Category: life

haven't read it yet… but look forward to it

CCECYOUTH has a 5 pronged evangelism strategy. I’m currently re-working some of our strategy material. But at the moment, here’s a quick sketch of the gear:

• 1) FRIENDSHIP EVANGELISM – We want our teenagers to know the gospel, seek to live the gospel and share the gospel with their friends in whatever way they can. We equip them in at least 3 ways: Two Ways to Live, The Jesus Bridge, Telling your Jesus Story. The first two tools are more about understanding the gospel than how to share the gospel. The 3rd is about giving your testimony.
• 2) FRIDAY’S ARE FRIENDLY – We want any week of youth group to be a good week to bring a friend. We recognise that outsiders are present each week – we want to present the good news of Jesus every week. We also don’t want to use insider language and jokes all the time – we want to speak about Jesus often and clearly and in a way that’s not boring. Friday’s should be fun!
• 3) DOUBLE UP ONCE A TERM – While any week is a good week to bring a friend – one night a term we have a night where the talk is specifically geared toward someone who doesn’t know Jesus. The aim is to double our numbers on this night. We haven’t yet done that, but this year there have been many non-Christian teens come on those nights.
• 4) FOLLOW-UP SMALL GROUP – We’ve got 2 follow-up courses called simplyJESUS. The junior youth material is similar to Tim Hawkin’s Discovering Jesus (God, Man, Jesus, Jesus’ death, Our response). The senior youth material is based around the two ways to live structure.
• 5) WEEK LONG MISSION – Currently we run a week long program in January – this is a heightened period of bringing friends along to events that we put on for juniors and seniors. The juniors program runs closely with our family mission in the mornings. Seniors runs a bit more independently in the evenings at a local hip youth centre (very cool space!).

What do you think? Would love to hear some feedback as I rework all this stuff.

In the end – we want our teenagers captured by Jesus. That honours him. And they are going to be far more effective at evangelising their peers than I can be by handing out flyers in the local high schools. (Note to self – get rid of Christian school so there are more Christians in gov’t schools!)

If you don’t know what I mean by the gospel… check out this.

I’m growing in my conviction that it’s all about Jesus. I’ve been thinking lately about what it means to have a cross-centred life and to run a cross-centred ministry. 1 Corinthians 15:3-5 speaks of what is of first importance. What? Jesus died for our sins. He was definitely dead. He rose again. He definitely rose again.

Jesus and his death on the cross is central to what Christians believe and ought to be central to what we proclaim, central to who we are and what we do.

I’ve recently discovered Of First Importance (h/t JT). Each day they post a quote that is “to help you live in the good of the gospel”. (Get it on RSS, get it via email.)

More info on Jesus here and here.

In case you didn’t realise – the pic is a still I took while checking out the moon the other night. It compliments my video quite well (by the way it’s now had more than 1700 hits on youtube!) Email me for a better quality print…

Desiring God had a major overhaul a year ago. They've just posted some of the stats from the past year: it includes 6.5 million page views per month and 600,000 sermons downloaded or streamed. John Piper is growing in his influence in evangelicalism. 1) His theology is gold! He seeks to exalt Jesus in his life and ministry. 2) He has 27 years worth of sermons freely available.

Okay – the heading to this post is a bit sensational… but my Total Lunar Eclipse video (see below or go to youtube) has just cracked 1000 views in just under 24 hours!!

While this may not seem like much, it’s a pretty lame video and there’s only been a handful of views that have clicked out from this blog. How did they get there? I’m sure it’s not a featured video on youtube – it’s simply through people searching for it.

CCECYOUTH has 32 videos online – but only a total of about 5000 views.

If you want to get a high number of random hits (something we’re not necessarily aiming for with ccecyouth) simply work out what people will be searching for on a given day. There’s your video name and some tags… the rest is history.

Jesus.