship more so than the outcome?
o Does it have to be an either/or?
o Is there something we can pull from the tightrope analogy?
 Moving from dependence to interdependence
 What are steps along the way?
 If we know that students in the next 3-4 years are going to
experience abandonment, what are we going to do about it?
- Want every kid to have identifiable ebeneezers.
- Awareness of others.
o For relationship? Salvation?
o Love others:
 Serving them
 Needs?
- Experience:
o Community
o Influence of Jesus-y friend
- A set of behaviors?
o Merging faith and life
o No sex until marriage, for example
o We need to affect their story in order to affect behavior
o Convictions impact behavior
o Talked about Curt Gibson’s model of current realities and finding
student’s stories in God’s story. (see notes from 2 years ago)
 How many adults in our churches could articulate God’s story?
(Jim)
• The Story We Find Ourselves In, Brian McLaren
• The Story of God, Lodall
 Importance of talking to them about God’s story
- Ebeneezers – need a place when they do fail to help them
o Preventative strategies and do-over strategies
- Understanding their place in God’s Story
o Looks different for every student
o Starts with creation
o Listen to the vocabulary they use to describe God (HS & older)
o How does John measure it in MS at Lake?
 One kid at a time and assess if they’re taking steps forward
 Sometimes it’s more of not moving backward as much as
moving forward
 Check the HS group as thermometer
• Assuming it doesn’t suck
o Following one student it’s easy to measure
- Genuine interest in spiritual questions.
 - This is a good list for us as a whole, but we each need to add our own parts
based on our churches and/or denominations.
- Is it reasonable to think that MS students can have an age-appropriate
understanding of grace?
o They understand mercy (Heather).
o Individual understanding of grace vs. collective understanding of
grace and living it out in community.
- All of this in community.
- “We do these things.”

If you were going to totally dive after this in your ministry, especially communally,
so that in 2 years the volunteers would say, “Yes we’re doing this,” what would need
to change in your ministry to make that a reality?
- Steve: Make things more personal – press and train our leaders to know
students better; give them language to understand that concept.
- Jason: do more life-on-life ministry – earn trust with senior leaders to show
them that this needs to happen.
- Jeff: pull back programs to allow leaders to hang out with students more
- Judy: pull energy from large-group ministry to small group (large group has
lot of momentum) – not intentional about relationships in breakouts from
large group
- Nate R.: implement them at camp AND support youth groups to do these
things; want the partnership to be more than once a year – FH to pay for
youth pastors to meet and discuss these issues.
- Ken: looking for more ways for students to experience community outside
of small groups – interact with the larger church.
- Nate S: Work with children’s pastor about what this would look like in 5th
and 6th grade to have a greater understanding of these things;
accountability to make sure ministry is still moving forward.
- Trae: community – change happens in the 10 weeks off during ALPHA and
convincing his boss MS isn’t a silo; re-communicating to leaders the
expectations.
- Kurt J: get away from an exact program with exact goal to reach exact
person; look at 3 arenas and talk about the same thing in all arenas – large
group, small group, individual – instead of particular program for particular
arena.
- Alan M: start with staff – can’t do with kids if not doing with staff; need
better community and investing in staff.
- Joe: listening to help others in YM context back in KC
- John: starts with volunteers; changing small groups; more life-on-life
incarnational opportunities – service, loving others, adult and student(s);
get rid of mid-week program or change significantly.
- Scott: avoid creating a bar that lands in behavioralism; ministry to
individual students;
- Alex: YS training stuff; context of role of body of the church in students’
lives; training leaders to know this is where we’re going.
- Marko: training of leaders; this bar is really hard and far away for the
 students at church; intrigued by talking to YW’s about lowering the bar.
- Eric: bringing better training and understanding to staff they hire at camps
and to other youth guys in area. (Marko: what about choosing one of these
as theme for the week of camp)
- Mark J: need to have leaders know their students’ stories better; let
students have tangible examples of feeling loved by the church;
opportunities not just programs; better connections with children’s and HS.
- Heather: really good at teaching on behavior, so it needs to start with her
and change that; have huge expectations for summer camp and 9th grade
trip, but these ideas don’t necessarily have tangible results.
- Alan R.: training with leaders; be willing to let some students go (Christ had
12, not multiple services); ask leaders for 3 deeper years of commitment.
- Curt G: got to build from the ground up in this context; meet with staff and
mentors and call out what they do well; training of leaders/mentors – take
it one step further to tutors and tutoring program; find symbols to
communicate the story - adventures; use symbols in the room;
confirmation option in moving from junior to senior mentor program; know
the Shema; camp in the context of racial reconciliation.
- Cristin: train volunteers; reevaluate placement of 5th grade; look at budget
and get more experiences away from the norm with the JH students and
volunteers.
- Jim: need someone to check in with him once a week to help him be a
better boss and smooth the chain of command and flow of information;
rally the church to YM – get the whole church to read Hurt & bring Chap in.
- Johnny: not be arrogant enough to accomplish whole list in a weekend;
work with staff that is coming out of ministries – communicate it’s a
journey and community; create content that affirms this list.
- April: hard because still getting to know her context; not be an island and
silo from 5/6 and HS; help staff understand where their story intersects
God’s story; priority of individual student over the ministry.