Well, it's good to be with everybody. There's a few other students who aren't here yet. I'm not sure if they're not going to be here or whatever, but anyway, we're going to move along. I have for you, the syllabus, you may have been looking for these in the bookstore, but we decided that we wanted to dress them up a little bit and give these to you guys on behalf of the Youth and Ministry Institute, which you will hear a lot about if you don't like the binder you can use around. You can find one out, or I can give it to you and complete loose leaf version. Throughout the semester, we will be adding lots of things, lots of handouts, all types of stuff, and we'll go pretty much according to the flow of the syllabus, however there will be times when we change stuff, just because of the conversation it takes place. Now, I know the first thing you want to find out is, well, what really is the purpose of this course and what is the requirements? You know, what I got to do to get an A and all those kinds of things, and I really want you to know that that's not primarily what I'm concerned about. I certainly want you to do well, and you will do well. You'll do well if you're here, if you participate in the discussion, if you show just a passion to know what we can do to really effectively reach this generation, but it'll be exciting. But anyway, first page, basically the purpose of the course is this, to lay a biblical foundation, and that's an important word, a biblical foundation for the practice of Youth Ministry while equipping the students to effectively minister to today's youth. And we will examine the following areas real quickly, an introduction to Youth Ministry. And this is important because there's so many philosophies of what Youth Ministry is. Shannon was just sharing earlier with me, if I can share this a little bit, that her perspective of Youth Ministry isn't good. Her experience in two different churches has left her with a bad taste in her mouth, and there's a lot of people around the country and around the world that don't really have good experiences with what is called Youth Ministry. And in most people, if I said we'll define Youth Ministry for me, you would come up with some phrase, probably a lot of bullets, but you really wouldn't be able to clearly identify what Youth Ministry is and what it looks like. And so we're going to talk about that. Next, we're going to develop a biblical vision for Youth Ministry, always going to scripture, looking for the foundation of what it is. We're going to evaluate different Youth Ministry models. There are lots. I mean tons. There are four primary ones that the many drift out of, but we're going to look at not all of them, but the primary ones and say, which one really is biblical? What is the fruit of this one that we can use? So often we find truth in some things that don't really even look that effective, but we hold them up high. Other things we hold up high that have no truth at all. And what we're going to constantly do is try to bring it down to what is biblical, what is right, and what is most effective. And if we are biblical, then we will be right. And we will be effective. And that's kind of a scope. We're going to continue here. We'll have an introduction to youth culture. Now the first time this course was taught, it was one credit hour for four days. We met for about three or four hours. And we tried to cover everything that was in this syllabus, plus a little bit more. And so it wouldn't say things in the beginning like an introduction to youth culture, it would say youth culture. And we tried to do everything we could to teach all about youth culture, which is insane. And so now in this class, since we offer another class just on youth culture, we're just going to have an introduction, which will be basically one class period looking at the content and context of youth culture today. We're going to look extensively at building a ministry team. You'll notice in your syllabus, there's probably maybe 11 pages worth of volunteer job descriptions in here, which is really worth the price of the syllabus. We're going to look at relational youth ministry. What is it? We're going to look at skills for how do you connect to youth? How do you connect to parents? How do you help parents connect to youth and youth to parents? We're going to look at an introduction to ministry families. We're going to look at youth ministry in an electronic age. The reason we're taping this course right now is because we're in an electronic age where some of the people around the country and even the world are going to take this very course sitting in small groups watching this in video because that's the world we live in. Well, how can we take the very best of this electronic revolution and use it to more effectively reach out to youth? How will we be able to use email, instant messenger, the internet, all those wonderful things to really move forward. But then with that, you can just begin to imagine the devastating horror or what all that means from internet pornography to kids meeting people from around the world and entering into relationships that are just real bizarre. We're going to look at that pretty intensely. We're going to look at youth ministry programs, things like Sunday mornings, which is classically called Sunday school, to your typical youth group, to small groups, all those kinds of things. And then we're going to look also at skills for evaluation. How do we evaluate whether or not what we're doing is effective. And I think that's an area where many youth ministries have failed and perhaps shined why you feel like you do. It really wasn't accomplishing anything other than maybe a babysitting service. And when it wasn't fun anymore, the kids didn't come. Those kinds of things. Any comments or questions so far in terms of kind of the scope of what we're going to do? Is there anything maybe not listed there that you're like, I really hope that we were going to cover that. There's also, of course, let me highlight a couple of other courses that we have in the works now or have already been taught. One is the youth culture class, which has been taught the last two January terms. Another one is outreach and evangelism and discipleship, which was taught last fall, which was a brand new course, which is two credit hours just focusing on apologetics outreach discipleship. We'll hit on it kind of in an introductory level, but that course really expands. It's all we talk about. And there's another course coming in the spring, which is going to deal with models of family-oriented youth ministry, Mark DeVries book, family-based youth ministry, which came out maybe years ago, and really, really challenged youth ministry in general, really created a number of models that go across the board. And so we're going to look at different models and what that looks like. And so it's a good question. Other questions or comments about kind of the content where we want to go? Good. Okay. Let's look at required text. I brought all of them except one. Purpose-driven youth ministry by Doug Fields. Have you guys found these in the library? I mean, the bookstore. They should be in the library as well. The Purpose-driven youth ministry was oh good goodness. I'm thinking probably 1998, 1997, somewhere in there was written by again in Doug Fields is kind of a veteran of youth ministry. Probably at this point considered the best book ever written on youth ministry in general. You're not going to read it and agree with everything that's been written. You're not going to look at it and go, I agree 100%. You'd also realize that the paradigm he's using is in a church that's, I don't know, I'm guessing 20,000 plus members. And so for your youth group of 30, it doesn't seem like, oh, this will work. However, I believe the principles that he presents here are very transferable. And that many of you may have already looked at it, I look at it constantly. I refer back to it, almost like an encyclopedia, just to refresh my memory. Game More Insight, you use it. So this is a great book. Another book that we're going to use is brand new, and it's called Starting Right. Now, this is the first youth ministry textbook ever written. Youth Specialties has just created what this is called, a little academic line. And they have two books out, actually three books out now. And I'm going to talk about why they did this a little while later. But this is a book that we'll look at. We'll read it covered cover, but we'll read it in sections because it's kind of written that way. Great articles. If you read it, you'll see that there are people that you don't agree with theologically at all, but they have good practical theology, things that we can understand and take from them, as well as things that aren't good. And we'll be able to dialogue about that and say that doesn't seem very healthy, is it? Is it not? This will be a great book. And then the other book, which I didn't bring with me is Connecting by Larry Krab. I think it's one of the best books ever written about youth ministry. And it wasn't written for youth ministry. It was written as he was going through a real change in philosophy of ministry that the local church, if it really would begin to connect together, would really eliminate a lot of the needs for some of the, the massive amounts of counseling that are taking place. Certainly we believe in counseling. Certainly it's important, but he simply was communicating that hey, come on in. He simply was communicating that we need to learn to connect. And that book will help us connect because that's what relational youth ministry is all about. All right. You guys coming in late? Welcome. We've gone through and done the name thing a little bit. So let's take a break. We're at a good pot place to do that. That's great. We're glad you're here. We just kind of went through the scope of the course, kind of what we're going to do. Briefly, we're going to talk more with that in a second. Then the required text. Again, it's starting right by youth specialties right here, minutes, purpose driven youth ministry, and then connecting. And let's talk now about what you're going to have to do to get the grade that you want in the class. And this is important. And I will tell you this right now. I want you to be creative with the assignments I give you. The last thing I want is for people just to simply read the books, write something which we would call busy work when I was a student here, and get it done. I really want you to engage the material. I would rather you write less and put hard into it than write more simply because you think that'll give you a greater grade. And there's basically three methods of evaluation. And the first is this. We're going to read the books. The books are critical. There's one other required reading. And that's going to be something like this. Teen people, or Teen Magazine, or Entertainment Weekly, or something like that. And I'll tell you more about that in a little bit. You do that. You say that a lot in introductory class the first day. I'll tell you more later. But I'll say about that later because it's important. At the same time, the student must complete the assigned reading and write a two-page response paper reflecting on a theme from the book or an individual section of the book. Let me give an example. Starting right has four major sections. You can do in two pages kind of an overview of how effective you think the book is, or you can take one particular theme that's represented in one of the chapters or one of the sections. And just write about that. You can do the same for purpose-driven youth ministry and for connecting. What I'm looking for is something that struck you. It's new, or it's something that you're so burdened by that you just want to tell people. And so you want to write it to me. You want to make sure I know it, that I see it, that I see your conviction for it. You just desperately want people to understand how significant it is. And that's what I want you to write on. It's only two pages. But I want you to pour out your heart in those two pages what that's like. You're also at the top of your paper. Identify how much of the book that you've read. I want you to be honest there. And I'm trusting you. If you read 100%, put 100%. If you read 40%, put 40%. If you read 20%, put 20% and write about the 20% that you read. That will affect the grade you get on the paper. But I'll be able to tell if it's just something that's rolling through at the last minute. And one of the goals in a course like this is to elevate the status of youth ministry. And so you realize that we don't just come in and say, let's play around like kind of youth pastors would. We want to take it serious. And I'm going to tell you more about that later as well. Next, possibility of grades will be your research paper. And by the way, the first thing is worth 30% of your grade. This paper is worth 60%. The papers look out this way. The first assignment is about eight pages, two pages for each of the books plus the magazine article. And then this is 12 to 15 pages. And basically it's double space. You know, I can tell which font you're using and whether you added 15 pages to it because you went to that font as that big. I'll be looking for that. Here's the research papers. And I want you to be creative with these. It's 12 to 15 pages. And it's based on the topics below. However, if there's something that you're really interested in, I would love to hear you present that and then we'll go from there. Here's what they are. First is a review of youth ministry resources. If you look in the back of a youth specialties book, you'll see something like this. And what that is in the very, very fine print is all of the resources that they've now created since 1968. Now, a lot of people have a lot of different feelings about youth specialties. I'll share some of mine at different times. I will say this so. No other organization has a list of topics like that. I have my own views on a lot of curriculum on a lot of youth ministry resources. And I need to. And so do you. And somebody who's going to be in youth ministry, whether you're a mom, helping out, a volunteer or the full-time youth pastor or an intern, you need to be able to critically evaluate what's good about youth ministry resources. The purpose of this paper would be for you to pick up maybe seven to ten youth ministry resources and then do a critical review of each of those resources. Finding out what's really good and what's really bad. Is it great in terms of the practical theology but has no real biblical theological foundation? If so, where is that true? And if so, how could somebody still use the practical side of it and give it the theology? Does it make sense? I'll present different curriculum throughout the semester where you look at it and go, oh, this is really good stuff, except it didn't really use a lot of scripture. And when it did, it didn't make a whole lot of sense. There's no context. Well, would it be possible to take their great ideas for practical theology, combine that with great biblical theology and have a great product? I think it's possible. On the other side, you may get something that's so rich that's put out by the most reformed thinking organization that exists. But you look at it and you're like, I can't really use this. Well, maybe you can use it, but you've got to add something to it. How do you do that? That's what that project will be for. And the challenge with that project is this you probably have to purchase many of these resources. Or if not many do it, you could certainly use my library or somebody else's. We'll make that available. If you do want to purchase them, then we can give you a significant discount through our ability with the Youth Administry Institute to order products. Use it about 40 to 50% off of the cost. And so it would be happy to do that. Also, with that project, I would love to be instrumental in helping you pick which resources you would want to look at. You might want to look at a whole series or you might want to look at seven different books and do an overview. Does that make sense? So if you're interested in that, you need to let me know. The next paper would be Youth Ministry in an electronic age. Now I'm very, very interested in people doing both of these assignments. So when I just mentioned in this one because it helps us as a seminary really grow in understanding what people think about the resources that are available. With the electronic age presently where it is, we know that there's so much material that's being presented in so many different ways. We know that there's so many avenues for kids to be administered to that we want to help know how we can more effectively do that as well. That's what this paper would be about. Basically, what are the dangers and opportunities that exist? This paper will help identify how youth ministers can effectively use today's technology to more effectively reach today's techno-minded students. For example, my youth group at Chesterfield Presbyterian Church has a young girl who has already created a number of websites for people and for our own youth ministry. It's up and running. It's amazing what she's been able to do. She knows more about the computers than I have. My five year old one is more about the computer than I do. She's on the mouse cruise and along those little learning tree games. She's having a great time. It's amazing what they know how to do. This class just entered college is the first class that entered college that has always had the computer. They were born the same year that the computer was born. And so we're just going to continue to see this technology advance. Then the last one is a great project as well. I title it my first year. This paper will result in the student developing a mission statement for a specific church where they might go be called to lead a youth ministry. The idea is that they will implement a biblical purpose-driven youth ministry for a local church listing goals and objectives that they would want to accomplish in a very realistic time-patter. One of the things that I teach students is that you need to have a set of goals. What are you going to try to do in your first 30 days? Your first three months, your first six months, and then your first year. This paper will be centered on you guys doing that. Basically saying, this is what I like to accomplish. Now, it doesn't have to be perfect obviously. You may really be going for the sky, but it needs to be something that you at least should laying out a plan. I'd be happy at any time during the semester if that's your project to sit with you and say, I don't know if that's a good idea or not. Think through this, but I'd be happy to do that. That's the three possible assignments for the projects. You can take those, add things to them, or you can come up with something of your own if you're just really passionate about something. However, if it connects to another class we teach here, like you're really passionate about family-focused ministry or something, I might say, I'd really hold off until you take that class and do one of these. Questions? There's bound to be some comment or question about what this paper looks like. Anyone? Question I might ask would be how many resources do I have to have for this paper? I'm not going to set a number. It is a graduate level paper, so you want to have some. But I'm not sure in some cases how many things have been written, for instance, on youth ministry and electronic age, probably not much. So you're going to get creative in looking for resources that are out there. You might be using some kind of a, you know, computer for dummy's book and comparing it to what we might use in youth ministry, that kind of stuff. I know there is some things that are out there, and I can help you look that way. But I'd be thinking, you know, three to ten, probably someone there, depending on what's available. And if there's a lot available, I'd probably know that, so you need to kind of think through how much I'm aware of what resources would be there. I would also consider very heavily the use of interviews, especially interviews of students. I think they are in many ways the expert that we're trying to reach. So you might, if you're doing the electronic age, talk to students. How much time do you spend on the internet? What are your favorite sites? What do those sites look like? And then in the paper, you might give me a list of the top 50 sites that youth have cited. And you can't base that on one person. You had to do a little bit of study there, but you get the idea. Okay, lastly, then 10% of your grade will be focused on participation in class dialogue with me. I'm going to offer you lots of things that are going to stir you up, whether it's through video, whether it's for people that I'm going to bring here that are going to kind of be interviewed by me or one of you. That's going to create a lot of dialogue. And so dialogue will be a significant part. Well, let's turn into the foundations of youth ministry calendar. This is going to give us kind of a more specific overview of what we want to try and accomplish during the course of this semester. And I'm going to probably ask a couple questions here just to see if you guys can define some things for me. Today, so if you're before, if we're going through the introduction, after the break, we're going to talk about youth ministry growing up. One of the big things that you're going to hear a lot is this message that because youth ministry is a calling, it's kind of a little phrase that we use at the youth ministry institute a lot because youth ministry is a calling. In fact, somewhere in your syllabus, there's a full page ad that we have run in many youth worker journals to kind of identify that that's one of our missions is to help people understand that this is really serious business. This is a calling for men and women to go into ministry to minister to today's youth. Part four, which will be next week after our break is called the cost of the calling. What does it look like for families? Recently, we did a survey every church in our denomination regarding youth ministry. We sent out 500 and some surveys. I think we received back oh, somewhere in the neighborhood of 125, 150, something like that, which is a very good response for that number. And we realized that there's a tremendous cost for many people who are in youth ministry. In fact, for all people who are in youth ministry and in ministry in general, we know that we've all experienced that. But what specifically is unique about the youth ministry situation? How does that look? That'll lead us then into a season of talking about the identity of the youth pastor, his family. What does it mean to be intimate with Christ and restoring our identity? Then we'll get to get into oh, about a class and a half talking about youth culture. Now, that'll only be roughly two, two and a half hours. That's why we have a whole of the course on youth culture coming later. Now, you're going to be active in that class because youth culture is something that we have to pay attention to. For instance, the movies they see, the music they listen to, those kinds of things. Does that make sense? And during that portion of the course, it's when you'll be looking through a teenage magazine. And I'll bring more of those, probably next week for you to look at and be thinking about what you want to kind of focus on. Their stuff coming out. It's just so, so awful. There's a new magazine called, oh, let me think, I'll bring it next week. I just got a copy of it last week. And its subtitle is a magazine for Girls with Attitude. You know, is that what you want your 13-year-old daughter to read? I don't think so. And it's put out by the people who have put out a brand new magazine from Mary Kate and Ashley Olson. Remember the little twins? Well, they're growing up and they've got some attitude. I mean, it's coming and people are paying attention to it. And so this is a very radical, very aggressive magazine which is trying to communicate a lot about how women should be in this coming generation. So, youth culture will be fun. We will have video, we'll listen to songs, we'll do a lot of interesting stuff there. At that point then, we're basically trying to ask the question, who is it that we're reaching out to? Who is it that we're trying to shepherd? Who is it we're trying to love? And we'll move into then an idea of how, how do we do it? And that's when we're getting the process of developing a vision statement. And you have many different vision statements that we've included in your syllabus, which I think are very interesting. October 9th, then we'll have campus day. So, we'll take a break. We come back, we'll continue on the discussion of vision and philosophy. What does that look like? Especially in the context of the church. We'll talk a lot about what does it mean to build a youth ministry team? Real quickly, how many of you work on a youth ministry team? Presently, you're involved one right now, okay? How many of you have been involved one of the past, done something with youth ministry? So, almost everybody in here has had some experience with that. One of the great crying needs of youth ministry typically is we don't have enough help, we don't have enough leaders. Now, love to talk about that. I'm in a situation in my church right now where we just lost like 14 leaders over the summer, whether from graduated from seminary or going back to college or whatever the scenario. And so, we saw a good number, but it's like, whoa, we're in trouble. We need more. How do we get them? What does it take? We're going to talk about that. We're going to move into, I spend three lectures on that because I think it's so important. Then we're going to move into relational ministry. What is relational ministry? What does it mean? Anybody got a great definition they could just throw out right now? Steve. You're on the right to speak. Okay, you're on the right to speak. Somebody else said it in a similar way. You're on the right to be hurt that students would say, I guess I do want to listen. So, that's a great phrase. What else is relational ministry? Okay, be like tearing down walls between you and the students and students in the culture, students and families. Yeah, all right. Anybody else? Yeah, being involved in their lives outside. Did you see outside of the church context? Yeah, not just sitting there seeing, hey guys, we got a great thing coming here at the church. We have pizza for you. If I didn't seem good enough, at least we have some food come anyway. It's say, no, we're actually going to go out. We're actually going to build friendships with those who exist beyond the walls of our church. That's great. Those are good definitions. We're going to just continue to unfold that. What does it look like? And what are the challenges of that? For instance, I know now it's a lot less comfortable for me to walk on a high school campus than it once was. You know, I dyed my hair a new color, and suddenly people began to look at me a little differently. You know, they think of me as a dad coming to watch somebody playing football as opposed to going to see a bunch of high school students play. And my kids aren't that old. They're only five, three and one. It challenges the heart. It's scary to get out of the car to walk into a missed large group of students and just try to fit in. Because I know I don't fit in, but we got to do it anyway. So we'll talk more about that later. Our programs with vision will take us into November. We're going to look really, how do you have a plan? What does it take to implement that plan? How do you evaluate the plan? Was it effective? In other words, how many times has your church said, let's evaluate the effectiveness of Sunday school? Is it accomplishing what it's supposed to accomplish? How many people even know what it's supposed to accomplish? Rarely, the churches ask those hard questions. They ask the wrong questions, and we're going to look at what those wrong questions are and how they lead us to wrong answers. We're going to look at, as I said earlier, a scope in sequence, the scope in sequence is the idea that we're going to have a plan from the time of student minors, this grade, and graduates. This is what we'd like to cover in terms of theology, doctrine, life skill, etc. We're going to look then into the electronic age, which is a brand new lecture. It's not in your syllabus yet, but it'll be coming. And then we're going to look at the administration of youth ministry. This is where a lot of youth pastors fall short. They're great building relationships, breaking down the walls, going out to be where their students are. But when it comes to administrative stuff, you know it's not that much fun. And they stumble, they fall, they make people upset, people think they're no good at their job, and suddenly it's over. All right, let's keep moving. The great thing about that is you're going to get to hear from an administrative assistant that I work with, who's a volunteer, and has been working with me for five years, never been paid a penny. She's phenomenal. You're going to have to have her sit here, her name's Kathy, and you just get to ask her all the questions you want. She's done this with me each time I've taught this course. Then we're going to look at evaluating your ministry, specifically, from the vision statement you created all the way through. How do we know whether what we've accomplished in the end is worth it? Because sometimes you're going to ask that question and you're going to wonder, David sits here in this class with me, and he was one of the young men that I had a chance to minister to for a long time. I met David when he was in sixth grade, and now he's sitting in his class as a first-year student at Covenant Seminary. And that's exciting. I remember whenever he used to come, and we started beeping each other on the nose. It was called Bees or Binking, and he actually broke my nose. In fact, you could feel a bump. Remember that? Pop me right in the nose, and I didn't get a bloody nose right off the smack to look at him and see where he has come. It's pretty awesome and amazing. And so I could look at him and go praise the Lord. He was one of the young men who sat in a Bible study with me having breakfast every Friday morning for how many years? Three. Maybe he's almost four. Maybe all of your high school career. And there's about five or six of us. Well, two of the people at that table are entering seminary this year. Another one was a part of that group. Never was in that Bible study. It was involved in a different way. He's here as well. Three students. And that's pretty exciting. Yeah, but you know what? I got two students from that group who are living in different parts of the world. One has worked on an herb farm. Another one's just kind of wondering, trying to figure things out. And we pray daily for their school for each other's faith in Christ. And so there's moments when I go, I don't have a clue what I'm doing. And there are other moments when I go, God, you've been so faithful. And it's hard to know sometimes. That's why we're going to trust in God. Any questions about the introduction? The kind of stuff we're going to cover? I know I'm kind of going fast with this. I'm just ready to get into the meat and potatoes. And I know some of you are going, man, I thought it was the first day. I thought we'd already be out of here by now. Yes, we probably would have, but we're taping the class and therefore we're going to be here until the tape stops. Any questions?