This week we finished our mini-series in our Middle School Ministry called “2 Big Words.” Certain words in our Christian faith can be difficult to understand, and in certain occasions these difficult-to-understand words are central to our faith. This series was about defining and exploring the importance of the words justification and santification.
This week we began a new mini-series in our Middle School Ministry called “2 Big Words.” Every now and then we come across big words that are difficult to say or understand. In Christianity, there are a couple of words that are not only central to our faith, but because the words are uncommon we might not realize how important these concepts are. In the two weeks of this mini-series we will be talking about justification and sanctification.
Being around a group of other middle school ministry pastors for a weekend inspired me to make a list of random generealizations about what is true of many of us who find ourselves working with middle school students. All of these things came from observations that I had about middle pastors while at the campference; they are all at least true of myself.
What should I add to the list?
Photo Credit: Varjakkk
If you work with middle school students, it’s always helpful to think back to what life was like when you were in middle school. I spent some time thinking about it, and here is the list that I came up with:
This past weekend I got to be a part of the Middle School Ministry Campference put on by the Youth Cartel. This event was unlike any other youth ministry conference that I’ve been to. The main reason for this was that it took place at Spring Hill Camps, allowing it to take the best elements of a conference and mix it with the best elements of camp. Because of the camp environment, the conference was less about listening to keynotes, although that was important, and more about spending time with the middle school ministry tribe. I loved to be able to go to breakout discussions, play dodgeball in the gym, hang out throwing pizza boxes into the fire, or just hang out talking about life and ministry, all with other people who love middle school students. Being at camp, all of the speakers hung out with us, which gave us a great opportunity to not only learn from them as they led breakouts or keynotes, but also to learn from them personally and get to know them as friends.
Worship is an abstract concept. Worship is anything that we do in response to God for who he is and what we’ve done. While simple in statement, the reality is it can be a difficult thing to grasp. Despite it being difficult, not only do I think middle school students can grasp this, I think that often they understand worship better than many adults. In middle school ministry one of our primary goals is to lead our students in the worship of Christ. All our students are worshippers, so as leaders we try to guide them to worship Jesus, not just in song, but with all of their life. We want our students to worship Him in their homes, as they go to school, and as they gather together with the Church.
But beause of the place that we find middle school students, how can we teach something as abstract as worship? When it comes to corporate worship, how can we teach them how to worship in that environment? When it comes to our personal life, how can we teach them how to worship in all that they say and do?
This Sunday we entered the third week of our sermon series for our middle school ministry called “Now Showing.” Each week we are taking scenes from movies and using those to point to Jesus and what it looks like to follow him. Recently, Disney re-released Lion King and because of that I wanted to include that movie as a part of our series; the scene we used to teach was full of great lessons that are all throughout scripture.
This Sunday we continued our middle school ministry’s sermon series entitled, “Now Showing.” Now Showing is all about taking films that are not meant to be about Christ and using them to point out and discuss what a life with Christ looks like. This week our movie for discussion was based on the movie Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs; the main idea being that God doesn’t look at what the world looks at. The following is an overview of the main ideas that we taught for the sermon.
This Sunday we started a new sermon series for our middle school students entitled, “Now Showing.” The idea with the series was to take movies which are not meant to be films about Jesus and use them to talk about Christ. Over the course of the next several weeks, we are going to be spending time discussing scenes from various movies and talking about how our Christian faith relates to what comes up in the film. This week our movie for the week was Diary of a Wimpy Kid, which in my opinion is one of the best movies at showing the life of a young middle school student. The following is an overview of the main ideas for our lesson from Sunday.
For a lot of young people, middle school can be an incredibly difficult time. If you don’t believe me, take a survey of adults and find out what percentage of them would like to go back to being in middle school. I have a feeling that very few adults would have any desire to re-live their middle school years and that’s likely because for many of them they have memories of middle school being a difficult time in their life.
