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Catechism in Crisis

  “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” Mike Tyson, the boxer, once said this to a reporter. The best laid plans are the first thing to go by the wayside in a crisis. Soldiers and athletes can fall back on their training and drills in a time of crisis, making decisions and operating based on learned instinct. The apostle Paul compared the Christian walk both to the life of a soldier and an athlete. Faith comes easy in times of peace, but, without discipline, it falls apart in times of crisis. One historic discipline to weather crises of faith are historic catechisms. Catechisms are distillations of Christian beliefs presented in a dialogue of questions and answers. They are not commonly employed in a low-church context, such as a Southern Baptist church, but they have immense pastoral, educational, and practical value. The first question of the Heidelberg Catechism can be used to illustrate this concept. The first question of the Heidelberg Catechism brings rea...
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How I Approach Planning a Ministry Calendar

  Around October of my first year in youth ministry, I was given an annual budget request form and told to have it ready for the next business meeting. The only guidance I remember receiving was to plan out the events I wanted to do for the next year and estimate how much those events would cost, the sum of all of those costs becomes your budget. Don't get me wrong, this is good advice and a solid way of planning out a budget, but it was at least two degrees of complexity above my skill level at the time. This advice assumed that (1) I knew how to estimate the cost of events, and (2) that I knew how to plan out a full year's worth of events at once. Cost estimation is such a rapidly moving target that it can't be covered in the scope of this writing, so I'll focus on planning a full year's worth of events. I still wouldn't consider myself an expert on either of those things, but one is greater than zero. The first problem I had to overcome in planning out an an...
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How Kids Should Study the Bible - 4 Levels

  I don’t know how to talk to babies, so one of my favorite hobbies is to talk to them about concepts at a much higher level than they could possibly comprehend. Something about explaining gantt charts or network scheduling to pre-toddlers cracks me up. The joke, however, is only funny without the expectation of comprehension. High level understanding of concepts is built by learning smaller concepts and connecting them together over long periods of time — more time than pre-toddlers have at that point in their lives. Likewise, children grow in their understanding and ability to study the Bible. They don’t simply arrive at a complex interpretation, understanding, and application of scripture, it builds as they grow up. This article will break down how kids at four different levels can study the Bible in an age-appropriate way. The levels will be early elementary, from pre-k through second grade (ages 4-7); later elementary, from third grade through fifth grade (ages 8-10); middle...
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"Wanna come with?"

 I remember this time in high school - my senior year - when my youth pastor gave me a real picture of what discipleship means. He probably didn’t think twice about what doing this meant to me. It was at Winter Jam, my second to last hurrah as a youth student, and he was headed to the youth ministers’ meeting that some of the bands held to encourage the ministers, have a time or prayer over the concert, and give a little meet and greet time with some of the artists. He turned to me and asked, “Wanna come?” and I jumped on the opportunity. I had started to feel a calling to youth ministry, and getting to tag along with my youth pastor to meetings like this showed me what being a minister was like. More than any youth sermon, this is what has stuck with me as a picture of discipleship. Discipleship is not just deep bible studies and accountability partners, discipleship is inviting others along in the normal rhythm of life. Several people have told me what doing the work of ministry ...
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I took a 20 year old course on youth ministry and here are my thoughts.

  In the spring of 2020, when most people were finding more free time in their schedules thanks to a greatly minimized commute to work, social media began to fill up with all sorts of ideas on what to do with all of this extra time (in addition to Tiger King hot takes). One of these ideas that piqued my interest came from The Gospel Coalition. It was to take online classes to develop more skills and grow in knowledge while you had the time. Along with this idea, they shared several courses that were freely available on their website, one of which was a course on youth ministry from Covenant Theological Seminary. I wanted to take the course since ministering to youth is how I want to spend my life, but I did not have the newfound abundance of free time. I had just started a new job learning the meaning of "essential worker" and quickly learning how to do high-tech ministry, so I saved the course for later. "Later," came around after the big post wedding move across...
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Passion Week Reading Guide

  Monday - Cleansing of the Temple To start off our week of reading through Holy Week, read Mark 11:15-19. If you remember back to our sermon yesterday , we looked at how Jesus cleared out the temple to make room for what was truly important - teaching God's word. What is something God might be leading you to move out of the way to make room for God's word today? Tuesday Continuing in our week of reading through Holy Week, read Matthew 25:1-13. After Jesus cleaned the clutter out of the temple, He made room for the teaching of God's word. He taught in a pattern that had become typical for Him — parables. In this parable, some of the wedding party was unprepared and missed their chance to celebrate with the bridegroom. The warning of the parable is to always be prepared for the master to return. Are you ready if Christ were to return today? Wednesday Today's reading is an immediate follow up to yesterday's reading. Today, read Matthew 25:14-30. This is an...
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on Learning CSS

  "What's your biggest weakness?" "CSS" I never really got a good grasp of CSS. The cascading style sheets that changed the look and feel of web pages never really clicked with me. I could handle the structure of HTML and the functionality of JavaScript, but CSS always tripped me up. In a job interview during my last semester of college, I claimed it was a weakness of mine. I was proud that I was able to get an answer to the worst interview question ever conceived, but I was not prepared for the interviewer's follow up question, "Why?" "Well, you see, the semester I was focused on front-end web development was cut short. There was this tornado, it destroyed most of the town and many of the buildings on campus were unsafe. The university allowed students to take their grades as they were and end the semester a couple months early. Those months were when I was supposed to be taught how to use CSS." I knew it was the wrong answer as soo...
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