Love the comments on the blog…I totally agree that the 20 something gap is huge. It’s the product of the failure of our approach to children’s and family ministry in the last decade or more. 

I think there are three factors in the Orange approach that we’re integrating at Connexus that can change the reality in many families and in many young adult lives with the next generation.  The first, is getting teens engaged in mission…in serving others.

There comes a point where each of us needs to stop being a consumer and start being a contributor.  Life just works better that way…in marriage, at work, in parenting, in friendships.  If all we do is take, and never give, then somehow we end up feeling empty…deeply unsatisfied.  Ironically, the very thing we are afraid of losing if we give to others (our fulfilment) is the very thing we gain when we give back. But then Jesus taught on that, didn’t he?

People speak of a prolonged adolescence among so many young adults today…I just want to avoid that in the next generation.  If, by the time our kids are 12 years old, they are learning to serve others, they will be able to put into practice all they have learned and will continue to learn.  So while they still play Wii at Xtreme, they may also choose to help with set up and tear down at the theatres, or learn to run a sound board for UpStreet or serve in a homeless shelter. Teens can also get into the thick of serving by serving as small group leaders in Waumba Land or UpStreet, or help in some meaningful way.  By giving back to others what God has given to them, they become whole.

What I love about people like Sarah, Terra, Tim and Laurie who are returning to church after an absence or as young adults, is that they are people who have learned to give back. This may be a key to fulfillment for each of them.  Ironically, while we really want to get, what they have seen is that by giving we get the most.

Parents have a critical role to play in the formation of this next generation.  By partnering with church leaders throughout the different stages in life, parents get equipped by the church to help kids assimilate faith and character into their lives from the youngest age.  But as their son or daughter heads into the pre-teen and especially teen years, by applying what they are learning through serving, and living outside themselves serving other kids, going on mission trips, and helping those on the margins of society, our kids may finally be able to see why we believe what we say we believe, and have what they know deeply integrated into their being by the time they are 18.  I think this might create a "stick" factor for Christianity that is much higher and much truer to Jesus.  After all, if it’s only information we’re teaching our kids without application, there will be no transformation.  And it’s pretty hard to walk away from transformation.

The other key component is moving from class-room based ministry to group-based ministry.  By teaching kids at every age level in a large session, people with teaching gifts are freed up to be engaging and to do what they do best.  In our model (as in all Orange models), kids then switch from a large teach time into small groups, where they have the same small group leader who tracks with them regularly.  The kids in the group are the same week to week too, so every child gets another adult building deeply into their lives and friends who are running the right direction.  This creates a powerful chemistry of relationship that is also very hard to walk away from.  It’s easy to skip out on class…it’s much harder to walk away from real relationship.  But then Jesus modeled that too right…something about 12 close followers…disciples….

Throughout the process, group leaders are interacting with parents to equip parents to bring home what God started on Sundays and to help address what’s happening in the home.  As we all know, sometimes kids stop listening to their parents (really?), and having another adult saying the same things parents say can make all the difference in the world.

I believe that mission for teens, groups for everyone and partnering with parents can really help kids get deeply grounded in their relationship with Christ before they leave home.  It will give them something real to walk away with, not from.

Long post…what are your thoughts?

I must admit.  Three years ago, family ministry didn’t matter to me. We had a "successful" kids ministry.  In my former ministry, a couple hundred kids and students would show up every week.  Hey if you had tons of kids show up, wasn’t that enough?

But my mind is changing on that.  Thanks to my work with a good friend and incredible leader, Reggie Joiner.

I just spent a couple more days with Reggie.  If you don’t know Reggie, you should get to know him.  He’s one of the most creative people and deepest strategic thinkers I’ve ever met.

These days, Reggie leads the Rethink Group (which he also founded).  Rethink not only publishes first rate curriculum for children and student ministry in churches, but is responsible for all things Orange, including the Orange leaders community, the Orange Tour and the Orange Conference next April.  Prior to working full time with Rethink, Reggie co-founded North Point Community Church and developed its innovative and powerfully effective approach to family ministry.

What drives Reggie is a deep and abiding concern for families.  In Canada, only 11% of people attend church on a regular basis, but even among those families who do attend church in Canada and the US, a stunning 80% of kids who grew up in the church leave the church when they go to college, not to return for years…or in some cases, ever.  Reggie has an incredible desire to change that.

The idea behind the Orange movement is that church leaders and parents can partner together around a master plan to cultivate faith and character in our children.  The church can’t do it alone, and parents can’t do it alone.  God designed us to do it together.

I find it incredibly refreshing to know that Reggie and his team work day and night on better ways to equip and help church leaders and parents raise the next generation for God.  I’m so thankful that Connexus will be an orange church from the ground up, even though we are still working on exactly what that means as the orange movements get shaped in these months and years ahead.  All I can say is I want to be counted on to be one of those who helps reverse that walk-away statistic.

I want my kids to be fully alive in God when they head to college.  I want it for more than my kids or your kids…I want it for the community, the region, the continent, the planet.  If life is truly found in God, why would we wish anything but that on the next generation?

Reggie and I spent last night talking about how to raise awareness about the silent crisis happening in churches with the next generation — that so few, even among the churched, are being influenced for God.

The first step to raising awareness is to acknowledge the problem.

Three questions:

    1.  Do you see it?
    2.  Do you care?
    3.  Are you prepared to do anything about it?

It bothers me that again and again, the hardest ministry to staff in churches across North America (including Connexus) is kids’ ministry.  Maybe that’s a factor in the stat.  Maybe we can change that!

more on this soon….

I had to leave our awesome Sunday gathering at Connexus on Sunday early…largely because I had to catch a flight to Atlanta where I’m spending a good chunk of this week working on things Orange and on retreat with the lead pastors from North Point, not to mention getting ready for soft-launch this weekend at Connexus Barrie.

On the way out, I had lots of time to think.  It’s not often a preacher finds himself with time off on Sunday mornings.  So, I looked around at life outside the church on Sundays.

The parking lot was pretty busy at the Galaxy with our people.  But Walmart was filling up too.  Okay…there were more lots more people at Walmart than at Connexus (even though we were close to packed out). And things were getting busy at Starbucks too. I waited in line for five minutes at Starbucks, desperate for a latte (they were closed at 8 a.m. when I went the first time!!!).

It got me thinking about categories.  I have spent so much of my life thinking of people as "churched" or "unchurched" – preaching to the churched, preaching to the unchurched etc.  But I’ve never called anyone "unchurched" to their face.  I mean how would that go over?  "Hey, I’m Carey.  I hear you’re unchurched."

At the end of the day, you know what we all are?  We’re people.  That’s it.  Just people.  More and more, I like that.  People — just plain people.

People Jesus died for.  People who find WalMart more compelling than church.  People who find church more compelling than Walmart.  People who all need Jesus.

I think moving forward, I’m going to spend less time talking about "churched" and "unchurched", and more time talking about people. Better yet…more time talking to people, not just about them.

Because the people shopping at Walmart have the same needs and face the same issues as those of us filling the Galaxy.  Because people in line at Starbucks still have deep questions about God, even though they are at Starbucks instead of at church. They simply don’t believe that the church can help them in their quest for God — at least not yet.

Maybe that’s who we’ll preach to starting next weekend with our soft launch in Barrie: people.  People who want to know God. People who desire relevant environments to lead them into a growing relationship with Jesus Christ.

Maybe one day, we’ll see Walmart less full on Sunday mornings and some weeknights when community groups are meeting across Central Ontario…because people are meeting Jesus.

Think about the the people in your life this week…and how we can all get them into environments that will lead them into a growing relationship with Jesus.

I’ll spend a good chunk of today (Friday) planning out the message series for Connexus well into 2008.  The one thought I can’t get out of my mind is how powerful love is.

I posted about the song Under Pressure earlier this week. Parts of the song have been echoing through my head for two days since:

"keep coming up with love, but it’s so slashed and torn…|why can’t we give love one more chance? |    Why can’t we give love…give love…give love…| but love’s such an old fashioned word|and love dares    you to care for people on the edge of the knife|and love dares you to change your way of caring about  ourselves…"

Haunting words.  Great questions.

Why did people flock to Jesus?  Many reasons, but I wonder whether one of the most powerful reasons is because in Jesus, people experienced real love.

What do you crave most deeply in life? Love.  Why do many kids go awol on life and into deep rebellion by age 12 or 15?  Lack of love.  What drives marriages apart?  A loss of love.  What causes breakdowns in relationships?  Absence of love.

Love is the glue that holds it all together….love is what’s lacking in our lives (my life too often)….and God, the Bible tells us, is love.

What if at Connexus, we accessed the love of God?  What if we just loved people?  What if somehow we reflected God’s love deeply and profoundly and He moved in us and through us and in spite of us?

That’s what I’m praying about/thinking about this weekend.  How about you?

I’m so excited. For the first time this weekend, we get to gather as Connexus Comunity Church on a Sunday morning. It’s a "insider" event (we’re not open yet), but it’s still exciting.

It happens at 10:00 a.m. at the Galaxy Cinema in Barrie.  And it’s a gathering for all people who have volunteered to help or want to volunteer at EITHER campus (Orillia campus people please attend too).  We’ll pray together, cast vision, train and UpStreet kids get their own theatre where they’ll watch a private screening of the Bee Movie while their parents and older siblings train (hey, serving at a church launch can be a family affair!) Even if you’ve never served before, here’s your opportunity.  It’s our orientation gathering because just ten days from now we do a soft-launch in Barrie with real "practice" services Sunday morning, and then on the 25th we soft-launch Orillia.  Each campus gets two weeks of soft-launch before the grand openings December 2nd in Barrie and December 9th in Orillia.  Folks, it’s almost here!

I’d love for you to spread the word in the next 24 hours to everyone in your address book who you think might want to help us launch Connexus.  It would help us greatly if you could call or email friends and let them know about it. We’ve already got many people we know who are helping — but actually others we’ve never met before have emailed or shown up at events ready to serve.  Amazing.  You can sign up for the first time on Sunday, too. We will welcome all the help we can get, and there’s defnitely room for you. So….please go viral and spread the word to people reminding them about this.

Plan to arrive by 9:45 a.m. so we’re good to go at 10 sharp.  For more details on Sunday, click here and jump to the Connexus blog. 

Thanks!

Yesterday was a quiet day…back from a trip…no weekend service to prepare for…gray skies…cold.  No office even to go to (although we do have some great temporary digs).  I had a thought that I have several times a year… I don’t have to do ministry. 

If you think about the nature of freedom, none of us needs to plant a church.  I could get a job in the marketplace.  We could just stay home on Sundays, or we could form a church that is far less than what we imagine Connexus could be.  I’d have more time with my family.  More time for myself. 

I do actually think in those patterns from time to time.  I imagine what my life would be if we weren’t doing this.  And it looks attractive for a few minutes.  Sometimes it looks attractive for a few days.

But then I think it through a little further, and life for me begins to lose meaning, focus and purpose.  I am reminded that we really will stand before God one day, and everything that looks so fuzzy now will be crystal clear.  We’ll see all our relationships on earth through the lens of the cross, and we will realize what was at stake.  We’ll realize what could have been, and what should have been, and what might have been if we’d partnered with God to bring the reconciliation He longs for us to bring to people through the cross.  For whatever reason, God puts a call out to all of us (not just preachers) to partner in His work today, the implications of which will last forever.

Last night as I drove to another appointment, I was flipping radio stations and Rock 95 played one of my favourite 80s songs — Queen (with David Bowie) Under Pressure.  Check out the lyrics:
 

                It’s the terror of knowing

                What this world is about

                Watching some good friends

                Screaming let me out

                Pray tomorrow – high higher

               

                Turned away from it all like a blind man

                Sat on a fence but it don’t work

                Keep coming up with love but it’s so slashed

                and torn

                Why?

Under Pressure was sung by a couple of guys who struggle deeply with life and with their sexuality.  The pain inside for them must have been huge, and they saw it in everyone else.  It’s a song that actually asks questions about love and meaning that are answered in the cross, but I’m not sure they knew the answer to that heart-cry is the cross.  The song brought tears to me eyes.

A call to ministry is just the way Jeremiah describes it.  If you try to shut your mouth, it burns like a fire in your heart.  You can’t extinguish it.

I wrote the bulk of this post early this morning at the Second Cup in downtown Barrie watching the first snow gently fall. Somehow it felt like Christmas.  As I leave the restaurant, I feel refreshed.  Ready to answer a call God placed not only on my life, but on our life together.  A call that I can’t escape…and a call today that I again deeply want to embrace.  Too much is at stake. God has done too much to keep silent, to pretend there isn’t a solution to the pain, sorrow and sin that have taken too many lives.  There’s a fire that burns that just won’t go out. 

A short prayer for this morning: God, in some small way, I want to partner with you today to make a difference.  Help me.  Thank you for this opportunity. Thank you for the cross.

How do you process the whole business of how you serve God in the world?  What pulls do you feel in good and not-so-good directions when it comes to serving God?

Last observation from my time at the Willow Creek Conference Saturday in BC (thanks Willow for a great event). 

Having spoken at numerous conferences in a wide variety of settings over the last five years, I see a lot of checkerboard enthusiasm among church leaders and volunteers.  Some are passionate.  Some aren’t.  Some really want to
take risks.  Some don’t.  I wish everyone was passionately committed to reaching others and being the church Jesus has in mind.

And yet everyone I meet wants radical results.  However, not nearly as many are willing
to pay the price associated with radical action.  Because at the end of the day, church and even spiritual growth are too often about us, not about the world. Is it possible to have radically different results without radically different action?  Isn’t that like desperately wanting to lose weight while sitting on the couch eating bags of potato chips?  Something’s got to change for the results to be radically different. 

I feel SO grateful to be part of a community at home that jumps into
real risk, that is willing to embrace deep change for the sake of Jesus
and for the sake of others.  You are one courageous group of leaders, and your faith and willingess to risk inspires church leaders all over the place.

I
never ever want to think we’ve "arrived" because we have so much to learn and so much left to do. But when I think of a
bible passage like this,
I think we are starting to really embrace the radical essence of that
teaching.  I desire that so deeply and I’m so excited to be doing this with you.  Let’s not ever quit!

You have left so much behind for Jesus.  All I can say is thanks for
taking this huge risk.  I feel privileged to be counted among the members of this community.

I love getting around innovative leaders. I had lunch and dinner yesterday with some of the other communicators at the conference I was speaking at in BC.  We had leaders from California, BC and Ontario in on the conversation, and we began to reflect on the changes happening in the church today.

Highlights:

• Something in the church is shifting deeply for people under 30.  They desire both anonymity and relationship (relationship on their terms).  Their tolerance for hypocrisy is minuscule. They are searching for something real, something meaningful, something personal and interactive. I’ve seen this in our community, and it’s a change that excites me.  We might be moving to an era where there is little tolerance for "playing" church and a deep desire to be the church.

• Two of the lead pastors were doing major series on hypocrisy.  The guy from California is in one right now, and I’m planning a major series for January 08.  We wondered allowed whether we could do 52 Sundays next year where all we did was say "love God, love others" and help people integrate that into their lives.  This is where most of us fall down.  We were kind of joking about preaching the same message 52 times, but I wonder what would happen if Christians were the most loving people.  What kind of teaching and what kind of environment in our community groups would lend itself to people truly being transformed into Christ-likeness. Isn’t that what people long for — to be different than we are?  Do we too often settle for breadth of information, and not depth of application of what we already know in our lives?

What do you think?

So this is going to be a strange weekend for a lot of us at my home church of Connexus.  No church services.  At least no church that we’re leading or directly involved in.  It’s the only weekend Connexus has off, but let me ask you, how will you spend it?

I’ve been thinking about how I’ll spend it. I’ll be stuck on a plane.  I’m speaking at a conference in Vancouver on Saturday and fly out at…yikes…6:30 Sunday morning. I’m so grateful for the clocks rolling back an hour…. I don’t get back to Toronto until 4:30 that afternoon.  I’ll be fortunate to make it for my niece’s baptism (really hope I can make it, Mandy) Sunday night.

But this whole thing made me think about how we engage God.  I find it too easy to duck God.  To fill up too much of my time in busy-ness for Him instead of direct engagement with Him.  I’ve got no stats, but my guess is that many Christians spend more time reading Christian books than they spend reading the Bible.  More time thinking about God than praying to Him.  Engaging Him.  I think I’m guilty.

What if we just deeply engaged God this weekend?  Sometimes I think we can use church as a substitute for truly engaging God. We go to listen, but not to be changed. Rating the preacher over lunch becomes the highlight, instead of actually engaging how the Word is speaking directly into your life at any moment.

Even if you do go to church (and I hope you do), what if you tried to engage God? What if we all did that next time we’re in church? What if we really opened our hearts and letting Him speak to us?  What if we stopped judging the music as though we had to text in some rating about whether we liked it or not, and instead, worshiped God and prayed for the people around us who were engaging Him for the first time? What if stopped evaluating the preacher and just listened – for God? What if we pray before we went to church, asking God to speak deeply into our lives?  Prayed while were at church?  Prayed after?  What would happen?

Man, I find being quiet with God a hard thing to do. Because then I need to face Him.  And I need to see myself for who I truly am.

Can you do that this weekend?  Can I?

So it’s day one as full time staff at Connexus Community Church. I am so excited and grateful for this opportunity to launch a church that really works for people.  Yep.  People.  Just plain people.  People who go to WalMart or Starbucks on Sunday, rather than to church.  People who think another hour of sleep beats meeting God.  People who are curious about God, but really don’t believe the church can help them.  People.

Leading people into a growing relationship with Jesus through irresistible, relevant environments is what Connexus is all about.  I’m so excited that our staff will meet today to pray, work for a few hours and then (actually) take our families out for dinner and a round of laser tag (yah…laser tag!) so we can celebrate this special time.  So much to do.  So much to pray about.  So much to plan.  So much to celebrate.  It’s so great being in this together, isn’t it?

Here’s a day one thought starter: Jay Hardwick is asking some great questions on his blog about why Christians don’t attract non-Christians into our life in Christ.  Most non-Christians think of Christians as uptight, dangerous and hypocritical people.  Why?

It’s not because we’re "spiritual".  People are attracted to spiritual Yesterday, the Dalai Lama visited Toronto and attracted  30,000 people at the Roger’s Center.   People were drawn to him.  Why? 

I wonder if Christians (me included) have missed the boat entirely
because we decide that maturity consists of breadth of knowledge (the I
just did a 75 week bible study on Revelation and know a lot kind of deal). But the
truth is, we come home from Bible study and yell at people and kick the
cat. No wonder outsiders avoid us. No wonder people flee us.  Unlike the Dalai Lama, we fail to exhibit love, humility or peace. And while the Dalai Lama may be "spiritual", he is no comparison to Jesus, who perfectly exhibited the character of God, which is love.

I wonder if maturity is not breadth of knowledge, but depth of
application: taking the simple-to-understand-but-difficult-to-do teachings of Jesus and scripture like love, grace, and humility,
and applying them at every level of our lives.

I hope that’s what Connexus is about.  I hope that we are able to offer relevant environments that draws people into the full depth of God’s love.  How deeply would you want love to be integrated into your life?  If we can begin to think like that, maybe the revolution might begin….