Food For Thought (Things that I am going through)

Where do I start on this day, oh yea right, from the beginning…..

The last few weeks I have been soul-searching. I know what God has called me to do in the past but recently I am not sure. So I want to share with you how He has been dealing with me

What direction should I go in? I have not been happy with the way my life has been for the last couple of weeks. I mean not with my marriage, I LOVE my wife with all my heart (25 years in may) and would not trade that for ANYTHING. I am talking about my job (career as I like to put it, yes there is a difference but for another time).

I am not sure where or what God wants me to do, I LOVE building relationships with students for the long haul, but I do know that missions is second. I am right now in a confused state and have been for few weeks and have been asking the Lord to talk to me and trying to hear His voice with nothing happening. I thought He wanted me to move on to another church, but that has not happened. I can’t see myself doing anything else but working with students full-time (people have suggested that maybe I need to become a pastor of a church, I just don’t see it). I am in a sadden state with our church and the no growth of it and even questioning myself as maybe I am part of the problem. Maybe I have reached my ceiling with reaching students, as you can see many thoughts are going on in my head at this moment.

 

But God has been slowly working with me (as always not as fast as I would like) so let me share some things that He has been showing me.

He started me with these verses

Matthew 11:29-30

Take my yoke upon you. Let me teach you, because I am humble and gentle at heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy to bear, and the burden I give you is light.”

He also showed me some stuff out of Psalm 143:5-12, just today.

I remember the days of old. I ponder all your great works and think about what you have done.I lift my hands to you in prayer. I thirst for you as parched land thirsts for rain. Interlude. Come quickly, Lord, and answer me, for my depression deepens. Don’t turn away from me, or I will die.Let me hear of your unfailing love each morning, for I am trusting you.Show me where to walk, for I give myself to you.Rescue me from my enemies, Lord; I run to you to hide me.Teach me to do your will, for you are my God. May your gracious Spirit lead me forward on a firm footing.For the glory of your name, O Lord, preserve my life.
Because of your faithfulness, bring me out of this distress.In your unfailing love, silence all my enemies and destroy all my foes, for I am your servant.

And from this, I learned to this. George remember my excitement and passion I had for youth from the beginning. I want you to reach out to me for help. But Lord I need an answer quickly as I am becoming sadden more and more everyday. I want to trust You but I need to hear from You, so I know where to go and what to do. Help me Lord to get rid of my doubt and confusion (enemy). Tell me so that I can stay in your Will. I am your servant, so please take this sadness away. 

Lastly I was shown this today in my devotions from Tony Evans:

Remember these seven keys as you trust in Christ to overcome the insurmountable circumstances in your life.

– Rest and prepare yourself for God’s service.
– Make sure you have a compassionate attitude.  
– Remember that God is interested in building His Kingdom through your situations.  
– Live so that non-believers can see Jesus through for you.
– Always give thanks for what God has given you, so He can use you to bless others.    
– Trust God during the impossible circumstances of life.    
– Remember that He works through weak things to make miraculous things

In closing, I am not sure where God is working in my life at this moment but I will “try to wait on Him for the answer.

Also I am not sure where you are in your life and what decisions or trails that you are facing but I hope that this will be you some encouragement.

Parents and their Teenagers (2)

As I continue this blog series on this what I think is a very important topic, I hope that you find it as well. If you did not read the first one who can click on the link here.Also in order to save me some time and not be accused of plagiarism, I will be making all that Walt says in Bold throughout this series blog.

We left off on the last one with this statement: Any kid living anywhere can be influenced by the negative and dangerous aspects of our culture at anytime. No church, school, family, or child is immune. So with that being said let’s get into it.

Believe it or not , to assume you’ve somehow made kids immune to the influence of culture just by shielding them from culture might just produce the opposite effect. In other words, by not preparing them to engage the culture with minds and hearts saturated by a biblical world and life view, we actually make them more vulnerable to the negative cultural forces they face both now and for the rest of their lives. Both we (parents and youth workers) and our kids need to be wise to the Scripture and streetwise about our culture.

Just like he did with His Son Jesus, God has made us all particular types of people who do His particular work in the particular time and place where He’s placed us.

In my own kids, we have dealt differently with how we raised them. With our daughter we were strict and kept her away from the culture as much as possible even where we sent her to a Christian school so she would stay away from all the cultural influences, which when she got out on her own, she went “wild” (my words) With the other two we did it somewhat differently and what I do now is that when culture creeps in, we try to explain it through God’s perspective (The Word of God). I would put it down as teachable moments. Now I am not here to say that our way is the right way, because as a parent you know your kid but you will have to come to grips that it is a strong possibility that they could be influenced by the culture and how you handle it will make all the difference in the world and their lives.

With that being said here is one more comment from Walt. John Stott says about every Christian’s call to become double listener: “Christian witness stand between the Word and the world, with the consequent obligation to listen to both. We listen to the Word in order to discover ever more of the riches of Christ. And we listen to the world in order to discern which of Christ’s riches are needed most and how to present them in their best light.

This is our calling as parents…., and consequently, it’s also the calling of our kids. When it comes to teenagers and their culture, what we don’t know (or don’t want to know or refuse to know) can hurt them.

It has taken me a while to get on board with this idea but what I can say is that I would rather “suffer” myself and listen and learn from their culture then to see my kids go down in flames because I was to ignorant to know about it.

(Deuteronomy 6:4-9)

Parents and their Teenagers (1)

I am reading a book by Walt Mueller on Youth Culture and it has a lot of interesting material in this book, so I have decided that I want to blog about it and throw my thoughts into it. The purpose of me writing this is to help parents and anyone that is associated with kids, teenagers, etc. to be kept in the loop. So this will be series of blogs that will expand for a while because I do not have time to write on this subject weekly and also there is so much that I want to share that these blogs will be for the most part short because I want you to spend the few minutes reading this and hopefully leave a taste in your mouth for more. The title of the blogs will probably be the same followed by a number to correspond on which one I am on.

I do want to let you know that if you allow God to work in your life while reading this then there will be no doubt that you will get upset with the material but please understand that it will be the Holy Spirit that is convicting you and nothing that Walt writes or myself. One last thing in order to save me some time and not be accused of plagiarism, I will be making all that Walt says in Bold throughout this series blog. With that said let’s get started.

How should I be reading this that is said? Because your God-given responsibility is to nurture your kids toward a deep Christian faith that’s integrated into all life, you need to know their culture and world. You need the knowledge to affirm culture’s positives and counter its negatives. But where do you begin? If you feel out of touch and confused by your teenagers world, please know that you’re not alone.

Parents if you do not invest time into your kids and raise them up right, The world will be more than happy to do it for you.

Teenagers need advice and they’re more likely to turn first to a friend (55 percent), followed by Mom (44 percent), a boyfriend or girlfriend (23%), and then Dad (20%)
When push comes to shove, dads and moms are devoting less time to bringing up their sons and daughters, thereby allowing someone or something else raise their kids for them.

Any kid living anywhere can be influenced by the negative and dangerous aspects of our culture at anytime. No church, school, family, or child is immune.

Well I am going to stop here for this blog, I hope that this little bit has whet your appetite and leave you with this, God is powerful and stronger than what this world has to offer but we need to believe in that and bring our kids up the way we are supposed to. (Deuteronomy 6:4-9)

God Bless

Is your teen drinking Four Loko – Canned Cocaine?

Here is another article that you might be interested in. It comes from Walt Mueller, who is the Founder and President, Center for Parent/Youth Understanding. The guru if you will when it comes to parent/youth understanding.

On October 8th, nine 17 to 19-year-old Central Washington University Students attending the same party had to be hospitalized with blood-alcohol levels of 0.12 percent to 0.35 percent. When the story first broke, officials were puzzled, wondering if the students had willingly or unwillingly consumed drugs, perhaps even date rape drugs. But toxicology tests for drugs were negative. Just two weeks later, officials released their findings. The common thread for the nine – one of whom almost died – was that they had consumed a sweet, highly-caffeinated, alcoholic energy drink called Four Loko. Sadly, this incident is not isolated, but increasingly common.

It’s no secret that the alcohol and tobacco industries need to cultivate new drinkers and smokers to stay alive, generate revenue, and grow. While there have been many times when they’ve denied it, those charged with creating marketing campaigns know that today’s underage drinkers and smokers are both the now and future tobacco and alcohol market. And while there are numerous regulations in place to prohibit them from creating and marketing products to teens, there are ways around that.

In recent years, the alcohol industry has created and peddled lots of new colorful and fruity products that blur the packaging and content line between kid-stuff like juices and soft-drinks, and adult stuff like highly caffeinated energy drinks, wine coolers, and even beer.

Now, the canned beverage known as Four Loko – from Chicago-based Phusion Projects Inc. – is flooding youth culture from young adults down to curious and young thrill-seeking kids. The brightly-packaged 23.5 ounce cans contain a caffeinated, 12% alcohol malt beverage that generates a dangerous buzz that is potent and fast-acting. The alcohol content is three times that of a beer. One can of Four Loko is equivalent to a six-pack of beer in alcohol content. Both users and health-care officials have likened Four Loko to cocaine in a can. Like soda, Four Loko contains sugar, artificial flavors (Grape, Blue Raspberry, Orange, Watermelon, Fruit Punch, Lemonade, Cranberry, and Cranberry Lemonade) and carbonation. It also includes taurine, guarana, caffeine, and wormwood (the active ingredient in absinthe), the four ingredients developers used as a basis for the drink’s name.

Four Loko’s rapid rise in popularity has administrators and healthcare officials on college campuses working hard to raise awareness among students as to the very real dangers associate with the drink. The fact that a growing number of cases of alcohol-poisoning related to Four Loko consumption and binging are being reported in hospital emergency rooms has officials concerned as well. This trend is sure to continue as Four Loko drinkers endeavor to down three or fan cans in quick succession in an effort to get the full effect of a quicker high.

Why is Four Loko gaining popularity among young adults and teens? There are many reasons.

First, kids are by nature risk-takers who have a sense of invulnerability that feeds the sense that “nothing bad will ever happen to me.” Not only that, but kids are looking to have a good time, and Four Loko is associated with fun.

Second, Four Loko offers a cheap high. At around $2.50 a can, it’s affordable. As a result more and more kids are going to drink it.

Third, Four Loko is marketed and sold in ways that attract the attention of younger and underage drinkers. For example the cans give off a “fun feel” through the use of bright colors that catch the eye. In some stores, Four Loko isn’t found on the shelves near beer and other alcoholic beverages. Instead, Four Loko is shelf-stocked near the non-alcoholic energy drinks popular among kids. In addition, the drink’s fruity flavors are attractive to young consumers who have been raised on fruit juice.

Fourth, the drink is marketed as being both fun and sexy. A visit to the Four Loko homepage features shadowy silhouettes of a couple of young, naked women standing seductively in the shadows, a marketing ploy that not only draws in the male audience, but promises alcohol-infused sex-appeal to female drinkers. In fact, many of the many Four Loko songs that are popping up on YouTube tout the drink’s ability to make those who are ugly, sexually attractive in the eyes of Four Loko drinkers.

Fifth, there’s the viral element that’s been fueled by the world of social media. Four Loko’s growing Facebook Fan Page features testimonials and drinking suggestions from satisfied Four Loko drinkers. The page includes this poetic descriptor of the drink’s effects: “Corny?!…Four loko: big sizes which make you do surprises…Tasty and makes you wastey…If you don’t like it, you’re a sucker cause four loko makes you f____ her…
It has a delicious flavor but the memories you cant savor…”

Sixth, there’s the pop culture element, particularly the growing number of Rap videos – many of them claiming to be “official” – that are posted on YouTube. A quick YouTube search of the term “Four Loko” provides perhaps the best street-level education on the drink that’s available.

Finally, there’s word-of-mouth. Kids are drinking it, then telling their friends. Once that happens, word is out and the power of peer pressure kicks in full-tilt.

What can we do in response?
Here are a few quick suggestions. As with any alcohol-consumption issue that involves underage drinking, binge drinking, or the immoral aspect and irresponsibility of drunkenness and the many resulting spiritual, physical, and emotional risks, the rising popularity and abuse of Four Loko requires diligence on the part of all adults. Parents should warn their kids about the potency and dangers of Four Loko. They should also set and enforce strict behavioral parameters when it comes to substance abuse. Parents and youth workers should present a united front by providing a Biblical perspective on drinking. In addition, they should discover and address any underlying issues that are driving kids to self-medicate through substance abuse. And finally, community members should unite to establish policies that regulate the marketing, distribution, and sale of Four Loko to kids.

Parents Beware: Don’t read you might get ticked

This was written by Scott Linscott, he writes as a parent of young adults. This is what so many of us youth workers have wanted to say to (some) parents over the years; and Scott says it so well. Here is the post in its entirety here:

The church in America is puzzled. Young adults are leaving in droves. Magazines, books and blogs are wagging the finger of blame to point out who is responsible. Some say it is a failure of youth ministry, some point to church budgets and some nail the blame on outdated, un-hip worship services. We parents are shocked that our kids just really aren’t all that into Jesus.

When I look for someone to blame I head into the restroom and look into a mirror. Yupp, there he is. I blame him. That parent looking back at me is where I have to start.

If you’re a parent, I’m might tick you off in this post. But, hear me out. I think that we, as parents are guilty of some things that make it easy for our kids to put faith low on their priority list.

Keys to Making Your Kids Apathetic About Faith

1) Put academic pursuits above faith-building activities. Encourage your child to put everything else aside for academic gain. Afterall, when they are 24 and not interested in faith and following Christ, you’ll still be thrilled that they got an A in pre-calculus, right? Instead of teaching them balance, teach them that all else comes second to academics. Quick … who graduated in the top 5 of your high school class? Unless you were one of them, I bet you have no idea. I don’t.

2) Chase the gold ball first and foremost. Afterall, your child is a star. Drive 400 miles so your child can play hockey but refuse to take them to a home group bible study because it’s 20 minutes away.

2b) Buy into the “select,” “elite,” “premier” titles for leagues that play outside of the school season and take pride in your kid wearing the label. Hey now, he’s an All-Star! No one would pay $1000 for their kid to join, “Bunch-of-kids-paying-to-play Team.” But, “Elite?!?” Boy, howdy! That’s the big time!

2c) Believe the school coach who tells you that your kid won’t play if he doesn’t play in the offseason. The truth is, if your kid really is a star, he could go to Disney for the first week of the season and come back and start for his school team. The determined coach might make him sit a whole game to teach him a lesson. But, trust me, if Julie can shoot the rock for 20 points a game, she’s in the lineup. I remember a stellar soccer athlete who played with my son in high school. Chris missed the entire preseason because of winning a national baseball championship. With no workouts, no double sessions, his first day back with the soccer team, he started and scored two goals. Several hard-working “premier” players sat on the bench and watched him do it. (Chris never played soccer outside the school season but was a perpetual district all-star selection.) The hard reality is, if your kid is not a star, an average of 3 new stars a year will play varsity as freshmen. That means there’s always 12 kids who are the top prospects. Swallow hard and encourage your kid to improve but be careful what you sacrifice to make him a star at little Podunk High here in Maine.

2d) By the way, just because your kid got a letter inviting him to attend a baseball camp in West Virginia does not mean he is being recruited. You’ll know when recruiting happens. Coaches start calling as regularly as telemarketers, they send your kid handwritten notes and they often bypass you to talk to your kid. A letter with a printed label from an athletic department is not recruitment. When a coach shows up to watch your kid play and then talks to you and your kid, that’s recruiting.

3) Teach your kid that the dollar is almighty. I see it all the time. Faith activities fly out the window when students say, “I’d like to, but I have to work.” Parents think jobs teach responsibility when, in reality, most students are merely accumulating wealth to buy the things they want. Our kids learn that faith activities should be put aside for the “responsibility” of holding a job. They will never again get to spend 100% of their paychecks on the stuff they want.

3b) Make them pay outright for faith activities like youth retreats and faith community activities while you support their sports, music, drama and endeavors with checks for camps and “select” groups and expensive equipment. This sends a loud and clear message of what you really want to see them involved in and what you value most. Complain loudly about how expensive a three-day youth event is but then don’t bat an eye when you pay four times that for a three-day sports camp.

4) Refuse to acknowledge that the primary motivating force in kids’ lives is relationship. Connections with others is what drives kids to be involved. It’s the reason that peer pressure is such a big deal in adolescence. Sending kids to bible classes and lectures is almost entirely ineffective apart from relationship and friendships that help them process what they learn. As kids share faith experiences like retreats, mission trips and student ministry fun, they build common bonds with one another that work as a glue to Christian community. In fact, a strong argument can be made that faith is designed to be lived in community with other believers. By doing all you can to keep your kids from experiencing the bonds of love in a Christian community, you help insure that they can easily walk away without feeling like they are missing anything. Kids build friendships with the kids they spend time with.

5) Model apathy in your own life. If following Jesus is only about sitting in a church service once a week and going to meetings, young adults opt out. Teenagers and young adults are looking for things that are worth their time. Authentic, genuine, relevant relationships where people are growing in relationship with Jesus is appealing. Meaningless duty and ritual holds no attraction.

There are no guarantees that your children will follow Christ even if you have a vibrant, purposeful relationship with Him. But, on the other hand, if we, as parents do not do all we can to help our children develop meaningful relationships in Jesus, we miss a major opportunity to lead them and show them the path worth walking.

I want my kids to see that their dad follows Jesus with everything. I want them to know that my greatest hope for them is that they follow Him too”.

Mt. 6:33 Steep your life in God-reality, God-initiative, God-provisions. Don’t worry about missing out. You’ll find all your everyday human concerns will be met. (The Message)

So my question to you parents, how are you with this? What are you teaching your teenagers? I hope that God is first, but since i have been here for almost 3 years I can tell you that if God is first, I DON’T see it. Maybe that is why you are having problems with your teenager, they don’t see Christ in you. I had a survey in June and asked them questions and one of the questions was how often does your parents talk to you about God and the results where very disappointing. 9 of the 15 said either never or infrequently.

Parents if you want to see your teen grow in faith, they MUST see it in you.

High School on Wednesday Nights

This is a different kind of post then I normally post but I want to share this with you all that read my blog.
The question that I have for you is what are your goals, not only just in the near future (school year) but what about after High School or College? Do you know what you will be doing but more importantly have you had a conversation with God about that? With everything that you all go through, I wonder if this is even thought of.

God is working in your life right now, and some of you may not even know it. He has plans for you and the question is did you know it?

So on Wednesday nights for the next few weeks we will be doing a little goal setting. There are many things that we set out to do to only fail because we did not either thought it out completely or you did not have a goal in mind.

In order for us to be successful just this school year, we need to have some goals set, too. Over the next few weeks we will be evaluating four aspects of our lives at school – social, mental, physical, and spiritual – and set goals for each one of them.

What kinds of things you will be involved with this year that could be categorized into one of these four areas?

So I hope that you can make it out to begin this journey together and to get focused on the task ahead.

What are we doing with our teens? (Part 3)

Here is part 3 and final. The statement that I ended with yesterday, I begin with today.

Those who no longer believe that all of the accounts and stories in the Bible are true:
39.8% first had doubts in middle school

43.7% first had their doubts in high school

10.6% had their first doubts during college

Clearly, there is a slightly delayed reaction going on. The doubts come first, followed shortly by departure. Students didn’t begin doubting in college, they simply departed by college. Again, if you look around in your church today, two-thirds of those who are sitting among us have already left in their hearts, it will only take a couple of years before their bodies are absent as well.
The Beemer study has a tremendous amount to offer the churches, the pastors, the parents, and the researchers who are sincerely looking into this problem. Britt’s study didn’t look just at behavior; he looked at belief. By making correlations between those beliefs and the behavior and intentions of those who have left the Church, the veil
was lifted, powerful new insights were revealed, and very surprising results were illuminated. ….Brace yourself, because in many instances the results are shocking, and they point a finger at many well-intentioned, firmly established programs and traditions of
churches that are utterly failing the children who faithfully attend every Sunday morning.

Be ready to give up long-held, cherished notions in regard to certain church programs of which perhaps you would never have considered the slightest possibility that there was such a serious problem as this research clearly showed.

First, we will investigate key aspects of the epidemic, including:
the effects of Sunday school

the two different kinds of kids who are leaving the Church and why it’s so important to know the difference

why the Church has lost its value and is now considered irrelevant

Second, we will investigate the solutions that are within our grasp:
how to defend the Christian faith and uphold the authority of the Bible from the very first verse
what it means (and doesn’t mean) to live by the Bible
the revolution that is reclaiming “church” in this culture
Along the way the investigation will be spiced up with a variety of fascinating findings regarding the following:
music
friends
unbiblical church traditions
teaching
beliefs about Genesis

If you are a parent, a pastor, or a Christian educator, then this research is for you. Or maybe you are one of the millions of students who are thinking about leaving the Church or have already done so. If so, I challenge you to let the numbers speak for themselves and then be ready to allow God to use you in new ways to make a difference
for the sake of the next generation and the Church.
Yes, I challenge you. This Sunday, look to the left and then look to the right. According to our research, two-thirds of the children and teens you see will be gone in a matter of years.
What can be done about it? Plenty, as you will soon see!

You understand why I really think that you should pick up this book. In Part 1 I gave you a link to Amazon.com so I have already given you the start. But it doesn’t end there. I told you in Part one that another story came across my blog that fits right in and here it is:

Forget the pizza parties,’ Teens tell churches
By Cathy Lynn Grossman and Stephanie Steinberg, USA TODAY

“Bye-bye church. We’re busy.” That’s the message teens are giving churches today.

Only about one in four teens now participate in church youth groups, considered the hallmark of involvement; numbers have been flat since 1999. Other measures of religiosity — prayer, Bible reading and going to church — lag as well, according to Barna Group, a Ventura, Calif., evangelical research company. This all has churches canceling their summer teen camps and youth pastors looking worriedly toward the fall, when school-year youth groups kick in.

“Talking to God may be losing out to Facebook,” says Barna president David Kinnaman.

“Sweet 16 is not a sweet spot for churches. It’s the age teens typically drop out,” says Thom Rainer, president of LifeWay Christian Resources in Nashville, which found the turning point in a study of church dropouts. “A decade ago teens were coming to church youth group to play, coming for the entertainment, coming for the pizza. They’re not even coming for the pizza anymore. They say, ‘We don’t see the church as relevant, as meeting our needs or where we need to be today.’ ”

“I blame the parents,”who didn’t grow up in a church culture, says Jeremy Johnston, executive pastor at First Family Church in Overland Park, Kan.

His mega church would routinely take 600 teens to summer church camp, he says, “and many would be forever changed by that experience. But this summer we don’t even have a camp.

“Remember, 80% of kids don’t have cars. Their parents could be lazy or the opposite — overstressed and over-committed. If parents don’t go to church, kids don’t, either.”

Don’t forget the over-committed teens themselves, the recession and growing competition from summer mission trips, says Rick Gage of Go-Tell Youth Camps, based in Duluth, Ga.

Chris Palmer, youth pastor at Ironbridge Baptist Church in Chester, Va., says its youth group enrollment slid from 125 teens in 2008 to 35 last winter.

He pulled participation back up to 70 this year by letting teens know “real church, centered on Jesus Christ, is hard work,” Palmer says. “This involves the Marine Corps of Christianity. Once we communicate that, we see kids say, ‘Hey, I want to be involved in something that’s a little radical and exciting.’ ”

Rainer agrees. He says teens today want Scripture, they “don’t want superficiality. We need to tell them that if you are part of church life, you are part of something bigger. The church needs you, too.”

But first, they have to find the kids.

Sam Atkeson of Falls Church, Va., left his Episcopal church youth group not long after leaving middle school.

“I started to question if it was something I always wanted to do or if I just went because my friends did,” says Atkeson, now 18. “It just wasn’t really something I wanted to continue to do. My beliefs changed. I wouldn’t consider myself a Christian anymore.”

As you can see that all 3-parts fit in and what are we going to do about it church?

I know that I have been convicted as a Student Pastor and will be working on getting my end “fixed”. But what about you parent(s) what are you willing to do to help your kids not fall out with their walk with Jesus?

What are we doing with our teens? (Part 2)

I hope that you are eager to read part two. As I was finishing chapter one, I was wondering and thinking WOW, can this be for real, than another story that I found came across my blog that can lead to this trend and I will share that at the end of the part 3 highlights.

So here we go for part 2:

The question that I left off with part 1 what and why (the root of the problem)
Twenty somethings struggle to stay active in Christian faith.

20% churched as teen, spiritually active at age 29

61% churched as teen, disengaged during twenties

19% never churched as teen, still unconnected

Who, Why, and What?
I began traveling and speaking in the United States in the 1980s. As an
Australian, it didn’t take long before I felt I had a good feeling for the pulse of American
Christianity . . . and I saw some tremendous needs. At the time, America could rightly be labeled the greatest Christian nation on earth, the center of the economic world — and although the Church was equipped with nearly every conceivable tool and luxury for developing and expressing its faith — I could see that the Church was in great need.

Since moving to the United States in 1987, I have spoken in hundreds of different churches from many denominations, numerous Bible colleges, seminaries, and Christian conferences on American soil. I have talked with the pastors; I’ve listened to those in the congregations; I have experienced “worship” in almost every conceivable style and form. The ministry of Answers in Genesis is deeply committed to the American church. In fact, the faltering health of the Church in the greatest Christian nation on earth is what
motivated my wife and me to move our family to this country in the first place. My wife and I testify that God called us as missionaries to America — particularly the American Church — to call it back to the authority of the Word of God beginning in Genesis.
….I’ve sat in the grand, but vacant, churches of Europe. I know
where this is headed. Where Europe is today spiritually, America will be tomorrow — and for the same reasons, if the Church does not recognize where the foundational problem lies and address it.
When I began to seriously ponder Barna’s numbers, naturally I wanted to find out more. For help, I called on a trusted and respected supporter of Answers in Genesis. As the chairman of America’s Research Group, and as a leading marketing research and
business analyst expert, Britt Beemer specializes in studying human behavior. Over the decades he has conducted dozens and dozens of surveys for leading corporations as well as small businesses. He analyzes the marketplace and the clientele, and makes recommendations that keep the companies excelling in a competitive world.
…Our goal was simple: We wanted to know who was leaving, why they were leaving, and what (if anything) could be done about it.
….To get to the core of the issues, his team studied only those whom we are most concerned about: every person in our sample said they attended church every week or nearly every week when they were
growing up, but never or seldom go today. We selected those between 20 and 30 who once attended conservative and “evangelical” churches. We wanted to look at the churches that claim to be Bible-believing congregations with Bible-preaching pastors. According to Barna, about 6 percent of people in their 20s and 30s can be considered “evangelical.” This is about the same as the number of teenagers (5 percent).4 The results from Britt’s research would
undoubtedly have been more drastic if we had considered more liberal congregations. We deliberately skewed the research toward conservatives so that we could all understand that whatever problems showed up would be much worse for the church
population in general.

…The sample included:

1,000 individuals from coast to coast

Balanced according to population and gender

With just over half being aged 25-29

With under half being aged 20-24

First of all, he didn’t discover anything abnormal about the group as a whole. There weren’t an unusual number of homeschoolers, or secular school kids, who were leaving. There wasn’t a significant number of females compared to males that had decided to leave. In other words, the 60 percent plus of the evangelical kids who choose to leave the church look pretty much like the 40 percent who decide to stay — at least on the outside. The breakdown of those who left really fits the profile of the evangelical population in general.
So at first, the who question didn’t seem to give us many answers. So then, why?

Why did they leave the church?
When we asked them this open-ended question, we got an earful.
At first, we were surprised (and a little disappointed) that there wasn’t a single reason. It would have been nice to find a single identifiable virus somewhere. How simple it would have been to stereotype the whole group and point out one germ that had been causing the sickness to spread. But the numbers didn’t say that. A single identifiable culprit didn’t appear. Other researchers have come to similar conclusions.
When LifeWay did their research for the Southern Baptist Convention, 97 percent of the “dropouts” listed one or more specific life-change issues as a reason they left church.
The most frequent reason they gave for leaving church was almost an indifferent shrug of the shoulders.

The top 10 reasons were:
1. 12% Boring service
2. 12% Legalism
3. 11% Hypocrisy of leaders
4. 10% Too political
5. 9% Self-righteous people
6. 7% Distance from home
7. 6% Not relevant to personal growth
8. 6% God would not condemn to hell
9. 5% Bible not relevant/not practical
10. 5% Couldn’t find my preferred denomination in the area

…In all honesty, these kinds of results just seemed too shallow for us at Answers in Genesis. And they seemed too superficial to Britt as well. We have a massive epidemic on our hands, and researchers seemed to be content with answers that sounded like “I just didn’t feel very good,” or “I wasn’t there because I chose to be someplace else.” …This is precisely why we teamed up with an expert like Britt Beemer who probes, and probes, and probes until he finds the right reasons. We found the real reasons, though some of them will shake many churches to their very core. Never content with the easy answers that people give to justify their behavior, ….
We can now identify the real answers as well as the causes affecting young people who leave the church.
As Britt studied his data, it was obvious that multiple issues are behind the exodus from church. The why? question would prove to be more complicated than many expected. But soon, as the numbers became more clear, patterns emerged, assumptions were destroyed, and quirky findings surfaced. One of the most important and startling findings turned out not to answer the why? question, but rather the when?
question.

Of all the 20 to 29-year-old evangelicals who attended church regularly but no longer do so:

95% of them attended church regularly during their elementary and middle school years

55% attended church regularly during high school

11% were still going to church during college

I think this is one of the most revealing and yet challenging statistics in the entire survey — and something we didn’t expect. Most people assume that students are lost in college. We’ve always been trying to prepare our kids for college (and I still think that’s a critical thing to do, of course), but it turns out that only 11 percent of those who have left the Church did so during the college years. Almost 90 percent of them were lost in middle school and high school. By the time they got to college they were already gone!

About 40 percent are leaving the Church during elementary and middle school years!

Most people assumed that elementary and middle school is a fairly neutral environment where children toe the line and follow in the footsteps of their parents’ spirituality. Not so.
I believe that over half of these kids were lost before we got them into high school! Whatever diseases are fueling the epidemic of losing our young people, they are infecting our students much, much earlier than most assumed.
Let me say this again: We are losing many more people by middle school and many more by high school than we will ever lose in college.

Many parents will fork out big bucks to send these students to Christian colleges, hoping to protect them in their faith. But the fact is, they’re already gone. They were lost while still in the fold. They were disengaging while they were still sitting in the pews. They were preparing their exit while they were faithfully attending youth groups and Sunday schools.

What a reminder to parents (and Christian leaders) to do exactly what God’s Word instructs us to do — to “train up a child in the way he should go . . .” (Prov. 22:6).

And further, “These words which I command you today shall be in your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up” (Deut. 6:6–7;
NKJV).

…Sadly, I think many see children’s programs as entertainment, teaching Bible stories, and so on, but when they get older we need to think about preparing them somehow for college — but as our research showed, by then they are already gone!

This topic regarding when we begin to lose our kids is where the study began to get very interesting and very illuminating.
For example:
Those who no longer believe that all of the accounts and stories in the Bible are true:

You will have to wait for part 3 to see the shocking news that we don’t want to admit but we need to.


What are we doing with our Teens? (Part 1)

Hello all,
It has been a while since I posted anything, we where on vacation last week and it was a great time of fun but most importantly a time of relaxation (which I really needed) but it is time to get going again.

So anyway while I was on vacation, I was able to do some reading (which I really don’t like doing and was very far behind) and one of the two and a half books that i did read while on vacation was called “Already Gone” (if you have not read this book than I really recommend that you do, it is eye opening) written by Ken Ham (Answer in Genesis) & Britt Beemer.
Because the chapter is so long and I want to highlight a lot of chapter 1 I’ll be breaking it up into 3 parts and I have some other thoughts to go with this, look for Part 2 on Wednesday and part 3 on Thursday

Here are some highlights of chapter 1 of the book:

Part 1:
An Epidemic on Our Hands
Epidemic (Ep-i-dem-ic)1
1. A disease or anything resembling a disease; attacking or affecting many individuals in
a community or a population simultaneously.
2. Anything which takes possession of the minds of people as an epidemic does of their
bodies; as, an epidemic of terror.
A majority of twenty-somethings — 61% of today’s young adults — had been
churched at one point during their teen years but they are now spiritually disengaged
(i.e., not actively attending church, reading the Bible, or praying).
— George Barna
Chapter 1

Guard what has been entrusted to you, avoiding worldly and empty chatter and the opposing arguments of what is falsely called “knowledge” — which some have professed and thus gone astray from the faith. Grace be with you (1 Tim. 6:20–21).

I dare you. I dare you to try it this Sunday. Look to the right, and look to the left. While the pastor delivers his message, while the worship team sings their songs, while the youth pastor gives his announcements, look to the right and look to the left. Look at
the children and look at the teens around you. Many of them will be familiar faces. They are the faces of your friends’ sons and daughters. They are the friends that your children bring home after youth group. They are your children . . . the ones who have been faithfully following you to church for years. Now, imagine that two-thirds of them have just disappeared.

That’s right, two-thirds of them — the ones who go to secular school, even those homeschooled or sent to Christian school, the boys and the girls, the kids who are leaders of the school’s Bible club, the kids who sit in the back row with their baseball caps pulled low over their eyes — imagine that two-thirds of them have just disappeared
from your church.

Yes, look to the left and look to the right this Sunday. Put down your church bulletin; look at those kids and imagine that two-thirds of them aren’t even there. Why?

Because they are already gone.

It’s time to wake up and see the tidal wave washing away the foundation of your church. The numbers are in — and they don’t look good. From across Christendom the reports are the same: A mass exodus is underway. Most youth of today will not be coming to church tomorrow. Nationwide polls and denominational reports are showing
that the next generation is calling it quits on the traditional church.

And it’s not just happening on the nominal fringe; it’s happening at the core of the faith. Is that just a grim prediction? Is that just the latest arm-twisting from reactionary conservatives who are trying to instill fear into the parents and the teachers of the next generation? No, it’s not just a prediction. It’s a reality — as we will document clearly from commissioned professional and statistically valid research later in this book. In fact, it’s already happening . . . just like it did in England; it’s happening here in North America.

Now. Like the black plagues that nearly wiped out the general population of Europe, a spiritual black plague has almost killed the next generation of European believers. A few churches are surviving. Even fewer are thriving. The vast majority are slowly dying. It’s a
spiritual epidemic, really. A wave of spiritual decay and death has almost entirely stripped a continent of its godly heritage, and now the same disease is infecting North America.

Many of us saw it coming but didn’t want to admit it. After all, our churches looked healthy on the surface. We saw bubbling Sunday schools and dynamic youth ministries. As parents and grandparents we appreciatively graced the doors of the church, faithfully dragging our kids with us, as our ages pushed into the 40s and 50s and beyond. But a vacuum was forming: there were the college students who no longer
showed up for the Sunday worship service, the newly married couple that never came back after the honeymoon. . . . Sure, there were exceptions and we were grateful for their dedication.

For the most part, however, we saw that the 20- and 30-somethings from our congregations were increasingly AWOL. To be honest, none of us really wanted to admit it, did we? And so we began to justify to ourselves that maybe it wasn’t happening at all.
Recent and irrefutable statistics are forcing us to face the truth.

Respected pollster George Barna was one of the first to put numbers to the epidemic. Based on interviews with 22,000 adults and over 2,000 teenagers in 25 separate surveys, Barna unquestionably quantified the seriousness of the situation: six out of ten 20-somethings who were involved in a church during their teen years are already gone.
Despite strong levels of spiritual activity during the teen years, most 20-somethings disengage from active participation in the Christian faith during their young adult years — and often beyond that.

Consider these findings:

Nearly 50% of teens in the United States regularly attend church-related services or activities.

More than three-quarters talk about their faith with their friends.

Three out of five teens attend at least one youth group meeting at a church during a typical three-month period.

One-third of teenagers participate in Christian clubs at school.

That’s all well and good, but do these numbers stand the test of time?

Is the involvement of churched children and teens continuing into young adulthood? Unfortunately not. Not even close. The Barna research is showing that religious activity in the teen years does not translate into spiritual commitment as individuals move into
their 20s and 30s (and our own research, you are about to discover, will illuminate you with reasons as to why this occurs).

Most of them are pulling away from church, are spending less time alone studying their Bibles, are giving very little financially to Christian causes, are ceasing to volunteer for church activities, and are turning their backs on Christian media such as magazines, radio, and television.

What does this look like numerically for today’s 20-somethings?

61% of today’s young adults who were regular church attendees are now “spiritually disengaged.” They are not actively attending church, praying, or reading their Bibles.

20% of those who were spiritually active during high school are maintaining a similar level of commitment.

19% of teens were never reached by the Christian community, and they are still disconnected from the Church or any other Christian activities.
Shortly after Barna blew the whistle on the problem, individual denominations and churches began to take an honest look at what was happening as their children and teens began disappearing into the young adult years. Their findings confirmed the trends that Barna had found.
Dozens of groups have looked at the issue from slightly different angles. Each study yields slightly different results, but their conclusions are unanimously startling. For example, when the Southern Baptist Convention researched the problem, they discovered that more than two-thirds of young adults who attended a Protestant
church for at least a year in high school stopped attending for at least a year between the ages of 18 and 22.
There are exceptions, of course. Here and there we find a smattering of churches with vibrant participation from the 20-something age group. In some cities, we are seeing congregations develop that are made up almost exclusively of people from this age group. But unfortunately, these are the exceptions and not the rule. The trends that we are seeing can no longer be ignored. The epidemic is a reality. The abandoned church buildings of Europe are really just buildings, yet they are graphic symbols — warnings to those of us who are seeing the same trends in our local congregations: we are one generation away from the evaporation of church as we know it. Slowly but certainly the church of the future is headed toward the morgue and will continue to do so — unless we come to better understand what is happening and implement a clear, biblical plan to circumvent it.
The trends are known; more and more are finding out about them — but the vital question concerns what is the root problem of why this is happening.
We need to know why if we are going to formulate possible solutions.

Part 2 will be out tomorrow

1 in 5 high school students abuse prescription drugs

Another article that I found and I would like to add that parents your teenagers don’t need to go to the streets to find drugs, they only need to go to the medicine cabinet in your house. Please be aware of your prescription drugs lying around the house.

A new report shows one in five high school students have taken a prescription drug that they didn’t get from a doctor.

The abused drugs include pain pills and attention deficit drugs used as study aids.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study found that the drug use was most common among 12th graders. White students took the drugs more than blacks or Hispanics.

The CDC did not have information on which drugs were abused the most.

The findings come from a 2009 confidential and anonymous survey of more than 16,000 U.S. high school students. This was the first year students were asked about prescription drug abuse.