Gerrard Fess is asking over at his blog. Here’s the story that spurred the question.

It’s a good question.  What do you think? 

Book review specialist Matt Cleaver poses a provocative thought. He writes, “The current status and priority that we give to Christian education is narcissistic. When a Christian desires to “go deeper” in their faith or to become “closer to God,” we often point them to a weekly Bible study of sorts that is supposed to be “in-depth.”

When we define Christian maturity simply as studying the scriptures “in-depth” for an hour once a week, we turn Christian maturity into an appallingly easy thing to do. It lasts maybe two hours, we can put it on our calendar, we know exactly when it will happen, and we can feel better about ourselves because we are mature.

Christian maturity is not something that you can schedule. It does not fit neatly onto a calendar; Christian maturity invades your calendar. It invades everything you do. To relegate it to something you can fit into a couple of hours every Tuesday night is short-sighted and deceptive.

Try putting justice, compassion, reconciliation, and forgiveness onto your calendar once a week and see how well that works out. Yeah, it’s not that easy. link

What do you think? Is this a fair assessment of Christian education today?

As I was scanning the blogs of YMX member I discovered that congratulations are in order for Youth Specialties‘ own Mindi Godfrey (blog):

so there’s been a little excitement going on in my work life lately. recently i was promoted to marketing manager, resources. i’ll still get to work with our denominational and network partners and the youth specialties academic support network. the rest of my time and energy will be focused on connecting people with our resources: books, curriculums, dvds, etc. i’m really loving the new role.

So, congrats Mindi and may God bless you in this new role! We’ve really enjoyed connecting with you at the NYWC and we’re looking forward to hearing about the new resources YS will offer too!

I was on a church committee to send devotionals once a week to college students. My day was Sunday. I worked my darnedest to search through Scripture writing something that was elegant, thoughtful, and edgy. For some reason, students kept asking to be taken off the list. Why, I thought, my devotionals aren’t that bad…until I discovered others in the committee were each given a day to send a devotional, so the students received one every single day. If they hadn’t checked their e-mail in two weeks, that could add up to a lot of e-mails.

Once I started reading what some of the other people were sending, I decided that I could get devos to students in a less offensive fashion. The truth is–most of these kids were deleting the e-mails as fast as they came, or letting them go directly into their spam folders. How do I know this? Because after I stopped sending devos, one of the kids started IM’ing me. He said he read one of mine because it was titled, “Stop Being a Jerk” and that was, “A cool title.”

Anyway, while my days of writing devos for college students are over for now, I still seem to be on the e-mail list to get these life-changing statements. Below are some of the inspiration thoughts:

With God, no one is every lost in the crowd.

A problem not worth praying about isn’t worth worrying about.

If at first you don’t succeed, read the instructions (the Bible)! The Bible isn’t antique or modern…it’s ETERNAL!

If life sends you lemons, make some lemonade.

You can’t have a rainbow without the sun and rain.

Umm, yeah. I don’t understand how we’re helping college students get the Bible in their lives without actually providing any Bible verses. It seems a little odd to me.

I don’t think spoon-feeding out-dated Christian cliches to college students is the way to go. They’re smart, and they’ve heard that the Bible means “Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth” a million times. Heck, they probably had a week of Bible School with that as the “theme”. From spending time with college students who are Christians, I continually discover their intelligence (we talk down to them), their passion, their amazing ability to reason through very adult problems (managing course schedules, getting papers written, class work), and their hunger and thirst for the Bible.

These young men and women don’t need to be spoon-fed; they need to get power shakes or enriched vitamin bars of biblical insight from home to encourage their walk at college (they probably wouldn’t mind if you mailed them a package of food either). They need a voice on the other end of the line when they’ve done poorly on an exam or been dumped by a lover. They need you to be on AIM when they have a question about God at 1 AM (just when you were about to sign off). They want you to check in with them on Facebook and throw presidential candidates at them. And when you send e-mails, they don’t want them to be weak statements that are meaningless to their lives and situations; they want you to write in your voice and to recapture their imaginations like you did when they were in youth group or young adult group or college group.

If you want to really keep ministering to your graduates, get a RSS Feed and subscribe to their blogs, get AIM, and make a Facebook profile. Oh, and then e-mail them your contact information. That’s an e-mail they probably won’t trash.

For further discussion: 

What are some ways you’ve been able to connect with former students while they’re at college?

How has it been beneficial for students for you to maintain a relationship with them when they leave home? 

Perhaps your job also includes “college ministry”, what do you do to reach out to local colleges? 

YMX member and blogger Chris Wilson asks readers of this post to consider which Biblical personality they most identify with and why.

So, as a call to my blogger friends, which person in the bible most accurately portrays you, your life, or your circumstances. It could be anybody, you could me Mary, Joseph, Peter, Moses, Hagar, Isaac, Paul, pretty much whomever you feel you most identify with while reading the text. You could even be Jesus perhaps, not that your feeling all that righteous right now, maybe your just feeling like you spend all your time being chased by crowds, dining with tax collector and hookers, and praying about your impending end. Anyway, to my few faithful readers, who do you feel you are the best reflection of (leave comment) and why (blog if you will).

While Chris intended this as a blogging theme, it occurs to me that this could be an interesting way to encourage (or lead) students through some character studies.  Thanks, Chris!

I caught this over on PK’s blog. This could be a great way to kick off a youth group. You could get students up and moving around and the whole group could mimic the dogs dance moves while the hippo sings.

Not sure how to use YouTube clips in your presentation program? Try vConvert.