Today is the due date for the work for one of my most difficult classes (Programming in Youth Ministry). I have been receiving emails since Monday with the work in them. Since there were 12 students in this class, and each project is around 50 pages long, I have a lot of reading to do.
Many of the projects arrived as a .rar file, which I had never seen before. It’s a different way to compress files. I had to go download a free program to “unpack” the work so I could read it. What I’ve read so far is fantastic. The work basically is a year of programming for a local church youth ministry, which includes budgeting, program planning, etc. I remember this class as a student, and I know that it is difficult. It’s a good thing I’ve got good students. I can’t wait to see them again in January.
Here are some pictures from our Youth Emphasis Week last week at the seminary. We did some drama, sharing, videos, etc. It was a pretty good week.
Yesterday’s chapel really had little to do with Youth Emphasis Week because it was the day where the students from Homiletics class preached. The good side was that one of them was Oscar, one of the youth ministry students. My class was good, though. We had a great time acting out the different “positions” in a culture. I think it will help them remember them. Oh, I finally posted the audio from my “talk” from Monday. It’s in Spanish.
We kicked off youth emphasis week yesterday with a pretty sweet chapel service. The band played Agnus Dei, and it was powerful. For some reason the driving beat of the drums on some songs stirs people to sing more, making it really cool. Then we showed a great video spoof of Lord of the Rings (Click here to watch it in Spanish). And I preached out of Psalm 71:17-18 about the RAP of youth ministry. The key words were remember, announce, and worry (preocuparse in Spanish). These three things are key for any church that wants to work with young people.
This week is “Youth Emphasis Week” at the seminary, which means I’m really busy. Basically, we are leading every chapel service for the week. The idea is to expose the rest of the seminary students to youth ministry. Hopefully, we will do a good job. Tomorrow, I’m preaching. I am hopefully going to communicate that it is more than just fun and games and that it should be important to every congregation. We’ll see how that turns out. We’ve got some creative things planned, too. Hopefully, those will get finished in time, too. Gotta go. Lots of work.
It’s always good to get feedback from people. Youth Ministry International has recently asked us to get some feedback from the youth workers we are training. Here is an incredible response I got from a youth worker in one of the countries we are working in:
This time of studying has TOUCHED MY LIFE in a very special way because: it has made me study more seriously; it has given the ministry much more seriousness; it has helped us integrate a series of courses with content that we didn’t have before with a much more systemization; FINALLY, it has been a blessing that we needed in this moment in history and that we didn’t visualize where it should and could come from, but God in His immense love and care for us already had seen it.
You should know that this guy has been involved in youth ministry for 16 years. He is 46 years old and recently began studying in one of our seminary programs. It is awesome to see this kind of feedback. It humbles me to hear these words from a guy like this that I admire. I am privileged to get to work with him.
