Orange Week: Second Favorite Session from 2011, Kara Powell
Been writing all week with these guys about Orange Coming up in April. To let you guys know that registration is open and to give you some of my perspective on how Orange has impacted me.
One of the sessions I loved at Orange last year was Kara Powell's session on Sticky Faith. Kara and her team are pushing the ball really far down the field for guys like me who don't have time to DO the research but desperately need to research to continue to provide the very best ministry for students that we possibly can.
This content for me was invaluable for this season of ministry we're in. We're in the process of developing our "Family Ministry" structure so I really needed to hear a lot of the content she had to say. Some of it reinforced what I already knew from surveying in our context here but so much of it was new! Plus I love being able to back up the realities of student culture with "well done" studies that give us church leaders legs to stand on when making shifts that necessary and challenging at the same time.
Here's a quick hit overview of my favorite things from that session.
She early on in the session brought to the surface the reality that "40-50% of students will graduate our churches youth ministry and drift from the faith"...while also adding that "80% of kids who drifted INTENDED to stick with their faith"....yet they still drifted. This was/is sobering but not shocking. The question worth wrestling with tied to that is, in light of that reality, how should we do kids and student ministry so that that is no longer the reality?
She made us pick a kid that we wanted to see Sticky Faith grow. This made it personal. Talking theory is one thing but when you make me think about specifically WHO I want to have 'Sticky Faith' it gets serious! I love that she pushed us to THAT point!
She talked about "The Sticky Gospel" and that we shouldn't allow our ministries to be the "Red Bull view of the Gospel" - Start off strong and high energy, then lose steam and ultimately 'crash', like we do with Caffeine. She pointed out that it barely gets them through high school but it doesn't fundamentally change them.
She posed this question that I've been using on students in various environments (mission trips over the summer, camp, small group, mentoring, etc.): 'what does it mean to be a Christian'? When they (Fuller) conducted this study they recorded that 1/3 of the students that took the survey didn't mention Jesus in their answer!
Question: Parents, do your kids know how you became a Christian? Talk to them about it.
Statement: "If we don't let our kids/students ask questions about their faith they will stop asking"
Statement: We have to be careful not to turn the gospel of Christ into the gospel of sin management.
