News About Kids

A couple of events happened this week involving young folks in the community.

First, a group of students from the school, including several from our church and affiliated with our youth program, came and raked up leaves all around the church grounds.  They ended up with more bags than you could count!  Witness:

And then, on that same day, some folks gave the church a gift for the youth.  Now installed in a corner of our kitchen is our very own youth refrigerator for pop and assorted items.  Take a look!

A huge THANK YOU to everyone who contributed to this effort!  The kids will be delighted to have cold pop and I'm sure those using the kitchen will delight in their increased counter space as well!

Both of these events made church a nicer place.  It's neat to see that people care about our community in these ways.

--Pastor Dave (pastordave@geneseelutheranparish.org)

Bible Study Reflections: November 3rd, 2011

This week's Bible Study reflection comes from our Wednesday morning Women's Bible Study.  Continuing our look at Acts this week we came across the following account of Paul's testimony before the priests and elders.

Acts 22:30-23:10

 30 The commander wanted to find out exactly why Paul was being accused by the Jews. So the next day he released him and ordered the chief priests and all the members of the Sanhedrin to assemble. Then he brought Paul and had him stand before them.
 1 Paul looked straight at the Sanhedrin and said, “My brothers, I have fulfilled my duty to God in all good conscience to this day.” 2 At this the high priest Ananias ordered those standing near Paul to strike him on the mouth. 3 Then Paul said to him, “God will strike you, you whitewashed wall! You sit there to judge me according to the law, yet you yourself violate the law by commanding that I be struck!”
 4 Those who were standing near Paul said, “How dare you insult God’s high priest!”
 5 Paul replied, “Brothers, I did not realize that he was the high priest; for it is written: ‘Do not speak evil about the ruler of your people.’”
 6 Then Paul, knowing that some of them were Sadducees and the others Pharisees, called out in the Sanhedrin, “My brothers, I am a Pharisee, descended from Pharisees. I stand on trial because of the hope of the resurrection of the dead.” 7 When he said this, a dispute broke out between the Pharisees and the Sadducees, and the assembly was divided. 8 (The Sadducees say that there is no resurrection, and that there are neither angels nor spirits, but the Pharisees believe all these things.)
 9 There was a great uproar, and some of the teachers of the law who were Pharisees stood up and argued vigorously. “We find nothing wrong with this man,” they said. “What if a spirit or an angel has spoken to him?” 10 The dispute became so violent that the commander was afraid Paul would be torn to pieces by them. He ordered the troops to go down and take him away from them by force and bring him into the barracks.

Click through to hear some thoughts on the significance of this story.

Weekly Devotion: God and Your Time

The other day I was making dinner in the kitchen as Derek held a phone conversation with his grandfather, my dad.  Talking to grandpa is a rare treat and I heard Derek's little voice cheerfully chatting, filled with excitement.  Suddenly Derek paused and asked a serious question:

"Grandpa, what do you like to do for fun?  Do you like to play with toys or do you just like to get drinks and type all the time?"

Ouch.

Guess who he was describing with that "get drinks and type all the time" line?  Bad dad alert in 3...2...1!  Perhaps my son was being a little unfair, as typing is part of the way food gets put on his table and those Diet Mountain Dews help fuel the brain cells, but still I made a mental note to myself:  "Play more with the kid."

Time management is one of the biggest challenges we face in the modern age.  Everything moves faster than it used to.  Where once you might have had six basic tasks in your day now it seems like you have 100, plus 32 more you're not going to get to, and those 132 things change from day to day.  It's easy to get submerged in our checklists of things to do, happy that we're accomplishing so many tasks.  We don't stop to think whether viewing life as a set of tasks is the best approach!  It's all too easy to say, "I visited three people today, started on Sunday's sermon, met with the youth, cooked dinner, mowed the lawn, posted to the blog, took out the garbage, and fed the cats.  Look how much I accomplished!"  You don't realize that to little eyes that big heap of tasks all added up to, "Every moment dad was actually home he typed."  If other tasks dominate the two hours where "daddy's home time" and "Derek's awake time" intersect, was this day really a success no matter how many things I got done or how well I did them?  More to the point, am I managing my time and my list or is it managing me and, by extension, everyone who loves me?

Sometimes it's OK to be busy every moment of the day.  Derek just has to wait on some days.  Sometimes it's not OK.  The point isn't that one or the other is better.  Rather I'm wondering how long it's been since I even bothered to examine the issue.

If we don't even bother to question these things you know we're not bothering to ask God for help with them.  Most often we pray about tasks or events.  "Dear God, help me do this right" or "Dear God, help this situation I need to face" or even "Dear God, help me get through all the things I need to do today".  It's like we're driving down the road and asking God to help us fill the gas tank and keep the car running.  That's well and good, but every once in a while shouldn't we ask him whether we're actually on the right road?  Fuel and repairs don't help when they're not getting us where we need to be.  Your car's in tip-top shape, you negotiated every part of the road perfectly, and by virtue of all that great driving you're now on the opposite end of the country from where you needed to be.  That, my friends, would be the definition of a "mixed blessing".

Asking God to help us make the best, most faithful, most holy use of our time is a way of making sure we're on the right road.  Few of us do everything we need to do, let alone want to do.  Asking God's guidance in prioritizing our time helps us understand which of our callings in a day are the most important and which can be set aside.  The more conscientious about fulfilling our tasks we are--which usually translates into the more we think the world depends on what we do--the more we need this help.

The nightmare scenario that follows in the wake of not asking God's guidance in these things:  waking up one morning and realizing that you're a good pastor, a fine blogger, a great garbage-taker-outer, but that you're never going to get to hold your little boy in your lap again because he's off to college and you don't even know him that well.  Cue up that "Cat's in the Cradle" song now.

As you pray this week, ask God to guide and govern your time as well as your tasks.  I know I will.  Now I'm off to play race cars...which turns out to be the most important and holy thing I can do right now.  Who knew?

--Pastor Dave (pastordave@geneseelutheranparish.org)

Ministry With Young Folks

I want to piggyback on something Rosanna wrote this weekend, expanding it into a larger discussion on youth and children's ministries.  Her piece was simple, describing the theologically teaching moments in carving pumpkins.  In one event and one essay she perfectly captured our strategy working with the younger folks of our congregation.

Since I started in youth ministry a couple decades ago I've been a proponent of conducting young people's ministries organically.  There's a time and place for sitting kids down and telling them all about God using chalkboards and worksheets and traditional teaching methods.  In our church this happens in confirmation and a little bit in Sunday School.  But if that's the only way you teach them about God, if that's the only experience they have of "God stuff", then you have the unintentional consequence of divorcing God from anything they do in the rest of their life.  You end up with young people who can recite correct technical doctrine in the classroom but who don't perceive God outside of it.  Entire generations have been raised to think there's "God stuff" and then there's "real life" and the two don't mix.  That, my friends, is an incorrect--OK, I'll say it--downright bad witness.

Organic ministry focuses more on finding God in the things the kids already do, how God is working in the lives they already have instead of how he's absent until they learn the chalkboard stuff.  We teach them about a God who is with them everywhere and always and not just during the hour they're learning at church.  The traditional message runs, "These things are holy, the things you do are not."  We try to teach them how to do the things they normally do in a holy fashion, not giving them holy moments but helping them see how to live holy lives.

From the outside this looks like doing a bunch of odd stuff in church:  carving pumpkins, playing games, sitting around and drinking pop and talking.  Some will say, "How is that different than what they normally do?"  It's not too much...and that's the point!  Little by little these kids are learning how to play games and be friends with each other in a holy way, how to see and invite God into their cultural rituals like pumpkin carving, how to share God in conversation and refreshments.  We're not happy with the kid who perfectly parrots our answers about the Trinity (which we do teach them) in class and then goes out into the world not caring about his neighbor.  We'll go a little light on the doctrine and show them what the doctrine means first:  sharing, caring, being together, getting over little bumps in our relationships and forgiving each other, celebrating this life God has given us, creating love and goodness in the world.  That way when they hear the doctrine they are able to embrace it because they've really been living it all along.

Organic ministry doesn't produce as many of the tangible moments by which we've traditionally gauged our results.  There aren't as many instances when we can say, "I taught the kids about  this theological concept today!"  In fact in a given moment one might say, "All I really did was carve a pumpkin or play a game.  What really happened there?"  But over the long haul giving up those single moments when we can be proud of ourselves as teachers in favor of multiple moments when we were integrating our lives and God's with the real, everyday lives of the kids really pays off.

In just a few years of doing ministry this way here I can point out case after case of young folks who have moved on coming back and touching base when they needed help, being concerned for the lives of their friends as much as their own, and bringing incredibly good things into the world.  And that's not going to end.  They probably didn't understand the significance of pumpkins and board games when they were 8 or 13, but when they're 35 or 40 they're going to look back and realize everything they got taught about God and life through this time together.  They're going to smile as they realize it didn't seem like teaching at all, that it was so deeply ingrained that it slid right into their hearts and stuck, and that God has blossomed like a flower in their lives as naturally as breathing.  We didn't give them a fish, we taught them how to fish, and that's going to affect everything they choose to do:  jobs, marriages, faith relationships, and hopefully raising the next generation of children.

Thank you to Rosanna and the rest of the Sunday School and youth ministry folks for putting it so perfectly and getting it so right.

--Pastor Dave (pastordave@geneseelutheranparish.org)