Storying and the Merge Conference.

A few years ago while working with a team for a national youth conference, I was exposed to the practice of biblical storying. This method uses story and imagination to help students grasp who God is, instead of the more traditional lecture/sermon model. There were many things that I liked about it. It really caused me to rethink how I had been teaching the bible. I realized that in many ways, having the right Picture of the Story that we are living in, is more important than knowing lots of trivia about God.

If you have never heard of, or thought about biblical storying then I would encourage you to check out these websites to get a better feel of what it is, and how it could help you in your ministry:

ECHO the STORY

Chronological Bible Storying

If you happen to work with students and want to expose your students to the world of Storying, MERGE is the best Student Storying Conference that there is. Students who go will experience  God's Story through creative storytelling, art and media, and hands on interaction.

The Worship Industry & Worship Consumption

I think that Brian McLaren has a great point here. Because church and ministry have become so professional, the "quality" of everything from worship to the sermon has risen, and the expectations have followed it. Church and ministry has become a product we consume. It even seems like we no longer identify ourselves as members of the community of faith, but as consumers of a particular churches performances and products.

Where have you noticed this?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPRKCmYuCWA

"Thank God for Phil Wickham..."

I was at coffee with a friend a few weeks ago and mentioned that I really liked Sing-A-Long, a free album by worship leader Phil Wickham. My usually somewhat jaded friend with admittedly picky musical taste responded, "THANK GOD FOR PHIL WICKHAM!!!"

I was surprised at such exuberance, but after further exploration and a few days with his new CD Heaven and Earth, I sorta agree...

I especially love the live (free) Sing-A-Long, but its all good...

Paparazzi Series Rewind (Jan & Feb 08)

This January and February Mosaic will be launching a new series on Boys, Girls, Birds, Bees, and following God. As I am preparing, I thought it would be helpful to collect in one post, the links to my last series on the issue.

paparazzi INTRO
Flash bulbs explode as people pursue their obsession with finding the next big thrill... extreme sports... extreme partying... extreme clothing... extreme everything... Our culture has gone wild. The message is clear: DO whatever you have to do... give up whatever you need to give up... go as far as you need to go.... all just to have the next thrill... and whatever your do... don't let your values get in the way of your fun.
... but does it really deliver? Or could it be that after experiencing all the extremes people are still extremely empty?
Life is a treasure. Don't throw it all away to fast.

Freedom is overrated

Paparazzi Week 1: The Proposition.

Paparazzi 2: hot R not.

Paparazzi 3: Celebrity
-Celebrity Video Text:
-Paparazzi VIDEO (Celebrity)
-News Cast video

Paparazzi 4: Feb 4th, 2008 (Part 1)
- Lessons from Duct Tape (Part 2)

Paparazzi 5: I see London

-Paparazzi comment round-up: What students are saying.

Respond!


And a few other links from other places:
Help Needed

Sheep with out a Shepherd.

Thoughts and Questions for student ministry

I am working on a list of thoughts and questions that are helpful for working with students today. The list keeps growing, but it is only based on my experience and things I might have read or heard. Take a look at the list and rip it to shreds, question it, remix it, add to it, correct it, or whatever you want. These are the sorts of conversations that we need to be having in the church today!

1. Most students are post-Christian: Students do not know the story of God... They know some details about it, some trivia, and some emotional stories about missionaries, but they do not really know the big picture.

2. Many students are post-literate: How do we create faith foundations in a Post-Literate world? 

-How does someone read the Bible if they don’t (or can’t) really read? (Do Christians owe a secret debt to J. K. & Stephanie Meyer? At least these ladies get teenagers and pre-teens reading!)

3. Shepherding vs. Teaching. Relationships are not optional.

-God spoke in Christ... Incarnation is living the message among them... The Medium is the Message...
-Jesus was never condescending... are we?
-How can we overcome the power-differential as parents?
-Are we out in front, or along side?
-How are we helping students to connect the dots?

4. Students need ADVOCATES! They often ARE treated unkindly and unfairly.
-Jesus was never condescending... are we?

-It seems like all people, young and old, respond best to respect.
-Students often lack an advocate that will really listen to and fight for them.
-Students need and respond best to people who take their pain seriously.

5. Students are “Growing up Online.” They are always connected.

-They live natively in a multitasking always connected community. How do we help them navigate it?

-What does grace mean when Google never forgets, or forgives..?

-Many students have moved past email. It is obsolete to them.

6. Many students today are overwhelmingly busy, stressed, hurt and anxious.
-Too much activity but too little real play
-They never learn how to make limiting decisions (either play guitar, or basketball, or be in forensics...)

7. Many students are mobilized by service (and relationships).

-They will evaluate Christianity based on whether its followers seem to make the world a better place.

-Consider redirecting family vacations toward missional impact.

8. Journey vs. Destination. (Long view vs. Short view. )
-Embracing students’ journey helps us to realize the development takes many stages, and that each stage has its own revelations, pains, and struggles.
-Plant seeds! Success is not week to week, but year after year. Sometimes it is hidden for long seasons.
-Often quick growth is in the “shallow soil.”

9. What forms Character? 

-Students need to learn boundaries (and develop the ability to say no and mean it.)

-What tools do we need to give them in order to do more than just say no... 

-Are those tools realistic in the timeframe that we are working with.
-Differentiation is a natural and healthy part of becoming an adult.
-More is “caught than taught.” Our choices teach our students life priorities.

10. Parents MUST be a big part of the process.

-What do we do with spiritual orphans whose parents are not Christians.

-How do we empower and equip the defeated, demoralized, and unqualified.
-As adults many students seem to eventually settle into the same faith "orbit" as their parents.

11. It take a “Village” to raise students that love God.
-Can the Church be a “Village” (a loving community) for students too?

-Utilize other “safe” adults when students pull away from you.

-Students crave multi-generational relationships.

12. The Church has lost the discussion about sexuality. 

-Christian students (even home-schooled) are statistically just as sexually active as any other students.

13. Youth Ministry is not Enough! *(but it is important!!!)
-Students need more than a program can offer.
-Student ministry needs to partner with parents, it cannot replace them.
-If you see a need in your students life, do not wait for the Church to fill it!

Temptation #2: THE FLESH

Something is wrong inside of us. Though God desires for us to live the best kind of life full of beauty and good, our desires lead us astray. Like a starving man hungers for bread, our fallen nature hungers for sin. Even though we know it is wrong we long for the promised treasures of sin. Even though we know it will hurt us in the end, often we do not say no. Like an addict we are hooked.
It wasn’t always this way. Once the first humans walked with God and did not desire sin they way we do today. But now our very nature is against God. Our flesh want to sin, and we do not need any external pressure or demonic influence to make us do it.

Temptation2presentation

View more documents from Brandon Brown.

The Greatest SNL skit of all times! ( or at least recently..)

Check it out:

Fun with ANIMOTO

I am playing around with a new video generator that so far seems to rock.

Why "Cash for Clunkers" is a stupid idea.

Recently the news has been full of jubilant reports about Cash for Clunkers. While this is certainly a welcome relief from the MJ funeral debacle, the nightly dose of communal celebration over the destruction of a perfectly good "clunker" is beginning to feel like a bad B movie. You know... the type of movie that actually makes you dumber as you watch it.

The news heralds "Cash for Clunkers" as a bold environmentally savvy way to boost the economy while producing a healthy environmental impact. They are wrong for many reasons.

1. The whole idea of stimulus is hard to swallow. Is the concept of going deeper into debt as families and as a country really they way to fix our economy? Can you spend your way out of a financial ruin? Try that in your household and I can predict what will happen. It sorta reminds me of a Miss Piggy cartoon I read when I was a kid... she used her Mastercard to pay off her Visa each month, and then reversed the order so that hypothetically she never had to pay. Problem: Everyone has a credit limit... even the richest country in the world.

2. The concept of spending billions on a non-renewable project is crazy. Invest the money in windmills or nuclear energy, or even on creating a nation wide electric car network as Shia Aggassi begs for. Why? Because investments have a yearly and ultimate return. Getting people to go further in debt, while taking to government further in debt, so that car manufactures can make some sales provides a small boost today, but Zero future dividend or payoff.

3. The environmental impact of taking "clunkers" that get less than 18 MPG off the road would make a small impact if they were all being replaced by cars that got 40 - 50 MPG or better yet, electric cars without carbon emissions. But the facts are that many of the new cars are only nominally better than the cars they were CLUNKERIZED.

I can only imagine the type of impact that several billion dollars would have made if invested in something like what Shia Aggassi proposes. Rather than putting more nominally fuel efficient oil based cars on the road, lets invest in a true solution, or at least a theory that could be a solution.

What do you think?


http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/shai_agassi_on_electric_cars.html

Steward Brand on GEO-ENGINEERING

The world is moving toward cities. According to Brand, we passed a threshold recently. Now most of the world is urban, and is rapidly becoming more so.

Watch the video. He makes some real interesting points about the one billion people living in slum cities. Rather than seeing them as hopelessly poor, Brand sees them as entrepreneurs who are fighting their way out of the extreme poverty of subsistence farming.

His short talk ties together the issues of green living and poverty in a way that is quite helpful. When resources are scarce, wars break out. For example in Darfur, much of the fighting is created by a struggle over who will control the less than adequate water supply.

Very interesting stuff.

Elmbrook Message: 10 Words for Life #5 Honor Parents

Honor your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the LORD your God is giving you.
Exodus 20:12

God intended for the Family to be the basic building block of civilization and the primary means of passing His story from one generation to the next.

Check out theMessage here:


Here is the slide deck if you want to follow along:

10 5 Honor

View more documents from Brandon Brown.

As we continue our series on the 10 words for life, this week we tackle perhaps the hardest of them all: Honor your father and your mother. For some, this Word comes easy. Your parents were great and you have no regrets, but for many many others family is associated with pain, shame, and anger. Their homelife looked (or looks) like a war zone, and the idea of honoring the flawed humans who caused them so much pain seems impossible. Our prayer is that we all may find hope and healing no matter what our family looked like.

Great Post on Youth Ministry Hiring

Found this on a friends site:

Click here to read the post:

Top Ten Ways to Ruin a Young Pastor (By jim Vining)
10. Promise big things in their interviews, and then pull back on those promises once the family is on site.

9. Do not bother mentoring them or investing in their personal or professional development.

8. Ask them to reach new people, but force them to think the same way as the existing staff.

7. Ask them to bring change, but do not allow them to do anything different.

6. Young Pastor’s Concerns = Never Valid. Member’s Concerns about Young Pastor = Always Valid.

5. Give them responsibility, but do not give them the authority to accomplish those things.

4. Give them greater workloads than other pastors, but also less respect.

3. Say one thing in private meetings, another thing in staff or elder meetings, and another thing in Sunday Worship.

2. Reject their ideas, tell them how to do it, and when it does not work … blame them.

1. Allow your personal insecurities to interpret the young pastor’s words and deeds as attempts to mock you or steal your job.

There are a few I would add or tweak... so maybe in a few years when I find time to blog again, I will generate my own list...

Flail

If you can run toward your hopes... if you can't walk toward your ambition. If you can even crawl or scoot toward the object of your greatest dreams... you can always flail for all your worth.

Laughing Baby Brown

Context: Containers for Relationships

Relationships die without context.

Take a strong friendship that "works" while two people are both part of the same context, and see what happens if that context is removed prematurely. Contexts can include clubs, sports teams, work, neighborhoods, churches, and more. Relationships developed any of these contexts can be real and substantial, yet if the context is removed (Ex. the church dissolves) then the relationships will langure in emotional purgatory for a while and eventually feel like a flat as a two liter of Mountain Dew.

Its not the friendship cannot rediscover itself in a new context, they just don't most of the time.

Context is what keeps it from provides the place to see each other and remember how much you appreciate each other.

Context is what provides the rhythm of the relationship.

Context is the fabric upon which the friendship is written.

Not all contexts are equal, and not all are easily replaced.

Cool Presentation on 21st Century Educators

Found this on slideshare and thought it was worth taking a look at.

The 21st Century Educator

View more presentations from Kim Cofino. (tags: educator k-12)

Francis Chan: Luke Warm and Loving it.

Francis Chan is cool. Randomly found this on youtube:



OH... and part of his Catalyst message from 2007

Hero Movie: Skitz's Story.

Skitz was failing as a friend. For some reason he had changed and had not bothered to give his friends the memo. They looked in at his life and wanted to be part of it, but he did not know how to invite them in. Even his best friend was starting to wonder what his deal was, how could a kid with his whole life through college scheduled in his iPhone be so unavailable.



This is a rough cut, so there is still some work to be done on it.
Make sure to click on the "Watch in High Quality" link. It is in the lower right corner of the player

Hero Movie Preview

This clip is a montage from the upcoming Hero Movie that I shot with some friends last summer. It chronicles the life of Sarah, one of the main characters. While at school she seems to be falling further and further behind, her she has a secret that will explain it all.

This is a rough cut, so there is still some work to be done on it.
Make sure to click on the "Watch in High Quality" link. It is in the lower right corner of the player

Cohen's First Three Months...

For some reason, slide share cut out the last 5 pages...

Cohen M. Brown 3 Months

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own.