Youth Story

When I was a teenager so many years ago (6), You could not have separated me from my music no matter what. I don't remember a single second in my car without the stereo blasting loud enough for the cars around me to enjoy the music with me. Teenagers today haven't changed much. If anything the music is more accessible to them than ever. Music is like an escape hatch offering a quick out during the complacent episodes of life. Teenagers are more dependent on the music than ever. People often say that the music is powerful, and its true. Music has a great deal of power in our society. Music can influence your mood, bring back memories or even give you hope for the future. Did you know the Gospel is much like music?  To the Christian teenager, the Gospel can be represented in many ways. The greatest experience I have in my life is speaking this Gospel into the lives of teenagers and watching them grab a hold of it like they would a new song on the radio. At firs...

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...

Today Mac, Christian and I decided to begin trading our NYC 2011 Swag! At the end of the night we decided to post here a picture of the items that we acquired! We have many multiples but it is important to note that we each only started out with our Tennessee Swag bags which include: a bag, a fan that lights up, a flash light, a Tennessee shirt, a regional shirt, a horn (The annoying ones), A Trevecca Lanyard, a towel, sunglasses and a headband. From there we acquired an amazing amount of items for which we have developed a point system and we want to share it with you. Here is the Official NYC TRADING POST! The Yum Cup: 20 Points Available in the Yum Center for $5.50 d Hawaiian Beaded Necklace: 100 Points (Took forever to get one) Trevecca Lanyard: 25 Points SNU VIP Lanyard: 50 Points West Virginia South Lanyard: 40 Points Tennessee Horn: 100 Points SWO Light-up Key-chain: 55 Points TNU Staff Beach Party T-Shirt Butler High School All Purpose Tool: 100 Points School giveaway from c...