Success vs Faithfulness

One of the toughest things about doing youth ministry is measuring how successful you are being. As I taught a bunch of youth ministers this week though, it's our job to be faithful, not successful. God is the one who grants success.

However, there is always this nagging question of how well are we doing? The trap that is all to easy to fall in to is to use numbers as a guage for how well your youth ministry is doing. What I have come to realise though is that this is not a good measure of success. Time and time again I hear stories of youth groups that have large numbers, but that see little fruit in the years to come ('fruit' being students who actually continue on as Christians beyond the youth ministry). The reason for this is invariably that the youth group attracted kids with a bunch of stuff that was really pretty frivilous and although it looked great at the time, it actually produced little of value. Success can also be measured by how others speak about your ministry, how many paid staff you have (bizarre!), how big your budget is (even more bizarre!), or just how many programs you run, ie. business.

Real fruit can only be measured by being patient and seeing what happens in the years to come. Are students continuing in their faith, or did they graduate their faith when they graduated high school (to use an American phrase).

I say all this because of twothings that happened this week. Firstly, on the day I taught the fellow youth ministers, I received a letter from a student who has just gone to university which basically said thanks for the past 4 years or so and confirmed in my mind that he's committed to his relationship with Jesus for the long haul. It was a good feeling. Secondly, last night we had almost double the amount of kids at our 11s-14s program than we had the week before. We've been running the group for a couple of weeks since school began, and have been struggling to get kids to come. It was a good feeling.

I'm tempted to leave it there...! But I think what it taught me about myself is that I am actually starting to understand what is more important, not just in work, but in life. For once, I realised that the second feeling wouldn't last. It's tempting to measure your success in life by the world's standards (how much you make, what you do, what you have, how many friends you have, how much you know etc), but actually it's really about the long haul, being faithful to the ones you love the most, and making sure that you are committed to what is truly important, not the temporal, but the eternal.

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September already!

Can't believe it's been a month since I last blogged. In that time I:

1. Finished all our summer programs for students
2. Took an awesome week's vacation right here in Mt Pleasant
3. Saw Hannah learn how to sit up, and now nearly crawling
4. Picked up Jonny Keys (see pics here of all the apprentices) from the airport to begin his year apprenticeship program here
5. Began all our programs for the autumn/fall
6. Watched many films (including the disappointing'Lady in the Water')...& the amazing 6th season of West Wing.
7. Saw my first live Premiership match at the awesome Madra Rua Pub in old North Charleston - Spurs lost 2-0 to Everton much to Jonny's dismay.
8. Joined my first ever Fantasy Football League...then joined my second...!
9. Booked plane tickets home for Christmas! Dec 21-Jan 2
10. Got some great music - Doves, The Fray, Passion: Everything Glorious, Thom Yorke and more
11. Finished a book all about the fall of Berlin in WW2
12. Celebrated Melissa's 25th birthday with 10 friends at a great little Chinese place near us
13. Saw the Charleston Battery (our local 'soccer' team) play 4 times I think - they are 4th in their division, and the play off's beckon!
14. Survived Tropical Storm Ernesto (lots of hype, lots of rain, but not much else)

Which just goes to show why I should blog more frequently...!

Happy Birthday to my nephew Cameron by the way. He is 3 today!

Hope you're all well. Please keep us in your prayers.