I missed the afternoon session on Thursday so I joined part II of Dan Webster's presentation on The Unexpected Leadership Journey: Leading from the Pages of Your Life. Webster runs Authentic Leadership, Inc..
The metaphor he gave was that of a sailboat. Our lives are like them in that there is a part above the water which everyone sees and the part below that no one sees. Thus, in life, we have visible competency and our invisible character. In leadership (youth ministry or any other type of leadership), the part below the waterline is essential to pay attention to.
He also proposed that there is a six-phase cycle we work through periodically in our lives. Each is necessary and has different purposes and characteristics.
In brief, those six phases are: excitement, fundamentals, responsibility, bored-tired-disillusioned, introspection and renewal.
We could be in different phases in different parts of our life. In the presentation, he fleshed out these phases from his life experience and from others he has learned from and challenged us to examine where we are at and to seek God's working through the phase we find ourselves.
The afternoon worship time included the David Crowder Band, Kendall Payne and comedy/drama of Ted and Lee.
I'm not too familiar with the realm of contemporary Christian music but some of the songs the David Crowder Band played was recognizable by me because we play them in our church.
Kendall Payne is a singer-song writer guitarist. Her ballads ranged from a snarky but spot on song about supermodels to a soulful mediation on prayer inspired by the life of Mother Teresa.
Ted and Lee did short sketches on stage dramatizing hypothetical conversations between Andrew and Peter who were disciples of Jesus and brothers. Their vignettes are funny and moving vividly illustrating how Jesus life and teaching shakes up people's lives.
The session speaker was Kenda Creasy Dean who shared the story of Eli and Samuel and applied it to us today in the church with our youth. Particular moving was how she showed the generations needed each other in the idea that Samuel was young enough and close enough to the heart of God to hear His voice but he didn't really know it was God until the older and fading Eli told him to respond.
Also moving was two presentations about some of the suffering in this world that Christians need to be mobilizing to fight against. World Vision has a display at the exhibit hall to bring us into a day in the life of one AIDS orphan.
The other critical battle today is against malaria. The organizations Nothing But Nets is leading the way in sending to Africa mosquito nets to protect people from mosquitos at night time. The project was started when people started to donate money after reading Sport's Illustrated's Rick Reilly wrote about malaria nets. A $10 net can save lives and we need to be part of this effort.
The session I attended was led by Tony Jones. His topic was An Identity Crisis: How New Research is Challenging What We Think We Know About Adolescence.
He started with a discussion of how Erik Erikson established the idea of the adolescent identity crisis which can be summarized by the word-picture: the free standing tower. Kids are trying to grasp their sense of identity so that they would be this free standing tower. However, since his research only looked at boys, newer research has shown more factors. Additional ideas have been put forward that stress the fact that much of identity is tied to our relationships to others.
To illustrate this idea, he said the tallest man-made structure in the world is a 2063 foot radio tower in North Dakota. It is not exactly a free-standing structure. It has massive amounts of guide wires and deep pilings to keep it standing.
He cited a major report from the research community that stressed the need for "authoritative communities" to improve the mental health of today's youth. Though the group preparing the report was secular, they could not deny the significance of religious communities as beneficial to the emotional, mental and behavioral health of kids.
The speaker in many ways acknowledged that the research really doesn't come as a shock to people who have been working with youth but what was striking was how quantifiable the results turned out to be.
One stat that really jumped out at me was that he mentioned that research is showing that that boys and girls learn best from teachers of the same sex and that male participation in public school teaching is at an all time low.
If the church is serious about making an impact on society then Christian men need to go into public school teaching.
The evening session speaker was Efrem Smith who explored the depth and breadth of what it means to have Christ as our life and to reveal him through our lives. He is a pastor of a multi-ethnic church and that was part of his message. He stressed that Jesus represents all of humanity on the Cross and that message of love and hope is for all of humanity. He challenged us to see ourselves as more than our human ethnic characteristics and reveal the supernatural characteristics of being children beloved of God.
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