How is my own practice of Christian faith shaping my values, attitudes, and behaviors? Decline certainly calls for renewal. Yet renewal begins with me.
All tagged youth
Love: It’s Time to Get to Work
Reflecting on years of teaching young students, I am reminded of exercises captioned “Listen and do.” Might this be a simple, yet awfully mature, set of ancient instructions?
Human Trafficking: A Church Issue?
As Christians, we strive to be more Christlike: to see marginalized people in their pain and vulnerability. To listen to them and their stories. To give them the kind of love that Jesus showed the outcasts.
Reflection Roundup: Soul Fire
We must give ourselves over to letting what’s burning on the inside show on the outside. Otherwise, we miss an opportunity to warm someone else and may wind up consumed by our own flames.
Preparing the Next Generation of Thinkers
Your congregations’ efforts to teach your teens and students how to study the Bible makes a difference. As a Bible professor, I can tell who has been taught to read the text for understanding.
Reflection Roundup: The Many Faces of Empathy
Friday is National Lemonade Day, so buy an extra cup and share it in Jesus’s name, confident that it makes a difference for eternity.
Reflection Roundup: A Nap and a Snack
This week one of my colleagues suggested taking care of ourselves might be our most important job, then went on to wonder if we could actually consent to a less-anxious model for those in our midst.
Movement Gives the Unmentionable Momentum
Talking about the pain and difficulty of this past year is going to be very important to all ages within our churches. But, how do we guide people to mention their pain?
Reflection Roundup: Christian Community, Face-to-Face
The mission of God is not something we have to do; we receive it. We share it and spread it around like maple butter on Holy Saturday French toast, savoring the Savior.
Reflection Roundup: Challenged and Changed
Let’s bravely take one another in and notice the reflection of Christ in the eyes we mirror each gift of a day, our motivation pure joy rather than any benefit bestowed.
Reflection Roundup: Reframing Our Questions
Looking bidirectionally within history, to what people, ideas, and entities can we allow our questions to be vulnerable so they may be changed?
The Path Less Traveled: Families, Autism, and the Church Today
What are these barriers these families face, and how can the church accommodate?
The Blessing of Blessing
What would it mean if parents, youth leaders, children’s ministers, and whoever else wants to, took seriously the idea of blessing?
Snapchat Prophets
Christian teenagers have a message from the Lord for the church, and they have truth bursting from their souls about morality that it would behoove the church to hear.
Helping Our Children Choose Baptism
It is a tragedy if certain children are more invited into this beautiful ritual than others are.
Where Have All the Young People Gone?
With young people, church can feel like a boat full of small holes and slow leaks. When bailing isn’t working, and you are taking on water, it’s tempting to give up.
Keeping Ourselves—and Young People—Near the Cross
I’ve always been slightly jealous of congregations with “real” youth groups. You know the ones I’m talking about: the ones with well-painted and decorated class rooms.
Intergenerational Ministry: The Organic Ministry of Small Churches
As a minister of a small congregation, one of the greatest blessings for me is witnessing intergenerational ministry continue to take root in the church in organic ways.
One Thing the Church Needs to Know about Millennials (and Every Other Generation)
Perhaps we are warding off an unspoken fear that our traditions and cultures in the church might be outmoded, passé, and irrelevant.
