Fun with Bible Mad Libs (or, Why Didn’t I Think of This Before?)

For tonight’s junior high youth group, I decided to use a Bible Mad Lib as a “springboard” into a Bible Study time. I’m sure everybody does this, so I’m sharing it only for the pure delight. These things made me laugh. And by “laugh” I mean cackle.

Here’s the template I constructed, using Luke 5:36-39:

Bible Mad Lib

No one (present perfect verb)*___________________ a piece from a new (noun)______________ and sews it on an old (noun)______________; otherwise the (noun)_____________ will be (past tense verb)**________________, and the (noun)______________ from the (noun)_______________ will not (verb)____________ the (noun)__________________. And no one puts new (plural noun)____________________ into (adjective__________________) wineskins; otherwise the new (plural noun)________________________will burst the (plural noun)_________________ and will be (past tense verb)_____________________, and the (noun)_____________________ will be destroyed. But new (noun)______________ must be put into (adjective)________________ (plural noun)____________________. And no one after drinking old (type of drink)_______________ desires new (type of drink)____________________, but says, “The (first type of drink)____________________ is (adjective)__________________.”’

And here’s but one example of what resulted. Again, cackled.

Bible Mad Lib

No one (present perfect verb)*laughs a piece from a new (noun)Billy Mays and sews it on an old (noun)Whitehouse; otherwise the (noun) couch will be (past tense verb)**blinked, and the (noun) trash can from the (noun) ball will not (verb) catch the (noun) Elmo. And no one puts new (plural noun) Elmos into (adjective smelly) wineskins; otherwise the new (plural noun) heaters will burst the (plural noun) lights and will be (past tense verb) jumped, and the (noun) chair will be destroyed. But new (noun) Atlantis must be put into (adjective) soft (plural noun) fans. And no one after drinking old (type of drink) soda desires new (type of drink) water, but says, “The (first type of drink) soda is (adjective) rough.”’

Put Me In, Coach (Youth Ministry Version)

John Vest has a nice post marking the 10 year anniversary of his full-time youth ministry career. Check back here in February of 2018 to read my 10 year reflections.

Fully aware of all I don’t know, I recently began a journey to become a better minister to the young people God calls me to serve. The Youth Ministry Coaching Program (YMCP) is the brainchild of Mark Oestreicher . Marko (as he’s known in the youth ministry universe) has written a handful of useful youth ministry books, particularly about middle school ministry. Last year I read his book Youth Ministry 3.0 and have blogged about it a few times. YMCP is a chance to interact with him around some of those ideas and to learn from a cohort of youth ministers.

Our first of six two-day gatherings was last week, and I’m already buzzing with insights from Marko and the cohort. I also had a chance to present some of my questions about A New Culture of Learning. Oh, and I have homework. This is going to be good.

See the promotional video below.

The Fellowship Gathering: Third Thoughts

“It’s a mad mission/Under difficult conditions”

Patty Griffin (for Casey Wait)

My first thought was, “I’m not one of these evangelicals anymore.”

My second thought was, “We see the world’s needs very differently.”

My third thought is, “We see mission very differently.”

Uses of the term “missional” were more prevalent at the Fellowship Gathering in Minneapolis than the little butter discs that came with the bread basket. I suspect definitions of that term were just as abundant.

I’m not a progressive mainline despiser of missional-speak. I’ve read everything the Gospel and Our Culture Network has published. In seminary I chased Darrell Guder around like a puppy dog. I’ve served the church as a volunteer in mission twice. My current call has “mission” right in the title. What I notice, though, is that “missional” has become for evangelicals an orienting idea, the ramifications of which are not being fully grasped.

The big idea behind the missional turn is that North America is itself now a mission field. Indeed it always has been, but decades of a single-minded focus on foreign missions efforts obscured that reality. Today, people like Alan Roxburgh and Alan Hirsch are becoming household names in evangelical circles by forcing that issue, and even by asking, “Can The West be converted?”

All of this is a good thing. A very good thing.

Yet to hear the term “missional” employed in Minneapolis, one would think its application is limited to practices of evangelism and to a congregational polity. I noted that in almost every instance where a speaker urged a more “missional” church, they did so in connection with affirmations about unchurched people in an unchurched culture. And they did so with a clear and repeated application to congregations and not to presbyteries or the PC (USA).

[excursis: the irony of the polity observation is that, while many evangelicals in the PC (USA) express an earnest desire to be more missional than the denomination seemingly allows them to be, many of them have used the withholding of shared support for the denomination’s mission efforts as a means of protest against it.]

This equation of mission with evangelism and congregations troubles me because I owe much of my own sense of call to ordained ministry to an experience with a PC (USA) mission program, one that didn’t involve me in explicit evangelism, and one that can’t be sustained by a single congregation but depends on shared mission support.

Also, I belong to a presbytery that is being profoundly impacted by an experiment in shared mission.

[another excursis: The Presbytery of San Diego has intentionally started to call itself a “relational community” that strives to become a “mission agency.” That would seem to indicate a belief in the presbytery as a locus of Christian mission]

The mission of the church in a North American 21st Century context will probably be driven primarily by congregations, but those congregations will depend upon the support of larger networks of congregations called presbyteries and denominations. In that light, it will be interesting to see the extent to which the Fellowship of Presbyterians proposes sharing mission support with the PC (USA).

That mission will also require witness and action that includes explicit evangelism but is not limited to it. The church will need to speak in its common life and in written statements to the “powers and principalities” of our culture. That is as much mission as preaching the gospel.

In Minneapolis, that didn’t seem to be part of the “missional” emphasis.

The Fellowship Gathering: Second Thoughts

“Weigh the pros/the cons come first/I’ve got a black belt in doubt.”

Cold War Kids

The Rev. Dr. David Swanson of First Presbyterian Church, Orlando, said during his address to the Fellowship gathering something to the effect of: the world badly needs to know what the church believes.

That was the moment of epiphany for me.

I’ve recounted my first thoughts about last week’s Fellowship of Presbyterians gathering in Minneapolis here and here, and I’ve commented on my perception of that movement’s overall aims here. Now it’s probably time to deal with some of the substance of my disagreement with it.

Swanson’s pivotal assertion was made breathlessly and in the context of deploring the lack of theological clarity that evangelicals in the PC (USA) are certain has been introduced by Amendment 10-A and the removal of standards of “fidelity” and “chastity” from the church’s ordained officers. To many, that change represents a departure from a traditional understanding of sexual ethics and Biblical authority. That departure is intolerable for lots of reasons, and prominent among them is a perceived ambiguity about sexual morals that will hurt the church’s witness and evangelism.

“The culture needs to know where the church stands. It doesn’t need the church to bless its sin but to call it what it is, unequivocally and without compromise. The mission of the church requires a clear stand on sex.”

[excursis: ceasing to condemn same-gender romantic orientation as such is clearly a moral move that pronounces the church’s conviction and conscience. I threw that gauntlet down some time ago]

The epiphany for me is that evangelicals have a very different perception of peoples’ needs than I do. As I read the gospels, I don’t detect an overwhelming concern on Jesus’ part to impart conviction to people. I can’t recall a single time when Jesus instructed his disciples to share their conscience with the world by pronouncing on ethical matters. The driving concern of Jesus’ ministry seemed to be accompanying people (“sinners”) who the religious establishment had cast out, feeding them, healing them, and sharing the good news of God’s judgment and mercy with them.

Surely a clear moral stake-in-the-ground is required, and Jesus drove that stake down as far as it would go. The problem for evangelicals is that Jesus repeatedly dodged peoples’ attempts to force an articulation of his moral position out of him. He was much more interested in making friends with the people that religious leaders made their living condemning.

Of course, that reveals a clear moral conviction. And while I’m never going to claim to get that conviction, pursuing it and living it out is, to me, the driving force behind Christian faith, ethics, mission, and ministry. It’s what I understand the church to be driving at.

That seems to be a different orientation from the evangelical pursuit of moral clarity. If Swanson is correct and the world’s most pressing need is to know the content of the church’s convictions about moral and ethical issues like sex, then I’m not sure the church I’m after can meet that need.

The Fellowship Gathering: First Thoughts

“I remember when we shared a vision, you and I”

The Mountain Goats

I’ve just returned from The Fellowship of Presbyterians gathering in Minneapolis. The event was organized by a group of evangelical pastors within the PC (USA) who called like-minded pastors and elders to join with them in creating a New Reformed Body connected to the current denomination and yet separate from it. Though I’m not one of those like-minded pastors (as evidenced by this post), I attended on behalf of my presbytery to listen to The Fellowship’s proposals and to work with local colleagues around them.

Better bloggers than I have summarized the gathering’s accomplishments. Here’s a summary from a sympathetic participant and one from an unsympathetic not-participant. Rather than summarize, I need to process. Thank you.

[update: I contributed to a roundup of reactions over at Two Friars and A Fool that gets more into the mechanics of the event]

I’m troubled by a couple of things. This post will process one.

I’ve been underestimating the distinct theological, methodological, and sociological DNA of evangelicalism and its expression within mainline denominations like the PC (USA). Which surprises me, given my evangelical breeding. I was baptized in a charismatic church and went to college at an evangelical Presbyterian school. I fumbled a job interview at a progressive church with an uncritical recitation of the reasons why gays shouldn’t be ordained, and the first chance I had to vote on the issue, I stood for the status quo (the “fidelity and chastity” standards).

The Fellowship is an expression of the core convictions of American evangelicalism: that the church exists to seek and save lost sinners (read: everyone), that the Bible is the only admissible guide to faith and life, and that Christians stand in a position of loving opposition to the wider culture in which they’re situated. My time in Minneapolis illuminated how differently I relate to those convictions now than I did even five years ago. It’s not that I don’t believe them, it’s that words like “sin,” “save,” and “guide” (not to mention “sex“) have acquired meanings for me that they didn’t have before. The old meanings haven’t been replaced so much as nuanced, complemented, and, pray God, enriched.

I have to believe that God has been in this process, while I still acknowledge that I could be wrong.

This unsettling realization has sent me running to historians of the evangelical movement to help me better understand the ways in which The Fellowship movement is replaying an oppose-and-separate movie the church has seen before (I’m starting here and here). Every Christian denomination has evangelicals in it, even though the vast majority of evangelical Christians belong to church expressions that aren’t affiliated with anything like an organized denomination. For mainline protestants in the U.S., that has always been the case, and it has always been a source of tension, if not all-out conflict (see the First and Second Great Awakenings). Since coming into mainline protestantism in my early 20’s, I’ve understood myself to be an heir of the evangelicals in those conflicts.

I don’t anymore.

My gut reaction to the things happening in Minneapolis showed me that I’m now standing somewhere else. I’m not sure what to make of that.

Meditate on This

Help me understand something that’s happening with the youth ministry I’m responsible for:

A student of mine (call him Steve), on his own initiative and without consulting me, approached an adult in our community to teach him and some of his friends meditation, and he offered the church as a sponsor and venue. The adult in question is known to me, and I regard her highly.

I spoke with her, and we scheduled three dates for a meditation experience that she would lead at the church. We sent out general publicity to our roster of students via email and text, but I insisted that participants primarily be recruited through Steve. I wanted him to invite his friends.

I couldn’t attend the first week (another adult did), but I attended last night. There were nine students there. Two of them are part of our congregation. The other seven represented Steve and six of his friends (five of which were girls). Steve’s mom is discouraged at the lack of participation by church youth, but my reaction is the exact opposite. I love this.

I love it because I have a growing conviction that ministry as a platform and youth ministry 3.0 insights are for real. During the last program year I blogged about Maggie and her use of a couple of church programs as platforms for her and her friends to do good work. This seems to me to be the same thing. Except it’s Steve and his friends.

Going into next year, it seems that several youth ministry “participant communities” are emerging. While there is still the traditional community of students from the church who come to weekly youth groups, there is also the community of Steve and his friends and the community of Maggie and her friends. The challenge will be to work with that traditional community on programming for them while also discerning opportunities to work with those other communities in meaningful ways.

Help me out: is this the right way to be interpreting what’s happening? Where else do you see this happening, and how does one discern well opportunities to do good work with new communities of students?

Converting Graduate Recognition Sunday

A few months ago a pastor friend of mine fretted to me about the church’s inability to retain youth into their college years. “90 % of youth who participate in church as high school students don’t in college,” he said. “And 90% of those who do in college don’t as young adults.”

I don’t know where my friend got his figures, but I’m inclined to believe them. What I don’t believe, though, is his framing of the problem. It’s not a failure of retention, but of conversion. We are failing to convert young people into more mature and responsible forms of church participation and leadership.

I don’t think the church is served by retaining Janie Straight-A Student into her young adulthood, at least not as she is in high school. She’s a gift to the church as a high school student. But as she grows and learns, her participation in church life, her understanding of God and her experience of faith, all need to be converted into something more than they were when she was 17.

Which brings me to Graduate Recognition, which our congregation will celebrate this Sunday. We will parade our five high school graduates up front, where I will fuss over them and lead the congregation in praying for and blessing them. I don’t see any reason NOT to do this. It’s a valuable ritual for the students and for the congregation that has invested in their nurture and growth.

What I do feel a need to differently, though, is pray. Whereas previous Graduate Recognition Sundays have had an air of, well, graduation, about them, I hope to give this one an air of commissioning. That we are sending these students out to the next phase in their life and that we still exercise a claim on them (and they on us) is what I wan’t to communicate. Even if they weren’t all relocating geographically, this would still be true. We are blessing them for the next phase of their faith journey, which remains intact in its current youthful form both to their and the church’s peril.

Twitter Makes The Church Better

This is a descriptive post about the San Gabriel Presbytery vote on Amendment 10-A this past Tuesday, May 10th, a deliberation that was preceded by a matter of mere minutes by the tweeted (and infinitely re-tweeted) announcement of the decisive 10-A vote result from the the Presbytery of the Twin Cities Area.

Before out meeting began, I was unofficially charged by the Executive Presbyter to watch for a Twin Cities result, so I spent most of the afternoon checking the #pcusa and #ptca Twitter tags. I celebrated with @mayog that @charlesawiley was with us, addressing our debate and leading our worship. and I broadcast his pearls of wisdom. I trumpeted @revsap’s floor speech to the world. I offered a lighthearted commentary–“scruple is a verb”–and I received in my Twitter flesh the punishment for my sin from @adamwc: “screw scrupling now.”

I wasn’t alone. People all over the room were shamelessly checking their phones. @heysonnie, @trindlea, and @ga_junkie collected and redistributed every update with stunning proficiency.

While moderating the CPM report, my phone buzzed in my pocket. Taking a calculated risk on my perception of the room’s distraction, I checked it: a tweet from @trindlea in which I’d been mentioned. As in, “@yorocko moderating . . .” I chuckled and scanned the room. @trindlea was hiding in plain sight.

We had the result before our debate began, and although we were prepared to respond if someone should announce the result from the floor during debate, nobody did. We debated for about 45 minutes along all the usual lines of argument, then we used pale green paper slips to vote.

During the dinner break, I used Face Time to call up some of our church’s elders who was unable to attend the meeting. The other commissioners from our church passed the iPad around and updated them about the proceedings.

Also during the dinner break, my colleague had a small audience around her phone, watching a video just posted by the Moderator of the General Assembly about 10-A’s passage.

At the close of worship, we read from an iPad the story from the denomination’s website confirming the success of the amendment before the benediction.

Media connected the church gathered.

Media connected the church separated.

I can unambiguously say that these tools made this exercise better than it would have been otherwise and better than it has been in the past.

My experience yesterday afternoon was a demonstration of the vitality and connection that social media technology can engender in the church. In the face of the doomsday scenarios being advanced already, that experience makes me hopeful and gives me something to point to and say, “Look how we love each other.”

Is The PC (USA) Like The NCAA?

Last week I wondered if presbyteries are families. Today I’m asking if the PC (USA) is like the NCAA.

The question comes from Clark Cowden, the Executive Presbyter of the Presbytery of San Diego. He writes on his blog:

We already have 16 synods and 173 presbyteries. Just as each congregation has its own unique identity, each presbytery has its own unique identity. What happens when a congregation realizes its identity does not match up well with the presbytery it is in? What happens if it discovers that its DNA actually matches up a lot better with the DNA of a different presbytery? Can we allow our churches to change conferences within the denomination like they do in college athletics? Can we allow new presbyteries, new synods, new fellowships, and new networks to be created to advance the Kingdom of God? In our church history, we have allowed for different orders within a denomination (Dominicans, Franciscans, Jesuits). Is it time for the PCUSA to explore something similar?

[[sidenote: I attempted to comment on this post when I first read it weeks ago, but my comment never appeared.]]

In another post, Clark answers his own question:

The PC(USA) is becoming more like the NCAA, which has 32 different conferences for major college athletics. The Pac 10 has different rules than the Mountain West Conference. The Western Athletic Conference is different from the Big 10. What other churches and other presbyteries do around the country, will be more like what other conferences do in college athletics. We are not responsible for what others do. We are only accountable for what we do.

Athletic conferences in the NCAA have always served as the organizing entity for local schools. And as much as the Big 10 and the ACC make of their “tradition,” conferences have always been flexible; which schools play in which conferences has always been negotiable. In that sense, the PC (USA) is like the NCAA. Churches have switched presbyteries since there have been presbyteries, normally for geographic considerations.

But that’s about as far as it goes.

In the era of cable television, which colleges play in which conferences is about one thing: TV revenue (There’s no such thing as “DNA” when it comes to a school or a conference. That image is an abstraction that serves to distance those wishing to realign from the local consequences of their actions).

College sports are good TV (College football is one of the most profitable broadcast products in the country). The South Eastern Conference (SEC), to take only one example, has multi-billion dollar television contracts with both ESPN and CBS. Individual schools in that conference received roughly $17.3 million from those agreements in 2010. Obviously, it pays to be in the SEC. The Big 12 conference recently inked a deal with the Fox Sports Media Group for broadcast rights to its teams’ games. Yet other conferences like the Big 10 have launched their own cable networks, which are usually collaborations with established networks like ESPN and Fox.

Given this landscape, colleges realign with conferences from which they stand to make a bigger share of TV revenue, and conferences lure valuable schools to their conferences that will drive bigger audiences to their networks, allowing them to charge higher rates to advertisers.

When a college leaves one conference for another, the new conference–and its executive–stand to gain significantly. The impact on the conference that’s left depends largely on the size of the school leaving. Basically, when a large school with a nationally-recognized sports programs leaves its current conference, it devalues the conference. When Nebraska left the Big 12 last spring, that conference nearly collapsed as the remaining big programs (Oklahoma, Texas, and Texas A&M) feverishly looked for greener pastures in which to play. In the end, the smaller budget schools in the conference had to guarantee some $20 million in revenue to the big schools to keep them, even though that likely would mean cutting their own (smaller) budgets.

I don’t have much sympathy for the complaint that this money-grabbing by conferences, schools, and networks devalues college athletics; sports and advertising-driven television broadcasting exist in symbiotic relationship. I have no naivete about that. Colleges aren’t bound to one another in conferences by “tradition” or anything else beyond financial reality.

But the analogy between the NCAA and a church denomination is fundamentally flawed. Clark Cowden perceives realignment in college athletics to be about DNA. It’s clearly not (unless you measure DNA in dollars). Likewise, realignment of congregations within the PC (USA) into different presbyteries will have more than “genetic” consequences. Some presbyteries will face insolvency as a result. People will lose their jobs. Churches may close.

Those scenarios don’t amount to a reason to maintain the status quo at all costs. Some things may very well have to change, and change is always difficult. But everyone involved with these conversations–presbytery executives, pastors, elders–needs to deal with the facts and to not fly away into metaphors, especially ones as misled as this.