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Going Public: How is your youth ministry engaging public schools this year?

The comment below was published along with a feature article called “Going Public” in the Sept/Oct 2009 issue of Outreach magazine, and challenges churches and youth groups to think differently about Campus ministry. How is your youth ministry engaging the public middle and high schools nearest your church this year?

(Download the article pdf here.)

In September 2008, Jeremy Del Rio launched 20/20 Vision for Schools in New York City with one idea in mind: What would happen if church leaders activated the people in their churches for “good deeds” within public schools?

Since then, the ministry has connected with nearly 200 churches throughout NYC boroughs, mobilizing them and community groups to come alongside public schools for meaningful advocacy and service.

Here, Del Rio shares how 20/20 Vision has succeeded and why he believes churches are called to this backyard mission field.

If the moral test of a society is how it treats children, America has failed the same test year after year for decades. Specifically, we have failed to educate the urban poor despite promising equal access to quality education for all. This educational inequity–where the place of one’s childhood determines the quality of one’s education–has been called our nation’s greatest injustice and the Civil Rights issue of our day.

And churches have watched it happen.

As we looked at what it would take to accomplish comprehensive reform, we knew it would require multi-sector, collaborative strategies led by men and women willing to commit. And churches are uniquely positioned to lead this effort.

First, the God we preach requires us to care about justice (Micah 6:8, Isaiah 61:1-8). The prologue to Proverbs 31’s Wife of Noble Character describes the Bride of Christ at her most noble: “Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves, for the rights of all who are destitute. Speak up and judge fairly; defend the rights of the poor and needy” (Proverbs 31:8-9).

Second, Jesus activates us as salt and light, that the world “may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven” (Matthew 5:13-16). Salt that loses its preservative and flavoring effects–or remains inside the saltshaker of our churches–is useless.

20/20 Vision is bent on activating churches. Our vision is that first graders of September 2008—the graduating high school class of 2020—would reverse decades of chronic underperformance and graduate in record numbers, equitably across demographics and neighborhoods, with the skills and character necessary to achieve in life.

Mobilizing congregations for scalable engagement requires a plan, and 20/20’s school adoption paradigm moves congregations from no relationship to holistic, transformative relationships. It begins by committing to pray for a specific neighborhood school as often as the church prays. If America’s 300,000 evangelical churches actually prayed for its 100,000 public schools, dare we expect God to answer?

It continues as congregations overcome generational mistrust by cultivating personal relationships at the school. Next, churches become answers to prayer by responding to felt needs with meaningful acts of service such as beautification efforts or event sponsorships. Then they develop an ongoing presence by volunteering as coaches, mentors or tutors, or coordinating leadership clubs. Finally comes the credibility to affect policy both at the school and district level.

To date, nearly 200 New York churches have adopted schools through 20/20. Together, these churches have open-sourced a multi-sector effort to transform education in America. Because the problems are too vast for one person, group or community to overcome on its own, sharing ideas, best practices, funding solutions, evaluation methodologies and reform strategies represents the best way to engage the best minds in transforming public education in this country.

If it’s “about the kids,” 20/20 reminds us to share.

And to lead.

–Jeremy Del Rio

ONLINE: JeremyDelRio.com; 2020Schools.net

Rev. Jeremy Del Rio, Esq. is the lead architect of 20/20 Vision for Schools.

Singing and Praying Justice (in our Youth Groups?)

UrbanFaith.com published an article today, co-written by Pastor Louis Carlo of Abounding Grace Ministries (New York) and me, that confronts an all-too familiar challenge for youth group worship leaders: what to sing, if anything at all?

… Too often our church music is directed inward as a distorted, selfish facsimile of worship. We long for God to meet personal needs and mediate justice on our own behalf, radically reducing our songs to individualized laundry lists of wants.

… How can worship leaders help navigate oceans of justice within congregational gatherings? First, in the music and expressions of worship we embrace; and second, by facilitating worship as lifestyle, not just musical ritual.

Marvin Gaye’s opus reminds us that music ennobles ideas, emotes passion, and defines eras. Because we feel it, music penetrates hearts and stimulates a response. Combine inspired notes with well-crafted lyrics and the results can be liberating. Or lethal.

In Call and Response, a 2008 documentary about sex trafficking, Dr. Cornel West describes music’s power to accentuate and ultimately eradicate injustice: “Music is about helping folk … by getting them to dance. Getting them to move. Getting them to think. Getting them to reflect. Getting them to be themselves, to somehow break out of the conventional self that they are.”

As musicians use that power to draw attention to injustices, people cannot help but get involved, West contends, because “justice is what love looks like in public.”

How do youth group worship music sets promote justice or social indifference by the signals they send each week? The article suggests ways to help worshipers capture a multidimensional view of God. What say you?

A Day on Discipleship and Spiritual Development

As Urban Youth Workers, discipleship and spiritual development are crucial elements to the development of our ministries and programs.

This day is dedicated to in depth conversation and training on the topic at a house on the water in Seal Beach. We are taking the first 25 to register so jump on it. Larry Acosta will be joining us to BBQ at the end of the training as you ca relax on the beach or jump in the pool.

Workshops/Discussions:
• Nurturing the Spark: Research on Youth Spirituality
• A Glimpse Behind the Scenes: The Lifestyle of the Discipler
• Stories from the Field: Discipleship Forum
• Discipleship Up, Close & Personal:
What it Can Look Like Week-to-Week

Speakers:
Gabe and Karina Veas - Authentic LA
Abner Ramos - Intervarsity
John Lewis - Urban Youth Workers Institute

Date: Saturday, August 29th 2009
9:00 AM – 3:00 PM (Training-Discussion)
3:00 PM – 6:00 PM (BBQ-Beach-Swim)

Cost: $20

Location: Upon Registration You Will Receive Address in Seal Beach, CA.

Registration: Click here to register.

Leading In Turbulent Times: Strategy as Leadership

“Four One Day Trainings for Executive Directors”

The economic crisis that our country faces is affecting all us and especially those of us leading in the Non-Profit world. UYWI has developed four one-day trainings to help prepare you to lead your organization forward. You can attend all of them or just the ones that fit in your schedule or area of need.

---

Strategy As Leadership

Harambee Ministries
1609 Navarro Avenue
Pasadena, CA 91103

Thursday, July 16, 2009

9:00 AM – 3:00 PM

click here to register

• Assessment
• Anticipation and Planning
• Taking People With You - Team Development
• Understanding Organizational Life Cycles
• Creative Destruction

You’re invited: “Love is an Orientation” Virtual Book Club

UPDATE, 5/20

I’m overwhelmed at the early response to the “Love is an Orientation Virtual Book Club” experiment. In 36 hours, more than 125 people have already joined! That’s a little larger than any book club I’ve ever participated in. On second thought, I’ve never actually been in a book club before, so that’s a bad comparison. Let’s just say, it’s a lot larger than I expected. Should be fun.

The first two discussion topics were posted today, and neither one requires that you have actually read the book yet. Let’s call them preliminary topics, generated solely by the invitation to join.

1) What Conversation?
2) Is “Agenda-less” even possible?

If you haven’t entered the fray yet, please do so here.
________________

ORIGINAL POST

Call this post an online experiment, but I can’t remember anticipating a book as much as Andrew Marin’s debut, “Love is an Orientation: Elevating the Conversation with the Gay Community” (InterVarsity Press). So, for me at least, the book’s release is worthy of experimentation.

My anticipation mounted for at least two years after meeting Marin through Urban Youth Workers Institute and hearing first hand his passion for reaching a community most Christians dismiss as unreachable. Add to that the timeliness of the topic — gay marriage, anyone? — and the opportunity to wrestle with a fresh perspective on it, and the book’s release feels, well, fresh. The book’s cover, for its part, promises no more of the pungently stale entrenchment of cliche Christianity/ese, which by itself is worth celebrating. *Grin.*

So here’s the experiment.

Create a virtual book club wherein interested Christ-followers and non can wrestle with the topic together.

Who should join?

Anyone willing to read and discuss the book, who also cares about:

• Advancing the Kingdom of God by loving sincerely the most marginalized among us.
• The hyper-sexualized culture young people engage everyday, and that culture’s affect on already hormonally changing teens.
• The confusion, pain, and challenges created by increasingly visible homosexuality and the backlash against it.
• People, period. But especially those we struggle to love.

Who Should Stay Away

• People with a political, religious, or other agenda besides seeking understanding.
• Know-it-all’s who want everyone else to see how smart they are.
• Narcissists. It’s not about you.

Where?

The Love is an Orientation Virtual Book Club will meet on a semi-neutral platform — Facebook — so YS Blog friends, UYWI blog friends, JeremyDelRio.com blog friends, UrbanMinistry.org members, CCDA associates and more can all engage easily.

Format

Again, this is an experiment. I took the liberty of initiating this particular conversation about elevating The Conversation (i.e. creating the group), but I do not own the dialogue. I reserve the right to remove hostile notes and comments (and will recruit other contributors/editors to assist), but otherwise any Group member can feel free to initiate a discussion topic or engage another topic.

Ground Rules

• R-E-S-P-E-C-T.
• Check hostility, if not your agenda, at the door.
• Foul or otherwise derogatory language will be removed by an administrator.
• Discussion comments should relate to the discussion. Personal attacks or digs will be removed.
• Self-edit. If you think your own post might be agenda-driven, it probably is, so save it for your own blog or hit the delete button. And if you see something offensive, please notify the administrator.

Hopefully we won’t have to modify the ground rules much, but I/we reserve the right to do anything necessary to “elevate” the conversation, even in cyberspace.

Enter the Fray

I just began to read the book this morning, and will be wrestling through it along with you as I read it for the first time. Join the FB group today. Purchase the book. And enter the fray.

Chicago’s student murder epidemic, and a growing response to it

According to a recent CNN report, 36 children and teens have been murdered in Chicago so far this year — more than one a week — and local activists and faith leaders believe the slayings aren’t getting the attention they deserve.

Had 36 kids died of swine flu this year, “there would be this great influx of resources that say, ‘Let’s stop this, lets deal with this,’ ” Pfleger said.

Instead, because violence is driving the epidemic, “We’re hiding it. We’re ignoring it. We’re denying the problems,” he said.

The current US Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, expressed similar disappointment in 2007, when Chicago recorded 31 murdered children during the school year and he was serving as the city’s CEO of public schools. Watch why the violence seems worse now »

At the time, Duncan said “all hell would break loose” if these killings took place in one of the metro area’s upscale enclaves.

“If that happened to one of Chicago’s wealthiest suburbs — and God forbid it ever did — if it was a child being shot dead every two weeks in Hinsdale or Winnetka or Barrington, do you think the status quo would remain? There’s no way it would,” he said.

This time, if a growing consortium of Chicago churches has its way, all hell will finally break loose from the city’s public schools. After learning about 20/20 Vision for Schools at the 2008 Urban Youth Workers Institute, a Chicago network of faith-based youth workers began exploring a similar anti-violence approach to education reform in September 2008. Five months later, Vision Nehemiah launched 20/20 Vision for Schools Chicago in February 2009. To date, over 40 Chicago churches have adopted public schools for meaningful prayer, advocacy, and service.

Fore more info, visit 20/20 Vision Chicago online here.

Why loving young people is like city living

[Ed. note: UYWI Blogger Jeremy Del Rio was invited to contribute to the Youth Specialties Blog as well, and they requested a semi-biographical first post. Enjoy.]

Greetings from Brooklyn.

Not Brooklyn Lindsey, YS Blog contributor.

Brooklyn, New York, the most populous borough in New York City. Birthplace of Jay-Z and the integration of Major League Baseball. And site of the largest battle of the Revolutionary War. If Brooklyn were its own city, it would be the fourth largest in America.

My name is Jeremy Del Rio and I’m an addict — if you can call young people an addiction. Or if you can call city life addicting. Either way, I’m hooked.

I’ve lived more of my life in Brooklyn than anywhere else, with pit stops in Manhattan (the glitzy borough), Staten Island (the forgotten borough), and the greatest of NYC suburbs, New Jersey (sometimes called the Sixth Borough). My wife has lived nowhere else. Nor have our sons, both of whom were born here.

Our boys will soon discover the ABC’s of City Living. Multifaceted and textured, Brooklyn is:

• // Altruistic, artistic, and adventurous.
• // Boisterous and beautiful.
• // Cosmopolitan, creative, curious, conflicted, communal, and even cliquish.
• // Diverse and occasionally dangerous.
• // Energetic.
• // Fun.
• // Grandiose.
• // Hyper.
• // Inspired and invigorating.
• // Jubilant and joyful.
• // Kind.
• // Loud.
• // Maturing and sometimes mean.
• // Neighborly or nasty.
• // “Over it.”
• // Passionate.
• // Quite charming.
• // Restless, rowdy, and relevant.
• // Smart, sophisticated, and sometimes sullen.
• // Typecast.
• // Unbuttoned.
• // Vulnerable.
• // Wide-eyed and occasionally wild.
• // Xenos friendly but sometimes xenophobic.
• // Yours to love (or not).
• // Zestful.

So, too, are young people.

You may quibble with my list, and its applicability to youth ministry, but that’s part of the allure of cities. It’s OK if you disagree. We can still get along. We can still build community despite our differences.

Like many urban neighborhoods, mine is in perpetual flux, transformed for generations by successive waves of immigrants. For the last decade or so, Bay Ridge has has evolved into one of the largest Arab communities in New York, with Halal meat markets and Hookah shops now lining the streets. Sometimes the newer arrivals make the long-timers uncomfortable. And vice versa.

So, too, our youth ministries.

Youth ministry is an inherently transitory time. No matter how we define the youth in our ministries, they are bounded by age, grade, or some other time constraint that insures that they will move on, leaving empty spaces or replenished pews. How we build community with them while we can determines, in part, whether they leave behind a vacuum or a legacy.

Do we attempt to conform them to our standards of decorum and decency, or do we empower them to flourish in the uniqueness endowed to them by their Creator? Does our community celebrate their differences by loving them sincerely, without an agenda?

Teen life is an inherently tumultuous time. Bodies change and hormones start raging, even as teens begin to confront life’s big questions — the very same questions many adults haven’t answered yet, like: “Who am I?” “Why am I here?” “Where do I belong?” But the uncertainty, curiosity, and ambiguity bring with them opportunity for exploration, adventure, and discovery. Do we embrace the unknowns that faith requires, or chase after the safety of what’s familiar?

When the transience and change feel overwhelming, I take comfort that Jesus gives youth workers an extra year with high schools students than he had with his disciples. Even more comforting: his prize student, Peter, still needed anger management after three years by his side. And his rag tag collection of unlikely followers — which included a political terrorist (the Zealot), a crooked bureaucrat (the tax collector), and a prostitute among other “ignorant and unlearned” devotees notable only for their least likely to succeed credentials — had to be at least as conflicted and petty as my youth group.

They were certainly (almost) as diverse as my neighborhood.

- A youth ministry veteran since age 13, Jeremy Del Rio consults churches and nonprofits on youth development and cultural engagement, and trains practitioners with Urban Youth Workers Institute.