Target Session One

Hey everybody. I'm posting live from Target here. Yep, as my brain expands, so can yours. Pretty exciting, huh?

Worship was amazing. I honestly came in overhelmed and tired. We've just had a crazy busy couple weeks - you can tell because I haven't blogged hardly at all. Worship alone recharged me soul and now I feel ready to learn and grasp new.

We are talking about signs of the times, and where this generation is going and what to do about it. cool.

Well buckle up, tonight's speaker is Leonard Sweet. enjoy.

Jesus's catch phrase was "I tell you the truth". Jesus wanted us to know how to read the sign on the times. Semiotics. the ability to read signs. What hermeneutics is to text, semiotics is to context. We use semiotics all the time. New car syndrome - see the car you bought everywhere. Semiotic awareness. Kids get bored, it's a state of semiotic breakdown.
Helping us get into a state of semiotic awareness. The ultimate in spiritual illiteracy is the inability to read the handwriting on the wall.
We can complain about the culture, or we can deal with it. It's like the weather, we can complain about it or we can adjust to it. (think ministry)

Five Areas we will deal with in the next ten years in a significant way:
(these are the best of times, these are the worst of times)

1.) Size does matter. But the next big thing is the next small thing. Can you do little large?

2.) There is a digital skin that is covering planet earth. We are going to see digital everything, everything digitalized. GRIN technology. Genetic Robotic Information Nano Technology. The way GRIN frowns on the future.

3.) Crusades 9. We are looking at a whole new crusades. The difference is the previous 8 crusades were confined to specific areas of the world, but this one is global.

4.) EPIC Rules. Experiential. Participatory. Image rich. Connective. Anything that is working is getting more epic.

5.) The Bell curve has been replaced by the well curve. A normal distribution curve - big middles and little ends. New distribution curve - the well curve. All middles are bottoming out. The chasm between opposites is greater, but they are not contradictions.

Let's talk.

EPIC rules. Postmodern Pilgrims. (check out this book) Also, the gospel according to Starbucks. Anything that is working in this culture is getting more EPIC. It's not how churches are programed. We've all sold out to modernity. The struggles that are happening in your church are not over preserving christianity as much as preserving modernism. (ouch) Our culture is participatory. Think about PS2 verses Wii.

Digital Onionskin covering the earth. Only going to increase. You need to integrate this into your ministry. Technology is now a utility. (not optional) This is the reality of the world we live in. New connections are possible all the time. The third generation of the internet is here. Fusing of web tools with human intelligence, the beginning of the web to reason and interact with us in real time. We need to communicate to this culture who Jesus is to this culture. Jesus is God's avatar. (eventually your avatar will be more important than your social security number) Change is not incremental, it is exponential. (the only people who are still doing cassettes are churches) We need to authenticate what is real and what isn't real. A world that connects people. But the web makes promises it can't fulfill. People are hungry for the real thing. Technology makes people hungry for the real. To get real in the future, you need to get virtual. You also need to be real. How can we use the internet in this way? Make an investment in your internet life. (I'm thinking more time on myspace, connecting with students) But you need to bring the internet and face-to-face together. Highly relational communication is key. Bridging the two is key. The primary culture currency is not words, it's images.

Cognitive Neural Linguistics. The key to anyone's information is reframing - giving them new metaphors. Jesus gave us an image and then gave us a two to three minute narrative. He stacked them. The power is in the metaphor. You think you dream in words? Your mind is made in metaphors. Our culture thinks in metaphors, in images. We are still preaching in words. (postmodern culture is extremely like the first century culture)
How do you bridge the cultural gap? how do we do missions on myspace?? Be in myspace but not of it. Make your top 8 your prayer list for the week. Find out who's not in anyone's top eight or top ten?? Get the church to think missionally??
Symbol of the future. Concerts. You don't sit in your seat anymore. You don't sit and listen to music. The highest moment is when the performer allows the audience to participate. (unleashes the spirit in them) Multi-tasking is the way we learn. Our students are yearning for the multi-generational family of the church. Our charge is the youth group, not the whole church. Storylines in postmodern culture are getting more complex. Everyone's brains are being rewired in this way. (think about tv shows: ie LOST, 24) The only way you aren't rewired is if you are disconnected. ADD is the result of cultural rewiring. Drugs are forcing our kids into the modern way of thinking rather then the postmodern they have been programmed. (millions of kids on a class two substance currently)

The Well Curve. A normal bell curve, everything bunched up in the middle. Huge classifications. Middle class, mainline religion, middle management, average. The digital culture has made everything in the middle bottoming out. All middles are in trouble - the ends are growing. (screens are getting bigger and screens are getting smaller) Rich are getting richer and poor or getting poorer. The world is getting more global and the more global it gets the more tribal it becomes. (tribal - what are your stories, your ancestry) Living in a culture that opposite things are happening. Connect the extremes to survive the culture. Think about a battery, connecting the positive and negative and it's explosive - you have power. Christianity doesn't like middles. It doesn't like lukewarm. Christianity is this way (polytheistic/monotheistic) - living the mystery. We hold both extremes. God is truly transcendent. My two pounds of brain can't wrap itself around the mystery that God is. (gives me hope for this generation and for my ministry)
We have an image statement that brings together these two extremes. The cross. Never separate the vertical and the horizontal. Lightning is formed by negative ions in the cloud and positive ions on the ground. Bring the two together. The cross is the lightning - the power. The key to this ministry is not to play it save in the middle, but to bring the ends together. You don't build a bridge starting in the middle. God is going to spit out the average middle of the road church/christian. (barf, hurl) "You make me sick, church". If your church is afraid of change, movement, motion - time to get out the barf bag. The more your kids do online, the more they will hunger for the real. High tech, high touch. Church needs to become a relational space. Currently the church is not designed for relationships, it's designed for principles. Make church more relational, add your stain to everyone else's. Make it messy, relationships are messy. There is going to be spillage. Worship should be relational. Odd numbers are key - three, five. (trained to write a sermon, not to design an experience) We need to think individually, connectively. Our shift should be more experiential.
Examples for youth pastors:
churches are going to get bigger and smaller. Our churches are looking more like warehouses, our houses are looking more like churches. (interesting) house churches. Increasing decentralization. The soviet union broke up into smaller entities. Success of Habitat for Humanity, bringing extremes together. It's EPIC. The poor have a house, the rich have an experience.

We are still teaching kids about word ethics (don't say that word, cleansing traditions if you did) but we need to teach our children image ethics - images we should never see, cleansing traditions to remove them. We need to challenge those images. Our kids face a grim future and they know it. We don't live in a 'great time' as those who have gone before it. The challenge - be EPIC. God has chosen us for such a time as this.

Ok - so these are my notes from this guy. Now, just to give you a little background. He claimed to be methodist. He knocked the pentecostals several times. I thought this was a little arrogant, considering he was in a sanctuary filled with AG youth pastors and leaders. He was VERY liberal in his thinking. Some of it I found interesting, challenging, and possibly true. But, I definitely need some more time to think about all the ideas he proposed. His talk left me feeling very overwhelmed and under-prepared. But I can definitely see the beginnings of a lot of things he's talking about, even at HAG. I am personally excited and challenged to take some of these thoughts back to our group. I want to spend more time with kids on MySpace - I see that as a much greater (and absolutely essential) tool than I did before. I also feel like we are doing a lot of things right - in the relational way our services are right now, almost by accident. A lack of leaders has really changed our structure on Sunday nights, but I'm not seeing this as a negative any longer. I am super excited to see how Rob and I can process this information and the changes we will instigate in the near future.