Stripped Down

Good morning bloggers!

I'm extremely excited for a bunch of worship opportunities this weekend! As we speak, my good friend Adam Strawcutter is working his was to the South Hills from Indiana Pa. Tomorrow morning he'll be leading worship with the Bridge band, and while he's in town for that he agreed to help me lead worship at my friend Jay Higham's new church plant here in Peters Township.

The fun part about worship tonight will be the complete lack of anything going on. No sound system. No flashy lights. No loud band. Just two guys with acoustic guitars and a choir of believers. It's as close as I think I'll get to what Jon Foreman has done after Switchfoot shows for a couple of years now, just a stripped down worship set. I'm super excited for it.

Don't get me wrong, I love to rock and roll with the best of them. Tree Anthem will always be my preferred style of worship music, loud and ruckus. But every now and again, I think it's really important to step out of what we're comfortable with and meet God in a profound new way. And for me at least, it's important from time to time to just trim the fat, to get all the distractions away, to take away everything that could get between me and the beautiful Savior.

And so perhaps this has more truth to it than just music. Perhaps today should be a day for all of us to strip down our relationship with God. Get away from the things that might hold us back, the things that might look like they're helping but are in actuality hurting. I'll give you an example that I've been convicted of lately. I am a sucker for a good devotional plan, a book that puts the words of God into my mouth for me. And while reading through these books every day looks like devotion, I started to wonder a few weeks back if I was actually communicating with God. The tool became the distraction.

So let's strip down from the garbage today. Let's strip down to basic worship, to un-hindered praise. Let's sing in a parking lot if that's what's required of us! Let's meet the face of God!

Godspeed,

J

This Week's Links!

Good morning friends!

This week as I've been tolling the internet for some good blog reading, I fell upon a bunch of really good articles that I feel like everyone should be aware of. Perhaps we'll keep this alive for every Friday, but like all the other habits I've had before, I wouldn't hold your breath.

Materialism in Youth Ministry

Marko, who always has a lot of really good things to say, dives deep into a pervasive problem in youth ministry today with his three part series on materialism. Stop what you're doing and check it out!
Part OnePart TwoPart Three

 

Are you a lazy youth worker?

Johnathan McKee's article at Youth Specialties had me concerned and perhaps a little confused. Youth ministers have always had a kind of reputation for goofing off and having fun. But is lazy the right word? Or even, is it simply the youth pastors in his area? (You can bet if the high school in my community offered me such a gift I'd hop right on it.

Another question that comes out of this article, even as kind of a throw-away thought, is what it looks like to be a youth pastor and be in seminary at the same time. Is it ok to spend a few moments at your desk doing homework? What if your work for the day is already done? How do you balance all of that with a family life? This article raises some good questions, and as always I'd love some comments here on J-Blog.
Today's Lazy Youth Pastor

 

Shameless Self-Promotion of the Week:

As some of you know, I've been riding my bike like a fiend lately. The reason for this is much more than just personal fitness, which is awesome, but I'm also working to raise money for the Bike MS event coming up this June. My goal is to raise $700, which is a lot of dough! If you could take a moment and donate as little as $10 it would be greatly appreciated, both by me and the folks affected by MS.
Bike MS

 

Back at it!

Hello friends and readers!

I have been on a bit of a break from Seminary for a few weeks now, and as such I thought I'd use it as a time to step away from the blog as well. I've been doing a lot of writing lately, and I thought it would be for the best to take a bit of a breather.

However, now that I am back, I find myself deep in the throws of writing again. One week in to the new term, and already I have a paper to start writing. I've been slowly collecting books to work on. I bet you can't guess what my topic is for this one:

 

I actually think it's going to be a really neat paper. It's about Lincoln as a theologian, rather than just as a president. But like I said, there's a lot of reading that's going to have to go into this one, so I've got my work cut out for me.

My last paper was A material, which also left me with an A in the class. I'm extremely pumped about that, but this time I want to do even better. Not that there are better grades out there, but my writing is something I've always taken pride in, and I'd like this paper to be my best yet. I'm working on little things, and collecting tips from all over the place (like Don Miller's blog).

And plus, how could you not write a good paper about this guy?

Coming up later this week, we've got posts about both youth ministry and worship brewing around in my head. You don't want to miss it!

Godspeed,

 

Jason

The First Paper Part Four: Submission

Hello friends,

It is finished. All the writing, all the editing, all the polishing, all the self loathing, it is all done.

On Sunday, a whole day early, I pushed the "send" button on an e-mail that represented 3 months of hard work. It represented a lot of learning too, pushing my mind and my theology to places they hadn't been to before. It was a good term.

And yet, I felt my finger hover on the mouse button for a few seconds before making the click happen. Was the paper up to my best standard? Were there places where I could go back and make it better? I had a few extra hours, but I had long ago decided the paper was where it needed to be, but I could fix it if I needed to. What to do?

"click."

And with that, the end of the term was here. With that, none of what was going through my head mattered. I was ready to move on to the next thing, and maybe even a little bit more, I was ready to have a three week break. Come what may, it's done and over. And it feels really, really good.

Thanks for following along on this one.

Godspeed,

J

The First Paper Part Three: Cutting Room

Hello bloggers!

If you've been following along this week, we've been tracking the progress of a young seminary student and the writing of his first paper in a very long time. Previously on Lost, err...The First Paper, we saw that our hero had escaped the clutches of the self-loathing period of writing a paper, and had experience his lightbulb moment. However, the lightbulb led to an unintended consequence: The 5 page paper was 6 pages long.

Our hero took some time off from the paper, to clear his head and try to focus on this morning, when he would have to decide what would stay and what would go in the paper. During the self-loathing period, this would have been easy. Just cut all of it. But now, now that the writer has formed an emotional attachment to the writing he's done, he hardly wants to leave any of it behind.

And so, sitting at the Caribou Coffee in my old neighborhood, I meticulously scanned the paper for pieces to remove. Does this argument make sense? Does this do a good enough job of coloring in the arguments I'm trying to make, or would a shorter quote do better? I spent a half an hour on the first pass, felt really good about what had been removed, and then glanced down with excitement to see that I still had 6 pages. Well, maybe closer to 5.75. But still, too much to turn in. And so I went back again. And then went back again. And then a fourth time. Finally, the paper weighed in at 5 pages.

These are the moments when you appreciate starting the paper as early as you did, because now I have sent to paper to my editor (read: Sarah) to look at the grammar and spelling and punctuation. But my eyes are off the paper for at least another 24 hours. A clear head is best when writing a paper like this, and when you're up against a deadline you don't have the luxury to take this kind of time with the writing process. I still have the original, unabridged version of the paper on my desktop, just in case I left something all too critical on the cutting room floor. But at the moment, I'm feeling really good about this guy.

More to come tomorrow!

Godspeed,

J

The First Paper Part Two: Lightbulbs

Good morning friends!

After my last post, I think some people thought I was spiraling toward depression over this paper! In truth, that's what it felt like! The paper was being written, and words were finding their way onto the page, but it felt a bit like running on a treadmill. Work was getting done, but it wasn't going anywhere.

For as much as I can't stand the "Self-Loathing" stage of writing a paper, it is absolutely worth it for the stage that comes next. Sitting on my living room floor last night after Veritas, I started thumbing through the insanely large book that I almost read for this paper (and am mercifully thankful that I changed my mind!) Jesus and the Victory of God by N.T. Wright. Wright is someone my professor told me I should contrast Johnson with, and so I started just thumbing through the book, and hoping to stumble across something I could use as Wright's opinion of Johnson.

Did you know, books these days come with a device known as an index? And, when authors reference another person and/or their work, they tend to list every occurrence of these references right there in the back? Lo and behold, I was now sitting on Wright's DIRECT opinion of Johnson, rather than having to find a quote that would theoretically work, I had the direct quote in my hands. Not only that, but Wright's quote led me to another book that I just so happened to have on my shelf, and that book led me to another. But the end of 15 minutes worth of work, I had about 3,000 pages worth of material at my feet. But more important than that, I had direction. The light bulb went off, and I was off to the races. As of this blog post, the paper stands at 6 pages long, meaning I have too much information. This will come back to haunt me tomorrow when I enter the editing phase, but for the moment it makes me want to do a dance right here in the lobby of Starbucks!

Not to over theologize my own paper writing experience, but I wonder how often in life we don't take for granted the dark times in the light of the "lightbulb" moments? Yesterday, I was convinced that this paper was going to be the worst thing I've ever written. Today, I'm actually quite proud of the little bugger! It's important during the dark times in our lives to recognize that light is coming. It might take a while, but we live with hope, because hope does not disappoint us.

And in the meantime, it doesn't hurt to dance when the lightbulb comes on!

Godspeed,

J

The First Paper Part One: The Loathing Stage

Hello again bloggers!

There's a lot going on in my world these days, and so I'm pumped to be sharing a bit more on the blog. If you find that I'm getting annoying, feel free to waste away the hours on YouTube.

I love the clip above! When I sit down to write, I almost always feel like that's how I start things out. The outside persona might seem calm and collected, but if you look closely enough you can see the rage boiling just beneath the surface as I pound my fist against the desk in frustration. This, as many of my writer friends will tell you, is the self loathing stage of the process.

I am hard at work on my first paper back at Seminary. It's the last assignment due in my New Testament intro course, and I really, truly want to knock it out of the park. Not just for the grade, but because writing has always been one of my strengths, and I want to make sure that it remains one of my strengths. In other words, there's pride on the line here.

It's not a horribly difficult paper to write, only a 5 page book review. The book in question is The Real Jesus by Luke Timothy Johnson, which sets out to explore whether the historical-critical method of study is the best way to approach the "real" Jesus, or whether there's a better alternative. I just finished the book yesterday, and so am now ready to write the paper.

I'm four pages in, and I'm trying a new approach as I go. Like the terror threat level, after I write each paragraph I am assigning it a color. Red means that I am most likely going to re-write all of this section. Orange means it's not quite red, but it needs some touching up. Yellow is pretty good writing, it just needs grammatical changes and editing. Green is ready to turn in to the professor. With four days left to write, I'm seeing a lot of red, a tiny bit of orange, an even tinier bit of yellow, and absolutely no green. The threat level is high.

But it will come. The hardest part about the loathing stage is realizing that there is in fact good writing underneath all this crap that is currently occupying my computer screen, and that with time and patience I can chisel away at it and bring it to life. Friday and Saturday are do or die days, and so I will only allow panic if I am still in the self loathing stage then. But knowing that I have a meeting with my professor in 30 minutes where I will show her where I am so far, I have a feeling the self loathing phase is going to stick around a bit longer...

More on this to come. Thanks for following along!

Godspeed,

J