I seldom take calls on Monday mornings from phone numbers that I do not recognize. Like many of you who are coming off a busy weekend, I typically take Monday morning to center myself and build a foundation for the rest of the week. Foolishly, knowing I was moving outside of my weekly rhythm, I took a call this morning and for the last hour I have been kicking myself…

What was the call about? Well, in a nutshell it was about youth ministry and evangelism. You see, last year the organizaton I lead (Sonlife) moved away from an event that it had been doing for nearly 20 years called SEMP. SEMP was an acronym for Students Equipped to Minister to their Peers. It was a good event and over the years thousands of youth workers and students had been impacted by the intensive week-long experience. The event was mainly designed to train high school students with the “why” and “how” of sharing their faith to their friends. All in all — it was a good event and for years it served it’s purpose.

When I came to Sonlife, I hired a guy named Mike Novelli and empowered him to lead the event through a season of change and into a new paradigm for equipping students to live missionally and he did (and I think very well). Last summer was our first season of the new event for high school students called, Merge. Merge is designed to help students merge with God’s story, merge with his way of life, and merge with his mission. Rather than giving the “tools” for evangelism to students, Merge is designed to help students understand a context and meaning for sharing Jesus and in that context then, join God where he is already at work. We still believe it is very much about equipping students and very much about sharing your faith — the starting point is just different.

Anyway, I take this call from a youth pastor in the mid-west and he is ticked at Sonlife because we are no longer doing SEMP. Because we aren’t leading SEMP anymore apparently we have ‘dismantled his entire youth ministry’ and now he has no more ‘purpose and direction’. I tried to help this guy see how I think we need a new kind of evangelism but in the end he wasn’t all that interested.

The conversation fueled my passion to help youth workers explore the idea of and experiment with a new kind of youth ministry. So, beginning tomorrow (or maybe later today) I will have a short series of posts dedicated to youth ministry and evangelism.