Big Room 1

My preconference continued this morning. This morning session focused on the message. How to be accurate to the text, how to keep teenagers attention, and using media and humor with the message.

Nothing special for lunch today. Just Taco Bell. I did try the black jack taco for the first time. I give it 2 stars. Nothing special, Very disappointing.

The conference is made up of what they call Big Room and labs. Big room is where the whole conference meets together. It looks like there is about 6000 youth ministers here. Labs are smaller and topic oriented.

Our first big room featured Andy Stanley. He is a pastor of Northpoint Community Church in Atlanta. It is a mega church which he planted 14 years ago. Some of you older people might know his dad, Charles Stanley. Andy talked about the pitfalls of leadership. He talked about how leaders do not know all the answers. When we do not know the answers we still need to have clarity and flexibility.

Even if we do not have a answer for a problem, we still need to have clarity in our purpose. We need to project this clarity to the people following us. He gave the example of Joshua. Joshua was taught by Moses about how to survive in the dessert. How to be a nomad. But now God wants Joshua to be a warrior and fight for the Holy Land. Joshua did not know how to fight. It wasn’t his training. So when it confused the Israeli dessert nomads, Joshua just kept reassuring them with the clarity that we are going to take the promised land. He did not know how he was going to do it, all he knew was that God had given him this purpose. He did not have all the answers but he had clarity in his purpose.

We also need flexibility in our ministry. Clarity in purpose, but flexibility in programming. Sometimes things just fail and we try to launch something to help it. But it fails too. We shouldn’t be afraid to start new things, but we also shouldn’t hesitate to kill something that is not working.

During the first big session, Youth Specialties and Zondervan took the time to tell us that Tic and Marko have left YS. I will miss them. I didn’t always agree with them, but I liked their ministry. They were never afraid to try to push the envelope. YS has always been kind of dangerous for Zondervan, even when Mike Yaconelli started it. The new head of YS looks like he will be a play it safe kind of guy. I will miss these guys (Marco and Tic) pushing the boundaries and I hope that YS does not lose its edge.