Sometimes I Want To Just SCREAM!

May 24, 2006 @ 5:32 pm by Pressed

Once again we approach another Wednesday night youth service missing all of our teenagers that should be the leaders of our group. Why, you ask? School is over right? No more sports, no more school activities, it’s free summer time and everyone should be available right? The answer is no. Basketball camps, traveling team baseball and soccer, and pretty much every other fun summer activity is starting up and the same people who I have not seen in weeks are once again not here. Kids who have grown up in our church, who are popular in school and who have awesome potential to do some awesome things for God are just way to busy and this is a growing problem without a solution.

I’ve becoming more and more frustrated with the current commitment level of this generation of teens. Not that they are not committed. They are very committed to a lot of different things and because of it they are spread so thin that they have become a jack of all trades but masters of none. This means they can do a lot of things ok, but they master nothing. What disturbs me about it is that Christianity is lumped into the pile of ‘things to do’ and is very low on the priority scale and yet they see nothing wrong with it since of course they are (masters of none). The same people would claim to be devoted Christians and extremely committed to the church. Don’t believe me? Just ask them. Do you believe that you are devoted to Christ and committed to the church? The likely answer: “Yes, we come to church a lot and I am a devoted believer in Christ and I a committed to coming to our church and being a part of the events and activities.” Well, do you think someone who is committed to Christ and the church would miss church 7 to 15 weeks in a row? Likely answer: *silence*.

That is the current trend I see. Teens who are said to be “active” in our church are the kids who miss anywhere from 7 to 15 weeks of Wednesday night church in a row and maybe come for two weeks and then miss another 7 to 15 weeks. The worst problem of all is that no one even notices! Ask one of their parents, “Did you know that your teen hasn’t been to a Wednesday night for 10 weeks now?” the likely response will be, “Oh your exaggerating, that can’t be right.” Well surprise! We take roll on Wednesday nights and it’s the truth. It just sounds so ludicrous to them that they can’t believe it themselves, since in their world they are committed and yet in the real world the truth is they are not very committed. Church takes the back seat to almost every other thing or activity in their life. The type of commitment found in Acts where the people were so devoted to the teachings of the Apostles and with meeting together that God added to their number daily those who were being saved is just unheard of by the mass populous of church goers.

We need to reach them with the Word and let it so captivate their hearts that they will WANT to come and that they will be so committed to Christ that Church will be a priority over all other things in their life. Good idea. The only problem is that type of relationship requires time and discipleship and we already know from their current actions that time is the one thing they are not willing to give up. Offer them a discipleship class and they will gladly enroll and them miss 8 out of 12 classes. Decide to teach them about these things on a Wednesday night and 7 weeks later they will come back to youth with absolutely no clue about what you have talked about for the last 7 weeks. They will miss church, miss events, miss fundraisers, and then go on the mission trip and come back home only to start the process all over again. This is a generation that I’m trying to reach for Christ… the “church kids”.

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Modesty In The Church: Are Our Teens In Trouble?

May 22, 2006 @ 11:16 am by Pressed

Several days ago Dr. Mohler had a podcast that discussed Modesty at Christian Weddings. This has actually been an on going discussion on several different blogs including: Joshua Harris, Trying to be Mary in a Martha World, A Puritan’s Hope, and GirlTalk.

On the Molher program a lady called in and made the comment that she didn’t think a man should tell a woman how to dress and while I think men are not the ones to go to for fashion advice, I thought Dr. Mohler made a good point. It is the man who will likely sin because of the way a woman dresses and therefore the man should have some input. Fathers should give advice to their daughters about their wedding dresses because fathers know how men think and react to the clothing women wear.

Guys are visually stimulated and that is something that I believe most girls fail to understand or consider when buying clothes. This is a natural response that is built within men and it is not something that can just be turned off at the flip of a switch. Even a happily married man who has eyes for no one else but his wife can be stimulated by another woman who dresses in a skimpy outfit, because that is the way guys are made. Even if he didn’t want to experience this, just a few seconds of someone walking by who is dressed immodestly can cause impure thoughts or feelings in a guy. It’s that easy.

I am certain that most girls who dress this way don’t think to themselves, “I’m gonna make a bunch of men sin in their minds today”. They just want to wear something that they think is stylish, attractive, and draws attention, but what women often fail to understand is that they are drawing the wrong type of attention. Do women really want a guy to like them only because they are attractive and have nice features? No. That is a shallow, meaningless relationship and yet they choose to dress in such a way that suggests otherwise.

This whole discussion brought up the issue of Christian weddings and the question: should churches set a dress code or policy for weddings to regulate what women wear in church ceremonies? While I think this is a good topic to discuss, I want to open it up to a little broader perspective.

As a youth pastor, my wife and I are facing this issue with our teenage girls in the youth group. I am shocked and appalled at what parents allow their teens to wear. Just the other day a teen was wearing a top that clearly showed her cleavage and when she sat down you could see her whole bra and other bodily parts. I noticed when I was passing out material to the youth in Sunday School and I am certain that all the guys that walked by noticed her too. A few days later I saw her again in public with the same shirt on while she was with her parents. After further prodding we find out that her mother bought her the outfit and approves of it. Now at this point you must tread carefully. Do you (A.) - Tell her the shirt is inappropriate at the risk of offending and embarrassing her and making her mother angry? (This method has been tried before in our group. It made people embarrassed and angry and never come back to church. It didn’t stop them from wearing those type of clothes.) Do you (B.) just ignore it and not say anything since the parents are obviously aware of the clothing and approve of it? Do you (C.) deal with the issue on a broader scale by teaching modesty to the girls in your youth group and hope that they make the right choices and change the way they dress?

I truly believe that the way kids and teens dress is a matter of parental responsibility and it is just another area in life where parents are dropping the ball. Our pastor preached on this the other day and I think it is so very true, parents today are more concerned with making their children Pretty, Powerful, and Popular rather than Pious. With that type of thinking, dressing popular is more important than dressing modestly and being involved in school activities, sports and social functions is more important than going to church and learning about modesty and Godliness. This is why the most popular church kids who have grown up in our church and should be the strongest spiritual leaders in our youth group are actually the least active teens. We have teens that have missed upwards of 15 to 16 weeks in a row of youth on Wednesday nights and then parents wonder why their teen isn’t growing spiritually and why they don’t know all the events that are going on. While I don’t understand this mindset, I know it exists because I see it working every week.

Proverbs 16:16 says “How much better to get wisdom than gold, to choose understanding rather than silver!” Our parents of today and the teenagers that are currently in our churches seem to be so busy that they cannot find time for church. Teens are involved in so many different things that they cannot pull a hour or two out of the week to make it to church at all and so I wonder; where is their wisdom and understanding coming from? If they don’t come to church, who is teaching them? Where are they learning about modesty? Who is teaching them morality and righteousness? I think the answer to those questions is obvious. We are raising up a generation of shallow, baby Christians with no ability to discern between right and wrong and with no understanding of the deep truths of God’s word (Hebrews 5) and the most troubling part of it all is that the parents are not only allowing it, they are fueling it.

What are we to do when parents are the ones allowing their teens to dress and act in these manners? How do we teach modesty to a group of kids who are popular leaders with tremendous potential and yet they never come to church, never get involved, and are too busy to learn anything about righteousness or modesty? How do we reach a group of kids who know nothing else but what their parents teach them about being pretty, popular, and powerful? This is the challenge our youth ministry is facing today.

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A Guide To Quick And Easy Podcasting

May 14, 2006 @ 11:52 am by Pressed

The interest in podcasting is growing at an exponential rate on a daily basis and I believe that the potential to use podcasting as a ministry and outreach for our churches is growing with it. Over the last couple of weeks our church has put together two podcasts that we post on our website and link to iTunes. One of the podcasts is our Sunday morning service and the other podcast is our Wednesday evening youth message. This opens the doors for not only an outreach of the church, but for those who miss the message and want to hear it or get a copy of it. Their task is as simple as going on the website, downloading it, and listening to the message or burning it onto a disk to share with others. We’ve had a CD/Tape ministry for a long time and now podcasting simply enhances what we were already capable of doing. With the help of a friend, we were able to get a podcast up and running with relative ease and I’ve decided to share with you how we are doing it in the hopes that other ministries and churches would be able to use this resource to enhance their ministry.

Step 1: The first step in podcasting is acquiring the proper equipment. I won’t lie to you, in my personal opinion I think Apple computers are far superior to PC’s in accomplishing this task and almost any other task involving graphics, video, and music or sound production. If you have any choice in the matter you would do well to look into getting a mac. On the other hand, this is a task that can be accomplished by both Apples and PC’s.

We are recording our podcasts using an Apple Power PC G5 running dual processors, a gig of Ram, and with dual 250 Gig hard drives for storing both video and podcasts. We’ve also been known to record a time or two on our PowerBook G4’s which can accomplish the same task, they are just a little slower at it. For now we are running a cable from the 1/4 inch headphones jack output on our old Allen & Heath soundboard to the 1/8 inch input jack on the computer. This is because we are recording the messages only and have no need for adjusting EQ and other things that can’t be adjusted on the board itself. However, in the near future we plan to upgrade. By using split cables we plan on running individual inputs into a separate sound board which will be utilized for recording purposes only. This will allow us to adjust EQ, input levels, and sound quality for the recording without affecting the main board and what the audience hears in house.

Using the latest version of Garageband, which is available only for the Mac, we are able to record the input that comes into the computer. Garageband has a special section which was designed specifically for podcasting and it includes royalty free sound-clips and sound effects to enhance your podcast and it has multiple features that help you make your podcast sound professional. You can digitally enhance sound and voices, you can adjust volume levels and you can even cut or edit out pieces of the message if needs be. Another cool feature of Garageband is that it allows you to add pictures or in our case sermon notes slides to the message which we plan to begin doing in the near future. Garageband makes our lives easy once we have the input set up and the message recorded. For you PC users, I don’t have the answers for you because I’ve never used a PC to accomplish this task. I imagine you need a program that will do much of the same thing that garageband does for the mac. I should mention at this point that Garageband does come standard with new Mac’s whereas you will most likely have to buy another program for the PC.

You should also keep in mind that your podcast will only sound as good as your in house sound system and microphones. We’re using an older Allen&Heath sound board with a Sure lapel pack that has the Countryman E6i Headworn Mic hooked to it. This is a sweet sounding setup, but it isn’t cheap. You will be able to produce a nice sounding, quality podcast with a lot smaller and cheaper computers, soundboards, and mics. Just take what you have and make it work. The reason we have what we have now is because we have collected and added to our system over a 5 to 6 year period, and did it all with no concept that we would be doing a podcast down the road. If you can produce it on what you have now, then you can slowly add to your system to increase ease and quality in your future.

Step 2: The second step in doing a podcast is getting it on the internet and making it readily available for people. The easier you make it for people to get, the better off you will be. We store our podcast on our own server space and make it available for people to download directly from our website and we also list it on iTunes which allows anyone to look our podcast up and subscribe to it. If they subscribe to it using iTunes, then every time they open iTunes if there is a new podcast it will download automatically to their computer. So how do you do this? Well, it is at this juncture that I have to turn this part of our podcasting guide over to my partner in all of this, Christopher. He will explain how to set up an RSS Feed, how to get it on iTunes, and what you can do to make it easier for people to get your podcast.

Well I can explain how I have set them up. I’m sure that there are many other ways to do. I start with some type of content management system (CMS). In my case I use WordPress. If you want a free WordPress blog check out this.) WordPress will automatically generate a RSS feed with the ability of including enclosures (the audio file). In WordPess create a podcast category. Get the feed address for that category. The feed address is the category address with /feed on the end. For example: http://www.mydomain.com/podcast/feed/ . Remember that address. Next we need to create a free account on FeedBurner. When you log into FeedBurner we are going to create a feed that is ready for iTunes. FeedBurner will ask for your feed address, that address that I told you to remember earlier. Then you will be able to easily add iTunes specific tags like category tags, iTunes image and rating. Follow the simple FeedBurner tutorial and after you complete all the questions you will be given your final feed address. This is the address that you will ask listeners to subscribe to and the one you will give to iTunes. To get into the iTunes podcast store open your iTunes application and click Podcast on the left hand of the window. Then click Podcast Directory near the bottom of the largest frame. On the left side of the largest frame you will see a link that says Submit Podcast. Click it. iTunes will ask for your feed address, type in your feedburner address (something like http://feeds.feedburner.com/sermonpodcast). Within a few hours your podcast will be accessible on iTunes. You might also consider submitting your podcast to Yahoo! Podcasts, Odeo, and Christian Podder. There now that is clear as mud.

Step 3: Promote it. If you do all of this work, get your podcast on the net and then never promote it, you might as well have been doing it all for nothing. You’ll get some people who stumble upon it, but it will never reach the people you have designed it to reach unless you do some promoting. This is our next step in the process. We plan on making a video of how to subscribe or download the podcast and then we are going to play it on Sunday mornings as a commercial to help our congregation understand how they can listen to the messages on the net. If you can figure out some other creative ways to promote your podcast it will be far more effective.

Step 4: Be consistent. If you are going to do this, then you need to go all in and do it every single week without missing a beat. This should be something that your congregation or ministry grows to expect and they should be able to trust in good faith that every week that message will be online and ready for them to download. If you are inconsistent with your podcasting then you can plan on it failing.

These are just some quick steps and tips on doing a podcast to enhance your ministry. We hope that this helps you on your journey in podcasting and if you do create a podcast leave us a comment and let us know where it is so that we can listen. If you have any questions or technical problems you can also drop us a line in the comments below and we will be sure to respond as soon as possible.

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iMac: The Ressurection

May 13, 2006 @ 6:36 pm by Pressed

Today Christopher, Michael, and I drove up to the Apple store with my iMac to get it worked on. We happened to get into a pile of traffic that cause a delay and I didn’t make it for my scheduled time, but I called ahead to let them know and was able to make it in fairly quickly anyway.

I told the Mac genius what the problem was and he said that the power supply and possible the logic board would need to be replaced. Without AppleCare that would be a grand total of over $950, and therefore I took a moment to be thankful that I purchased AppleCare. The guy then went on to explain that I could sign up for what is called Apple ProCare for only $99 and get my computer back today, within a couple of hours. If I didn’t sign up for the ProCare then it would take over a week to have it finished. The ProCare card is an Apple membership that gets you free personal one on one training sessions with Mac professionals, it gives you priority on repairs so that my computer gets fixed on a priority schedule ahead of all the others that are not ProCare customers, it allows you to get advanced reservations to meet with the Genius Bar at the Apple store, it gives me an opportunity to bring in my Mac (and any Mac registered in my name) for a yearly tune-up where they will run system diagnostic checks, install updates, and clean the display and keyboard, and if I buy a new mac, with the ProCare card they will set it up, transfer my existing files to the new computer and get everything ready to go. Needless to say I went ahead and purchased the ProCare and within two hours they called me to let me know my computer was ready to be picked up.

Instead of waiting for the day to try and schedule my appointments I am able to schedule appointments in advance with the ProCare card which solves one of the issues I had yesterday, and I am so glad that I didn’t have to wait a week to get my computer back for a repair that takes only 45 minutes. The guys at the Genius Bar were helpful and quick and my computer is back to its fine looking self. Today has been a successful day. Thank you Lord for a good day.

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Deep Fried iMac G5

May 12, 2006 @ 10:58 pm by Pressed

This morning I woke up, went into the computer room, turned on my iMac and began downloading some of the latest updates. I ate breakfast, took a shower, and got ready while it downloaded. Before I left the house this morning I went back into my office to see how much of the update had downloaded and when I moved the mouse I heard a popping sound and the screen went black. I sat there for a moment in stunned silence and then I began to smell that familiar burnt electrical smell. I tried to turn the computer back on a couple times with no luck and the smell continued to get stronger so I unplugged it.

The good thing is I bought the extended warranty AppleCare which should cover the damages. I called Apple, told them the problem and they asked me several questions to make sure I was ok and that I didn’t have anything that happened that could produce a possible lawsuit against the company and then they told me to take my computer to the nearest mac store to get it taken care of. Unfortunately for me that is a hour drive from my house. The other problem is that I had to make an appointment with the Apple store online. Does that make sense to you? My computer gets fried, but the only way to get an appointment is to make one online. You can’t call and make one. That was about the most frustrating part of this whole deal.

So, tomorrow it looks like I will be visiting the Apple store to get my computer taken care of. We’ll see how it goes.

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