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How Not to Burn Down the Church & Other Failures

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We went from a quiet prayer-filled reflective room to one with giggles & a thick cloud of smoke. Ah, the joys of youth ministry.

For over a decade I’ve been putting together some really cool prayer station worship experiences for teenagers, youth workers, and regular lay adults of all ages. I was apparently pretty good at this – so good that I had some CDROM project created through Abingdon Press some years back. But all those great experiences and still two failures haunt me.

1. I was a new junior high guy to a large methodist church. This worship stuff was part of my hiring so I talked the senior director to let me set up a worship space. She agreed, so I set some of the youth into the motion of setting up sacred space. One prayer station had a cross & candle in a glass baking pan and the idea was to write on some sheet of paper and burn the paper. Yes, totally not creative, but it’s one of the stations the kids wanted to do so I tested it out. It could work. Worship starts and the youth & adults are moving through the space no problems. As things moved along I saw a sudden bright light out of the corner of my eye. One of the kids lit his little paper on fire & dropped it into the glass pan. However, his burning paper missed the pan and landed on the rest of the papers. So, being brave he picked up all the papers and dropped them into the pan. Now, instead of some smoldering papers we had a decent bonfire (ok, that’s a bit of an exaggeration). We did have enough of a fire to melt the candle so now we had oily wax floating in the pan. Then comes in another brave teenager with a cup of water to douse the flames. So with the introduction of cold water to a hot glass pan (you may know that physics does not appreciate…) and Boom! there goes the glass. Thankfully that did get the flames out, but there was quite a bit of cleaning up to do.

2. We had Lent series one year and, as was customary with our Lent services, we tried to some ‘different’ type of stuff for worship. For some reason there was a lot of permission given to play with Lent (just don’t touch Christmas & Easter). We were exploring an Exodus scripture where the Israelites were ‘pitching their tents’ at the base of the mountain and God had these clouds of smoke on the mountain. So I had this great visual idea of setting up a mountain scene with a tent at the base. How cool to generate some smoke as well! So I proceeded to set up a large cooler in the choir loft, draped fabrics and papers down the sides to give a mountain look. Then set up one of my camping tents at the bottom, just behind the altar. It looked great! Just as service  began, I put in the last step, dry ice put into the cooler with some water!  A little smoke generated as worship started, “This is going to be awesome!” I said to myself.  Then, nothing… Still nothing… Worship came and went and it was very far from awesome. Dejected, I looked into the cooler, wondering “Why?” and saw that the dry ice had totally frozen all the water in the cooler. Now it was just a big block of ice. Apparently using to much dry ice can do that.

I share these perceived failure moments in my years of ministry because they are just that, perceived. People actually liked the mountain & tent visual. They didn’t know there was something else supposed to happen. I even apologized to our lay leader for not creating smoke. She graciously & honestly said, “It was great, I don’t think God needed the smoke.”

That smoky Sunday school classroom where we almost burned down the church was no longer a calm contemplative worship space, but it was still sacred. You can bet that over seven years later that is one of, if not the, most memorable moments in worship as a youth. It also became bonding moment for the group.  From that incident on, when planning worships together, there would inevitably be a statement “Let’s not burn down the church this time,” with a collective laughter following. I still think of those two instances in ministry, and that is my own issues at play. I know in my heart they were how God imagined them working out.

May you create and take risks in ministry. They might not go how you imagine it, but they will go how God imagines.

Shalom
-Gavin
Gavin Richardson is Digital Community Builder for YouthWorker Movement and the Short One at YouthWorker Circuit.  He has been in youth work for almost two decades now, has been a writer and consultant on numerous internet and published projects for the church. He’s often a speaker around the country on church communications and community building. His current projects are working on developing online Youth Disciple Groups and finishing a new book “Sticky Sheep.” He is the part time youth guy at Good Shepherd UMC in Hendersonville, TN.  If you ask, he will say that he is a “misfit” of the church. He lives in Nashville with his wife Erin, son Brooks and dog Crimson. You can connect with Gavin (and he’s totally cool with that) throughhttp://about.me/gavoweb.

Who is Pouring In to You?

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Who is pouring into you…

I am in fellowship each month with a group of local Youth Pastors. The group’s goal is to support, encourage, and share life together. I cannot describe how uplifting it is to be together with the community! When we gathered this month, we spent the time sharing stories of how we witnessed God working this summer. One by one we shared great stories of how we saw
God at work in our teens, through our teens, and even in us. They were all amazing storied, but there was one story that got me thinking…

The story was about how she was invited to go on a mission trip with some people from her church, and although there were youth on the trip, she was not really expected to lead in any way; and they were paying for her to go.

Through the trip she was able to experience again what it is like to go on a mission trip and experience God at work, without needing to worry about the next thing or what that kid is doing over there.

She described it as a truly refreshing and refueling. She then described, how many of us feel, that it seems like she was always giving…giving…giving, and never being pour into herself, and she looked up and said to the group of youth ministers: “Do you every feel like that?

Where you are always pouring out and no one is pouring into you?”

And you could see on everyone’s face, including my own, that we all felt that way in one way or another.

It does seem like we find ourselves in this place more often than not, if we are honest. As ministers, too often we find that no one is there or even thinks of ministering to us. And we know that it is not just some devotional that is going to fill us.

For me, at each church I have been at as a youth pastor, I have always found a family or two who recognizes this and in their own way pours into our life and is there for us, without trying to push an agenda. And second, it is relationships with peers, fellow youth pastors, those in the same boat that I also find refueling in. It is these relationships that you can find refueling, rest, and God.

May you find these kind of relationships in your context, so that you may find rest…

If you are in need of help finding or creating a group of peers, check out

Youth Pastors Anonymous, a support group for Youth Pastors, on Facebook and at http://YouthPastorsAnonymous.blogspot.com or contact Chris at YouthPastorsAnonymous@gmail.com

Chris Cummings grew up in Brentwood, Tennessee and graduated from Tennessee Technological University in 2005 with a degree in Marketing. Chris is the Youth Director at Forest Hills United Methodist Church in Brentwood, and he and his wife Joanna are both students at the Center for Youth Ministry Training—CYMT’s first married couple.

What is Your Best / Worst Youth Sports Story? {GIVEAWAY}

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I have been given a copy of “The Sacred Acre” to review for a site like this and Amazon, etc. It is not the usual reads that I dive into but this one is different. If you are not familiar with the Ed Thomas story and legacy it is one of great triumphs and depths. ESPN E60 did a feature on him a few times.


 

I have been promised two free copies to our friends, so I thought it would be fun to share some of our ‘war’ stories as youth workers going to our teenagers sporting events. Throw in your funniest, worst, most inspiring, biggest headache story and we will decide amongst those who share. Depending on how fast I finish my copy I might throw mine into the mix for a third person (I know that just has you jumping for joy).

P90X your Church Email!

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I happen to be subscribed to a number of church email newsletters. Some because I helped set them up and have not removed myself from the list, some because in a weak moment I wanted to know how they communicated. Many times I am feeling pretty bored with the emails. They are always doing the same things and in the same way. I know what is in there before I even open up the email.

P90X is a popular workout program that you would have to be under a rock not to have heard of it. If you own a tv you must not have it turned on ever to not have seen one of their commercials. One of their cool marketing tricks or actual solid training technique (you decide there) is their design of training called “muscle confusion.” The idea is simple, do different stuff so that your muscles never get used to the work out and will burn more calories because they are never conditioned to do a certain set of exercises.

Well, the brain is a muscle, although different than your buttocks it is a muscle and gets trained. So I had this idea. What if churches did their email communications with the p90x model of muscle confusion in mind. If you send an email each week have a different type of presenting a message, different layout, and different writers. Once you set up a few layouts and themes you can repeat using them in some random pattern. So far, it has been a concept that apparently is foreign to the people I have suggested it to because it does not compute or seems like too much work.

Funny enough, the MarketingProfs folks just put out an article with a similar thought process in mind “Variety is the Spice of Life.”

Lack of variety in email marketing is a common dilemma for marketers. Businesses newer to email marketing or with fewer resources tend to gravitate first and only to promotional messaging, but there is plenty more you can and should communicate to your list.

They go on to list 1. email newsletter 2. personal & holiday greetings 3. follow ups 4. educational entertainment as emails to spice things up instead of a constant barrage of promotional emails.

So what could mixing it up p90x style look like for a church email program?

  1. Email Newsletter: You want to push all your information at people in the hopes that they are now informed so go ahead, get that over with.
  2. Ministry Story: Find some good ministry stories to share. A paragraph or two, not more than 500 words though. If you can’t find 500 words to share some cool story about the ministry happening in your church then you have worse problems than an email communication issue. You can switch it up from choir, to youth ministry, to missions, then to worship. Again if your ministry leaders cannot come up with 500 words to share a story about their ministry then they have more problems to be dealt with than email. This practice though is helping the people of your church have stories to tell about the church family they are a part of. So when someone asks them, “what does your church do?” they will actually have some stories to answer with.
  3. Images Only Reflection: Put out an email that is just photos of the congregation. Sure you can link those images to something else. Please no cheesy clipart or stock photography. Really nice cameras are owned by at least a few people in your church. Charge them with photographing the work of their church as part of their mission. People love to see good photos. People love to see good photos of themselves and the intrigue that they might be featured in an email. Open rates will be huge!!
  4. Challenging Devotion or Message: Have a message, again less than 500 words that gives a glimpse of the Kingdom of God and gives some actionable response/challenge to people. A get out and do kind of thing.
  5. Other email types to throw out there. Community Prayer email: Not your prayer chain, but a prayer you want everyone to pray for the month. Poetry devotion: plug in a single email a poem written by a congregation member. What is Out There: so often church emails just share the church things, share blog posts, news articles, that give glimpse to what others are doing

There you go. Gavin’s p90x Email marketing method. Give it a go and see what happens. Tell me I’m full of crap. Tell me it has revolutionized the culture of your church. Let me know it is a whole lot more fun than just blasting out the newsletter or bulletin in another form. If it doesn’t work in 90 days I’ll give you a full refund of the money you spent on this advice.

Oh, and if you want to use an enhanced email program, I suggest you do, then go with MailChimp for your free option. There are other pay options such as Aweber or Emma I’d suggest, Emma if you want someone to hold your hand & help design.

the Fabulous Female Theologians of Twitter (some of)

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No, this isn’t some calendar shoot idea, though admittedly that would be quite amusing. Yesterday Bill Reichart posted a Top 10 Theologians on Twitter and I shot back that there were no women theologians and that they all seemed to be the same stock white males that get thrown out everywhere. So Bill asked for me to add to the list. I am happy to because not that I am in any disagreement with the list (though some of the 10 are not close to my top theologians, but that’s just a flavor thing) my critique wasn’t done in a mean spirit. It is the trouble with making a list, someone gets left out.

So in the spirit of sharing, here are some Female Theologians of Twitter (not in any particular order)

Rachel Held Evans gets my first & easiest nod, mostly because we have actually hung out before. Watching her growing audience and the prophetic voice she is speaking from has been great to watch over the years. Seriously, if someone is going to take the bible seriously enough to sleep in a tent in the front yard when she is on her menstruation period has to get some props, or a honk as you drive by.

Maggi Dawn who has been a voice through the alt worship scene of the UK for over a decade plus is now moving to Yale University as their Dean of Chapel and Associate Professor of Theology which she did similar to at Cambridge for the decade prior. Also a published author as any good minister in the academic circles would be. She has also been a prolific blogger and speaker to add onto her list of good works.

Bishop Vashti McKenzie who is the first female ever elected to the highest office of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (A.M.E.) in its 200 year history and has served there since 2000. She’s pretty cool when it comes to social media podcasting, blogging, and putting up a 12k follower list on twitter (which is the largest for this listing, i think).

Diane Butler Bass first came onto my radar with her book the Practicing Congregation by Alban Press (a great read) and has been a favorite of mine since then. Probably her most prominent book has been Christianity for the rest of Us, which has actually sat in my to be read pile for some time. Promise Diane, I will get to it. &:~)

Tami Heim & Toni Birdsong I am grouping together because they are the duo behind Sticky Jesus. Met them at a TN Christian Chamber event a few months back and they are just delightful. I don’t believe they have the academic theology pedigree, but old friend Stan Grenz put its that everyone is a theologian and under that and considering their prolific capacity and passion to sharing Christ they get on my list & should be on yours.

 

Given, this list was actually a bit difficult to produce in that many prominent female theologians don’t do twitter, or started an account but are rather quiet on them. My criteria for this was rather simple in that they needed to be ‘active’ (totally subjective to according to me) and have around or over 1k followers. That cut into some of my list of people I like to read like a @lnwiner. Thought about adding in some folks like a @sandramccracken but she’s touring now and most of her tweets are about shows at the time of this posting, not quite a time of high theology for her now. Thought about some of the famous pastor wives, but ultimately discounted them because those seem to be ‘team’ influencers. One thing I thought was interesting was that there wasn’t any tribute twitter accounts to people like  Julian of Norwich. Sadly, Teresa of Avila went quiet a few years ago.. Mother Teresa is somewhat alive in bots and tribute accounts.

Most though, I have this idea that Twitter isn’t the medium for the lady. Maybe it was the culturing of its early adopters but Twitter in many ways has a feel of self promotion mixed in with its sharing and conversation & I don’t think it is part of the female drive to get into puffing out the chest to show a “this is what I have to say” everyone.

All guy lists are not anything out of the norm. Andy Rowell put together an add on list a few years back and all his peeps were dudes, and he’s someone who is very open to the various people who take on leadership of the church. So maybe we need more ladies doing their theology thing on twitter, maybe not, someone has to be acting out their theology out in the real world and we are probably better off having the ladies do that while us fellas talk amongst ourselves about who is best.

So feel free to comment away and add more of the lovely ladies of twitter for this listing.. it really is just a start of a hopeful full recognition