I love it that a lot of the content generated here at Life in Student Ministry is based on my interaction with you guys (or “ya’ll,” depending on where you’re from!). If you have questions or ideas for me, please contact me at any time.

One question that’s popped up several times lately is what to do when parents use church as a form of punishment and ground their kids from youth group activities. GiGi Logan, the Children’s and Youth Ministry Director at All Saint’s Episcopal Church in North Carolina, writes in an email, “…parents don’t realize that they’re teaching their kids that church is like a cell phone, TV, etc. and that’s SO NOT COOL!”

Honestly, I don’t really have a lot of advice on this subject, so I’m hoping many of you will pool your wisdom in the comments below. I’ll just make a couple observations:

1. While I’m excited that a teenager enjoys youth group enough for the parents to see it as a significant loss for their child, it’s still exactly that — a significant loss. Kids are not usually grounded from going to school because it’s both a privilege and a responsibility. Church is no different. In fact, maybe if a parent is having trouble with their kid at home they should send him or her to more church, not less. (As long as that’s not perceived as cruel punishment to the opposite extreme! lol!)

2. I’m against using church as punishment not because I’m the youth pastor and youth group happens to be “my baby.” I’m against it because the church is instituted by God and every student here is part of the body.

3. My dad is a pastor and despite my parents’ stance on enforcing church attendance over anything else, there was a time during my early teen years when they grounded me to my room for an entire month, including no church. In that case, it communicated that my punishment was a HUGE deal.

What do YOU do when a youth group student is grounded from church? Your advice on the matter is greatly appreciated.

Actions speak louder than words. Whether parents like it or not, kids see the priorities and values they set for the family and it makes a difference on how kids live their lives.

All the hype over the past couple years about the student drop-out rate from church seems to be focused at the church, specifically the youth workers. Almost every other week I see a new Chicken Little article about how the sky is falling and that youth ministry is failing miserably. However, the biblical structure of raising kids is through the parents, not church youth workers. Statistically, the kids who graduate from high school and stay in the church are not those who had a super-dynamic youth group. Rather, it’s those whose parents have intentionally passed on the faith. Of course, this assumes that parents have a living and vital faith that’s worth passing on. As much as we hate to admit it, we have a lot of parents who are sold out to the world and give lip-service in church, so their kids see that and do the same. Teenagers reflect what they see in the church.

According to the Family Driven Faith audio series by Dr. Voddie Baucham Jr., 92% of families don’t have devotions together even once a year. He also says that the average Christian family has less than 30 minutes of spiritual discussion each week. Maybe the church should focus more on discipling parents who will in turn pass that on to their kids.

I wish we heard more Deuteronomy 6:1-9 values being passed along to students by parents, but instead youth workers hear, “We won’t be at church for the next couple weeks because Jonny made the traveling baseball team.” Actions speak louder than words! Students learn that sports trump God so they can collect trophies that will collect dust in the basement in 40 years. And then we say idolatry isn’t alive in our churches? No wonder church is often a student’s last priority.

Even our homes communicate something about priorities. In most American families, the TV is the focal point of the living room. Notice that all the furniture is arranged around the room to focus on it, as if it’s the alter of our homes. Maybe family priorities need to change, not just “We go to church once a week unless something better comes up,” thinking that will somehow teach our kids that God is important, but in integrating God into daily life and decisions.

Lest I be misunderstood, I am not trying to blame parents as many have done to youth workers. Rather, youth workers need to consider parents as a vital contact for reaching students for Christ knowing that they have a much bigger impact in their lives than we ever will.

My Personal Story
My parents definitely didn’t do everything right, but one thing they did get right: they communicated by their actions and decisions that God always comes first. As kids, we noticed that and learn valuable lessons from it. When my brother was invited to join the travel soccer team, my parents made him turn it down because their games were on Sunday mornings. When we had wrestling matches on Sunday mornings, we’d always go to church instead. We often saw financial priorities when they spent money on helping other people even though we knew money was very tight at home. My dad taught us the Bible almost every day, including lots of scripture memorization (that I still use today!). Now that we’re grown and out of the house, every one of us are leaders in either vocational or volunteer ministry. Coincidence?

I understand this is all by God’s grace, not a formula with guaranteed results, but following God’s family principles definitely seems to have a better rate of return than any other alternative.

As someone who usually enjoys The Simpsons on TV, the movie wasn’t quite as good as I hoped. In fact, I was little disappointed. It had all the normal jokes and parodies of religion, environmentalists and the government as you’d expect, but there were several clips that were just unnecessary that kinda ruined the whole thing for me, like men kissing, exposed private parts and attention drawn to a woman’s chest. Thankfully there wasn’t really any swearing, but still, why can’t they just keep it clean? Half the theater was kids aged 9-14!

Overall, it has a good theme about the importance of family and spending time with your children, but it seemed to be shadowed by making light of physical abuse and marital disrespect.

Although a plot line was definitely present and very random at times, as The Simpsons are notorious for, it wasn’t as gripping as your average movie. Fortunately, there’s a lot of consistent laughs and chuckles throughout the film, which holds your attention for the hour and a half.

The wit and “Dumb and Dumber”-like humor definitely shines in The Simpsons Movie, but if you plan to see the movie you can probably get away with waiting to rent it on DVD.

[tags]The Simpsons Movie[/tags]

For our one year wedding anniversary, I made a nice DVD of our wedding for my wife. A guy from my father-in-law’s church who shoots and edits TV commercials for a living was gonna do the whole thing for us for free, but a year later here we are and it doesn’t look like he’s going to get around to doing it. So, I got my hands on the raw video footage and did the best I could with what I had. Unfortunately, the audio is poor at parts, but it still helps remind us of what actually happened on that day. It all went so fast.

Here ya go:

This Sunday is my one year wedding anniversary! In this podcast I quickly recap our past year, ministry together, a conversation I could’ve had before dating and what Dana probably thought after she married me.

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Dana and I are home from vacation and ready to get back into a routine. It was nice to visit her family and old friends of ours in Texas, but it’s also nice to be home again. We’re so tired from traveling so much the past couple weeks that it was nice to just sit last night and do nothing. Tonight youth group Bible studies start up at our house twice a week, though, so the break is over. We took about 700 pictures or so over vacation and put 211 of them online. Check out all the fun!

It looks like I was tagged by Chris at serialyouthpastor.com to list the first 10 songs that come up on shuffle in iTunes. I normally don’t really do these blog tag things (they remind me of lame email forwards from back in the 90s), but for Chris I figured, why not? Here ya go, Chris, just for you:

1. How deep the father’s love — Skillet
2. Mighty good leader — Audio Adrenaline
3. Now I sing — Out of Eden
4. Drunk in tha spirit — T-Bone
5. My hell — Disciple
6. Pressing on — Relient K
7. Blessed be your name — Tree63
8. Readyfuels — Amberlin
9. Bring it on – Steven Curtis Chapman
10. Violently — The Benjamin Gate

If anyone else wants to do it, consider yourself tagged by me.

We’re finally back from our trip to New Jersey where we put on a camp for inner-city Angel Tree children and I have to say, my youth group kids did an absolutely outstanding job of working with the children. They stepped up to the plate during stressful times, handled difficult situations with great wisdom and poured 110% of themselves into the campers. The most encouraging part was that the impact they made on the kids’ lives was visibly evident throughout the week. We could literally see the life-change taking place as some of them heard about God for the first time and experienced love an affection from the nine youth group counselors. I posted several hundred pictures of the trip on my youth group website, for anyone who’s interested.

We returned to Minneapolis Thursday evening and now, after one canceled flight and another delayed two hours, Dana and I are in Oklahoma for her family reunion for a couple days. We’ll also spend some time in Dallas visiting friends and our old church before heading back to Minnesota next week. Until then, it will probably be quiet around my site here. Time for some good ol’ vacation.

One of the cool things about the lake house we’re renting is that half of the other houses on our lake are owned by people in our church. Dana and I don’t have any big water toys, but most of them do. Yesterday was such a nice sunny day that our neighbors took me, Dana and Katelin, my 13-year old sister-in-law, out on the lake to have some fun. It was Katelin’s first time out on a motor boat and first time to do any type of water sports, so her eyes were either wide with terror or wide with excitement the whole time.

Every Sunday throughout the summer my youth group is doing an event called “Wake ‘n Ski” where we take kids out water skiing, tubing, knee boarding and wake boarding, stop for a cookout and an evangelistic message, and then maybe ski a little more or wrap up depending on how everyone feels. We pray many students will come to know Christ through this outreach.

Here’s a video clip of Katelin’s first time water tubing.

Last Sunday night our new church held a welcome party for me and Dana. The full photo album of this event can be seen here, but here are a couple pictures to summarize the evening.

Started off with dinner. Man, so much good food.

Dana’s checking out the desert table operated by a couple students.

Several students teamed up together to lead a couple worship songs. They did a great job, too!

The Sr. Pastor re-wrote the lyrics to the song, “Deep in the heart of Texas,” and had my former pastor from Texas and his wife lead it.

Then we had a head-to-head text messaging competition. Looks like I have the fastest thumbs this side of the Missisip (thanks to Verizon’s T9 text-entry method)!

A FUNNY STORY HERE: I also had to identify several text message abbreviations, such as LOL and G2G, that our pastor got off some website somewhere. Well, POS came up and I was like, “Uhhh, you really want me to identify that one?” Several students in the audience started laughing so hard they could hardly contain themselves, which confused our pastor and the adults. Apparently this website said that it meant “Parent Over Shoulder,” so I just played along with that. Monday morning I told him what POS really stands for and why it made the kids laugh so hard, to which he started laughing hysterically, too! Ahhh, good ol’ innocent church bloopers.

They tested our our Texas BBQ sauce tasting skills by having us identify which sauce was which. Alas, Dana is clearly the true Texan.

Story time with Tim! I shared a brief version of my testimony and life story.

Before closing several youth volunteers came up and prayed for us as we begin in our new ministry.

Me and Dana front of our welcome sign.

After driving about 1,200 miles in a bumpy annoying-to-drive U-Haul truck, Dana and I have finally arrived here in Minnesota. Here’s the chain of events:

Sunday, February 11: It was our last church service at our old church. The youth group put a little desert reception together for us after church where we took plenty of pictures and said our final goodbyes. Dana and I then went out to lunch with some church friends, turned in our apartment keys and drove three hours to Oklahoma City where we spent the night at her grandparent’s house.

Monday, February 12: We hit the road around 9:30 AM and drove through heavy rain the entire 10 hours to De Moines. Unfortunately the U-Haul only got about 8 MPG, so we had to stop every 200 miles to fill up the thirsty tank.

Tuesday, February 13: A big snow storm came through while we spent the night at a hotel in De Moines and kinda messed up the city by morning time. Schools were closed and people were advised not to go out except for emergencies. Traveling the final leg of our trip to Minnesota wasn’t really an emergency, but we left anyway, choosing the risk of the road over the boredom of a hotel room. It was slow at first since the roads were cluttered with accidents and cars stranded in ditches, but once we drove a couple hours and got outside of Iowa the going was pretty smooth.

We arrived at our house at 3:30 PM and were greeted by about 15 youth group members and several adults who helped unload our stuff into the house. We set up the essentials, like the bed and bathroom, ate dinner at our neighbor’s house (who are also our landlords and youth group volunteers), and went to sleep.

Wednesday, February 14: Dana and I spent all morning unpacking, but then left in the afternoon to enjoy Valentines Day plans together. First we returned the U-Haul and then took a ride in a little private plane to check out the area from an aerial view. We took lots of pictures, including ones of our own house on the lake. After the plane ride, we went to a local resort where we checked into a very nice room, enjoyed a great dinner and soaked in a hot whirlpool. Unfortunately, we ended up with some loud neighbors and couldn’t sleep that night. After some complaints and then listening to our hotel neighbors try to get into our room through the adjoining door, Dana and I just packed up and went home at about 3:30 AM. Fortunately, the resort was very sympathetic, didn’t charge us for our stay and also offered to give us another free night.

Thursday, February 15: From here on out we’re just unpacking and settling into the area. So far we’ve made good progress. We’d like to be mostly finished by this Sunday, my first day at the church, so we’ll see how that works out.

Thanks again for all your prayers and encouragement while we were on the road making this transition!

P.S. I haven’t had time to go through my RSS reader for almost a month now, so I knew I’d be very far behind with many of the blogs and sites I read, but 1,442 new posts?! Whew, it’ll take a while to catch up on that.

More pictures of our move from TX to MN
More pictures of our Valentines Day plane ride and resort stay

A nice shot of me loading the U-Haul

Saying goodbye to our old church

Our U-Haul towing my car

Dana and me going out for a ride around town in MN

The indoor water park at the resort we stayed at for Valentines Day