Tag Archives: high school ministry

The Truth About Mormonism

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TheTruthAboutMormonism-Final

I’m preparing a two-week teaching series called “The Truth About Mormonism”. This will be my first time teaching about the Mormon Church from the stage in my 11 years as a youth pastor. I’ve considered doing it in the past, but have been reluctant to do so. A handful of fellow Christians have even discouraged me from talking about it from the platform.

The Mormon Church is prominent here in AZ. I often hear things like, “Everyone at my school is LDS”. While that obviously isn’t true, my students feel like they are swimming in Mormon seas in their classrooms and on their teams.

My conviction is that I’m not shepherding my students well if I don’t tell them two things: First, the Mormon religion is a false religion, and Joseph Smith was a false prophet. Second, the gospel of grace is incredibly good news to devoted Mormons, and it’s the gospel that they need. They don’t need to be bashed. We don’t need to have a “GOTCHA! IN YOUR FACE” moment with them when we point out false prophecies and inconsistencies.

What I’ve heard countless times is that it’s Mormon bashing to teach or talk about Mormonism. That’s a defense mechanism aimed at preventing anyone from questioning their beliefs. I’ll spend the weekend right before this series picking apart the Bible and Christianity, looking for inconsistencies and reasons to bail on the whole thing.

My hope is that my students and their Mormon friends will submit to the truth, even if it hurts abominably.

My hope is also that none of us would come across as arrogant jerks through the process or in our resulting conversations.

My greatest hope is that the LDS students in the Gilbert area would fall in love with Jesus, who is more than enough to save and sustain them, and the Bible, which is more than enough to teach them about the one true God.

 

 

Utilizing Skype in Student Ministries

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Last year I was an interim Freshman Bible Teacher at a local high school. Our students were reading through a book, and I thought it would be awesome to finish out the project by doing a Skype Q&A with the book’s author. The classroom has a smart board in it (which is basically a 6-foot iPad on the wall). That never panned out, but my dream… wouldn’t… die. Are you inspired yet? ;)

Years ago I flew in an incredible apologist to come and speak in my High School Ministry. After paying for the flight, hotel, food and honorarium it got a bit expensive. It was worth it, but it was expensive. I wanted to bring him back right away.

And then it hit me… why not Skype him in?

No flights. No meals. No time away from his family.

We have the technology available (laptop, strong internet connection, mics). SO WHY NOT?

And it’s working out. It looks like we’ll lock him in at about 1/4th the cost! He’ll have to do some prep and do two 30-minute Skype sessions, so I want to honor his time with an honorarium… but he’ll get to speak from his house, with all his resources right there in his lap, his family down the hall, while getting piped into our youth room hundreds of miles away.

Is anyone else utilizing this kind of technology in a ministry setting? It seems like such a win-win!

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One of the ways we help our students to dig deeper and apply what they are learning is by handing them these Life Notes on the way out the door each weekend. They are created by one of our volunteers (Tisha Olson) each week, and they follow the teaching from the weekend sermon in the HSM. Students have loved them!

Q & A with High School Students

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A couple weeks ago we asked our students to write down any questions they have about Christianity, faith, spirituality, and that sort of thing. I’m going to answer a handful of them from the stage over the next few weeks, and then I’ll answer the others on video and post them on our ministry blog. Here are a handful of good ones I am looking forward to answering. (Side note: I will do my best to answer them. I don’t want to come across like I’m some answer machine when it comes to all things spiritual).

  • What will heaven be like, specifically?
  • How does predestination work?
  • What makes this religion (Christianity) different from others?
  • Where do religion and evolution meet?
  • Are the stories in the bible supposed to be taken figuratively or literally?
  • Are only Christians going to heaven?
  • What does God say about dating?
  • Can God help me get better at something?
  • Does God believe in love at first sight, or is it a myth?
  • How do I know if God is mad at me?
  • Is it OK to be mad at God?
  • Did Jesus feed 5,000 people or 4,000 people? The gospel accounts don’t say the same thing.

Communication Avenues

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We use all sorts of communication avenues in my high school ministry.

Text Messaging is our primary means of communicating with students. We text students at least once a week with reminders about events we’ve announced. We use a company called “Boom Text“.

Facebook is our second most used avenue. We have a “fan page”, which isn’t ideal. It doesn’t allow us to send messages to our students and parents that are fans, just “updates”, which they don’t see unless they click their Inbox and look at the updates. I am friends with all of our students on my personal account, and I have them in groups of 20 so that I can send them messages. So I set them up like “Mission Students 1″, “Mission Students 2″, etc… Then I just copy/paste the same message into group messages. I’d like to just set up a page for the ministry that behaves like a normal profile, but Facebook doesn’t allow it. We utilize a few tabs on the page too (Events, Videos, etc…). We also tag every student in our photos, which draws them to the page.

We use fliers for everything. How many of them actually make it home? Who knows… but I can’t give up on this one yet. We could probably go paperless, but I’m old fashioned I guess.

We create a quarterly calendar, on paper, which is also saved as a picture and pdf and posted everywhere.

We have a Twitter account, but only a handful of our students are on their, so we primarily use it to update our Faceboook. It also posts to our website.

Email is last and least. I use it as my primary means of communication with my volunteers, but I usually copy every email with a Facebook message to them too.

We also have an “Announcements” time during each gathering on Sundays- they sure do seem like they’re listening, but who knows!

WHICH ONE(S) OF THESE DO YOU USE IN YOUR MINISTRY?