I don’t think I am an alarmist. The word ‘departing’ in the title of this post may appear that I am but to me, the word ‘vanishing’ was to excessive. Another word that came to mind was ‘deserting’ and that just didn’t seem fair.
At any rate, today I got news via a friend’s email that [...]
Archive for April, 2009
Youth Ministry & the Departing Youth Worker
Posted: 30th April 2009 by Chris in Consulting, Just a thought, Leadership, Youth Ministry4
I’ve been thinking a bunch lately about how we help our students best understand the Church and its work in the mission of God. I have received several recent emails in which youth workers have expressed a deep concern for their students understanding of the church.
Can the students in your youth ministry describe the nature [...]
[I've been posting once a week over at Scot McKnight's blog. You can read the post and join the conversation over there and read my previous posts HERE. Below is this weeks installment...]
Sometimes I wonder how I ever even made it as a youth minister through my emerging adulthood years (think: Dr. Jeffrey Arnett and [...]
Youth Min and Learning the Bible’s Story
Posted: 11th April 2009 by Chris in Spirituality, Training, Youth MinistryMy predecessor at Barefoot left a pile of book proposals on my desk and today I picked up a small stack of them during a slower moment in the day and began to skim them.
At first glance at, two things surprised me about the proposals. First, the proposals were eerily similar in their content. All [...]
Youth Min. and Transformative Environments
Posted: 2nd April 2009 by Chris in Theology, Training, Youth MinistryI spent this past weekend in San Antonio, TX with some new friends at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church and a few other churches within the Diocese of West Texas. I led several conversations for a couple dozens students around mission, community and identity formation – some of the very things we’ve recently been discussing on [...]
Youth Ministry and Community
Posted: 2nd April 2009 by Chris in Spirituality, Theology, Youth MinistryIt wasn’t until I was nearly half a dozen years into vocational youth ministry that I began to discover that I couldn’t will a sense of community. As hard as I worked to create an environment of invitation, generosity, hope, love, hospitality, honesty, shared learning, etc., I discovered that community isn’t developed out of a [...]