Technology, Theology & Ministry
This morning an experiment began.
Our theme for the month of September is “Creation” and tonight at youth group we talked about our Christian responsibility to care for creation. Often it can seem quite daunting to think about how a single individual can help care for the planet…so tonight we ended middle school and high school youth group with a challenge: keep all your trash this week.
I watched the series premiere of FlashForward this afternoon – and I’m very hopeful that this is going to be a really great TV series. Here is the premise in a nutshell: for 2 minutes and 17 seconds, the entire world blacked out and gets a glimpse of their future. Obviously – once the 2 minutes and 17 seconds are up, the world is in mass chaos, people are dead, injured and it seems that everyone had a flash forward to the exact same moment in time about 6 months in the future.
Already there are some major issues as some people see themselves in relationships with different people, some don’t have any flash forwards (does that mean they are dead in 6 months) and others are now beginning to try and piece together how this could have happened. And for you Losties out there, there is one scene in the show where you can see a billboard advertising for Oceanic Airlines. Whether that means there is some sort of crossover to Lost, or ABC just did it for fun…who knows.
I’ve had a chance to flip through a couple books recently, and wanted to share them with you. Jason Boyett is not a professional theologian, but he does live in Amarillo, TX (I’ll have to forgive him for that one…). He’s written a series of “Pocket Guide” books that are pretty clever. I mean, I can’t tell you how many times in my ministry this year, I’ve been asked a random question about the afterlife or saints, and thought to myself, “Dang! If only there was a simple, pocket-sized guide to the afterlife I could flip through to find the answer…”
Enter Jason Boyett and his Pocket Guide series of books.
This past week, I had the privilege of working together with the Youth Council to make an important decision for our youth ministry program. I had recommended changing something that I soon found out was probably one of the church’s biggest “sacred cows.” I felt fairly strongly about my recommendation, had good theological reasons behind it, and was hoping that the change could come about.
There were some who were supportive – others who did not want to see the change happen. What I found were people who had very strong personal opinions about this issue. I told them that it’s great they were so passionate about it; better to have passionate people than folks who couldn’t care less what you’re doing.
So we met as a Youth Council to make the decision and I was able to lead the group through a Group Discernment process, something which I was given by my Spiritual Director. I was a bit ambivalent about the process, having never led something like this before, but the end result was amazing. What happened in the room and between everyone present could only be explained by the Spirit’s guidance and direction.
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