eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780310569916 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Zondervan |
| Publication date: | 05/26/2009 |
| Series: | Especialidades Juveniles |
| Sold by: | HarperCollins Publishing |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 304 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Unleashing God's Word in Youth Ministry
By Barry Shafer
Zondervan
Copyright © 2008
Barry Shafer
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-310-27497-1
Chapter One Built to Last?
For you have been born again, not of perishable seed, but of imperishable, through the living and enduring word of God. 1 PETER 1:23
They had been in the Presence of God and they reported what they saw there. They were prophets, not scribes, for the scribe tells us what he has read, and the prophet tells what he has seen. A.W. TOZER THE PURSUIT OF GOD
What are you doing in your student ministry that will outlast you?
I remember the first time that question occurred to me. I can't recall where it came from or who asked it. Maybe it was a book. Or perhaps a training seminar. But it made me sit up and take stock.
Looking around at the church youth ministry I directed, I began measuring. Evaluating. Tallying up the "lasting" potential of our hard-fought efforts. The calendar was packed with all the right things: contact ministry in the schools, missions trips, retreats, and the always popular, fun stuff such as ski trips and frozen-chicken bowling.
But in the final analysis, any lasting impact seemed to be measured in months, not decades.
Little did I realize that the one question-what are you doing that will outlast you?-was only the first in a series of convictions that would parallel a seemingly unrelated season of preparation, all of which would converge at the place where God was stirring the hearts of students all around me.
It was a fairly amazing convergence.
And it happened like this.
Before Dana and I married, I had been in full-time youth ministry for about three years. Not long after our wedding, we decided to ramp up our personal study of Scripture. Ever since I believed in Christ as a preteen, I've had a curiosity about the Bible. At 14 I spent my own hard-earned money (cash that was earmarked for a 10-speed bike, the rage of the '70s) on a leather-bound Living Bible (the rage of Christian teenagers in the '70s). I just had to have it.
I experimented with approaches and even came up with my own color-coding system, marking Bible themes and highlighting related verses. This led to a better-than-random approach to searching the Scriptures in my early adult years. But it was start-stop at best.
Now in my early 30s and new to full-time student ministry, I knew I wanted to take the Word more seriously. Dana brought a love for Scripture and some great Bible study background to the mix. As our lives and personal approaches to study melded, I began to see that Scripture could deliver a depth I'd never tapped. But the approach called for something more than reading a passage and consulting the nearest devotional commentary.
Picture searching for bedrock by bulldozing off an acre of soil one layer at a time, rather than randomly drilling a few holes here and there. That's the image I had as I discovered the value of going deep, layer by layer, comparing Scripture to Scripture, rather than drilling in fast with a passage and a commentary. Wielding a drill may have gotten me there more quickly, but I had missed too much along the way.
Fascinated with what I was learning and how it was changing my relationship with God, I found that I couldn't get enough. I even became an early-morning Bible person-unprecedented from a sleep junkie who once said, "I could work any job as long as I didn't have to be there before 9 a.m."
My unlikely sanctuary was the local White Castle, where I could count on plenty of solitude (not to mention great coffee), because few go to White Castle for breakfast. There I began to find what I was looking for in Bible study-what A.W. Tozer describes in The Pursuit of God as the difference between the scribe and the prophet. The scribe, says Tozer, reads of other people's experiences with God and tells others about them; the prophet goes into God's presence and tells others what he or she sees.
Somehow, ever so slightly, I could feel myself shifting realms. And the difference was potent.
As Scripture began to send its roots into more of my life, I started to pick up on the words that those who wrote the Bible used to describe God's Word. Everlasting. Enduring. Eternal. Imperishable. Time-sensitive words, too many to count, that credited God's Word with the results I'd only hoped to see in my own youth ministry.
Click.
The light went on.
Dry-Sponge Discipleship
So how would this work? How could I help students experience firsthand the enduring nature of Scripture-or all the benefits of Scripture, for that matter-and thus build into them a deeper faith that would last?
It had to be more than saying, "This book is everlasting. Read it."
It had to be more than cajoling them into it. More than memorizing. More than reading a verse and asking, "What does this mean to you?" Hadn't we all had enough of that?
It had to be more than what we could accomplish in Sunday school, a discipleship program, or, in fact, any program.
The way I saw it, there needed to be some metabolizing of the words on the page-an uptake of Scripture's eternal qualities into their lives.
Picture a dry sponge dropped into a bucket of water. That's what it had to be.
More Than a Tootsie Pop
I took a hard look at the discipleship program we had in place, measuring it against my newfound standard for lasting impact.
It didn't fare too well.
So, eager to make some changes, one day in my office I opened a file in my desk drawer labeled "Bible Study."
Except for a lone photocopy of an exercise you could do with a Tootsie Pop, it was empty. Evidently I had a long way to go.
But not as far as I might have expected.
Already I'd been wowed by Scripture in my intentionally ramped-up times in the Word. A few simple hands-on tools of Bible study had worked miracles (and I do mean miracles) in making me "early to rise."
Maybe they'd help our students, too. Not necessarily to be early-risers (that'd be asking for more than a miracle), but to get beneath the surface and tap into the enduring nature of God's Word.
So we threw out an invitation to our entire student ministry. It went something like this: This summer we're having a Bible study at our house. Wednesdays from 4 to 6 p.m. Bring your Bibles. Don't count on pizza or food, icebreakers or games. We'll be studying Colossians.
And to parents we gave a caution: If your kids don't want to attend, don't make them.
Twelve students signed up. Twelve.
I was intrigued by that number for a new "discipleship" effort.
As students filed into our home, filling up our living room, I sensed a level of anticipation I'd never felt from these kids. It was palpable. We'd communicated an atmosphere of challenge, and our students obviously were up for it.
Dana and I handed out the entire book of Colossians, printed on 8 1/2 x 11-inch paper. And then we dove in. Armed with those tools of inductive study that had worked so well for us (more on that later), we gave the students things to look for in Colossians and ways to mark these things once they found them. Then we sent them to different parts of the house for a little mini-retreat with Scripture.
Reconvening after a few minutes, we helped the students process the info they'd seen in Scripture. We asked a few simple questions such as, "What did you find?" "What else did you see?" "What does that tell you about God (or yourself)?" and "What do you need to do now?"
As the weeks passed, we made some unexpected observations:
Each session ended with a flurry of questions about God, Jesus, the Bible, or theology. Some questions had to do with what the kids were finding in Colossians. Some didn't. It was obvious that our students were getting questions answered in Colossians that they'd never expected would be answered. So they began to bring up all their unanswerables. The discussions were rich, intense, and a good deal deeper than we'd bargained for.
Many of our students were experiencing personal renaissances before our eyes. Even the kids with attention-deficit challenges managed to stay engaged. Something about the hands-on way we were taking Scripture apart-rather than just reading or listening to it-seemed to keep them connected. (For the record, I was sure I had enough attention deficit to deal with in my student ministry; of course, we all probably think that to be the case in our own ministries!)
And Dana and I started to notice that we weren't seeing the typical summer drop-off in participation. Our group of 12 steadily grew-in fact, it doubled by fall.
We knew we were on to something, though, when students sent tape recorders and asked for the handouts when they had to miss a session.
Feeding Frenzy
Don't think for a minute that this was a one-shot experience with a group of super-spiritual, exceptionally gifted students. To us they were the greatest kids around. But like the original 12 disciples, their most extraordinary trait was their ordinariness.
Ours was a middle-sized church in a middle-sized town (aptly if not unimaginatively named Middletown) in the middle of the Midwest. Students came from homes representing a cross-section of middle America: Professional, semi-professional, blue-collar. And they varied greatly in terms of spiritual initiative. Some were committed Christ-followers. Others, not so much.
The long and short of it? God had already been moving in these students' lives. They were hungry. Dana and I were only there to help feed the hunger.
What we hadn't expected was an all-out feeding frenzy.
Metabolism
That single-summer Bible study changed the entire landscape of our youth ministry. When the school year began we divided that group into two-middle school and high school. After that our ministry was never the same.
Intentional Bible study became more than just an add-on-more than another program. It was the heart of our work with kids-what kept them, and us, on the leading edge of what God was doing in our midst.
Now, more than a decade later, those same students are teachers, lawyers, pastors, nurses, and missionaries. They are people whose faith we admire, who are having an impact in their families, churches, and fields of influence. We continue to hear from many of them, sharing how a Bible passage we explored is still teaching them-or quoting back to us a truth they've never let go of.
Despite the group's generally high level of engagement, we still sometimes wondered if they were listening. Would they get it? But God's promises paid off. What happened in those years outlasted us-and it will continue to last.
It metabolized.
As a side note, after we moved on from that particular youth ministry, it continued to grow exponentially and remains strongly committed to God-seeking, teenage Bible study. In fact, the ministry currently attracts more than 100 students each week (in a church smaller than 500 in size), and more than 75 percent of those students are involved in the small-group Bible study ministry.
In case you need proof, God packed Scripture with promises of payoff for those who earnestly seek him-not casually or haphazardly but with diligent intentionality. Take a look at Hebrews 11:6: "And without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him" (emphasis added).
God wants us to absorb Scripture into our lives. In fact, God used the metabolism analogy on several occasions, instructing both Ezekiel and John to "eat" his Word (Ezekiel 3:1-3; Revelation 10:9-11). Anything less and we lose the uptake factor-the point at which the Word's active ingredients start to permeate our spiritual composition.
If God's Word is meant to be metabolized, why is it that many of our best teaching and discipling efforts wind up being little more than "spray-ons" that eventually wash off?
The greatest lesson I learned from that seminal question What are you doing that will outlast you? is that this was God's way of satisfying a hunger God had already been whetting among the students we were ministering to. Had I remained distracted, Martha-like, consumed with the many activities of student ministry, I'd have missed what God was seeking to accomplish in that ministry.
In fact, in my 20-plus years of doing and observing youth ministry, I've learned that God is constantly creating hunger and is on the lookout for those who will help feed the frenzy.
But are we listening?
Sliding into Biblical Illiteracy
Many observers of modern youth discipleship have noted a decline in the Bible study aspect of youth ministry. Chap Clark, a well-known youth ministry teacher and author, recently shared with me, "One of the blessings and curses of being around youth ministry for three decades is that one is able to witness firsthand where we're moving forward and where we are falling back. I'm convinced that the single most important area where we've lost ground with kids is in our commitment and ability to ground them in God's Word."
The church today, including both the adult and teenage generations, is in an era of rampant biblical illiteracy. And there are consequences.
It's been estimated that as few as 69 percent and as many as 94 percent of teenagers leave the faith after they leave our youth ministries. In fact, the Southern Baptist Council on Family Life reports that 88 percent of kids raised in evangelical homes leave the church by age 18.
Some will return. Many won't. And some return with life-marring scars.
The Barna Group has been actively tracking 20-somethings for several years. In 2006 they reported that of all young adults, 61 percent were churched during their teenage years but are now spiritually disengaged. Only 20 percent have maintained a level of spiritual activity consistent with their high school experiences.
Who among us hasn't experienced firsthand this dropout factor in one way or another? What disheartens me most is that students' decisions to leave the faith are usually based on bad information.
They've observed the adult Word-believers around them operating in ways that are less than Word-true.
They've watched contentious church business meetings, conducted by people who've quoted to them in Sunday school, "Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love" (Ephesians 4:2).
They've memorized "Those who consider themselves religious and yet do not keep a tight rein on their tongues deceive themselves, and their religion is worthless" (James 1:26, TNIV)-yet they've listened to adult believers maligning one another.
Or maybe they just want another day to sleep in, thinking unbelief has its privileges.
The point is, most decisions to walk away from the Christian faith aren't based on God or Jesus or anything the Word says about either, but on a poor projection of Christianity.
So what if we could frontload teenagers with a lasting, biblical picture of God? What if we could help them encounter him firsthand in a way that whets their appetites for more?
I believe the race for the exit door would slow dramatically.
It's tough to walk away from things like mercy, grace, and redemption-especially when those terms are infused with new vitality and moved out of tired clichés in ways that only God's Word can accomplish.
Why the Dropout?
In his groundbreaking book Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers, Christian Smith examines this dropout factor, asking nonreligious teenagers who were raised in a faith tradition why they became nonreligious. Check out their answers in the following table:
Reasons Nonreligious U.S. Adolescents Raised in a Religion Became Nonreligious, Ages 13-17 (percentages may not add up to 100 due to rounding)
Intellectual skepticism and disbelief 32% Don't know why 22% Lack of interest 13% Just stopped attending services 12% Life disruptions and troubles 10% Dislikes religion 7% Lacked parental support 1% Vague or no reason 2%
Interestingly, all but the last two reasons could be directly impacted by an effective uptake of Scripture. Scripture is capable of holding up to intellectual skepticism. The concepts of mercy and forgiveness, when properly understood and experienced, always give a reason to follow Christ. Deep exploration of the character and ways of God are practically guaranteed to keep a seeker interested.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Unleashing God's Word in Youth Ministry by Barry Shafer
Copyright © 2008 by Barry Shafer. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents Part One: God's Quest for Us 1. Built to Last?....................62. Priorities....................19
3. What You Don't Know Can Hurt You....................32
4. Getting the Word in Edgewise....................46
5. Is the B-I-B-L-E a Book for Youth Ministry?....................57
Part Two: Our Quest for God 6. Love Letter....................70
7. God, Show Me!....................83
8. God, Teach Me!....................105
9. God, Change Me!....................124
10. Teaching the Jesus Way....................136
11. The Equipping Trifecta....................150
12. Feeding Frenzy....................165
Part Three: Tools for the Quest 13. Leveraging Teenagers' Desperation for Depth....................186
14. It's Greek (or Hebrew) to Me....................201
15. Tracking a Character....................220
16. Grab Bag....................237
17. Where in the Word Are You?....................247
Conclusion: What Am I Doing in Student Ministry That Will Outlast Me?....................275
Appendices A. The Equipping Gifts....................278
B. How We Got the Bible....................282
Notes....................300