Life2gether

I’ve really enjoyed partnering with my buddy Cam in our ministry to high school students called InsideOut.  Our desire is that our students would be changed by the renewing of their minds.  With that in mind (pun intended) we are currently making our way through a series called The 4G’s taken from Tim Chester’s excellent book called, You Can Change.  These are the 4 Truths about God that can set us free to live in light of the gospel:

1. God is great, so we don’t have to be in control.
2. God is glorious, so we don’t have to fear others.
3. God is good, so we don’t have to look elsewhere.
4. God is gracious, so we don’t have to prove ourselves.

You can read Chester’s chapter on these 4G’s here.  Chapter 2 (Why Would you Like to Change?) is also available here.  LBC members, please continue to pray for this ministry to our students.

Here’s a brief description of Kenda Creasy Dean’s provocative book, Almost Christian: What the Faith of Our Teenagers is Telling the American Church:

In Soul Searching, Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton found that American teenagers have embraced a “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism”–a hodgepodge of banal, self-serving, feel-good beliefs that bears little resemblance to traditional Christianity. But far from faulting teens, Dean places the blame for this theological watering down squarely on the churches themselves. Instead of proclaiming a God who calls believers to lives of love, service and sacrifice, churches offer instead a bargain religion, easy to use, easy to forget, offering little and demanding less. But what is to be done?

In order to produce ardent young Christians, Dean argues, churches must rediscover their sense of mission and model an understanding of being Christian as not something you do for yourself, but something that calls you to share God’s love, in word and deed, with others. Dean found that the most committed young Christians shared four important traits: they could tell a personal and powerful story about God; they belonged to a significant faith community; they exhibited a sense of vocation; and they possessed a profound sense of hope. Based on these findings, Dean proposes an approach to Christian education that places the idea of mission at its core and offers a wealth of concrete suggestions for inspiring teens to live more authentically engaged Christian lives. (Taken from Dean’s website)

• Buy the book here
• Read CNN’s take on it here