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The Landing

August 7, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Steven is gone this week, he’s a cabin leader at Saddleback Church’s Junior High Summer Camp, keep him in your prayers. I’m sure next week you will be reading on this blog about his week. In the mean time you will be hearing a lot of my voice this week.

 This week at Saddleback Church we are hosting a yearly conference for our Celebrate Recovery ministry. Celebrate Recovery is a program developed here at Saddleback by Pastor John Baker. Celebrate Recovery is a biblically based program for overcoming addictions, hurts and hang ups. It has a huge success rate. There are thousands of churches all over the world who use this program and we generally have about 3,500 people attend this conference. It gives me a chance to talk to people from all over the country who have come to Saddleback for this conference.

About two years ago Celebrate Recovery launched a recovery program that is designed for teenagers called, “The Landing”. If your church is not using this program I would encourage you to look into bringing it to your church. I’ve talked with students here at Saddleback who attend our program and most if not all of them have had success with this recovery program when they have failed with others. I think the reason for success in this program is simple; it’s biblically based and brings God into the healing equation.

Programs like The Landing are great for students because they see they are not alone, that there are caring people who have been through struggles of their own and they are there to help them. It also shows them that they are not the only one who struggles with an addiction, a hurt or a hang up of some kind. I think often times teens think no one else is going through or has gone through what they are dealing with.

This is also a great serve opportunity for adults looking to volunteer at their church. It’s your opportunity to use a hurt in your life and help a student avoid the same pit falls.

 

 

Filed Under: Counseling, Youth Ministry Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Showing students that God’s love is forever

June 27, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Steven: This year before my junior high small group started, my co-leader and I sat down and wanted to make a list of goals for our boys. We started with short-term goals like bonding and building friendships, then went to end-of-the-year goals like making sure all of our boys knew Jesus and had ample opportunity to commit their lives to him. As part of that, there were two nights throughout the year that we led the guys in either a salvation prayer or “re-dedication” prayer in order to start living their lives for Christ. These were awesome nights that the guys were able to get a grasp on the reality of their lives and make a significant change for the better.

That would last for a little while. Many of our students start out with a thought that they live for Jesus and are living their lives according to him, but they are constantly falling back on what their worldly instincts are. At times they even seem proud of going back to these worldly ways of living, and quite frankly I don’t understand it. On some level I do, but I can’t wrap my mind around the fact that the guys brag about their earthly habits. Somehow society takes over and they revert back to their lives before Christ.

This is a struggle we constantly deal with, not just in our boys’ lives, but in our own as well. I think on some level we all eventually revert back to our earthly lives. We struggle with habits that we’re not proud of, make a commitment to live a God-driven life, do well for a while, then fall back down.

It’s time to break that cycle. We need to break out of this never-ending trap of committing all we have to God and then falling back down. We need to intentionally live for Him in a way that will stick. The more we learn to not turn our backs on God, the more it will reflect into our students and give them a better chance at living for God for the long term.

God isn’t just for short term, He’s forever.

Matt: We live in a society where everything has become disposable. When I was a kid, if your television broke you called out  a repairman. Today, if your TV is more than two years old and it breaks, well it’s probably so far behind in technology that it’s not worth it to spend money getting it fixed, just replace it. Disposable food containers, beverage cans, razors, the list goes on and on.

There is one thing however that is not disposable. Once you get it, you get it for life. That’s salvation. When you invite Jesus into your heart it’s for life, it’s not just for today or this hour or the duration of whatever problem that is going on in your life. It’s forever. It’s for always. We need to make our relationship with Jesus that way. It needs to be for a lifetime not just for the meantime. Once we do that, we truly have formed a relationship with God. The next step is to teach and demonstrate that for students so that we pass that down to the next generation.

Many of our students come from broken homes, and for some of them their lives are filled with broken promises. They realize that their parent’s marriage that was suppose to be forever ended up being for a short time and that maybe God has turned His back on them. We need to show them that God never forgets, never breaks his word or does not have time for us. God’s love is for a lifetime.

Here’s the bottom line, if we teach our students that God’s love for us is not a flash in the pan, its not temporary, it’s a “forever thing”, they learn to turn to Him in times of trouble and need, not to turn away and look for help and comfort in the wrong places.

How do you demonstrate to your students that God’s love is forever?

Filed Under: Youth Ministry Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,

The game has changed between JHigh and High School

June 1, 2011 by Leave a Comment

As this school year is coming to a close, I’ve been looking back on an awesome year with a brand new group of 7th grade guys. This is the second group of junior high students that I’ve led in a small group, and it seems like something has changed in the way we minister to our junior highers now.
Before I used to tell people that I thought junior high was about drawing students close to God for prevention of future problems, and high school ministry was about drawing them close to God to fix their problems. Looking back on this year with my junior high group, it’s clear that that philosophy has changed. This year most of the guys in our group have some kind of hurt, habit, or hangup that they deal with constantly.
I don’t know where or when this change in the game happened, but it’s definitely something that the youth ministry community needs to be aware of. It’s super important that we don’t lose the opportunity to minister to hurting students because we discount the fact that they need such help at a young age. One example is an epidemic of pornography and lust in our culture. I heard a statistic over the weekend that the fourth most searched term on the Internet last year among 7-18 year olds was “porn/sex.” Seven year olds? You’ve got to be kidding me!
The world is changing. Students no longer have to seek out sin… Sin finds them whether we like it or not. In order to stay current with the times, we need to be on the lookout for ways to more effectively minister not just to junior high students, but all students.
Question: What are some changes you’re noticing in ministering to students?

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Change Through Discomfort

April 29, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Matt: I admit it; I am a creature of habit. I like things to stay the same. As Steven says, “Matt is not the biggest proponent of change”. I also know that as a Student Ministry Leader, discomfort is one of the ways that God will stretch and grow me in many areas. I need to look at discomfort as a tool to make me a better leader, not as something to shy away from.

Sometimes in student ministry things can get just plain messy. I have 17 guys in my high school small group. It seems like at any given time at least one of them is going through some kind of issue in his life. Some are small problems, but some have been some pretty major issues. I do my best to explain how God will never waste a hurt, and how he uses situations to help grow you. I explain how during bad times we have two choices.  We can worry or we can worship.

Discomfort grows me as a leader. It helps me to remember that I don’t have the answers to everything, but I know someone who does. Discomfort makes me want to turn to God for help, to realize that I can’t do this by myself. I need to count on God and the people he has placed in my life. One area I always need work on is timing. I want to fix my students problems, but I forget that its God’s timetable not mine, I’m just the instrument that God is using, but the timing is all up to Him.

Discomfort strengthens my faith. I need to recognize that often times the discomfort in my life is spiritual warfare going on. Satan HATES when we start bringing more and more students to Christ. The more effective we get, the more Satan turns up the heat. That’s when I rely on my faith to get me through hard times. I think of the apostle Paul, in prison, but yet teaching about Christ, and relying on Him for strength.

Discomfort makes me grow. It makes me get out of my spiritual rut. It makes me seek out God even more, it forces me to go deeper in His word in my Bible reading and my quiet times with God. My mother use to say that God made rainy days to help us appreciate the sunny days. For the most part, my life is filled with sunny days, but I forget to be thankful for all that I have in my life; instead I dwell on what’s going wrong. The rainy days in life help me appreciate all the sunny days that God has given me. I want to pass that on to my students.

Steven: I like to take my students out for dinner every week. It’s a great time for me and my co-leader to connect with students one on one, and often times they seem to be completely different people when we get them away from the rest of the group. I think this is when the best ministry happens. Last week we took a guy out who tends to be one of our more…vocal…students. In our thinking, he tends to get louder and more disruptive whenever we’re talking about something serious or a struggle that someone has in their life, so maybe he’s just trying to avoid talking about things like that. When we took him out to dinner we got on the topic of struggles and we told him that this time was a perfect opportunity for him to speak freely without the other 12 guys in the group hearing what he had to say. At first he was very reluctant to go deep and he stuck to the shallow “struggles,” but we tried something that he probably isn’t used to – being uncomfortable.

By not allowing him to escape the conversation through jokes or changing the subject, we forced him to look deeper into his own mind and feelings and really think about the things that were bothering him. He knows these things deep down, but I’ve found that when someone is struggling with something very serious, they bury it so deep that it takes a while to dig back out. In this kid’s case, it was a very emotional family issue that he has been struggling with for years, so it took a while for us to get it out of him. If we had just let it slide and allowed him to change the subject, I know we wouldn’t have gotten down to the root of the issue, but because we got him to step out of his comfort zone, it got real.

When I look back on my own life, I realize that the best moments for my spiritual growth happened when I allowed that discomfort to set in. When I rededicated my life to Christ and I chose to live a different way, it made me uncomfortable at first. Why would I want to change my life when I’m so comfortable with it right now? When I chose to start volunteering with junior high ministry, I was uncomfortable. One of my best friends had to talk me into doing it, but I was still apprehensive about spending all this time with junior highers that, quite frankly, drove me crazy. Looking back, I’m so glad that my friend made me uncomfortable in that time because it changed my life. The bottom line is this: We love the comfortability of the status quo, but if you want to see real change, there has to be some discomfort.

Are you allowing discomfort to change you, or do you shy away from it?

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