It's now 11:38pm Saturday night. We lose an hour tonight....so really it's 12:38. It's been a long day.
So let me just say that today wasn't the greatest day ever.
Some of the best parts of today weren't workshops or general sessions....but conversations with friends who are in youth ministry. Laughing and sharing and listening to each other is amazing.
Breakfast went long with some friends. Lunch was long with friends. Dinner was long with friends. Each was quality. And therapeutic.
The morning general session was pretty bad. The music was great. The speaker they had was horrible. I mean HORRIBLE. I'm constantly self-evaluating. I know what I'm good at and what I'm not good at. I'm more than willing to tell you the things I'm good and bad at. I don't feel like I"m that good at too many things. When I can say, "I could've done that better", you know you've done a bad job. I could've done that better. Dude was BAD.
Bad how? He literally said nothing. He self-promoted his program in LA. He told us that burning out isn't a real thing. Kind of a bummer.
The afternoon session I picked was about new technology. It was OK. I knew a lot of what he was presenting. I did come away with some new ideas and resources to check out moving forward. My friend Jim could've probably presented the workshop.
Tonight's session was awesome. Great worship with Justin Howerton Band. Then the Skit Guys. Then Gungor rocked out. The speaker tonight was Gary Haugen who works for International Justice Mission. He reminded us that part of God's character is Justice. That we are to be about seeking justice too. GOOD STUFF.
Tonight we went to the Skit Guys late night option and laughed for 2 hours. I needed that. And at the end they reminded me that I love my students.
I think I'll be looking for a better day tomorrow. However today was refreshing.
This coming Friday, I'm headed to Columbus Ohio for Simply Youth Ministry's youth convention. I'm pretty darn excited. Basically this is a couple days with a couple thousand people much like myself.
On the whole this is intended to be a great time of learning. And I know that I will learn some new things. However, I've been in youth ministry for somewhere around 18 years now. I can't see that I'm going to drastically re-design how I do youth ministry. I use these opportunities to refresh. To hear things that I KNOW are true, but need someone to tell me them. To reconnect with some old friends.
To be honest when I was going to big youth conventions like this years ago, I was seeing person after person that i went to college with. These days most of the people that started youth ministry with me, are now doing something else. Most are still in ministry, but are senior pastors, or associates, or worship leaders, or children's pastors. So there's a little less "catching up" as there use to be. But I'm hanging out with a good buddy, and will be meeting up with some other friends while there.
So my goal is to blog throughout the convention like I did two years ago. That means that this weekend there should be several posts up about where I'm at and what I'm doing.
VERY good chance that there will be numerous tweets as well. If you're not following me there, I'm @biggoalie31
I'm also now on Instagram. Not sure what I'm doing with that....but I'm working on it. If you wanna follow there it's also biggoalie31
I'm pretty sure I'm coming up on 17 years this summer of doing youth ministry. I don't say that to pat myself on the back, but to say....it's been awhile.
A few things have happened lately that have made me realize that my roll as a youth pastor is changing. It's fine with me, but I'm becoming aware of it.
Last weekend I was asked to lead worship at Snow Camp for the PCA presbytery that I started doing youth ministry with. I love being asked to do that. It's like coming home. I get to hang out with leaders who have been helping to lead for years. It's always a fabulous time to be with them.
In the weekend though, two things struck me.
1. The most obvious to me was that one of my students (that was in my youth ministry for years in Warren) is now a youth leader at the church I used to work at in Beaver PA. So over the course of the weekend, I got to watch her interacting with her girls, loving up on them, playing and laughing. I couldn't have been more proud of her. Here she was doing all the things we had talked about for years.....and she was good at it!
[As a humorous aside....the speaker talked about "resting" in God.....which is something that I harp on my students about. She is not good at it. She knows it. We talk often about it. So she had to go to her students and say "You know Aaron is my youth pastor and has told me this for years....and I"m bad at it". Soooooo funny.]
2. Some of the leaders in the individual churches.....were junior high boys in my cabin when I started youth ministry.
Look, I'm fine with these things. I'm fully aware that I"m getting older by the minute. It's not about me getting older but about the roll I'm taking on.
When I started doing this, I was 21. I was a pretty immature 21 at that. So here I am hanging out with junior high boys and being silly. I don't want to say that I was cool.....but I was just old enough that parents believed I wouldn't kill their children. And just young enough that the students wanted to hang out with me because they knew it was going to be silly fun.
I'm now morphing over into more of the "dad" figure. I'm as old as a lot of my students parents....or close. I'm still immature, but people just attribute that to the job I have. I think the roll I'm playing in students lives has changed from "you're a crazy young guy" to "you're more of a mentor".
I heard Duffy Robbins (youth ministry guru) talk about this once. He said he started youth ministry as this young guy who he couldn't believe parents let their children go on trips with. Then as he had children of his own he became the father figure to the teens. He's now at a point where there are younger youth leaders who really take charge and he's more of the grandfatherly patriarch figure to teens. They come to him to hang out and spend time and seek counsel.
Time moves on. Things change. Some things stay the same. I love what I do. I know that I'm where I need to be. I'm just realizing who I am is changing....and that's OK too.
Two weeks ago we had a guest pastor at church. He taught on Ephesians 4:1-16.
There are times when people say things that you already know, but you need to have someone say them out loud for you to acknowledge them. The youth convention I went to in early March was much like that. Lots of things I knew, but I needed to hear them said out loud. Seems like I've been hearing a lot of that lately.
So anyway Toby (the pastor) focused on 4:4. And within that one line hammered home the idea that YOU were called. Not just the elders, pastors, deacons, evangelists, etc. That wasn't lost on me as I teach that regularly to students.
He went on to say that pastors, elders, etc. are there to equip us to then perform our calling. So I then had to ask myself if I'm truly equipping. Am I? Am I putting the tools into students hands?
When David went to fight Goliath....he turned down the kings armor because it didn't fit. He could fight with that crazy stuff that he'd never used before and wasn't tailored for him. But he also didn't go into battle empty handed. He equipped himself first. The Bible says he took his staff in his hand, went to the stream and got 5 stones and put them in his shepherd's pouch and then has his sling.
Am I putting the right tools in my students hands to equip them to face the giants in their lives? I want to believe I am. How can I be better? Am I also putting things in their hands that they just don't need? They're going into battle and I'm putting a party blower and a snow shovel in their hand too? Am I equipping in a healthy way?
He also said that a pastors job is to shepherd. To protect and guide my flock. In this area I feel like I do well...or as well as my flock allows me to. I feel that teenagers are the flock that intentionally ignores the shepherds voice. They know the shepherds voice, but choose to say, "I know this is right, but it doesn't make me happy." If anything I want to be overly protective of my flock....as my flock walks boldly toward the edge of a cliff.
Note: The pastor didn't say all those things about me badly equipping....I did. Also know that I'm not doubting my calling, I just want to be better at what I do.
Over the years I've pretty much given up on buying any youth curriculum that's out there. I know there is some good material, but it's just too much work. I'm a big believer that what works for you won't necessarily work for me. I've been to so many conference and read so many books and heard "how to do youth ministry". In practice it falls flat on it's face.
Here's what I've found... 1. No one knows my students better than I do. I know who they are, and what they're dealing with. Stock curriculum just doesn't do justice to my kids.
2. Warren is different. What works in California, or New York, or pretty much everywhere....probably won't work here. My students just aren't dealing with the same things that students elsewhere are.
So even when I do have curriculum, I have to change questions or re-work stuff so that it works with my students. It's basically more work than it's worth. And to be honest, just teaching from the Bible is much more effective and worth while. Getting kids into God's word is way more important.
SOOOOO anyway...I rarely ever buy pre-processed programming. However I did get a book for my Sunday School class. Actually I got a few books in an old series that Group put out. They've been really good. We've really enjoyed them. I've had to re-word some of the questions, and asked questions that aren't there. No biggie. It's been worth it.
However this past week I came across THE WORST QUESTION EVER. The lesson was on our priorities. What is the focus of our attention. Are our priorities God's priorities. For most of us that's just not true. So are you ready for this? Toward the end of the lesson this question was there: "What would be different if everyone used God's priorities?"
Are you serious? What would be different? What WOULDN'T be different? The end of poverty, the end of materialism, the end of violence.....basically heaven would be here on earth if everyone used God's priorities. How ridiculous. What would be different. UGH! Come on people think before you write!
Every year the area youth pastors have done a weekend retreat at a camp not far from here. It's a lot of fun, and has spawn some amazing ministry opportunities. The last two years as a fun activity we've done a "Talent Night" on Saturday night. Just a way for kids to do goofy stuff or serious stuff or show off a bit. Some of the kids have amazing talents we didn't know about.
So this past February we had our retreat. On Saturday evening at dinner our food coordinator told me that after worship I should send the kids up to the dining hall and she'd have big bowls of pudding laid out for them. So after worship I did what she told me to do. I told everyone there was pudding laid out and they should go eat it. Little did I know that in the mean time there was a change made and there were different snacks laid out for the students.
So we get back and some kids are filing over to me to do some last minute sign ups for the talent show. I'm semi-MCing the event from the back of the room at the sound board. One of those students is one of my kids...Kevin. I don't think anything of it. Kevin is normally pretty quiet...but it seems that when we get to the retreat a switch is flicked in his brain and he becomes incredibly outgoing and vocal.
So I'm letting everyone know who goes where and we finally get to Kevin. He stands up and lets everyone know that he's going to do a free-style rap based one....NO PUDDING. He's angry that I told him there was pudding and there wasn't any...because he really likes pudding.
He then proceeds to bust a rap that is not amazing. If you talk to Kevin today, he'll tell you that it wasn't very good. However it was one of those moments on a teen retreat where everyone got behind it because it was so bad. It became the "cool thing". Everyone kept saying "Blame it on The Aaron. UHHH"
I submit for your viewing pleasure Kevin's Pudding rap in it's entirety. I would like to point out ahead of time that I muted his mic at the very end because he clearly had nothing left. Prepare yourself....it's not really good and might not even make sense to you.
So the retreat is over and every is talking about this Pudding Rap.....for weeks.
At the time we didn't know that one of the girls had videoed the whole thing. So when she posted it on YouTube and linked it for me, we flipped out! The madness continued!
So I told Kev that I was going to try and redeem his Rap a bit. I've been thinking about how to go about doing that.
The first thing I did was ripped the audio from the video. Problem one arose here. I'm now using the audio from a video shot in a really big room with lots of crowd noise. Not a good starting point.
Step two was finding a program to work in. To be honest I haven't worked enough in most modern editing software to be comfortable. So I played for 1/2 hour with a program that really wasn't designed to do what I was asking it to do.....but found that I could make it work.
Then I started cutting up the audio I had into little snippets. This was also hard because any little section with bleed or crowd noise couldn't be used. I had to get just the right little clip. I then started looking for sounds. I didn't know what I was looking for exactly....guitars? orchestra hits? gongs? bass? I just knew I'd find something. Here too was a problem because it needed to be in the right format so the program I was using could edit it easily enough.
Then it was a lot of cutting and pasting...finding loops and using making them fit. Because of the program I was using, and the quality of the audio my hands were tied. But after WAY too much time messing around with this....it's done.
We took teens to Pittsburgh two weeks ago to work for World Vision's Distribution Center there and I put it on the mix for the trip. That was big reveal to students.
Breakfast went long with some friends. Lunch was long with friends. Dinner was long with friends. Each was quality. And therapeutic.
