One Simple Piece of Advice That Will Immediately Make You a Better Preacher

I have never seen my students respond to the Bible as enthusiastically as they did at winter camp a year and a half ago.

Not necessarily to the sermons, mind you (though they responded to those well too). What I have in mind here is the Bible itself. My students left winter camp with a new appreciation for the power and beauty of the Bible, and they did it for one reason that is, in retrospect, very obvious and very simple: the preacher read the Bible like it mattered.

The text that he preached from on the first night of camp was Ephesians 1:3-14. The preacher, Dr. Erik Thoennes, spent roughly five minutes of his sermon reading those twelve verses. He carefully and slowly emphasized key words. He articulated sentences according to their structural rhythms. He inflected the whole text with passion and conviction.

That is, he did exactly what you would expect someone to do if he believed that the most important part of his sermon was the part that God wrote.

I was hanging around students after that first night, and I asked some of them what they thought of the preaching. Again and again, I heard the same piece of feedback: “It was awesome! I’ve never heard anyone read the Bible like that!”

Compare that to my preaching through Haggai for the month just before camp. I knew that Haggai would be confusing at points because it is an obscure Biblical book and its message is so dependent on its historical context. So I would get to the text in my sermons and I would read quickly, figuring that my students would be so confused that it barely mattered if they heard it read. The part where I explained it to them–the part that I wrote–that was the most important part of my sermon. That’s apparently what I believed, and that’s almost certainly what I conveyed to my high schoolers.

Here’s the thing: a lot of our students already believe that the Bible is boring. They don’t need our help with that. So when you or I stand on a stage and read a passage with noninflected hurry (or worse yet, say something like, “This is a long passage, so I’m going to read it fast”), it only confirms that idea for them. Subconsciously though it may be, your students will think, “Even my pastor thinks the Bible is boring. Or he at least thinks that I can’t understand it unless he explains it.”

So here’s one incredibly easy way for you to be a better preacher–a way that requires almost no training or practice: when you read the Bible out loud, read it like it matters.

Read it like it really is God’s Word. Read it like it has the power to change their lives. Read it slowly. Read it emphatically. Read it passionately.

Read your passage enough times beforehand that you know how its literary construction conveys meaning. That way, when you read it out loud in your sermon, you can use your vocal inflection to convey the same. This post has mostly been about the rhetorical power of good out-loud reading, but don’t underestimate the explanatory power: as you read the passage with intentionality about its structure, your students will understand it better and your expository task gets that much easier.

When I got back from winter camp that year, the first thing I did in my first sermon back was repent. I stood on stage and told my students, “I’ve been reading the Bible to you as if my words mattered more than God’s. Please forgive me. There’s nothing in the world I want to teach you less than that. It won’t happen again.” And it hasn’t.

Just about every youth pastor I know wants his students to read their Bibles more. That’s because we believe that the Bible is the very Word of God, full of life and power and beauty and, ultimately, God Himself. We believe that if our students read their Bibles, God will change their lives.

If you believe that same thing, let me give you a very simple, very obvious piece of advice: next time you get up to preach, read the Bible like it matters.

GCYM Conversations: Jeff Bruce Gets Funky with His Doctrine of Inspiration

Jeff Bruce is the Pastor of Young Adults and Connections (whatever that means) at Creekside Community Church in San Leandro, CA. He’s also my guest on this episode of GCYM Conversations, an episode that covers the Psalms of Lament, the appeal of liturgy to young, progressive evangelicals, the Imprecatory Psalms, and Jeff’s adorable 4-year-old daughter. It doesn’t, by contrast, cover much youth ministry talk (check out just about everything else we do here for that), but we thought you might enjoy it anyway.

As always, we’d love your feedback, so send us an email at godcenteredyouthministry (at) gmail (dot) com. We’d also love it if you’d subscribe to us on iTunes, where you can also rate and review us.

Enjoy!

Download: Jeff Bruce Gets Funky with His Doctrine of Inspiration

GCYM Conversations: Dr. Joe Hellerman Has Advice for Youth Pastors with Difficult Bosses

Dr. Joseph Hellerman is a professor of New Testament at Talbot School of Theology and Biola University, one of the pastor-elders at Oceanside Christian Fellowship in El Segundo, CA, and the author of, among others, Embracing Shared Ministry and When the Church Was a Family. He’s also Faris’s guest on this episode of GCYM Conversations.

As a seminary professor teaching about deep church community and the value of sharing ministry leadership, Dr. Hellerman gets a lot of students coming to him wondering what to do when they are not experiencing those things in their churches. In particular, those with difficult-to-work-for senior pastors ask him what they ought to do in their situations.

Since this is a youth ministry website, we figured that there might be a number of you experiencing similar difficulties, so Faris got Dr. Hellerman in front of a microphone to talk about the counsel he gives. The first half of the podcast consists mostly of that, after which point Faris and Dr. Hellerman explore church-as-family and shared leadership more directly.

As always, we’d love to hear your feedback. Comment here, or send any thoughts and questions to godcenteredyouthministry (at) gmail (dot) com.

You can subscribe to GCYM Audio (which includes the regular GCYM Podcast as well as our Conversations and Audio with Experts episodes) on iTunes, where we’d also love it if you’d rate and review us.

Enjoy!

Download: Dr. Joe Hellerman Has Advice for Youth Pastors with Difficult Bosses

The Best Dating Advice for High Schoolers I’ve Ever Heard

I’m a little late to the punch, but I loved Derek Rishmawy’s TGC post about what he tells high school students when they ask him things like, “How do we make sure to keep God at the center of our dating relationship?” Here is the core of Rishmawy’s counsel:

Still, over the years I’ve come to see that there is one key mark of a maturing relationship centered and continually centering itself on Christ: both of you are absolutely committed to each other’s involvement in the local church.

He gives 4 reasons that he says this to students. If they stay committed to church involvement, the dating couple will:

1. Sit under real preaching.
2. Meet with other believers.
3. Receive the Lord’s Supper.
4. Worship God only.

I liked the article enough that I immediately passed along this line of thinking to my leadership team so that it becomes our main, unified message to students who are dating. I plan on sending the article out to my small group leaders when the school year starts as well.

So go read the whole thing, and consider passing it along to your team as well.

Reason #483 to Preach the Cross: To Show Your Students What God Is Like

The gospel-centered movement is pretty constantly beating the “preach the cross” drum. I’m not going to try to defend that sentence, because I don’t think I need to. “Cross-centered” and “gospel-centered” are everywhere, and at GCYM, we think that’s a good thing.

We should constantly preach the cross because the Bible says stuff like, “I determined to know nothing among you except for Jesus Christ and Him crucified.” Also because our students need to know the fullness of their forgiveness. Also because we want to make disciples who pursue Jesus, not just moral performance.

Those are great reasons to preach the cross. They are probably also the reasons we think about most often. This post is about yet another reason we should preach the cross, one which perhaps we think about less often: we should preach the cross because the cross shows us what God is like.

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Obviously, we want our students to know what God is like. So our usual approach to teaching them this is to line up a preaching series or a Bible study where we teach the attributes of God by teaching propositional definitions: God’s “omnipotence,” for example, is His “ability to do all that he pleases.” Term. Definition. Verses. Illustration. Application point. Next attribute.

Theological propositions fell out of style there for a bit, but I’m not anti-propositional in the slightest. I learned the attributes of God in this way, I teach them this way, and I would encourage any other youth pastor to teach them this way. While you’re at it, buy your students Erik Thoennes’s Life’s Biggest Questions (or ESV Study Bibles) and A. W. Tozer’s The Knowledge of the Holy.

But while you do all that, notice this also: the Bible’s primary way of showing us what God is like is by interpreting events rather than laying out context-less propositions. And the climactic event of God’s revelation of Himself in Scripture is the cross. Put another way, one of God’s great purposes in the cross is to show us what kind of God He is.

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There are a lot of Biblical texts that make this point, but John’s Gospel is what got me thinking about it. It is in John’s Gospel that Jesus repeatedly refers to the cross as the place where he is glorified (12:23; 13:31; et. al.).

So what does it mean for Jesus to be “glorified” then? I like Piper’s (completely propositional) definition of God’s glory: God’s glory is “the beauty of God’s manifold perfections.” That is, everything good about God (His “perfections”), taken all together (“manifold”), on display for us to delight in (because they are “beautiful”).

While neither Jesus nor John likely had that exact definition of “glory/glorify” in their minds when they said and wrote those things, it seems fair to say that Jesus is “glorified” on the cross in John in part because it is there that we see the fullest picture of what kind of Messiah He is. As we look upon the cross, therefore, we don’t just see an event; we see a person.

That is why when we see the bloodied body of Jesus of Nazareth lifted up on the cross, our response isn’t horror, but worship. Why is it worship? Because we know that Jesus of Nazareth is the Son of God, and that therefore the bloodied body is the ultimate display of the fullness of God’s extraordinary, incomprehensible, beautiful-beyond-all-words love for sinners. So much so, in fact, that any time Christians say that “God is love” or that “God loves us,” well, we just can’t help but to talk (and sing!) about the cross.

And that is the key idea I am trying to express: the attribute (God’s “love”) is expressed in the interpreted event (the New Testament accounts and explanations of the cross). Of course, it doesn’t only tell us about His love, either. It also tells us about His wrath, justice, wisdom, independence, omniscience, mercy, grace, Trinitarian nature, and so on.

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So what’s my point for youth ministry? It’s this: when we stop giving our students a regular diet of cross-centered preaching and teaching, we don’t just leave them starving for grace. We leave them starving for God.

If we mostly preach topical, felt-need based Biblical counsel (“How To Stay Pure In A Pornified Culture”) or Old Testament “moral-of-the-story” lessons (“How to Slay the Goliaths in Your Life”) or Gospel stories where Jesus is mostly our example to follow (“Learning to Love Like Jesus”), well, then, we end up telling our students about everything but God Himself. I bet most of our advice is decent. But it won’t give our students God. And nothing can satisfy the heart of a junior high or high school student besides God Himself.

So there it is: one more reason to constantly preach the cross. Let’s help our students grow in their discipleship to Jesus by showing them a God whose nature and character are such that He really is worthy of their worship.And let’s do that by preaching the cross.

The GCYM Podcast, Episode 13: Breaking the Addiction to Strategies and Methods

After being away for far too long, the GCYM crew is back in action with episode 13 of the podcast. This week we discuss something Faris brought up in written form not too long ago, namely our addiction to better strategies and methods as the means to fixing every one of our ministry problems (as opposed to, say, praying).

The plan is for this to be the first in a series of episodes discussing the unhealthy addictions we are prone to in youth ministry, so stay tuned for those.

Thanks for your patience with us while we have been away for a bit. We’re excited to be back rolling again, and we plan to have some new writing up soon too.

As always, we’d love to answer your youth ministry related questions on the podcast, so fire those over to godcenteredyouthministry (at) gmail (dot) com. And don’t forget to subscribe to us on iTunes, where we’d also love it if you’d rate and review us (seriously, every one helps!).

Enjoy!

Download: The GCYM Podcast, Episode 13: Breaking the Addiction to Strategies and Methods

GCYM Conversations: Darin McWatters, Camp Super-Expert

It’s summer, which means it’s camp season in youth ministry. We’ve talked about camp in the past on the GCYM Podcast, but since summer is indeed upon us, I tapped Darin McWatters, a true camp expert, to get his input on how to get the most out of camp and how best to set up a camp preacher for success.

Darin is currently the Pastor of Teaching and Mission at 1BL in Lakewood, CA, but what makes him such a good source on this is his extensive camp ministry history. He was a director at Hume Lake for awhile, and now he does a lot of camp preaching and teaching. Put it all together and you’ve got a guy who can speak to camp ministry from pretty much all sides.

You can keep up with everything we do with GCYM Audio by subscribing to our podcast on iTunes, where we’d also love it if you’d rate and review us. And as always, we’d love to take a crack at your questions, so email them to godcenteredyouthministry (AT) gmail (DOT) com.

Enjoy!

Download: Darin McWatters, Camp Super-Expert

Jonathan Edwards’ Rebuke of Self-Reliant Youth Workers

I told you there was going to be more on this.

And this time, not a quote from Edwards, but a lecture that JT posted a few weeks ago from Edwards super-expert, George Marsden (author of both a long and short Life of Edwards), with a follow-up from Colin Smith, pastor of The Orchard Evangelical Free Church.

Dr. Marsden spends 45 minutes talking about Edwards’ relevance for today, situating Edwards in the midst of the rise of the Enlightenment’s emphasis on “instrumental reason” and the emergence of all kinds of new technologies. The result of this was a world in which for every problem, the solution was better reasoning and techniques.

I started watching/listening to this lecture (put on by The Carl F. H. Henry Center for Theological Understanding) with only semi-interest, since Marsden on Edwards is just the kind of thing worth paying attention to. “Sure,” I thought, “I’ll give it a few minutes and see if I care.”

But reliance on reason and technique is not just a hallmark of 18th century New England, obviously. This kind of thinking is part of the fabric of our world, perhaps even more so now. And this certainly includes the Church: our leadership books, conferences, and blogs (including this one) are often trying to, like Edwards, embrace the good of technique and reason. The trouble is that, as I’ve mentioned before, I quickly become outright addicted to them.

For those reasons and more, I found both Marsden’s lecture and Smith’s pastoral application extraordinarily helpful for me as a youth pastor in forcing me to reconsider how much I rely on God Himself instead of my own instrumental reason. This is well worth the hour or so it takes to watch or listen to (oh, and skip the Q & A at the end: it’s less helpful).

Jim Elliot’s Rebuke of Self-Reliant Youth Workers (Like Me)

Well, maybe not on youth workers specifically. But you’ll see what I mean:

“We have been very much encouraged–through reading a book that deals with examples of apostolic missionary methods–to believe again for some sort of New Testament pattern to be worked out among forest Quichuas*. How false and fleshly to reason that God will do a work here ‘because Pete, Ed, and Jim are trained, capable, young, and strong!’ I have been much impressed lately of the absolute necessity of God Himself rousing the conscience. I do not know how, nor even where, to begin to make a man think seriously about sin and judgment, and must look to the work of the Holy Spirit for the beginning move toward any hint of such a working.”

– Jim Elliot, in a letter to his future wife, Elisabeth, April, 1953, as recorded in Shadow of the Almighty. Emphasis his.

God has to do it. Let’s be less self-impressed, self-reliant, and technique-addicted. Let’s ask Him to change hearts.

More on this later.

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*The Quichuas were the South American Indians to whom Pete Fleming, Ed McCully, and Jim Elliot, et. al., were missionaries before they were martyred among the Aucas three years later.

Factors in Your Attendance Numbers that You Can’t Control

Maybe you’ve noticed that we’ve been on a bit of a numbers kick around here.

On Tuesday we released a podcast all about how we think about the relationship between attendance numbers and success in our (variously-sized) youth ministries. A few weeks before that, I wrote a post about how I have reacted to my group’s declining numbers.

One of the difficulties with thinking about this issue is that it is so personal. I am not a third-party consultant analyzing someone else’s fading numbers, making suggestions, then going on my merry way. I’m the declining ministry’s pastor, driving home and fretting why less people came tonight.

And while I am actually not that insecure about this, I am somewhat insecure about it. I certainly notice it, and I certainly wonder why it’s happening. And of course, as I wonder, my brain naturally gravitates towards the shortcomings of my own performance. I don’t know if this is a particularly male response (some people make it sound that way), but I know that it is at least part of my response, and I’d bet it’s part of the response of some of the folks who find themselves particularly drawn to this series of posts and podcasts.

The trouble with being the central person involved with a declining group is that my personal stake in the process can pretty easily cloud my vision. I rush to think about my preaching, my leading, my relational shortcomings, my event-planning, my whatever. And that is sloppy analysis.

The reality is that there are a ton of factors related to why students may or may not come to your youth group, many of which are completely outside of your control (which is a major reason my own boss–a 20 year youth ministry veteran–doesn’t seem to care  that our numbers are down). It’s just hard to see that when you’re the guy.

The goal of this post, then, is to help you think about what’s going on in your own ministry on any given night by listing every factor I could think of that affects your youth ministry attendance but that you have no control over at all. Hopefully it helps you analyze, but also, helps you sleep better at night.

I’m going with bullet points and brevity, so feel free to ask in the comments for further explanation:

• Overall church size
• Church age demographics
• Changing cultural trends in family sizes (i.e. people having less kids)
• Changing cultural trends in marriage rates and ages
• Increasing student participation in number of extracurricular activities in general
• Increasing expectations for how much time a student puts into any one extracurricular activity
• Simple schedule conflicts
• Any particularly busy homework week
• Generally busier homework lives
• Family commitments/vacations
• Various schools/districts scheduling differing vacation weeks
• Poorly discipled/discipling parents who think of youth group as just another extracurricular activity
• Lack of access to transportation
• Students’ relational strife with one another
• Students making out with each other for a long time and therefore missing or being late to youth group but I definitely wouldn’t know about this one because I definitely never did this when I was in high school…
• Church’s distance from students’ homes
• Students’ jobs
• Students’ staying away from you or another leader because of their own emotional unhealth leading them to miscontstrue or purposefully misinterpret some incident, comment, etc.
• Students’ laziness, lack of care about the things of God, or sin issues more broadly

By no means is this an exhaustive list, and if you have any you’d like to add, the GCYM crew would love to hear them!