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Methodism

gold, silver, bronze awards : top john wesley moments on youtube

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as i look over the church landscape & how they use technologies, i started wondering.. how is our church founder, john wesley, being represented on youtube? and with looking over all this (and the winter olympics in play right now), i decided to medal the top wesley moments on youtube.

 Wesleychapel gold: john wesley chapel linebacker : the young folks at houghton college put this satirical parody of the terry tate office linebacker commercials together & they are just brilliant. involved a bunch of the students and some of the faculty. they reflect some of the core wesleyan theology tenants within the video mixed into a bunch of "ouch" and laughing moments. clear cut gold medal winner!

Wesleysermon2a silver: john wesley sermon, thoughts on war : mark topping is apparently know as a john wesley impresonator. this excerpt is taken from his dvd doing his shtick. the except is posted on the or more about the methodist church of great britain channel which has a few other cool videos. this sermon has the most hits of the excerpts. what i think is funny is quickly wesley would be run out of a pulpit in todays umc for preaching the way he did. the solid silver winner!

Wesleyvideo bronze: john wesley a heartwarming story : this is our dark horse that came out of no where in the medal podium to sang the bronze. i give you the history of john wesley via the confirmation class of first united methodist church of mercedes, texas. what are you doing with your claim the name curriculum? bet it is not as cool as a silent movie motif of wesley's life. anyways, this campy funny approach to sharing wesley's story is by far more entertaining than any of the other powerpoint movie presentations (though some of the foreign language, to me, ones were pretty cool).

Picture 8 standing looking on: relcaiming wesleyan tradition : yup, we tried to see if this thing could go viral for kevin some time back, so it had itself on the 'watch' list, but in the end, it couldn't pick up the medal. this little diddy by the gbod spins off the guinness commercials, which i suppose it okay since wesley had some guinness influence.

**look for the top medalists videos for the united methodist church. that's going to be a tight competition

give to who was there, because they will continue to be there : desparate times in haiti

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received word the other day that one of my high school buddies was taking a team of doctors down to haiti for relief efforts. there was quite the bit of news coverages because, since our time in high school he's been able to wedge into the media market place. i saw another news article where a number of children who were up for adoption to american families were rushed to their pennsylvania homes with the political people showing smiling faces as if patting themselves on the back.

no slack on my friend & his medical team, they will do a lot of work and a lot of good work i am sure. but it had me wondering. slight slack to the political players who lord over visas and all these international adoptions.. it had me asking, "why now?"

UMCOR_blog_120x200 sure, there was an earthquake & it is devastating, but long before that, there was extreme poverty & suffering… where was the anderson cooper's & media police alarming us to the worlds ills? chasing tiger woods?

i share my thoughts to say this one thing. as you are compassioned to give to help with relief efforts, give to the people who were already there, because, they are most likely to be there long after everyone is gone.. and they will be dealing with the aftermath of not only a physical earthquake, but a systemic poverty.

this is why i am so pleased to say that i am a part of the united methodist church & its continued work under the UMCOR banner. they were there before the earthquake, sadly some died in the earthquake, and will be there long after the earthquake. i applaud & more with the folks at highland park umc who have kept a long standing clinic in haiti since the 70's, but lost one of their church members in the earthquake.

learn more about the stories happening in haiti, long after the news vans leave & continue to help those who will be there long after cameras turn off and go home.

visit: www.umc.org/haiti

naming the paradigm : rob bell on youth ministry

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Robbell

i've often said when working with other youth ministry leaders, 'you can get anything done if you can speak to it well.'

my thinking behind that is, my observation, that much of youth ministry actions are intuition/gut moves (some may say Holy Spirit leading, which i'm cool with). those movements are done with great intentions and well meaning, but just as i have a hard time telling folks why i am a 'nice guy' (something i've been accused of on occasion) it is hard to explain intuitive actions. coupled with, many 'professional' youth leaders are quite young and haven't had a great deal of experience working with & coaching adults sometimes twice their age. but, if you can speak to people why this or that is necessary, they are more apt to go with your leading, even if they do not completely agree. thus, an importance to speaking well of what you are doing in ministry.

with that in mind, i was quite excited to read some of rob bell's thoughts on youth ministry in this interview with youth worker journal. he speaks so well to some of the issues i feel at hand for our current crop of youth growing up in youth ministries around the country.

YWJ: OK, the magic bullets, if you don't mind.

RB: The
dominant paradigm in churches is production, not discipleship. It's
about how to keep kids coming—how are the numbers? In the gospels,
whenever there were large crowds, Jesus gave a difficult teaching that
thinned out the crowd. Over and over, He chose those moments: John 6—Unless
you eat my flesh and drink my blood. Nice. Very accessible for kids.
There is a certain pattern where He's trying to find out who is
serious. Youth workers are put in this position where their paychecks
are based on how many people they can keep in the place. When they read
the gospels, they realize this whole system seems to be going the other
direction. Many youth pastors I've met are promoting something they
don't believe.

YWJ: Like what?

RB: They're
told by the senior pastor to encourage the students to attend the
service where there's a seven-part sermon on raising funds for a giant
building, and kids don't really buy it. At the same time, the kids are
wearing a red bracelet and becoming passionate about AIDS and water in
Darfur. So the youth pastors and the kids sit in a system that says the
preservation of this system is the first priority, and they look around
at these giant issues of justice that are demanding a generation to
step up and do something about it; and guess what they do?

this excerpt i pulled basically because it shares two tensions i feel in youth ministry, 1. the need to have top notch programming & 2. the culture of preservation (something i feel is paramount, not in a good way, in my mainline tribe). those two things are just not part of the Kingdom of God that i envision.. now, can #1 be a gateway, sure.. can #1 help in discipleship, sure.. but at what cost are we going so overboard that we loose sight of our goals.. living at Christ lived, loving as Christ loved. to me that isn't grounded in a program or an institution. those are ground out in relationships beyond human measures and being remarkable because you have been inspired to be that way.

anyways, check out the interview i could go on and on with the various questions & answers.

a heretics advent : how do you give thanks

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A Heretics Advent from Gavin Richardson on Vimeo.

i read this little parable for our youth the first sunday of advent. we were coming off the thanksgiving holiday and it seemed poignant. i share with you to ask the same thing i asked of our teenagers. 'what are you doing to not live into this parable.

here's what i am encouraging you to check out.

making a splash in social media : its okay to loose control

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i liked this little ted talk presentation on social media, in part, because it is short and tells a simple story. the learning point that i would suggest my church tribe needs to take a hold of is, “its okay to loose control” and that “no longer does the message come from the top down.”

we can all think about how ‘the world is flat’ and everyone has an equal voice to traditional media institutions and powers & that was really scary to them a number of years ago (might still be). but if you embrace that others are talking maybe not just about you, but with you, then they are people to lift up and share the genuine voice/face of your ultimate cause.

but, the control factor comes into play.. ‘what will they say next?’ etc.. well, as someone who comes from a religious background, we say that one needs to have ‘faith’.. yes, novel concept, but a good concept when one practices it. my experience though is that people really only have faith as long as it falls within their boundaries of human control. with that, we miss out on the possible beauty bound up in the mystery of individuals and community. i hope for a day when my tribe’s structural institutions that helped it to get a certain status and size, see the way to get out of the way and have faith in its community to do something remarkable.