Similarly to allowing students to doubt (part 2 of this series), we ought also to allow students to discover truth on their own. I am not saying that we allow them to discover their own truth. Rather, I am saying that we allow them to come into truth via their own understanding and practice. I contend we are far better off in the shepherding of our students if we allow them to believe that something is true in their own time and through their own unearthing and articulation of the particular truth.

Truth is not something that can be understood and practiced simply by passing on what we have come to know through words alone. I mean, how have we ‘come to know’ what we do? Was it simply because someone told us that a particular thought or concept IS true and so we believed them? C’mon. There is no way have you come to the place you are with God right now in this present moment because someone convinced you that something was true simply by using words. Language (words that give meaning) is very important in the process of discovering truth but it is not THE process. The process of practice, reflection, observation making, abstract correlating and tested experience all come together to help students ‘come to know’ what is true. (i.e. Kolb, Experiential Learning).

Therefore, the environments that we create and sustain become essential. Without an effective environment or a collection of various environments we are simply left to assume that just words that define ideas and concepts about God help students ‘come to know’ what is true. So, as youth workers, we are not solely the passer on of truths as we are environmentalists that help create a culture where truths can be unearthed and applied. We, as youth workers (parents, coaches, teachers, etc), are key to the entire unearthing truth process but our role ought not to be the carrier of what is “right” as much as it ought to be the designer in which the truth that we have come to know might also come to be known by others.

The inevitable question I get asked when I talk about this is always something like… “So… then… what constitutes an effective environment?” My answer is usually something like this… “I think there are three critical elements of an effective environment. The three elements are time, space and content.”

Time — moments to discover God and instances to punctuate the time.
Space — freedom and breathing room to discover God in the time the individual feels is exact.
Content – the substance or the material used to help the individual do the things I have already stated are important. Things like practice, reflection observation making, abstract correlating and testing by experience.

(BTW- I am not sure where I got those three elements. I can’t remember if it was one particular author or seminar speaker or who but they are something I have been using as a template for a while now.)

My premise (for those of you who are confused by these ramblings on) is quite simple. Here it is… Don’t tell students what is true and expect them to just live it (truth) out. On the contrary, guide or shepherd your students into environments comprised of time, space and content that allow them to ‘come to know’ what is true through their own understanding and practice. Be and environmentalist as much as you are an evangelist.

A few months ago I posted re: my son’s recently identified hearing loss. You can read the post HERE.

Thanks to all of you who have prayed for him! I am happy to say that Luke is doing just fine. He is adjusting well. I am very proud of him. He has been attending school each morning where he works diligently on his speech and interaction with other students.

It is amazing how much difference a hearing aid makes! His world is completely different. Again, thanks for all of your prayers and the many emails inquiring about how he is doing.

Remember the phrase, “There are no dumb questions?” When we were kids teachers, parents, church workers, tutors, coaches, etc. wanted us to ask questions. Emphasis was put on the “no dumb” in the phrase above which means that the “there are questions” part of the phrase above was essentially a given. So, maybe a better way to go about making such a statement would be, “There are questions. None of them are dumb.”

Where did that line of thinking go? Why do so many who work with youth get spooked when students ask questions or express doubt? We’ve been telling students, ‘there are questions’ and ‘there are no dumb ones’ then when they have questions about faith issues many feel like they need to suppress those questions in favor of a more certain method of making known – absolute condescension. Meaning, some holding to an anti-doubt way of learning faith hold the key to all wisdom and meaning and therefore why would anyone doubt? After all, THE answer is this, that or the other thing. There is no doubt about it. “So why all the questions?”, some ask.

A few weeks ago I was invited to sit on a roundtable of sorts at a local Christian school here in the greater Chicago area. I didn’t want to go as I those types of arrangements usually make me more frustrated than is good for my spirituality. I said yes, however, because I had some connections with some of the other panel participants.

As I suspected, the ‘moderator’ had an agenda. The questions asked were not to spark conversation and healthy debate. Rather the questions put forth were to prove the moderator’s point – that the ‘lack of faith obviously visible’ in their students was a direct result of the many years that the school of allowed students to ‘question their faith’ and therefore, the students weren’t taking faith seriously. Needless to say, I stopped getting questions a few minutes into the conversation.

Doubt is good and so is dancing with it. Guiding our students in the process of their own belief is imperative to their ongoing spiritual development. It is imperative because in some way, shape or form doubt will always exist. Even something as simple and real as doubting oneself does indeed doubt faith, no? If we doubt elements of and within our stories, we doubt faith.

I realize that for many of you allowing students to doubt what I am talking about is not necessarily dangerous. I contend, however, that many of the parents of the students you work with most likely don’t feel the same way you do about faith and doubt. On a similar note, perhaps it might be a healthy exercise for you to measure how your volunteers feel about allowing students to express doubt. Oh yeah, and allowing students to doubt and allowing students to express their doubt are not the same thing. Most people who work with youth are okay or at least semi-okay with an internal conversation of doubt. However, when it is expressed verbally to the entirety of a group, it creates an often-unwanted environmental dynamic. A dynamic that encourages doubt to surface and can sometimes lead others to doubt upon a topic they haven’t yet doubted upon. Some of us just avoid the topic of doubt altogether knowing it isn’t always explainable and never controllable.

Dancing with doubt provides our students with an opportunity to…

…see God reveal himself in bigger ways than humanity can even imagine
… grow beyond the doubt; only to doubt something else
… joyfully cling to what is hopeful not to what is joyously hopeless
… establish a rhythmical critical thinking process that can lead to experiencing God more fully
…guide others toward and through the same doubt(s)
… trust God and others in immeasurable ways
… become more aware of the difference between confidence in things and trust in God
… experience the peace that comes through trust as along with the anxiety that comes with doubt; learning to experience them simultaneously
… listen to and learn from the authentic faith of others
… let failures in life be as significant as successes knowing that failure can lead to doubt and doubt can ultimately lead to more trust
…continue or begin serving others even when their faith isn’t all ‘worked out’
… see the world for what it is—a broken, messy, conglomerate of endless questions about what’s real – and in due course what’s restorable
…avoid the cynicism of those to whom doubt is wrong and inappropriate
…be patient with their peers who may struggle with the claims of God’s story

“Doubt is probably a permanent feature of the Christian life. It’s like some kind of spiritual
growing pain. Sometimes it recedes into the background; at other times it comes to the forefront, making its presence felt with a vengeance.” Alister McGrath, Doubting: Growing Through the Uncertainties of Faith

Check out Doug Jones’ post over at Perigrinatio HERE.

Tony Myles is a great friend. I met him a few years ago when he was discovering what God had next for him and we were discussing some possible roles with Sonlife. It never worked for him to come on our staff but Tony and I have done some writing together on a few projects including a soon to be released resource pack based on our Enroute training called, Virtues of Jesus. He also co-wrote a great devotional for us called, The Miracles of Jesus. You can check that devotional out HERE.

Tony is the pastor of Connection Church near Akron, OH and there is a great story about him and his church in the Beacon Journal that will undoubtedly warm your heart. You can read the article HERE.

(ht to Marko)

I have decided to hold off on posting my follow up thoughts to the “Five Dangerous Things” post (click HERE) for a couple more days. Reason being, I have decided to include Doug Jones over at Perigrinatio to post along side of my thoughts hopefully giving our fellow readers more to think about.

Let this also be an open invitation for any of you who also want to post your thoughts. I think this is a fundmental yet important line of thinking so the more voices to help us all sort this out the better! If you plan on posting with Doug and I, post your thoughts by 6/18 at 5PM or so…

“Facts and reason alone do not stand a chance against a story because both depend on story for their power. It is naive to think one has arrived at one’s views and values solely through unbiased consideration of objective data. Data are never objective because they are always gathered by story-breathing human subjects. All facts are inert and useless until they have been interpreted, integrated into this narrative or that.”

From Daniel Taylor’s “Tell Me a Story: The Life-Shaping Power of Our Stories” (Bog Walk Press, Page 80)

I am a fan of Gever Tulley. Gever is a brilliant guy. He is a computer scientist by trade but is the founder of The Tinkering School, a summer program that helps kids build the things that they think about and dream up.

I first learned about Gever Tulley through TED: Ideas Worth Spreading. If you are not familiar with TED you should go HERE and intake as much as you possibly can.

Gever has a about a 10 minute presentation called, 5 Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Kids Do. You can watch it HERE.

The 5 dangerous things that Gever puts forward (he is actually writing a book of 50) are to let our kids:

1. Play with fire
2. Own a pocket knife
3. Throw a spear
4. Deconstruct appliances
5. Break the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act)
5.5 Drive a car

Despite the provocative title, the talk is really about safety. Essentially, Gever is saying that if we eliminate everything “dangerous” from the life of our kids then the first time they come into contact with dangerous things they will undoubtedly hurt themselves.

If we are walking with our kids, however, through the experience of such dangerous things then we can help them be creative, confident and aware of and adapt to the environment around them.

I contend that the same is true for those of us helping students grow into a deeper relationship with Jesus. I think we can take Gever’s assertions and draw principles to the spiritual formation of adolescents. That being, if we don’t ever let our students (and our own children) do “dangerous” things within the realm(s) of faith, we aren’t helping them with a real sense of “know-a-bility” — what they come to know through shared experience.
So, here are five dangerous things I suggest we should let our students do (feel free to comment and add to the list!) Like Gever, I really have 6 but I think that 4 and 4.5 go hand in hand…

1. Dance with doubt
2. Discover truth for themselves
3. Disengage from reality every now and then
4. Dispatch their story, not someone elses
4.5 Determine their own future
5. Deconstruct what they are told, see and come to “know”

Over the next few days I will be breaking down each of these 5 ‘dangerous’ things we should let our kids do. In the meantime, I would encourage you to join TED and, at the least, watch the presentation by Gever Tulley. You can view it HERE.

Yesterday I spent the morning over at Youthfront South (our HS camp) training our college staff (some of them pictured below) in the art of storytelling and facilitating conversations. Much of what I have come to understand about the art of storytelling has come from Mike and Caesar over at Echo The Story.

Originally we had Mike Novelli coming in to do the training but schedules got complicated as they tend to do and so we weren’t able to have him. I enjoyed doing the training but it would have been great to have Mike with us.

At Youthfront we are experimenting with and implementing the concepts that I am writing about in my upcoming book, Story, Signs and Sacred Rhythms at camp this year (and for years to come we hope). Actually, we are bringing the concepts into all that we are doing in our training of youth workers, at our ministry site in Mexico and in all of our other local ministry expressions here in Kansas City.

The book has been extremely fun to work on. I am nearly finished with it. The manuscript is due later in the summer so I am thinking about it and writing a bit almost every hour of the day.

The basic idea of the book is to resource those of us (paid youth workers, volunteers, teachers, coaches, parents, etc.) who are consistently creating environments of spiritual transformation with 1) an understanding of what constitutes healthy, valuable environments, 2) a framework or approach to spiritually guiding students within the environments that we create (using a process that begins with helping students engage with God’s story and ultimately ends with helping students develop behaviors and expressions that live out God’s intended ways) and 3) practical tools to help us “environmentalists” implement the proposed approach.

I look forward to interacting with you on the ideas and concepts in the book. I will be doing a seminar at each of the YS conventions this coming fall around many of the ideas in the book so maybe we can connect there to chat about it too…

For over 9 months I have been commuting from Chicago, where I currently live, to Kansas City where I work at Youthfront. With each passing trip I have gotten more and more eager for today – the first day of camp.

We have about 230 middle school students with us from mostly the greater Kansas City area, nearly 100 high school and college staff and of course a dozen or so of our Youthfront staff. I can’t tell you how thrilled I am to be in the middle of all this!

Since I left my role as a youth pastor in a church near Minneapolis about 4 years ago I have been missing the direct interaction with students. Yeah, I have spoken at a ton of retreats and conferences over the past 4 years and interacted with students via that privilege. However, to be a part of a team that is joining in the work of God by creating environments for spiritual transformation is something that I have greatly missed.

I have also always had a bit of a pit in my stomach as it relates to the fact that while at Sonlife we really haven’t had a local ministry expression to speak of. We did week-long and weekend events for students (Led by Mike Novelli, and a team of amazing people –and they were stellar) but we really haven’t had the resources to administrate and lead an intense and direct ministry with and to students like we do at Youthfront. I am not solely refferring to the campers but the high school students and college students we will be with all summer who are serving on our staff team. It is in those summer long relationships (and many of them work at our camp for 3 or 4 years in a row and we connect with them throughout the year) that the opportunity to experiment with philosophies and methods of spiritual formation exists.

In the end, I guess you could say that it feels “right” to be training youth workers in a framework for missional youth ministry through Enroute and our other training methods and at the same time have a place to practice what we are teaching and training youth workers…

I love what my majority role is at Youthfront –-training youth workers and overseeing the day to day of our all of our ministry initiatives. I wouldn’t trade it for any other job. However, to have a job in which I get to interact with youth workers around North America and students from a local ministry expression such as Youthfront is truly a sweet thing.