Most parents can relate to the challenge of addressing the topic of sex with their children.  How much information is enough and how much is too much?  When are they ready for the conversation and when it is to soon?  How do we bring up the topic?  To be honest, the awkwardness and fear many times causes us to avoid the subject all together and culture becomes the only formative voice in the lives of our children on such a critical issue.  Once again, the Fuller Youth Institute (he have referred to their blog previously) has provided a helpful resource for us as parents on having this “awkward conversation” with our students.  I encourage you to take a listen:

Fuller Youth Institute: How Do I Talk About Sex With My Teenager?

D303 & Centennial Counseling To Host Film

on Female Bullying

“Finding Kind” at Arcada Theatre on April 22

Centennial Counseling Center and St. Charles School District 303 are proud to host a free screening of the documentary film: Finding Kind, with a panel discussion following the presentation of the film.  The St Charles Youth Commission and the historic Arcada Theatere are sponsoring this screening.  Finding Kinddocuments two college girls, Lauren Parsekian and Molly Thompson, as they travel across the country in order to better understand the epidemic of female bullying and challenge girls and women to become allies of change…by Finding Kind.

Date: Sunday, April 22, 2012

Time: 1-3 p.m.

Where:  Arcada Theatre

105 E Main St.

St. Charles, IL 60174

To view the Finding Kind trailer, and for more information about the Kind Campaign and how you can be a part of the movement, visit: www.kindcampaign.com

PLEASE NOTE:  Due to certain language and content, Finding Kind is recommended for students in grades 6-12, although younger children will be allowed to attend at the discretion of their parents.  The film is best used as a conversation starter—feel free to bring your family, team, or group.

What You Need to Know About Faith in College from Fuller Youth Institute on Vimeo.

This is a season full of change.  Seniors are graduating and preparing for what lay ahead.  For some, this will be the first time in their life when their faith really becomes an a full expression of their own worldview and belief system.

For parents, it can be an opportunity.  My friend, Ken Lippold, once told me that graduation parities need to be more about their future than they are about the past.  It is appropriate to celebrate their accomplishments and yet there is more that our Grad’s need to hear from us.  As much as we applaud them for the work and dedication that it required to complete high school, we can use this season to commission them for the call that God has placed in their lives and their entrance into the mission field called college, career and life.  Use this season to remind our graduating students that they are being “sent” in much the same way that we send a missionary to a foreign country.

Congrats grads, I look forward to hearing all that God will accomplish in you and through you.

I posted this video on the blog a few months ago, but I wanted to bring it to you attention again. I used it last Sunday with the students as we began a new series in TREK entitled Pitch Black: Becoming Light in a Dark World focused on peer to peer evangelism. The video captures well the concept and motivation behind the series, our calling to give away our faith, to be fisher’s of men.

The question is how? How do we share Jesus with a generation that is skeptical? How do we point them to their need for Christ without becoming judgmental hypocrites? As we dive into this conversation, here are a couple questions to begin the discussion at home:

• Take a look at I Corinthians 9: 19 – 22. What do you think Paul is saying in these verses regarding how he approaches those who do not have the gospel?
• Think about a friend that you have who is not a Christian. What would it look like for you to find common ground with them? Where would you find a “starting point” in you r efforts to share Jesus with them?
• Let’s face it; the idea of evangelism isn’t popular in our culture. How do we help a friend understand their “need” for Jesus (dealing with their sin problem) and yet avoid coming across as the judgmental Christian who appears to “have their act together”?
• How can we as a family help to reach out to your friends who don’t yet know Christ?
• Which of your friends would you like us to be praying for?

An excerpt from an interview with Dr. Paul Tripp: (found on www.cpyu.org)

Q: What sort of goals should a parent have as their children reach the teenage years?

A: Unfortunately, western culture has had a terribly cynical view of the teen years. It’s a view that is largely biologically based. People tend to see teenagers as a collection of raging, rebel hormones encased in skin. Of course, the idea is that you can’t talk to a hormone. I read someone who put it very well. He said that if you add the word “teenage” to any other word, it becomes a negative. Take “teenage driver.” That’s a simple instance of how this particular age group attracts cynicism.

The problem with this way of looking at teens is that it’s a subtle denial of the Gospel. Actually, what we’re really saying is that there’s a class of people for whom the Gospel won’t work. That’s a devastating theology. My experience is that when parents buy into that view of the Gospel for their teenagers, it begins to bleed over into other relationships. They begin to have doubts about whether Christ can reach all sorts of people.

That means that simply surviving your teens is not enough of a goal. In a sense, having survival as a goal is selfish because it’s focused simply on getting yourself through a difficult time. The other problem with having survival as a goal is that, as parents, we tend to settle for external, behaviorist sorts of goals.

We try to deal with our kids according to the Nike way—“Just do it!” Children who have only had parents who want to regulate and control their behaviour don’t have much when they leave the home.

In America, for example, we have had a huge number of kids from Christian homes who go off to college and forsake the faith. Actually, I suspect that they never had it in the first place. In fact, what they had was the faith of their parents. It’s just that they never internalized it for themselves. All that the college situation does is reveal the true heart of the teenager that had been masked by parental control and regulations.

Naturally, all parents need to have regulations that control the behavior of their children, but it’s not enough of a goal. The sort of rule-keeping that we describe as behaviorism, which is disconnected from the heart, is repudiated throughout the Bible and was the peculiar sin of the Pharisees. Christ roundly condemned it. And yet Christian parents can be very successful at creating a new generation of young Pharisees who live with no sense of need for the Gospel at all, because they’re quite good at keeping external rules. That’s pretty scary to me.

We need to see that the final years of a child’s life at home are a time of unprecedented opportunity. As a child’s world unfolds before him and he experiences greater freedom, his heart gets revealed. This means that we have to take every opportunity to be part of the final stage of preparation. Being involved with our teenagers at a deep level is something we mustn’t avoid.

(for more of this interview and more on the topic of the goal of Christian parent check out the full interview.)

Check out this article from out friends at the Fuller Youth Institute:

Becoming Aware:  (by Rhett Smith)

A shovel, a mirror, and a tray.

Recently I stood before a classroom of parents with these rudimentary objects.  The shovel, mirror, and tray presented stark contrasts to the technological tools I was trying to help parents view as influences that are shaping their kids’ lives.

The journey that brought me to this place of teaching parents about their teenager’s use of technology and how it shapes them may be similar to yours. Like many people who work with youth, as a college pastor I found myself quickly intrigued by all the new electronic media students were utilizing. Thanks to my college students I started a blog in ’04, followed by Facebook in ’05 and Twitter in ’07.  And you never saw me without my trusted Blackberry or iPhone.

But it was not until this last year that I started to become wary of the changes that I was noticing in myself.  I was distracted and unfocused. I began to feel phantom vibrations in my pocket¹, though no cell phone was there. I noticed myself incessantly sending tweets from a Coldplay concert though I was on a date with my wife.

I knew it was getting bad when my 3-year-old daughter would walk around the house imitating me by pretending like she was talking on the phone.  More and more I felt concerned with what was happening “out there,” and not present with what was happening immediately in front of me.  It was a lonely and disheartening recognition of how technology was using me.

I’m now a marriage and family therapist, and one of the turning points for me was when it dawned on me during a therapy session that many of my clients come to therapy because it may be the only time during the week that they have someone else’s undivided attention.  As a therapist I was present with these people day in and day out, so I decided that my family deserved that same treatment and more.  From that point on, I decided to use use technology in such a way that it didn’t come in between my most important relationships.

Helping Others Navigate the Technological Terrain

As a youth pastor, volunteer, or parent of an adolescent, you are going to find yourself in the position of trying to help both kids and parents navigate the world of technology that teenagers are immersed in. My hope is that the following ideas can better provide you with the tools necessary to bring fruitful discussions and changes in your youth ministry, family, and personal life.

The Shovel—Technology Shapes Us

I first saw this analogy employed by technologist and author John Dyer. ² John stood before the audience with a shovel in his hand, explaining that when we use a shovel, whether for good (i.e. to plant a tree), or for bad (i.e. to hit somebody), the shovel still has a shaping effect.  No technology is neutral.

In the case of the shovel, regardless of how we use it, it is likely to leave us with calluses. The philosopher and communication theorist Marshall McLuhan said that “Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot.”³ Most of us are largely unaware of the weight of media influence in our lives.  We must begin to start thinking beyond just how we use technology, to how it is actually shaping us.

Action Step #1: Help those involved in your youth ministry understand that any use of technology will shape them in some way.

• Hold a seminar that is aimed at helping parents, volunteers, and students understand that technology can be employed for both good (homework research; college searches; chatting with friends), and bad (viewing pornography; gossiping; bullying).
• Demonstrate to them how technology shapes us all. For example, you could have parents think about the number of phone numbers they used to have memorized, compared with today. You could have youth talk about how texting has enabled them always to be connected, without having to be physically present.
• As an experiment, families could download Rescue Time (http://www.rescuetime.com) to their computers, and then at the end of each week look at how much time they spent online, and where they spent it. This information can be a catalyst for determining if that’s how each member of the family wants to spend their time, and how they spend their time online may be transforming them.

The Mirror: Technology Reflects Identity

One of the things that I have really begun to notice at the gym the last few years is the amount of time that teenage boys spend looking at themselves in the mirror.  They will periodically flex their biceps or pull up their shirt to get a look at their abs.  In a similar way, social media technologies such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are the mirrors by which many teenagers receive back a reflection of who they believe they are, or how they want to be seen.  This reflecting back aids in the construction of their identity.

As adolescents begin to answer the question of “Who am I?”, they use various online channels as the conduits of identity construction. There are a couple of relevant terms⁴ for this construction of self, but one of the more compelling terms is that of the “saturated self” presented by psychologist and social construction theorist Kenneth Gergen. ⁵

Gergen’s theory is that in the formation of relationships, people often use mediating technologies. He explains, “For as new and disparate voices are added to one’s being, committed identity becomes an increasingly arduous achievement.”⁶ Thus if one lacks an inner core/identity, Gergen believes what one is left with is a “saturated self”, or “multiphrenia”, which is a term he uses to explain what happens when identities are shaped by too many choices of self-expression.  So for example, as a teenager forms relationships, they are often using the technologies available to them such as their cell phones, Facebook, internet chat, etc.  But if they don’t have a strong sense of self already in place, all the technologies that they use eventually saturate them and keep them from developing a coherent identity.

Action Step #2: Help those involved in your youth ministry ground themselves more relationally in face-to-face interactions.

• For example, you can teach several biblical passages where one’s face-to-face relational interactions bring about a clearer sense of their identity.  For instance, in Genesis 2:23 Adam becomes a differentiated being ⁷ , setting him apart from his initial creatureliness.  This differentiation is best realized in relationship to another person, Eve.  In I Corinthians 12 and Romans 12, members of the body of Christ construct identity, and have a clearer sense of self because of their relationship to the whole body, something they can’t achieve in isolation.
• Work on striving for face-to-face relationships with the volunteers, parents and teenagers in your youth ministry.  When possible, meet face-to-face, rather than using email, chat, or even the phone.  In a culture where efficiency is often valued over relationship, you might be the one opportunity they have to be relationally grounded.
• Help encourage teenagers by reminding them of the various qualities you see in their identity.  For example, a parent could keep a journal about their teenager, and on occasion share the qualities that they notice as having a positive shaping effect on their identity.  Or a youth pastor could take time hand-write a note to a student, encouraging the spiritual growth they are seeing in their lives.  The use of a different technological medium (writing) has a more personal effect than they are used to receiving through the use of much of the social media technology they spend each day using.

The Tray: Technology Needs Boundaries

“My vocation is, at each moment, to make the person in front of me the most important person in my life.”⁸

As I read those words of a nun, as quoted by the Roman Catholic priest and author Ronald Rolheiser, I came to the realization that I have not always done a good job of being present with other people.  One of the challenges that technology poses is that it makes “what is happening out there” often more important than what is happening right in front of us. For example, texting friends to see what they are up to can quickly become more important than enjoying the meal with the friends who are physically present with you at the time.  But like a tray that has corners and edges, our friendships with others are constructed of relational edges and boundaries that help us know where we begin and end in relationship to one another.

Action Step #3: Help those involved in your youth ministry develop various boundaries around their use of technology.

• For example, teach the story of creation, highlighting the fact that God created in six days and then rested on the seventh.  This Sabbath rest is a reminder to us that we need to set boundaries in our week, and around our use of technology and other tools we utilize. Doing so also reminds us that we are dependent upon God, and not upon ourselves or the tools that we use.
• Place a tray or basket where all people present can physically place their cell phones in when entering the youth room.  Setting aside these devices visually demonstrates to yourself and others that you’re wanting to be present with those you are in relationship with.  This is a great practice to institute as a family at home, placing a basket or tray in a prominent place in the house where all members of the family can place their electronic devices. ⁹)
• Ask others their perception of your use of technology.  Sometimes we have a distorted sense of how much our use of technology gets in the way of our relationships.  Getting others’ opinions may change how we use technology.

As I reflect back on how my thinking on technology has shifted, I am constantly reminded of something one of my favorite Fuller Seminary professors once said in class.  Dr. Ray Anderson was talking about the importance of being grounded in relationships, reflecting on the fruits of the Spirit as Paul writes in Galatians 5:22-23.  Dr. Anderson commented that he could say that he exhibited those fruits of the Spirit, but what he really needed to do was go home and ask his wife and children if that was true.  They could give us the best indication of whether or not it was true.

In much the same way I have started to realize that the best indicator of whether or not I’m using technology, or it’s using me, is to ask my wife and kids.  Their responses will be a good indication of whether or not I’m really present when I’m with them, or if my use of technology is getting in the way.

I would encourage you to sit down with your kids or the youth you work with, and ask them how you may be better present in their lives.  Ask them if your cell phone, or laptop, or some other technological tool gets in the way of your relationship.  This conversation is a great start to opening the doors to what may be a fruitful interaction in your family life and youth ministry.

Action Points

Here are a few simple ideas that can be implemented immediately in the context of a youth ministry or family:

• Begin the Conversation: Set aside a time where each member of the family or youth ministry honestly shares some ways they believe the use of technology is shaping them. Then allow others in the family or youth ministry to reflect back what they have heard to the speaker, as well as adding their own additional insight.
• Set Boundaries: Place a tray or box in the central part of your home or youth ministry, and begin the practice of placing all electronic devices there upon arriving.  Talk together about how this practice changes your experience of being with one another.
• Technological Fast: Teach on the theological idea of Sabbath and solitude, drawing from the creation story in Genesis, and Jesus withdrawing to solitude in his ministry.  Use these teachings as catalysts to practice a technological fast in your youth ministry or home.  The fast can be of any length, but should be followed up by further discussion of implementing a weekly one day fast.

(for his sources, see http://fulleryouthinstitute.org/2011/02/maintaining-relational-presence-in-a-technological-world/)

For the first time in decades, teen suicide rates are increasing.  Our own community has felt the sting of these tragedies and for many, it leaves us asking how can support our teens, how can we be better prepared and how can we help prevent another tragedy in the future?  Here are the details on one community event aimed at creating dialogue between students and parents on this painful and relevant topic.

The Batavia Parent Academy is sponsoring  A Dialogue for Parents and Teens about Death and Suicide with:

Tigger Kainz, Conley Outreach Community Services
Joanne Furnas, Association for Individual Development
Stephanie Weber, Suicide Prevention Services of Batavia

When:  Wednesday, March 9, 2011 – 7:00 to 8:30 p.m.
Where:  Rotolo Middle School, 1501 S. Raddant, Batavia

Who:  Parents and students in grades 7-12 are invited to attend this important and compelling presentation to:
- Provide information about death and suicide
- Validate your feelings about death and suicide
- Open the lines of communication between parents and teens
-  Share concerns about this relevant and timely topic.

This week, we had our first training meeting for our summer mission trips to Roseland, Mexico and Ecuador. During our time together, we dealt with the questions of “why”? Why do we do these trips, raise all the money, spend Tuesday nights in training, send out support letter, host servant auctions, etc,? Why, because we want to be a part of what God is doing around the world. We want to be a part of the Kingdom of God business that he is about. We want to be a brush stroke in a much bigger picture that will carry on for eternity. We want to trade in the values of this world, this culture for something greater.

TREK Parents, students and volunteer leaders have been invited to participate in a screening of the documentary film: Race to Know Where: The Dark Side of America’s Achievement Culture” on Wednesday, March 2.  The screening will take place at 7 p.m. in the Geneva High School auditorium and will be immediately followed by a community discussion facilitated by members of the District 304 Counseling and Advising staff.
In this film, a concerned mother turned filmmaker aims her camera at the high-stakes, high-pressure culture that has invaded America’s schools and children’s lives. The film shines a light on the price young people pay for this “race to nowhere.” High-stakes testing has replaced meaningful teaching and learning. Cheating is commonplace. Stress-related illness, depression and burnout are rampant. Many young people arrive at college and the workplace unprepared and uninspired.
In the words of a student in the film:
“You have to be smart, but also you have to be pretty, and also you have to do sports and you have to be involved in the arts, and you have to find something unique about yourself, because if you don’t know yourself before you do all that, you’re going to lose yourself.” Kelly, 9th grade
Don’t miss out on this opportunity to view this important film. Viewing time is 85 minutes. For more information about the film, go to www.racetonowhere.com.
Ticket purchases ($10) should be made at www.rtngenevahs.eventbrite.com.

Please be aware that there is a $5 surcharge for tickets purchased the night of the event and that all ticket prices are fixed by the film distributor and not by Geneva School District and the Coalition for Youth.

Remember waking up to this? I admit, I didn’t think that it was that bad until I went outside to begin shoveling and came up against some of the snow drifts. I am so thankful for very kind neighbors with very large snow blowers.
The blizzard of 2011 was a shock to the system for sure. A storm like that only hits Chicago once every 10 years or less (I hope). What was interesting to me after hearing other discuss their perception of the “Snow Day”, was the seeming shock that came from having a day with no where to go, just being stuck at home. I heard people talking about how relaxing they found it, refreshing not be be running off to work, school, practice, meetings and any other number of activities. It was for many of us, a shock to the system.
In my time working with high school students, I have become alarmed at how often I hear them describe their lives as overwhelmed or stressed. Like most adults, my first reaction was that “they have no idea what it means to be stressed.” After digging deeper however, my conclusion is that this generations access to technology has not served to make their lives easier but rather to heap on more expectations, requirements and information overload. Everything happens faster and yet we seem to have less time than ever.
The reason that the sudden stop brought on by a blizzard was so shocking was because it was so counter-culture. We rarely or never have day where our only option is to be home with our families. We hardly no what to do with it.
Our snow day has made me ask, “How can I plan a snow day for myself and my family?” What would it look like to take a day every quarter, or once a month or even one day a week to simply just “be with my family” and really very little of anything else. For most of us (including me) it sound nearly impossible but after one day, locked in my home with very little to do but be a husband and a father, it made me ask, “how can I make this happen again?”