Sanford: Day 1

Boy did I mess up big time. And boy did God (and Rob Graff) bail me out big time.

I didn't have enough cargo room in our cars. I could've gotten another rental vehicle. But I didn't and we were left without room for a quarter of our luggage.

Praise God that Rob Graff volunteered to drive our bags up to Sanford. Thanks Rob!

We made it without further incident. We are sleeping at the church; the girls are in the main worship space, the boys are in the office complex. Evergreen Covenant meets in a couple storefront buildings between downtown Sanford and the Walmart.

We had an orientation meeting with Pastor Frank and he walked us through the week. We also practiced our "Minute to Win It" games and began our "secret servant" game.

Tomorrow we will be worshipping with Evergreen and hitting the beach.

See ya tomorrow night.

Steve

Mile Markers in Bethany Covenant Youth

One of the most important parts of growing up is the observance of rites of passage. Rites of passage for teenagers are an essential part of measuring their maturity and forming their identity. These rites include entering high school, getting a driver's license, first school dance, first job, and graduating.

At Bethany Covenant Youth, we want to structure our ministry around various rites of passage so we can help our students measure their spiritual maturity alongside their physical and emotional maturity. We want these "mile markers" to help our students discover their identity as a child of God and as a disciple of Jesus Christ.

Each of our Mile Markers corresponds to a level of spiritual formation. We want our students to KNOW Jesus, GROW with Jesus, SHOW the love of Jesus, and GO and make disciples of Jesus. This is the path people take in their faith journeys and a way of seeing how we can keep becoming more and more like our Savior.

Our Mile Marker for KNOW is our 6th Grade Breakfast. At this point, they are leaving children's ministry and entering into youth ministry. They are given a gift from Kelly, our children's pastor, and given a Bible by me that they will need for their next Mile Marker. The next two years for them in ministry will be devoted to KNOWING Jesus by getting to know him better through Scripture reading, prayer, and worship. They will work out what it means to have a relationship with Jesus and with other Christians.

Our Mile Marker for GROW is Confirmation. Our 8th graders go through Confirmation so they can be more sure of what they believe and why they believe it. They are given an overview of the Old and New Testaments, Christian theology, and church history. They are also challenged to memorize Scripture and do a project that displays compassion, mercy, justice, or evangelism. During this year, and the years that follow, students are challenged to GROW in spiritual maturity and start becoming more like Jesus in thought, deed, and attitude.

Our Mile Marker for SHOW is CHIC/Summer missions. Both of these events will expose our students to the world in new ways and help them get a bigger picture view of Christianity, the Kingdom of God, and what their place in all of this is. CHIC will challenge our students to go deeper in their own faith but further in their efforts to show God's love to others. Mission trips help our students be the hands and feet of Christ in serving others and sharing the Good News about Jesus with them. In following up with these major events, students will be challenged to be the hands and feet in their youth group, their church, their homes, the schoools, and their communities.

Our Mile Marker for GO is Senior Challenge. This is a new program and more information about this will be shared later. Senior Challenge will culminate on Graduation Sunday as we celebrate the lives of those who will be leaving our youth ministry, prepared to engage the culture around them and make disciples for Jesus Christ.

We believe as a ministry that rites of passage are essential for helping students seeing where they are in their walk with Jesus, how their faith is growing, and what they can be focusing on in their spiritual growth. It also gives students something to constantly be looking forward to, while at the same time allowing them to look back to see where they came from.

Winterfest Return

The Winterfest bus should be back at 5:30 PM Today.

Winterfest

Last I heard, they needed to go around an accident on the highway and then it should be smooth sailing. They will getting off soon for food at an all-night diner and the road to Winterfest is open.

Winterfest

Everyone, it is slow moving on the way to Winterfest and everyone is doing fine. They will get there, we are just not sure when. Please continue to pray for safety, but at this point there is no cause for alarm. Everyone is in good spirits and maintaining a good attitude.

Christmas Parties

Our Christmas parties will be this weekend, Friday the 17th and Sunday the 19th.

For SURGE, the party is a Sock-Swap! Bring a fun pair of socks, gift-wrapped and ready to be exchanged. Also bring your favorite holiday goodie!

For HighLight, the party is White Elephant, so gift-wrap something from around your house and bring it along your favorite holiday goodies.

After this weekend, there is no youth group for awhile, so come while you can! Youth group will resume the 14th of January for SURGE and the 16th for HighLight.

Self-Injury

Our students live in a very high-pressure setting. They are encouraged to pursue excellence in academics, sports, music, the arts, etc. They are constantly on the run and constantly busy. This can lead to a great deal of stress in their lives.

One increasingly common form of stress-release is Non-Suicidal Self-Injury (NSSI). NSSI includes cutting, burning, rubbing, erasing, implantations, self-tattooing, and other activities that cause physical pain to oneself. It is most common among teenage girls, but not exclusive to them. Boys tend to seek out high-risk activities like extreme fighting or street racing.

Non-suicidal Self-Injury is just that: non-suicidal. Self-injurers do not want to kill themselves. They view self-injury as a way of relieving stress, of taking control of something in a world that seems to be completely out of their control. While this may seem to be a very silly way of relieving stress, we all have our favorite means of relaxing; for me, the best way to relax during a stressful time is to kick back on my couch, turn on a ball game, and eat Cheez-Its and drink Cherry Coke all day. Some might find that to be a silly way of relieving stress. We have to understand that self-injury is merely a coping mechanism for many students.

While it is a coping mechanism, it is a dangerous coping mechanism. Self-injury can be addictive. Every time one cuts or rubs or burns, they are releasing endorphins, aka "nature's heroin." This gives a high sense of pleasure that can be just as addictive as drug use.

Self-injury, while not suicidal by intent, can become suicidal by accident. A person could slip and cut deeper than they wanted to or hit a vein and lose more blood than they intended. They could lose control of the fire with which they are burning themselves and cause serious injuries to themselves. Self-injury can quickly become more serious and more dangerous than intended.

All self-injury is essentially a cry for help. Some people are quite obvious about this and will injure themselves in an easily visible place on their body and make no effort to cover it up. This is a very obvious and desperate cry for attention. Most self-injurers will go to great lengths to cover up their injuries. They will injure themselves on their upper thigh or midriff, places that are usually covered up by clothing, or they will injure themselves on their wrists and wear long sleeves (even in warm weather) or cover up their wounds with bracelets. Most self-injurers are in a place where self-injury is seen as their best option for coping with the stress and anxieties they face in their lives. They have seemingly exhausted all other possibilities for coping.

For parents, this could be a great cause for alarm. This could fill you with a tremendous amount of guilt to see your child injuring herself. It could be quite painful to know that your child is hurting themselves because they feel they have no other options for support or care.

Parents could also react by rushing to quick judgment and becoming angry with their child for cutting herself and punishing the behavior. This reaction ignores the fact that self-injury is a symptom of a larger problem. Again, self-injury is a symptom of a much more important and much more difficult problem.

If you, as a parent, discover your child self-injuring, do not rush to judgment. Do not react in a negative way. Listen to and empathize with your child without giving the appearance of anger, disappointment, or frustration. You may feel all of those things, but deal with those privately. This is a moment when your child needs you and needs unconditional love and support from you.

Affirm your child for being honest with you and affirm your love for them. Listen to them talk about why they injure and the stress that they feel at school or at home. Empathize with them and validate their feelings. Before you begin the process of helping your child overcome this and eventually stop self-injuring, make sure that they know you love them, you care about them, and that you understand them.

At this point you will have a few options, which will be discussed in a later blog post. But until then, make sure you are checking in on your children to see how they are doing and how stressed or anxious they might be. Do not assume that your child is self-injuring, but don't assume that they are immune to it. Keep your eyes out for the warning signs and high levels of stress in your child's life.

Remember that I am here as a resource for you and can point you to other resources as well. The goal of this post is to help you know about this trend, understand what it is, and what your first response should be should this become an issue in your household. Your job as a parent of teens is difficult, and you are always in my prayers.

Steve

Forms

All forms (schedules, permission slips, policies) can now be accessed at bccyouthforms.blogspot.com. You may also click "Forms" in the links section of this blog. This is where you will be directed for any additional copies of print forms distributed by our ministry.

Confirmation Schedule Spring Semester.

This is the schedule for Cross-Training for our New Testament semester this Spring.

Confirmation 2010-2011 NT

Confirmation Schedule Fall Semester.

Below is the class schedule for Cross-Training Fall Semester.

Please Note: We will NOT be meeting September 29th. Sessions 7 & 10 will be due October 6th.

Confirmation 2010 OT

The HighLight Highlight Reel: Fall Kickoff Edition!

SURGE Highlight Reel: Fall Kickoff Edition

Fall Season is Here!

Here is what you need to know about school year programming for Bethany Covenant Student Ministries:

1) HighLight (our high school youth group) meets Sundays 6-8 pm

2) SURGE (our junior high youth group) meets Fridays 6-8 pm

3) Cross-Training (our confirmation class) meets Wednesdays 7-8:30 pm

4) Spirit-Level (our youth worship arts ministry) meets Wednesdays 6-7 pm

5) Sunday School (7/8 grades, 9/10 grades, 11/12 grades) meets Sundays during the 9 am service.

For your convenience, the schedule is linked on this blog. Please make use of it to keep up-to-the-moment with our youth ministry programs.

Pray for a great school year of ministry!

Thoughts on Missions

Last night at HighLight, Cora and Margo shared with us their experiences in the Philippines. They went for two weeks this summer, and brought back some very powerful pictures and stories of what God taught them on the island of Cebu. We also heard from the Benton Harbor missions team and learned what they discovered about God and life on that trip.

It is great to see young people serving God. As I keep telling our youth, they don't have to wait until they are adults to make a difference in the Kingdom of God. I have been impressed with the number of students we have serving in various ways already and am praying that God would continue to inspire and challenge our students to follow his calling into Kingdom service. Next summer at this time, I hope we are hearing stories from the missions trips 4 or 5 of our students went on, and that we keep hearing more and more stories every year of what God is doing in our students and through our students.

Goals are our friends

When I was in college, we had to take a class called Integrated Field Experience. In this class, we learned about valuable, practical skills we would need as we prepared for a life in ministry. One day, our professor told us that "goals are your friends." Up to this point in my life, I was pretty much a "go with the flow" kind of person; I did very little intentionally. So even though my professor told me that goals were my friends, I wanted nothing to do with them.

As I have gotten older and been given much more responsibility than I had in my youth, I have learned to make goals my friends. They help me prioritize my agenda and my money; they help me prioritize my time and my relationships; they help me--most importantly--to be intentional in growing more mature in my faith.

In Philippians 3, we see that the Apostle Paul had a goal for himself:

¹⁰I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, ¹¹and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead.

Pressing on Toward the Goal

¹²Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already been made perfect, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me.¹³Brothers, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, ¹⁴I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.

You see, Paul himself had a goal: to become more and more like Jesus and achieve the prize of being made completely perfect in Jesus. His goal was to live his life like Jesus, to become like Jesus.

What is your goal for your life? What are your goals for the upcoming school year? What are you goals in becoming more like Jesus? Take some time in the next week or two to ponder these questions and seek out the Lord's guiding hand in your life.

Tuesday nights in Benton Harbor from Benjamin Capps on Vimeo.

"And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death—even death on a cross!" (Philippians 2:8)

 

Humility doesn't come any more shocking than this. First, the Creator of the universe refuses to demand His right to be treated as God. Instead, He humbles himself by becoming stuck in time, first as a baby human, fully human, a servant down to His own human DNA. He grew, obedient to time, waiting for the hours and days and years to pass like every other human must. Finally, this passage tells us, God bowed so low as to obey even death.

Death -- the consequence for Adam's sin -- "for when you eat of it you will surely die." Now perfect and humble Jesus Himself obeys the consequence for sin to spare all of Adam's believing children. And not an easy death, either. Not a noble, kingly death. Not death "with his boots on" in the heat of battle or "passing in his sleep" to avoid the pain.

This was death at it's wickedest -- a death so cruel the Romans would not allow the worst Roman citizens to suffer through it. A death of shame. A death that invited mocking and spittle. How: "Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus."

Think: Why would God allow His only Son to suffer by obeying such an ugly death?

Pray: Thank God for Jesus' enormous humility to lower Himself to the point where He could pay the penalty for your sin.

Do: Look up the definition of humility in a dictionary and write it out word-for-word while thinking about this verse.

Six Flags today