we met this morning and shared book recommendations and music recommendations. then we dove into talk about what it looks like to have our ministries embody and teach the “love god, love others” jesus creed. we had a very healthy and long discussion about measuring things. how do we measure (or determine) if our ministries are full of teens that love god and love others? should we even ben trying to determine this? lots of important questions, and a few good nuggets of insight (which i’ll post in edited form when i get the notes).
then we had a final half-hour or so talking about evangelism and outreach with young teens, based on the assumptions and understanding we’d talked about the previous day. again, notes to come on this.
i’m now at the denver airport, getting ready to fly home. jeannie is out of town tomorrow and friday, so i’ll be doing the work-combined-with-single-parenting thing for a couple days, which is always a bit stressful. PLUS, it’s the part of my cleanse where i have to go hard core on a juice fast: i get to eat one kind of fruit one day (only that, nothing else), and another kind the next day, then the three days after that are only homemade juice drinks (plus all the pills i’m poppin’). one week to go!
have you noticed a difference at all with this cleanse??
The whole idea of measurement has bothered me for the past five years. There must be some way for us to determine if we’re doing our work well in order to bring correction if it’s needed. Yet to measure our success based on anything but something concrete, like numbers, is so subjective, it opens things up for simply opinions, good or bad, and maybe personality attacks. I’m thinking specifically of your post earlier about abusing youth workers. Yet measuring success by numbers is not healthy either, because then the goal is to produce something that, ultimately, only God can produce. I think the argument that measuring by numbers means that God is blessing Mormons and Muslims is a valid one… sort of. Anyway, all that (and so much more) to say that I’m sure your discussion, which could have gone much farther down this road, must have been a great one. I look forward to hearing some potential outcomes.
for those of us visiting from abroad…what’s a cleanse? Is it some sort form of American dieting???!
timmy — it’s not really a diet; it’s cleaning the body of all the toxins and preservatives and other bad stuff that builds up and hangs around. flushing that stuff out of the body. and it’s not american at all.
What were some of the book and music recommendations flying around the Jr High YP’s.
i’ll post some of them when i get them, andy