Youth Story

Normally I am submerged in the culture of youth pastors or even of teens themselves, or at least I had been for many years. These days I find life is full of sick family, a new wife (who is also sick), a college that has lost all appeal to me, Housework, pets, business, Church. I spend all my time on those things and still there is my job as a youth pastor. Tonight I took a break from everything to hit the internet and check some of the blogs that I used to enjoy reading. One of the first posts I came to was an anonymous art blog, that I am sure many people read because it is one of the most popular blogs in the world. On today's blog there was a post that I have copied and pasted here below: Now at first glance if you read it slowly, you assume that there is a troubled teenager in a youth group somewhere. Then however, you notice the line at the bottom, "I'm the youth pastor.". I remember one night in youth group a few years ago as a teenager stood up following a...

The past month I have been in a series called "To the Garden". I turned our youth room into an actual garden with real life plants and a few fountains. It even had a makeshift waterfall made of stacked television sets. We started the series in the most obvious place which was Genesis. From there however the students were surprised to find that we had made our way out of the garden and Genesis. We took a pit stop in Ezekiel and then on to the New Testament. We found ourselves back in a garden so to speak with each lesson. The neat idea behind this was: that we are invited to be co-creators with God. This played out in two very real ways for our teenagers. First they had the opportunity to plant in our youth room some seeds. They did this the first week of the series. This obviously symbolized being a co-creator, but it had a deeper double meaning. We talked about the seeds that we as Christians are planting in other peoples' lives around us. The students watered the seed...