I’ve found a new hobby. I have found absolute delight in digging up older books on youth ministry – books from the 70’s and 80’s. Much of what I find I purchase for a couple of bucks from some obscure website and they’re usually shipped from places in the world I can only wish I [...]
Archive for the ‘Spirituality’ Category
Youth Ministry & The Task of Culture Shaping
Posted: 5th June 2009 by Chris in Church, Spirituality, Theology, Youth Ministry8
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 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 [...]
[SLAP!!] Thanks, I needed that!
Posted: 19th February 2009 by Chris in Leadership, Spirituality, Youth Ministry“One axiom of leadership I have come to appreciate reads, ‘leaders do not inflict pain, they bear it’. In the same manner, leaders do not absorb praise, they re-direct it. The success of any Christian leader lies significantly in their ability to keep this two-fold movement of leadership in balance. Leaders who inflict pain lose [...]
Chasing Francis by Ian Cron
Posted: 14th February 2009 by Chris in Books, Church, Spirituality, TheologyAround the office at Youthfront there are a few legendary stories of people who have either been on staff or have merely stopped in a time or two over the years for a meeting or an inspirational talk or to partner in an event, say a prayer, etc.
I think most of the stories I hear [...]
Gina, my wife, was given the gift of a subscription to Weavings: A Journal of the Christian Spiritual Life some time ago. When the bi-monthly issues arrive in the mail each time I am quick to snatch them up as if they were a gift to me.
It usually takes me at least a month or [...]
I came across a book I think many of you might find helpful. It is called, The Cow Of No Color: Riddle Stories and Justice Tales from Around the World.
As far as I can tell, it is a fairly obscure book (Amazon rankings don’t always mean a book is or isn’t obscure — #423,247 as [...]
The last two weeks have been exhilarating! They have also been very exhausting — all of us who work with youth this time of year (or any other time of year really) find ourselves quickly consumed by the work and we are left tired hoping to recover sometime before the fall.
Two weeks ago we [...]
5 ‘Dangerous’ Things, Part 3
Posted: 29th June 2008 by Chris in Spirituality, Theology, Youth MinistrySimilarly 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 [...]
“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. [...]