I had the unique opportunity during my college days to work for a couple of summers at an enormous Procter & Gamble paper mill near my hometown. The factory was an huge operation. On one end of the massive complex, loggers would deposit their semitrailers loaded with felled trees from the northeastern Pennsylvania forests. Out the other end would come a wide array of Procter & Gamble products ranging from Bounty paper towels to Pampers disposal diapers. The process this company went through to turn timber into paper was amazing. The logs were made into pulp, and the pulp was then turned into an assortment of paper products.

I have often wondered about this process as an illustration of local church youth ministry. At one end we receive undeveloped and immature early adolescents – called junior highers. Out the other end of our “factory” comes the finished product – high school graduates. Of course, I understand that this analogy breaks down in places. The natural resource we work with is the lives of individual teenagers (along with their families), which makes our task of molding hearts and lives vastly different than the inanimate process of turning wood into paper. Yet I do believe that we must begin to think intentionally about our product as well as the process by which we turn out graduates from our ministries. (more…)

The Lord gave me a unique opportunity a few weeks ago. On a recent flight I sat next to a young man who was on his way home for the holidays following his first semester at a well-known university. Justin was one of the most outgoing and engaging young people I have ever met. Almost instantly after he sat down in the window seat in our row, he began asking me the typical “airplane questions”: Where are you headed? Where are you from? What do you do? I answered that I work with church youth workers and teenagers and that I was headed to a church to speak to a group of students and their adult youth workers.

His response startled me, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. “Why bother?” he asked before he launched into his story of how he had grown up in an evangelical church and had attended Sunday School and youth group meetings from a very early age. He was quite anxious to inform me that all of his church teachers and youth workers were inconsistent and unreliable and that his first semester at the university had demonstrated to him that Christianity is false. Justin’s brief college experiences had caused him to believe that his Christian upbringing was nothing more than make-believe, feel-good, historical stories that were made up by and for people who need that kind of emotional crutch. (more…)

I am always amazed and astonished by the Biblical story of the birth of Christ in Luke 2:1–39. I love to read it at Christmastime, plus I find myself reading it several other times each year. I love that account of Mary and Joseph’s trip to Bethlehem for the birth of the Christ Child. Humanly speaking, I am saddened that the birth of our Lord—the King of Kings, Lord of Lords, and Creator of the universe—took place in a manger and not in a grand and gorgeous palace. I can intellectually appreciate the role that prophecy played in that location, but my heart hurts because of the place that the world had for Him.

It is for that reason that I tend to look at Luke’s account of this event as a masterful three-act drama that culminates with the response by the shepherds to the angelic pronouncement of the birth of Christ. Imagine with me the unfolding of this magnificent production. (more…)

“That we henceforth be no more children, tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the sleight of men, and cunning craftiness, whereby they lie in wait to deceive” (Ephesians 4:14).

We certainly have had strange weather lately where I live in northeastern Pennsylvania. Due to a strong November windstorm last night, most of the leaves have now fallen off the trees in my yard. This morning I noticed the results of another strong storm we had this past spring, almost seven months ago. You see, one day last March, a spring storm carried my family’s garbage cans down the block with the contents spilling out and blowing all over our neighborhood. Now that the leaves are down, I realized again that there are still plastic bags higher than I can reach in the trees in front of our house.

God’s Word uses the vivid illustration of being “carried about with every wind of doctrine” as an apt depiction of the importance of teaching doctrine and theology in our churches. The Biblical objective of local church ministry is to produce people with the spiritual maturity for a life of service for Christ. (more…)

Most readers are probably familiar with the hit television program Extreme Makeover: Home Edition where Ty Pennington and his team of designers and builders find a family that needs help and within an incredibly short period of time actually build them a completely new house. I’ve often wondered if some of our churches could use an “extreme makeover” as well. Are many of our churches so out of touch and irrelevant that it’s time to rebuild? I’m not necessarily referring to the buildings, but rather to our overall approach to ministry. I’ve been wondering if Extreme Makeover: Church Edition might indeed become necessary. (more…)