I've been thinking (and it hurts)

I have been in a thinking mood for a few months now about youth ministry. I have gone back to the drawing boards to recreate the foundations of the way that I do ministry. Which made me think of one question: What is it, exactly, that we want students to look like when they leave?

This has been a tough question to answer specifically. Of course we want them to look like Jesus, but what characteristics does that entail? Reading the bible daily? Well that is a good thing to do, but if not accompanied by the right heart, it is useless. Praying every morning before school? That is also a good thing, if done right. What if they don't have a proper perspective on what prayer is? (Self-centered rantings about what we want God to do)

So I have been asking myself, not what actions I want to see them do, but about what character I want to see come about in their life. There is a church in the area and their youth pastor is not called a youth pastor, they use the term, "Student Journey Designer." I think that is a good fit as to what we are trying to accomplish as youth pastors. We are trying to design a pathway for students to walk down that leads to a life devoted to Christ.

So all that said, I read an amazing part of this book, Spirit of the Disciplines: Dallas Willard:

"The general human failing is to want what is right and important, but at the same time not to commit to the kind of life that will produce the action we know to be right and the condition we want to enjoy. This is the feature of human character that explains why the road to hell is paved with good intentions. We intend what is right, but we avoid the life that would make it reality.

The Sermon on the Mount is not a set of principles to be obeyed apart from identification with Jesus Christ. The Sermon on the Mount is a statement of the life we will live when the Holy Spirit is getting His way with us...

...No one ever says, "If you want to be a great athlete, go vault eighteen feet, run the mile in under four minutes," or "If you want to be a great musician, play the Beethoven violin concerto. Instead we advise the young artist or athlete to enter a certain kind of overall life, one involving deep associations with qualified people as well as rigorously scheduled time, and diet, and activity for the mind and body.

...What would you tell someone who aspired to live well in general? If we are wise we would tell them to approach life with this same general strategy. So if we wish to follow Christ - and to walk in the easy yoke with him- we will have to accept his overall way of life as our way of life totally. Then, and only then, we may reasonably expect to know by experience how easy is the yoke and how light the burden.

We cannot behave "on the spot" as he [Christ] did and taught if in the rest of our time we live as everybody else"


Spirit of the Disciplines, Dallas Willard. p7-8