Where God Is Leading Me
Wow. The past month or so has been amazing. I have been working with a group of 16-year-olds in an intensive leadership development program. I’ve had the opportunity to share some thoughts with them, watch several of them make key decisions in their life about the role Jesus will play in their future and had others blow my mind in terms of their capacity for leadership and their potential for impacting their community with the message and life of Jesus. This first few weeks of the summer has really helped to affirm some conversations I’ve been having with God and others around me for the last number of months.
It’s no secret that I am passionate about church being done with excellence and be geared toward those who are still trying to figure the whole God thing out. To that end I’ve been working in student ministry for the last few years to change culture and create environments where young people can explore faith and make some key decisions about the role God will play in their future. Our middle school program has exploded with growth and our high school program is about to reap the benefits of that commitment as well. These are exciting times for student ministry and exciting times for our church.
Of course, in the midst of all of this, Lindsey is pregnant with our first child, a boy I can’t wait to meet.
So what’s going on in my head and what am I thinking about and dreaming about for the future of student life at Cedarview? In a word, lots. This past March I had the chance to visit North Point Community Church in Alpharetta, Georgia and attend a conference on church ministry called “Drive”. That conference and experience reaffirmed some of my own ministry leanings, began some new relationships and also helped me to see areas where our own student environments need to grow. There’s a lot to say but I’ll give out some headers so that I’m not jumping all over the place.
Outsiders Before Insiders
As our program has grown, the number of people coming from outside the Cedarview family has grown and dwarfed them a bit. Our split is now about 20% from Cedarview and 80% from outside Cedarview. In terms of church involvement roughly 70% of our middle school students are not currently attending a church weekly. This has obviously created some tension and some challenges for our ‘church’ students and their families. The conversations in small groups revolve more around social/relational issues and less around the spiritual topics some of our students would like to have. We are addressing this issue in a number of different ways. We have begun recruiting more leaders, hoping to double the number of leaders in both our environments before the year launches. Our hope is that by providing more leaders for involvement in our environments we will be able to increase the number of personal conversations students are having and spur them toward growth in their relationship with Christ. We are adding a new style of small group called “On Deck” that will be a catch-all for first time visitors/guests to the environments. We have really seen the impact that adding one or two new people a week has on group dynamics and we want to make sure that we are doing our best to preserve the small group environment, multiplying groups as necessary.
In spite of these challenges, we will continue to program in a way that targets those from outside the Cedarview church family. Make no mistake, we will not compromise our teaching or our goals for students. We want our students to prioritize their relationship with Christ, influence their friends and experience personal ministry. However, we recognize that for many students, coming to church at all is a huge deal and we are committed to making the experience as welcoming, friendly and understandable as we possibly can.
As a part of our continued focus and priority on students outside of Cedarview, I have been working with the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board to be installed as the Pastoral Care Worker for John McCrae Secondary School. I have gone through the interview process and am now awaiting a final decision from their committee, please pray for approval from them. My hope is that through this placement I will be able to continue to build relationships with many of the students who have attended our middle school environment and encourage them to continue their spiritual journey through involvement in our high school environment. Also, it’s an opportunity to learn more about youth culture and be available to students of all faiths, encouraging and counseling as best I can.
Systems
One of the areas student ministries has really been falling behind is in the area of systems. We have no real process of tracking new students, parents or people who make decisions for Christ. Our development of leaders just sort of ‘happens’ and so I’ve been working with our leadership teams to develop some systems and resources to help us address some of these issues.
We’ve created a system to help us manage student/family data. Our hope is that this system will help us to keep in good contact with as many students and parents as possible, updating their information regularly and keeping it complete. It’s got to be more than a partial email written on a scrap of paper and our commitment is to manage the data well and leverage it for great communication with students and parents.
Two areas we’ve noticed we need to be better at is how we welcome first time attenders and how we follow up with students who make decisions to follow Christ. For the first time attenders, we’ve worked hard to develop a system that welcomes them and their parents into the environment, provides information on rules, expectations, policies and program description, as well as being our first formal communication with a new family. The system includes follow up over several weeks and the goal is to integrate the students into the environment and supply the parents with information, a parent community and access to leadership should they have any questions.
In working with students who make decisions for Christ, we want to make sure we are not just having them ‘say a prayer’ and then be abandoned. We want to equip them for growth and the development of healthy habits in their life. To that end we will be training our small group leaders to be the primary point of contact after a decision is made and equipping them to provide the support students need and the follow up they need. We’ve created materials that will help students kickstart their faith and take next steps. We’ve even produced a 30 day bible study that walks students through the book of Matthew. We’ve built in follow up emails and phone calls into the system to make sure that students are given the best possible chance of success as they transition from old patterns of behaviour to new patterns.
With our leaders we are introducing some simple concepts to help them better understand their commitment to our environments as well as equipping them to maximize their effectiveness in their roles. We are starting to identify leaders who are more gifted in program from those who are more gifted in small group leading and trying to establish teams in each area. We have identified team leaders and they are working to build their teams and train them for their specific responsibilities as well as to care for them.
Ministry Events
We continue to evaluate the types of events and frequency of events that make up our calendar year for both our middle school and high school environments. As we grow we are continuing to notice the strains that many events put on our staff, resources and church family. To that end we are starting to narrow the focus of our events and instead of doing many small events, we are planning on focusing on a few key events throughout the year that we have identified as being critical to our mission of students prioritizing their relationship with Christ, influencing their friends and experiencing personal ministry.
So, the challenge ahead is pretty huge. There’s a lot for us to do and a lot for us to plan for but God is faithful. I continue to be amazed by how God works almost in spite of us. Events and situations that I think are having limited impact, God is using to show up in peoples lives. These are just a few areas where God is leading me and challenging me in terms of ministry there is a lot more he is up to. I am continuing to study and am reading books a lot. I am currently working through ‘Doctrine’ by Mark Driscoll, ‘Mentoring Leaders’ by Carson Pue and I am probably going to reread ‘Shaping The Spiritual Lives Of Students’ by Richard R. Dunn at some point this summer too.
How You Can Be Praying
There are a few things currently on my plate that I would like prayer for:
- Cultural Exchange To South Korea – My hope is to take a group of high school students on a cultural exchange to South Korea next summer. In order to do that there are a lot of details that need to finalized before I can even make a formal presentation to our Global Missions Team.
- Lighting For The Chapel – As we transition from a small youth group mentality to a large student ministry mentality there are some key facility needs that we are working through, we would like to buy lighting that will equip us for now and the near future, pray that we’ll be able to find the right equipment at the right price to enhance our environments.
- Leaders – Plainly, we still need more leaders. I know God will provide but I like to plan and I can get a bit panicky. We need somewhere around 10-12 more leaders to meet our goal for next year just in middle school alone and we could use another 3 or 4 for high school as well (particularly females).
- Family – Our family is going to grow in the fall and with everything else going on I don’t want to miss out on anything with our new son. Pray that Lindsey’s pregnancy would continue to go well and that we would have a beautiful, healthy baby. If you’re extra keen, pray he sleeps a lot and isn’t too fussy, LOL.
Anyway, that’s an update on where God is leading me and the things I have been thinking about. There’s a lot more that God is up to but if I put it all here now, there won’t be anything left to post later!
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