Posted by admin in General, RokStories, RokTabs, Uncategorized Monday, 8 March 2010 17:22 No Comments
Ahhhh… Spring is in the air (and my allergies are going crazy)! With this time of the year comes all the planning and preparing for another great summer of ministry. One of our biggest events in the summer is Summer Camp and we are praying this year’s camp is unlike any other camp we’ve been a part of. We are aimming at taking one of the largest groups we’ve ever taken to camp and making it more meaningful than ever.
The dates and location have been set: July 12th-16th at Falls Creek in Oklahoma. Now we just need to get everything ready.
We need cooks, chaperones, adult coordinators for prayer, bible study, recreation, fellowship and fundraisers. If you know someone who may be interested please let me know.
Posted by admin in Uncategorized Monday, 8 March 2010 09:47 No Comments
In youth ministry, one of the hardest things I’ve had to experience is leading students into a growing relationship with Jesus, while their parents are doing the opposite. In a lot of cases, the parent wants the best for his/her teenager. It’s just that their definition of “best” might not match up with mine. There are some hard-and-fast rules to engage if you don’t want your teenager to care about God. The following are just a few.
1. Make sure their extra-curricular activities are priority over church. You should always make sure that their scholarships are intact, and that they don’t get kicked off the team. That’s definitely more important than their relationship with Christ and eternity, for that matter.
2. When your teenager screws up, ground them from church. Of course! If they don’t care that you take away their TV, cell phone, or friend time, hit them where it hurts. Take away church. Yeah – that oughta do it.
3. Don’t call them out when they need guidance. Always let them make their own mistakes. And if they’re about to do something super-destructive, it’s probably best that they learn on their own. Because learning it the hard way is always the necessary path, right?
4. Talk negatively about your church staff around your teenager. If your pastor messes up, make sure that you call a family meeting to roast him. You should definitely let your teenager know that people can’t be trusted, especially incompetent church leaders. Your teenager needs to know that trusting church leaders isn’t smart! If they don’t trust church leaders, there’s a small chance they’ll ever accept God’s direction in their life. And that’s the safer way to live.
5. Don’t model real faith. At the end of the day, the last thing you want to do, if you want your teenager to ignore God’s voice, is to follow it yourself.
Please know my heart on this issue. We parents need to be leading our families to Jesus every chance we get. Maybe it’s time to take inventory of who or what we’re actually leading our families to.
After all, actions speak louder than words.
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article by Mark Cox. Mark Cox is the Student Pastor at Indian Springs Baptist Church.
Posted by admin in Cultural Interest, RokStories Saturday, 6 February 2010 15:08 No Comments
Churchrelevance.com recently posted an article on the top 100 words searched by kids on the internet. Understanding what they’re interested in helps us to understand how we can be vigilant as parents and as youth workers. Check it out.
Earlier this month, Symantec published a list of the top 100 kids’ online search words for 2009 (ages 18 & under). The data comes from a free search monitoring service for parents called OnlineFamily.Norton.
As expected with a sample group including teenagers, some of the online search words are anything but innocent. However, what is shocking is that “porn” is the 4th most popular search word among kids ages 7 and younger.
Amusingly, “Norton Safety Minder” is the 46th most searched for phrase among kids 18 and under. Search results include instructions on how to temporarily disable OnlineFamily. Norton.
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