Importance: 10%
The
Related notes:
- Seven Practices of Healthy Youth Ministry
- Notes on Fundraising, Travel, Risk Management and Logistics
- Scaffolding Dance as Parents
- Supportive Adults
- Notes from Partnering with Parents
- Notes from The communal shape of the Christian Life
Dr. Nafzger Bible study
Stranger in a familiar land
Every time we study scripture we should know where we are in the big picture story of the Bible
People without a story?
- We are familiar with biblical episodes but we don’t always see how they all fit together
- We tend to think the over arching story is all about me not about the people of God as a whole
- There are other competing stories that are compelling
- Materialism
- Progressivism - always getting better and moving forward
- Pessimism - everything is always getting worse
the Christian story
- Creation ⬇️
- A good creation goes bad ❌
- God forms his people and sends them
- Jesus comes and redeems ✝️
- Sends his people out again waiting for Jesus ➡️
- Jesus come back and sets it all right ⬇️
⬇️❌➡️✝️➡️⬇️
None of the arrows are going up. We are never going toward God but instead God is always coming to us. God does all the work of us coming home
Arrows are always going forward not back. We look back to who God is but we are always looking forward as our job as the people of God
We fit today in the fifth arrow pointing forward to Jesus second coming
Jesus mission has a church not the church a mission. Jesus chose to have a church for his mission
Ways to tell the story
Battle between god and satan is one way to tell the story
A broken creation God fixes is another way
A dysfunctional family that is reconciled
A society that is mortally sick with sin but that has been healed by the great physician
Focus
A people who are exiled but have been sought out and will be brought home
Home is wherever God is with us Through his promises and his word and his sacraments
We are citizens of a different land strangers her in this world
A way to think about preaching today is like prophets preaching to exiles. Because we live in a morally, socially, and culturally distant from us.
Book: Cadence of Home - Bruggmann- we are exiles in the world today
Our world is increasingly like the church in the first century than any of the other centuries before
It is then helpful for us think about what it was like for God’s people in exile before
Psalm 137 the lament of people in exile in Babylon
To be in exile is to be longing for home
So as Christians we should think of going through our lives a little homesick
The feeling of homesickness: unstable, out of place, isolated, lonely
Thinking and Responding like Exiles
We accept the fact that we are not in charge of where we are or how the world works around us
For a long time Christianity has at least had a seat at the table of society in the west but that is quickly going away
This reminded us that we are exiles and that we are always at the mercy of God
We recognize the danger of a preoccupation with self
When we think about ourselves in a time of exile we end up having a pitty party with ourselves
Psalm 137 moves from lament to focus on God
We acknowledge that we feel the exile more than our youth. They don’t feel the loss of what they didn’t grow up knowing.
Just like the children of Jews in Babylonian exile didn’t know a different life
How we live as Exiles
Daniel’s Unrequested Vocation Daniel 1:1-6 Carried off into exile
He was given a new name to establish a new identity that is based in Babylonian mythology
Forced to serve a pagan king that is in a nation that destroyed his home.
How would we respond to this?
Daniel’s four fold model
- Served the pagan nation with respect. Daniel 1:8-21 asked to not defile himself with the kings food.
- Stayed faithful when he was pressured to conform. Daniel 6:1-23 Daniel in the lions den. He remembered his name “God is my judge”.
- Sought help from (and helped) his fellow believers. Daniel 2:1-24 faced a life or death challenge and went to his fellow believers and asked for prayer. Bonhoeffer - “the closest you are to another believer is when you pray for them”
- Daniel confessed the sins of his people. Daniel 9:1-19 reads Isaiah and realizes that they are in exile because of sin and confesses on behalf of himself and the whole people of Israel.
Rom 12:17 - we disagree differently. No evil for evil
Rom 12:2 - not conformed to world but renewed minds
Rom 12:15 - join together when the good and the hard experiences of our fellow believers
There is an appropriate time to confess our corporate failures as an honest witness.
Rom 12:9 - abhor what is evil
We are baptized to have an identity that sends us out into the culture with the knowledge that our sins are forgiven with nothing to lose and a sense of subversive freedom to love those who hate me
Other exiles Ester and Joseph
Vocation - the word means calling. God calls us his own and then calls us to love one another. But we have different responsibilities for loving different people.
Main categories of vocation:
- family - child sibling, parent, spouse
- church - church worker, child of God, fellow believer
- Society - citizen, neighbor, volunteer witness
- Workplace - colleagues, student, classmate, employer, employer
Some we choose but most are given
Since the 1950s youth ministry has been a ministry of influence to get them to do something. The relationship ends up being a means to and ends.
This ends up not actually relating to people at all but just trying to get them to do stuff.
Because if our relating to people is a means to an end we end up not really having real relationships with people that last.
We need to relate to them in order to relate as the end goal. For the sake of actually having a relationship
God related to us like this. He restores us and forgives us so that we can have a relationship that’s the goal not us doing a particular thing
Bonhoeffer - “place sharing“ - a way to think about our relationships within the church
- you share joy
- Suffering
- Dreams
- Decisions
- Conversations
- Questions
- Grief
- Forgiveness
Book: how to know a person -
Need to move to a companion-oriented way of doing ministry
Warning - no church worker can be a place sharer with all the people in a church or youth. There needs to be boundaries and a community of leaders
Church workers can think of themselves as a matchmaker putting youth and supportive adults together
This is a way to think about how to build community in an intentional way that encourages real community that is not just based on the work of a pastor or youth worker
Bonhoeffer - life together - A day spent together is praying, reading Scripture, singing, and table fellowship all done together Types of Table fellowship
- daily meals
- Lords supper
- Eternal feast
Ministry of holding your tongue Ministry of meekness (humility) Ministry of listening Ministry of Bearing Ministry of Proclaiming
how we respond as exiles
Four things we say when we open our mouths
- Lament (for and with them). Psalm 13
- Pain, request, confession
- Assurance - help people know that God is present with us
- Defiant Doxology - confesses that God can work a newness out of the present shambles. No matter how dark the world is or what is going on we hold onto and proclaim the promise of life, forgiveness and salvation.
- Promise - tell of all the promises of Christ
A defiant doxology: Even though .… Yet will I praise You for …..
Responding like and Exile
We are working in a world that is increasingly not like us and more against us than in the past.
Different ways to respond:
- Run from the world in fear. Circle the wagons and protect what we have and protect our own.
- Run at the world in anger. There tends to be a nobility of being angry because it means you care about something. We are tempted to warrant or promote this behavior rather than turning the other cheek.
- Run with the world in conformity. Younger people are more tempted to run with the world in conformity.
- Pursue Hospitality. Rom 12:1-2, do not be conformed to the world. Rom 12:9-18 what it looks like to live as a Christian in love. Paul talks about how to live as church but also how to respond to the world outside. This is a great section on rhythms.
What is hospitality. The Greek word is a combination of two words. Philo - love Xenia- strange. Which means love of those who are strange. That is what hospitality is it’s messy and hard.
This can start with loving the youth who are often strange. The way they talk or the things they do are often strange.
How do you love these people? Not as complicated as you may think. Based on vocation
Book: Rise of Rage
What is Rest
Rest is not inactivity but is what fills us and recharges us.
That means just sitting and doing nothing or watching tv is not rest in the true sense but is inactivity.
We are all different in what puts energy back into us, but whatever those things are should be what we prioritize for our self care.
That is what rest really is. These are the things that puts more life into us and gives us the energy to keep going. This is a gift from God and is what our sabbath rest should look like on a day off or time away from work.