Tim Weston

Last Saturday, I had the opportunity to attend Youth Specialties‘ The Core 2008: Generation Change with my pastor and two of my fellow youth volunteers at Camp Hill UMC.

Overall, the event was pretty decent, though I didn’t think it was as good as the previous week’s conference at Messiah College or a training held by Group a few years ago. My main gripe was that the training was more theoretical than practical, so instead of going home with lots of examples and ideas to try, I came home with lots of conversation starters for me and the other youth leaders. Conversation starters would be great if I had lots of time to invest in youth ministry, but I’m neither a full- nor part-time youth leader, so any time I do have comes after my 40+ hour a week job.

Would I recommend the conference to other youth leaders? Most definitely, as long as they understand going in that they’re not going to be talking with their staff on the ride home about all the great ideas they can put in place.

Last Sunday was Christ UMC’s annual Youth Sunday, the one Sunday of the year where the youth have complete (or at least almost complete) control over our worship services.

This year, the youth and leaders decided on a theme of “Jesus is our hope.” The idea primarily came from a popular YouTube video that shows a young woman who was very close with Christ but was torn away and distracted by her boyfriend, greed, drugs and alcohol, etc. Eventually, the young woman realizes that her only hope is in Jesus and, as a result, he breaks through all of the tempters to save the girl.

The teens used the skit (which they performed!) as the service’s sermon. The youth also chose three scripture readings for the morning:

The Parable of The Wise and Foolish Builders

²⁴“Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. ²⁵The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock. ²⁶But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. ²⁷The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash.”

The Parable of the Sower

³“Listen! A farmer went out to sow his seed. ⁴As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path, and the birds came and ate it up. ⁵Some fell on rocky places, where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly, because the soil was shallow. ⁶But when the sun came up, the plants were scorched, and they withered because they had no root. ⁷Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up and choked the plants, so that they did not bear grain. ⁸Still other seed fell on good soil. It came up, grew and produced a crop, multiplying thirty, sixty, or even a hundred times.”

⁹Then Jesus said, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”

¹⁰When he was alone, the Twelve and the others around him asked him about the parables. ¹¹He told them, “The secret of the kingdom of God has been given to you. But to those on the outside everything is said in parables ¹²so that,
” ‘they may be ever seeing but never perceiving,
and ever hearing but never understanding;
otherwise they might turn and be forgiven!’”

¹³Then Jesus said to them, “Don’t you understand this parable? How then will you understand any parable? ¹⁴The farmer sows the word. ¹⁵Some people are like seed along the path, where the word is sown. As soon as they hear it, Satan comes and takes away the word that was sown in them. ¹⁶Others, like seed sown on rocky places, hear the word and at once receive it with joy. ¹⁷But since they have no root, they last only a short time. When trouble or persecution comes because of the word, they quickly fall away. ¹⁸Still others, like seed sown among thorns, hear the word; ¹⁹but the worries of this life, the deceitfulness of wealth and the desires for other things come in and choke the word, making it unfruitful. ²⁰Others, like seed sown on good soil, hear the word, accept it, and produce a crop—thirty, sixty or even a hundred times what was sown.”

Comfort for God’s People

²⁷ Why do you say, O Jacob,
and complain, O Israel,
“My way is hidden from the LORD;
my cause is disregarded by my God”?

²⁸ Do you not know?
Have you not heard?
The LORD is the everlasting God,
the Creator of the ends of the earth.
He will not grow tired or weary,
and his understanding no one can fathom.

²⁹ He gives strength to the weary
and increases the power of the weak.

³⁰ Even youths grow tired and weary,
and young men stumble and fall;

³¹ but those who hope in the LORD
will renew their strength.
They will soar on wings like eagles;
they will run and not grow weary,
they will walk and not be faint.

The services were extremely moving and the youth received wonderful compliments from the congregation; all of the credit, though, must go to God, as during our last couple practices, I had no idea how we were going to get through the services because we just weren’t prepared.

The skit was filmed during the early service, so if I’m able to get a copy of it, I’ll post it here for all to see.

I’ve finally had an opportunity to compile my notes from last week’s 3rd Annual Messiah College Youth Workers Conference, so I’m ready to post a wrap-up of the event.

The highlight of my day was most definitely the keynote speech (broken up into two parts) by Kenda Creasy Dean, a professor and the director of the School of Christian Education at Princeton Theological Seminary.

The focus of the speech was that today’s teens don’t have a Christ-centered faith. Instead, they follow a faith system called moralistic therapeutic deism which has the following creed:

1. A god exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human life on earth.
2. God wants people to be good, nice and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and most world religions.
3. The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.
4. God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when God is needed to resolve a problem.
5. Good people go to heaven when they die.

The problem, Dean said, is not that they’ve learned this faith from television, movies or music; instead, youth practice this type of faith because that is what the church has been teaching them.

Dean continued by saying that teens need a consequential faith, a faith that is the foundation for everything that matters in a person’s life. To get there, we need to let teens know that there are four key toeholds to consequential faith: a creed to believe (is God worthy of my devotion?), a community to belong to, a call to live out (vocation) and a hope to hold on to. In particular, the hope teens are looking for is that the world is going in a good direction and that they have a role in getting it there.

One of the best parts of the keynote was that I was seated next to a youth leader from a town not too far away from Selinsgrove. It was great to be able to talk with someone from the area who I can interact with after the conference, instead of someone from hours away whom I will likely never see again.

In addition to the keynote speech, the conference also had two other sessions in which participants could choose from a number of topics/discussions. I chose “Writing God’s Story on the Heart of Teens” by Mike Harder and “The Jesus Contradiction: Why People Like Him but Dislike Christians” by Rob Tucker.

In those sessions, I learned how to share the Gospel with students in new and creative ways and be more effective as an evangelist for Christ.  Both sessions were decent, but they seemed rushed, which is typically the case at day-long conferences.

Looking back, the conference was a great opportunity to be refreshed and revitalized for youth ministry.  Each time I attend a conference or training like this, I return home more excited than ever before about serving God by reaching out to teenagers.  If you’re involved in youth ministry and have the opportunity to attend a conference such as this, I highly recommend it!

Friday evening, I had the good fortunate of attending The Altar & The Door Tour at Hersheypark Arena featuring Casting Crowns, Leeland and John Waller.

The concert was over three hours long (including two brief intermissions), with John Waller performing for about 20 minutes and Leeland for about 45 minutes. That left two full hours for Casting Crowns to play some of their greatest hits. I wish I’d kept track of their set list because there were a few songs I wasn’t very familiar with that I really liked.

If any of these artists comes back to the area, I’m definitely going to check them out. In fact, I kind of wish I’d been to their tour stop in State College a few weeks back. Fortunately, Leeland will be performing at Creation Festival this summer so I’ll get to see them again in just a few months.

If you’d like to see some photos from the concert, I have a bunch posted on Facebook (you don’t need to be a member to view them).

I spent much of last week at a conference in Washington, D.C. with a bunch of coworkers (hence the lack of posts). Each year, on the last night of the conference there’s a “Be True To Your School” party where attendees are invited to wear school clothing/colors and hang out with others. There’s music, a cash bar and lots of fun activities; last year they had pinball and arcade games set up around the ballroom, as well as other activities.

This year, one of the activities was a green screen interactive video called PopNoggins. Somewhat surprisingly, there were six people from SU, including myself, who were interested in taking part in this fun activity. We were allowed to choose a song and then the guy running the computer added character bodies and, well, it’s probably easier if you check it out for yourself.

I came across this interesting test over at ysmarko and thought I’d post it here to share with others.

In 2m 1s

Click here to Play

Tonight I finished reading another book that Josh Griffin recommended, The Blogging Church by Brian Bailey and Terry Storch.

While I thought the book was great and very informative, I didn’t get quite as much out of it as Josh did, perhaps because the book really needs to be in the hands of other members of my congregation.

The reason I purchased the book wasn’t to learn about blogging (an aspect of the book in which the authors cover quite well in extensive detail) but instead to learn what benefits a blog has to offer a church.  As it turns out, there are far more benefits than I realized.

The first, and perhaps most obvious, benefit of a church blog is that it can share news about the congregation.  From stories about recent and upcoming events, to testimonies and stories of life change, to ministry news and the weekend message, there’s lots of information about a church that needs to be disseminated to current and prospective members.  A blog serves as a quick, easy and inexpensive means of distribution.

Second, a blog can cast the vision of a church.  Instead of simply posting the church’s vision and mission statement (which should be done anyway), a blog can help define the congregation’s identity.  It can also help answer questions raised by parishioners and explain why the church does the things it does.

Finally, and perhaps most important, having a blog can help a church reach out to others.  This process begins by starting conversations and extends further by helping to develop relationships and, eventually, build community.

I’m going to recommend this book to my Pastor and Directory of Lay Ministries and see what they think about using a blog as a communications tool.  If implemented and used correctly, I think a blog could be a tremendous asset to my congregation.

At this week’s Bible study with The Gap, we spoke briefly about how we have grown/regressed spiritually over the past year.  That got me thinking: how do you measure spiritual growth?  I’d never really thought about that before and now I’m wondering how, if at all, I’ve grown spirituallly throughout the past year.I’m interested in learning how others determine/measure whether or not they’ve grown spiritual from one point in their life to another.  Hopefully some of you will post comments from which I can glean some ideas.

Earlier this week, I came across a WordPress theme on Weblog Tools Collection called StudioPress by DailyBlogTips.  I really liked the design and layout, so I installed it and did some tweaking to make sure things would look good on my site before going live (thanks Ryan Boren for the Preview Theme plugin!).

If you notice any oddities/bugs while reading my blog, please leave a comment on this post so I can investigate and hopefully fix the problem.  Thanks!

Because the 30 Hour Famine was canceled, I had the opportunity to attend an event sponsored by the UMC’s Central Pennsylvania Conference called Creating Worship With Deep Soul. The six hour event was hosted at Christ Community United Methodist Church and led by Marcia McFee.

While the six members of my congregation who attended gleaned some information, it seemed like the session was focused primarily on how to integrate “contemporary” worship ideas/tools into a church’s weekly services. Unfortunately, the discussion on worship design teams (the topic my colleagues wanted to learn about most) was barely discussed as Ms. McFee ran out of time.

There were a number of interesting things I learned, though (primarily because I’m not part of my congregation’s worship design team):

• Whatever we do for worship, it must be spirit-filled and meet peoples’ yearning to be touched.
• Worship with integrity is engaging, elicits a response and causes worshipers to be changed. It also offers something for people in each of the eight categories of multiple intelligence.
• If we don’t witness various perspectives of our worship services, it is direct evidence to the dominance of a few.

The last bullet really caught by attention. No matter how many people are on a church’s worship design team, unless we’re reaching out to others and asking for their opinions on their worship needs, we aren’t doing enough to make sure worship is changing peoples’ lives.  After all, isn’t that what worshiping God is all about?