The Cube - a youth leader's dream

The second series of 'The Cube' has been on Sunday nights for a few weeks now and proves compulsive viewing as Phillip Schofield tries to encourage contestants to take it in turns to try and 'beat the cube' and win £250,000 (so far unsuccessfully).

The game is simple. Complete a number of challenges, each one taking them nearer to that jackpot. The challenges are made up of different games to test the challenger and they have to decide whether or not to walk away with the money they've earned or to risk everything to 'beat the cube'.

As I sit and watch this most weeks with my family, I can't help thinking two things:

1. Was the programme written by youth leaders? I've certainly tried many of these challenges with different young people over the years.

2. If we haven't done so already, we should be using these games! The challenges are perfect for fun ways of engaging young people who attend youth groups and clubs each week.

As someone who is always looking for new ways of engaging teenagers, this format is great. I am sure I will not be the first leader to stage a 'The Cube' night, as we invite the young people to take the different challenges including emptying a box of balls in 10 seconds and stepping over a series of beams while blindfolded.

The great thing about these challenges are that they are mostly very simple, which makes them simple to emulate.

The games also could be adapted to make them team challenges and so foster an atmosphere of co-operation and cheering each other on.

As a close for such an evening, it would be great to get the young people to think about the risks they take and how this can be motivated by greed if we're not careful.

Well that's just a few of my thoughts on this ready-to-use resource from ITV!

Do let me know how you use it.

Andy

The X Factor

Our television screens are loaded once again with competitions: have you got the X factor come dancing you're fired?

We're told the competition has never been stronger, that this year is better than ever, that only one can win. The desperation in each of the contestants heart-felt stories and testimonies show that 'this is it' for them as they express how they have 'waited my entire life' for this moment. Life is left hanging on a score or an opinion or a wave of a finger fired. The reality is only one can win; the rest, by default, fail.

Whilst fun to watch, I can't help wondering whether these kinds of programmes make us more judgemental as a nation. How quickly I find myself watching and deciding that an act is no good before they've even really started.

All too often I meet people who feel they don't measure up to much, that they wish they were more like someone else they know. We do young people a disservice if we tell them they can be anyone they want to be. The reality is all too clear from these programmes - you can't. What you can be is all that God created you to be and the promise of life in all its fullness if we follow His path for our lives.

Now that's an exciting route to take, where there's no fear of being judged, of not measuring up because each of us is unique and so is God's plan for each of us.

As we disciple young people, we need to be helping them to discover God's blueprint for their life. There's something very special about those moments when a young person discovers a bit more of why God made them they way they are, and they are given a fresh boost of life as a result.

Competition is good, indeed research suggests that boys in particular need it to help stimulate growth, but not when it is at the cost of self esteem.

The reality is that there is the X factor in each of us, if the X factor is something special that sets us apart from everyone else. The challenge is to realise that this special something is no better or worse than the next person's, as it's always unique and personal. It is exactly this X factor that shows us why God made us. We are His gift to the world, at this time, in this place and there is no one like us.

You're hired!

Andy

Sophia Network Theology E-course

Over recent years there has been a good increase in the number of women involved in youth ministry and particularly as youth pastors/full time leaders. However, as I travel around I discover that a significant number of these women are convinced of their call to this leadership role yet find it difficult to articulate it theologically.

For this reason from the beginning of October, the Sophia Network are running an eight-week theology e-course to help all of us, both men and women, get to grips with what the Bible says about men and women.

If you sign up for the e-course, each week you'll be emailed some passages to read and a number of questions to think about, and then there'll be a chance to discuss them on Facebook in a closed group for those signed up. You could get together with friends to do the material, and then post your thoughts and comments for others to share. There'll be plenty of opportunity to ask questions, disagree, wrestle with theology and hopefully gain some insight.

You can sign up on the sophia network website http://blog.sophianetwork.org.uk.

Enjoy! Ruth

Ok, it's confession time. I have always loved the start of the new school year. From a very young age I've loved the meeting up with friends after the summer break, I've loved the onset of autumn and the prospect of woolly jumpers and thick scarves. But most of all I've loved the opportunity for ... new stationery. The joy of a new pen and notebooks yet to be written in cannot be underestimated, and many years on that joy remains the same! (I know, I need to get out more). There's something about that blank notebook that holds so much potential - thoughts yet to be had, stories yet to be written, reflections yet to be reflected.

Over the summer I've been reading some of Donald Miller's work, and particularly his book A Million Miles in a Thousand Years. In it he reflects on the experience of having his biography turned into a feature film. What caused him the most concern was that the film producers wanted to adapt a lot of his story (when I say adapt, read invent new stuff) because it just didn't contain enough drama to be turned into a film that people would watch.

Moving on from those thoughts he asks what might our lives be like if we think of them as stories - or for our organisations or churches rather than having a mission statement, we have a storyline? He talks about the fact that no-one ever sets out thinking that their greatest dream in life is to be the owner of a Volvo, but actually that is often the height of excitement for many of our lives.

This got me thinking about what kind of story it is that we're inviting young people into. Kenda Creasy Dean says that if young people are to grow in consequential faith there are a number of things that need to be in their a story:

1) a God worthy of belief
2) a community to belong to
3) a hope for the future

As we head into this new term with a blank page ahead of us and a story to be written, what will that story contain both for us and those we lead?

Write well! Ruth

A vital lesson about team from Fabio

No one is going to convince me that the England World Cup squad was not full of top quality footballers. The skills present amongst that group of 22 players are brilliant and show some of the quality of talent that there is in this country.

Yet we all know what a disappointing summer it has been. Here we can learn a very important lesson from manager, Fabio Capello: simply putting highly skillful players together on a field does not make an effective, victorious team. There needs to be much more to it than that if they are going to win.

Similarly when we think of those who work with us in our youth ministry, it is not enough to simply bring together energetic, keen and skilled leaders and expect great things to happen almost automatically. For a team to work we need to not just concentrate on the goal but learn how we can best work together, support each other and share the task.

It can be difficult persuading leaders that they need to meet together as a team to reflect on how the ministry is developing, to discuss ways the team could work more effectively and also to grapple with difficult issues, but we ignore these things to the detriment of the young people we serve.

The effectiveness of our ministry should not equal the talents of our individual leaders, rather it should equal the synergy of our leaders working together single-mindedly plus the blessing and guidance of God, poured out when his people are united.

Andy

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Rabbits in headlights

I was speaking to a group of young people this week about David and Goliath and I used an illustration of rabbits in headlights. If you drive along a country road at night and you catch a rabbit crossing the road, it will tend to stand still, almost as if it is mesmerised by the car headlights. Why don't they keep hopping across the road instead of waiting for their impending collision?

The point I was making to the young people was how the Israelites were like this when they saw the size of Goliath, the nine and a half foot tall giant. They were paralysed by what they saw, whereas David walks in with his confidence in the living God. So instead of waiting for the impending beating from the giant, he knows that his God is greater than any giant.

This got me thinking as to whether some churches are a bit like these rabbits in how they view young people: they are leaving our churches and there is nothing we can do about it.

However, if we view the situation through the eyes of David, with his confidence in the living God, how different might it look? With God all things are possible (Matthew 19:26).

God doesn't want the young people to be turning away from our churches either so we have to walk with our confidence in him, that we can find a way to stop the trend, to work out new ways of reaching young people, even if it means defining new ways of doing youth ministry in our churches.

If we don't, our churches will experience the inevitable fate of the rabbit.

Andy

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Lord Sugar shows us how to invest in young people

Question: What do you do when you have devised a successful TV format, delivered seven popular series of the show and are now looking to take it to a new level?
Answer: replace the adults with young people.
When I heard that this was what the BBC was planning to do with the BAFTA award-winning show, The Apprentice, I wondered how it was going to come across, and whether it would be' dumbed down' for young people.
Having watched the first two episodes, it is with some relief that I can report that the twist to the format is working. There are a few elements which are obviously for the purpose of TV entertainment, such as making them all wear business suits (some of which seem to be on the large size, making the young people look even younger!) but the challenges seem to be typical of the programme and they haven't been made easier for teenagers.
As I watched this week I couldn't help thinking that Lord Sugar was showing us how to work with young people effectively. He gave each one respect, didn't talk down to them (any more than he usually does to the candidates anyway!) and he expected them to be able to do the task he asked them to do.
In some ways, the young people come across better than the usual candidates as they don't have so much ego or arrogance, and even show much more openness to working as a team and listening to each other's contributions than the adult candidates sometimes do.
What would happen if church leaders took on a group of teenagers for a season and asked them to help with their leadership tasks? By this I mean giving them genuine leadership responsibility, not simply asking them to take the collection in the service or to give the reading. I think we would discover that the young people we have, no matter how few, would surprise us by their natural abilities, their willingness to learn and the speed at which they develop and grow in confidence.
It must be time for us to invest in young people as leaders while they have these teenage traits rather than waiting for them to be ten or twenty years older, where, let's face it, everything takes a little longer to process.

Andy

starting a Growing Leaders – Youth edition course

I'm just starting to run a Growing Leaders – Youth Edition course in Leamington, where I now live. I'm running it with a youth pastor at another church in the town. Last weekend we had our first session, away at a great venue, Barnes Close in Bromsgrove.
We've got seven young people taking part, coming from five different churches in the area, and I am so excited! Excited because these young people are all really looking forward to growing as leaders. There was a real buzz amongst the group, who didn't all know each other before the weekend, and a sense of commitment and desire to dive into the course and not miss out on anything that God might want to teach them.
As leaders we came away buzzing too. Enthusiasm seems to be infectious and none of us can wait until we meet again next month for session two.
What impressed me was how each person was willing to get involved with whatever they were asked to do and how quickly the group bonded and started to support each other.
One of the sessions of the day looks at Jesus' model of leadership being that of a servant and it was great to see how this teaching was immediately worked out through the young people offering to serve each other at the lunch table and offering to pour each other drinks throughout the rest of the day.
For many churches the thought of running the course may seem too much or that there are not enough young people in the church to make up a group. This is why we offered the course to churches across the area and actually it makes the potential for kingdom growth in our town even more exciting. Now there will be five churches seeing the benefit of investing in our young people, not just one church. Hopefully this will be contagious and more young people from these churches will want to take part in future courses, but maybe that's just me getting carried away a little, we've only had session one!

Andy

How do you get to the next level?

One of the opportunities that arises from being at CPAS is being able to encourage and support churches as they seek to develop their youth ministry, whether this is well established or fledgling. For sure, most of the time youth groups start because the church sees an unmet need in their community, whether it is young people hanging around in the graveyard or whether it's suddenly finding a dozen young people attending the Alpha course (which happened in the church I am a member of here in Leamington).
The challenge, however, is so what do we do now? A group may have formed, people may be coming, but is this all there is to it? How do we develop the work and take it to the next level of community, of unity, of spirituality?
There are many useful areas we can look at, including seeking God for vision and direction for the ministry, developing our leaders who work with the young people and providing guidelines for how youth groups can operate safely. These are all essential if we are to develop what we do, but I wonder if these all miss out a vital component.
This component is how the rest of the church and young people relate. We have tended to find adults who are willing, if not keen, to work with young people and let them get on with it, but what is needed is a greater awareness and understanding. For young people to feel like they belong to the church they don't only need a group where they can grow and feel safe (belong), they also need opportunities to contribute to the life of the church and to use the talents and gifts that God gives them, just as we all do.
So the challenge for me is how do we help the local church fully welcome young people into the community of faith, where we all grow together, recognise we all have something to contribute (regardless of our age) and we can inspire one another.

Andy

'Awkward'.

'Awkward', is what I heard a radio presenter say after playing Cheryl Cole's latest single, 'Parachutes'. He was basically implying that Cheryl must feel embarrassed by the words to her latest song due to the break-up of her marriage to footballer, Ashley Cole.
Now my eight year old daughter loves Cheryl Cole and is really keen to buy her album when she's saved up enough pocket money so I've been thinking about what kind of role model is she and is she someone who I would want my kids listening to.
I've only heard a few songs from the album as they've been on the radio or on TV and it's a fascinating insight into the life and soul of Cheryl. The album was recorded and released following Ashley Cole's previous infidelity and it seems that Cheryl put this out as a public way of saying that she's committed to the marriage, despite her husband's wanderings. In today's society I find that impressive and a wonderful breath of fresh air.
If we are talking to young people about relationships then the song lyrics to some of these songs could be really useful: 'Fight for This Love' looks at commitment through adversity, 'Parachutes' is about support and trust, and '3 Words' is about how powerful the words 'I love you' are.
Unfortunately for Cheryl Cole, she is discovering that in a relationship it takes two people to share in this kind of commitment to make it work and she is now under immense pressure to separate from Ashley. I heard on the news last week how she was being advised that 'staying with him could have an adverse effect on her career'; how can that be a reason for splitting up?! But then I guess that's the world of celebrity. And there have been countless vox pops shown of people in the street encouraging her to ditch him.
I find myself being impressed by Cheryl. Life must be incredibly difficult at the moment and you could see this on her face as she performed at The Brits the other week. But if her songs are any sign of her feelings and commitment, then I think that she could be a great role model for young people today. And, yes, sometimes life is 'awkward'.

Andy

Reflection on The Brits

I make watching The Brits award show an essential part of my annual viewing schedule as I find it useful in watching popular culture trends, keeping up to date with music culture and seeing who are some of the key influencers of the young people I work with. I also have a passion for music!
This year did not disappoint. There was the usual array of bizarre clothing and hairstyles, typical rock'n'roll antics and language (carefully muted by ITV1) and, of course, the range of "thank yous" from the different award winners. Musicians play music for a reason - they're good at it, we really shouldn't expect them to be able to make speeches!
I am intrigued by Lily Allen's song, The Fear, which she opened up the show with. I have thought for a while how the lyrics are an accurate portrayal of popular culture, how there is a desire to be rich and famous regardless of what the cost is, and yet how this cost leads to losing a sense of personal identity or self esteem, of being 'taken over by The Fear'.
It seemed to me that this was a theme running throughout the ceremony. Lady Gaga was almost overwhelmed with her 3 awards, by the third she seemed to not understand why anyone would have voted for her. Yet her performance was flamboyant and unusual. I felt that she was living out Lily's song as we watched her journey through the evening.
The whole thing was hosted by Peter Kay, who tried to keep all the celebrities in their place, with plenty of quick quips and refusing to double kiss! An anti-celebrity celebrity.
With young people wanting to be famous more than anything else in life, it seems the only way forward is further loss of personal identity and self esteem. So how can we tackle this with the young people we know? The challenge is not easy or simple but it must start by helping them discover who they were meant to be. This means taking them back to the Creator, realising how he made them and the plans he has for them. Helping them discover what grace really looks like, how awesome it is and how releasing & empowering it is. The other thing we need to do is to give them opportunities to use the talents and gifts that God has given them. That way they learn to see how unique they are and learn what their part in God's kingdom is.
Hopefully by doing these kinds of things they will discover what their personal identity looks like and they will love who that person is. Easy to say.

Andy

How do we reach out to the 'Skins' generation?

So 'Skins' is back on our TV screens and teenagers and students all over the country will be once again rushing back to see the latest antics of the lives of the sixth form students in Bristol. Now in series 4, when it first started I found 'Skins' very awkward viewing. As a youth minister I think it is something vital that we need to watch because those we serve are watching it, but I wrestled with the content as being entertainment, so dipping in every so often seems to be enough.
'Skins' reminds me of a film I watched at the end of last year called 'Kidulthood', which came out in 2006. I watched this film because a 17 year old lad in my youth group said it was great and he felt it was a good example of what life really is like for teenagers. I found it really uncomfortable viewing as I watched a young girl at the start of the film being bullied so much that she chooses to end her life. The result gives the rest of the school a day off and the film follows how their day falls apart.
I found myself thinking if teenagers really are like this, we as the Church are miles away from really having a significant impact on them and how much we need to change to be useful.
But I also thought that I don't think all young people are really like those portrayed in 'Skins' or 'Kidulthood' but they would like to be. And that's the point. Our challenge is how can we help young people see positive alternatives as to who to aspire to be like?
We need to help young people develop positive ways of dealing with the difficulties that life sometimes face, not choosing ways which help them opt out or run away from the problems.

Andy

The inspiration of young people

Last weekend Ruth and I met a small of group of young people who are just over half way through the Growing Leaders Youth Edition course. What a great group of people they were! Here was a group of young people who were passionate to see God use them and excited about where he might lead them.
That experience has given me fresh motivation this week to keep looking at how God uses me and where he might want to lead me and I often find that this happens to me when I talk to young people. They are a real inspiration as they are not tarnished with cynicism or disappointment in what Church could, and should, be like. I think this is why Paul told Timothy to set an example to all believers about what it means to follow Jesus (1 Timothy 4:12). We could really benefit from listening to the young people in our churches, hearing their stories and being inspired by their passion for God.
Andy

Off to Dorset!

I know everyone says this, but I really can't believe how quickly the days are flying past - we'll soon be preparing for next Christmas at this rate! Here we are at the end of another week heading into the weekend. Andy and I are busy in the office doing a couple of last minute bits of preparation before we leave the snowy climes of Warwick for hopefully a sunny Dorset. This weekend we're leading 24 hours away for a youth group as part of their Growing Leaders - Youth Edition course. We're really looking forward to being with them, hearing their stories of how they're getting on with the course and the hopes that they have for leadership in their schools, communities and church. We'll fill you in when we return!

Whatever you're doing this weekend, have a great time!
Ruth