 Sweet, so if you did just come in late, all you gotta do is go to Twitter if you have it, look up my name, this is not a shameless plug for follows. Okay, you do not have to follow me, but if you'll click on the link, then you can have everything that we're doing right here on your device, okay? You can screenshot, as Zach said also. And the reason why is because sometimes you need help with presentation tools. I know maybe you use PowerPoint, you know, or whatever, right? There's different programs. This is a, I don't work for them, okay? I don't get, I'm not contracted with Prezi, but it is elite presentation tool and filing system. Okay, I get asked all the time, man, you know, I need to file sermons. I need to file queues for the use service. I need to file my messages, you know, themselves each week. And the Prezi app is perfect for that because the students can come in and watch it on their device, not just the screens. And I know maybe sometimes you're trying to get them to not have the device in their hand, but it's not going away, okay? So we may as well redeem it. And so one of the things that will help you with the Prezi is this. You have students that are unable to be there on a certain Wednesday night or Sunday night or whenever. And they can access this wherever they are, you know? So it's just a, it's an elite presentation tool that I would suggest that you get. Also, I want to give you a resource and some of you have already seen this study. It is the Gen Z, the culture, beliefs and motivations shaping the next generation. And this is the latest in a two-year study by Barna. They did a youth ministry one 2014 through 2016 and this is 16 through 18. This was put out in February 2018 with all of the latest statistical analysis and data on youth ministry. So this is a must, a must read. I have taught this at the university level and my students rated this as the highest textbook in the course that had been taught over a decade. So this is phenomenal stuff. Graphs, it's easy to read because there's pictures. Yo-yo, all right. So you want to get that. It is the Gen Z study by Barna. If you go online at tabarna.org, if you go there, you can order it right there and get it sent to you, okay? So I wanted to make sure that you saw that. All right. So yesterday in this session, we did not get through all of the information. And how many of you were here yesterday? Okay, a few, good, okay. I'm just gonna do a quick review of that for those of you that are newer, okay? Just so I can catch you up to what we did and then we're gonna finish with the data that we did not get to, all right? And the way I want to couch this session is as you know, culture is not just about church culture. Now, we're going to apply it to church culture, but I want to take a walk through some of the trends that I see in youth ministry today. I have the advantage, maybe disadvantage in some settings to travel and to be in a different youth setting every single week. I will be in a small, medium, large setting. I will be in an urban, suburban, rural setting every week. And it gives me this university of education, okay? To see the condition of youth ministry. And not only, hear me, not only in the church, but to see it in the public school system or to see it in para-church, okay? FCA, Fellowship of Christian Athletes, Youth for Christ, first priority, all these different kinds of para-church or the YMCA's, I help YMCA's with programming. So to be able to get a grasp of what is current, okay, what is current in youth ministry or youth development, okay, this may not just be youth ministry in the church, but development outside of the church, NGOs, non-governmental organizations, and then the para-church settings too. So that's like a university of education. And so what I did on my website, and I'll give that to you again for those of you that are new here, you will be able to follow all of this along what I'm gonna do here shortly. You'll be able to follow that, not just here, but all of the content, all of the material that I use here is in my blog also on my website. So it's a 14 year blog, all right? It's a 14 year blog. And just saying that is like intimidating, isn't it? If you've ever tried to blog, right? Like three times a year, you know, or whatever, once a quarter, I've been doing this for 14 years every week. And I lay it off in the summer because of my schedule in the summer, but you can go to youthology.com. It's Y-T-H, so it's short for youth, Y-T-H-O-L-O-G-Y.com, not biology or zoology, okay? Youthology, Y-T-H-O-L-O-G-Y.com. And if you go to the blog dropdown, all you gotta do is search in the search bar, the topic that you're looking for for youth ministry. I tell people this all the time. If I have not covered your topic, please send me a contact. On the last page of the dropdown is a contact. I will blog it within a month. I'll post it within a month. And I've had several people do that and it's a blast because then it gives me content too and I'm not always doing the same thing, right? So if there's something you're looking for, whether it's like leadership meetings, how do I run a valuable leadership meeting? Or what about student leadership development? How do I do student leadership development? Because that is work in itself. Campus access, the sexual revolution, all these things. So if you don't see something on there that you want, please send me a contact and I will post in a month on your topic, okay? So thank you again, as I said yesterday. No more commercials, but thank you so much for being here. It's humbling. I think the longer you do this, the more you realize how less people think about you. And sometimes you wonder in my travels, this is 35 years doing youth ministry. In my travels, I wonder, is anybody gonna listen? Is anybody gonna, is anyone interested in youth ministry today? Because what happens is we do it for a few years and then we go plan a church, or we get a demotion and become a lead pastor. I said that. Yeah, so we try something else or whatever. I believe in longevity in youth ministry. You know, way back in the spring, May 1980, when I gave my heart to Christ, God had called me to youth ministry and this was right before my senior year of high school. And I went off to college and God spoke to me again. This is, I want you to be a youth pastor. And I remember going through four youth pastors myself. And I remember saying to God, okay, if you want me to do youth ministry, that's what I'm going to do. And if you change your mind, let me know. I said that, if you change your mind, you let me know. Because I was all in and I talked to him every day and he's asked me to do nothing different. I think most youth ministry leaders who move on, don't move on because it's God's will. Now that sounds like a really terrible statement, doesn't it? Like I know the Lord's will for their life. I didn't say all of them, I said most because I have these conversations every single week. Right before we came in here, Zach and I were speaking with someone about that before we walked in here, I hear this conversation of longevity every week. It may come up in the podcast that we're gonna do right after this. So I believe that most, not all, but most youth leaders leave because they haven't been able to reinvent themselves. Think about that. When you first get into youth ministry, right? You first get into youth ministry, you're like their brother or their sister. You're so close in age, you're a peer. Then maybe you become the big brother or the big sister or you become the cool uncle, right? And then it's like you're the father or the mother. And then you get into like what I'm doing now, I'm the grandfather. And you know grandfathers are dangerous, right? The grandfather walks into the room, everyone's like, what's he gonna say now? You know, and it gives you a lot of free, whatever. So anyway, that was all free on longevity. That was not youth culture. Okay, let's go here. So trends in youth ministry. So what we did, I don't have like a pointer or anything. I guess I could move, I just take a look at the whole thing. So what we did is we covered the family, we covered worship, the sexual revolution with like some new terms and things that are out there. Truth, we talked about theology in youth ministry a little bit. We hit on racism, but I'm gonna pick it up there because I'm not quite done with that. And then we did not get into the supernatural, okay? And then, so I'm gonna start with racism and then I'm gonna go to the supernatural. And then I'm gonna hit two other, actually three, no, two other topics. We're gonna talk about parenting. So not just family, but some of the things that I see with that. And then also this post-Christian worldview. Okay, I'm gonna take that apart a little bit. So when I say things like, when I see trends, these are the kind of things that I see. Now, I see them in a positive and a negative light. Like some of the things when we were talking about racism, let me go there and bring you to that. When we're talking about racism, we are saying that 50% of Gen Z are non-white. 50%, it is the highest percentage of diversity in a generation ever in America. So if our youth ministries are not addressing this issue, we are missing it, we are missing an opportunity to speak into the lives of the Gen Z. So if you back it up, kind of give you a little bit of history here, right? Gen Z is the latest. I would have probably called them the likes because they like everything, then unlike, and you know, all that kind of thing, but anyway. But that's Gen Z. Then the millennials are their older brothers and sisters. Right, familiar with that. That were born like 80, 1980 to 2,099,98. And then the Gen Z was born like 98, 99, 2,000. Every sociological model's different. They never land on the same age, right? And now around 13, 2013, they say the next Gen is already coming. They just haven't labeled them yet. Okay, and those studies are already coming out because those are just elementary type kids now that are five, six years old or whatever. So when you look, when you see Gen Z, that's what we're talking about. It's the latest, junior high, high school, and then some of the young college also, okay? So diversity is a great teacher, isn't it? Diversity is a great teacher. Everywhere I go in youth ministry, there is an increase in what I like to call racism. I didn't say that there's no racism in America. I'm not that foolish. And I know that I'm the white guy and that we're not even supposed to talk about it, okay? But I want you to know there is a growing racism in the youth culture that is so encouraging. It is. Everywhere I go, I hear this from young people also. And it's almost like they're trying to escape the anger of the older generation. Okay? Listen, it's okay to like say amen or whatever if you like that. But you know, if you don't, that's fine. We can talk afterwards, okay? I would love that. This is observations, okay? This is observations. So when I say things like growing racism, it doesn't mean that racism isn't here. We know it is. But what I'm hearing from young people is this. Why can't my uncle stop talking about racism, right? That things that happened to him? I wanted to know, no, my friends, my posse, my tribe, right? My bestie is non-white. I play on a team that is not all white. My study group, right? All of these things are being pushed and stressed in our generation. So what we have to do is capitalize on this. So what I wanna do is give you some key words, maybe words that we're not real familiar with, social justice type, biblical justice type words that should be regular in your youth ministry. We should be talking about honesty, especially as white privileged, there's not a ton of diversity in the room. I realize that, which is really odd because oftentimes in my settings, there's a lot more diversity, but not as much in this conference, in this movement right now. So we have to grow in that. Honesty, especially from white privilege. We have to be honest in our discussions with teenagers about this idea of racism and biblical justice. Number two, forgiveness. Oftentimes in settings like this, I will publicly say, please, my non-white friends, specifically we would move to our black friends, right? Or African-American, I know that there's a division out of what they want to be called, right? Or my Hispanic friends are Latino, right? And I'll publicly ask for apology. I've posted on this many times, about every month or two, I will post on this. And I'll begin with, please forgive us because forgiveness is powerful when we talk about racism, okay? And then reparations, what is reparations? Reparations is actually doing something about our honesty and doing something about forgiveness. Rebuilding, rebuilding relationships, okay? Tolerance, intersectionality. Wow, a buzzword right now. This is a new cultural buzzword. If you Google this, you'll see so many articles on intersectionality, which really is, I like to call it a hybrid. It is a hybrid relationship. It is a synced relationship between the races. I like to use the word, I know it's not up here, but intergenerational, did you hear that? Intergenerational, not generational as in the ages, but an intergenerational, okay? An intersectionality within our church of the races. Like I hear people will say things like this. Well, we're a multicultural church. Listen, we need to become more than a multicultural setting. We need to become intercultural. You see the difference? You see the difference? Multicultural just means that we exist together. It just means there's a multiple set of generations or races or belief systems, but inter means that we are actually related and we have conversation and we have understanding and we repair and we've rebuilt relationships. So that's what we mean when we get into intersectionality and then actionable defense, actionable defense. This is another term that has become popular in biblical justice where I'm actually doing something and not just saying it. I'm actually, I'm not just saying what I believe, but I'm doing something about it. So this growing racism. And then finally, the most important thing that we must do in this generation right now is identity work. Now this gets into the human sexuality too, doesn't it? Identity, and we dealt with that. All the new terms and stuff. We kind of talked about that yesterday. And again on the blog, if you want to go there, you can see that. I think there's 20 terms there that are being taught students in the school system. But right along with that is identity work as it relates to not just male and female, okay, but between the races also. Like when people say things like, man, I don't see color, right? I don't see color. That's almost disrespectful. And I know, I get the understanding and the teachings of Christianity and that we're all people of color, right, POCs. But that's not the common language that people use today. And it's divisive if we say things like, well, I don't see color, because we should see value between inter races, not just multi-race, okay. So just some of the things that I see, I know we did some more stuff with that yesterday, but okay. So let me go on and go to parental duality. So this is gonna kind of be an offshoot of what we talked about, the loss of the family in youth ministry yesterday. One of the trends that I see and you see is the brokenness of the home. And really, to be honest, it's not just the brokenness in the home, it's the redefinition of home. It's a redefinition of marriage. Our government is redefined through legislature, we're redefining marriage, which then has an impact on the home, doesn't it? So we have to be careful of the kinds of things that we are allowing and not standing up for the biblical definition of the home. But so that was more yesterday. So parental duality, what do I mean by this? One of the things that I think we have to understand is the kind or type of home our students are coming from. Do you know your students' names? Do you know your students' story? Every student has a name and every student has a story. And as a youth leader, like when we talk about longevity, one of the things I've shared with people for years is the reason that I've stayed in this is because I've learned students' stories and not their name. And it makes me more empathetic and it makes me more loving and unconditionally walking into their life and giving them this kind of hope. So when we look at this concept of helicopter and ghost parenting, you see the extremes, okay? You see the parent that maybe gave more theology than they should have, law, you know, the whole idea of you can't do this versus we get to do the, it's when you look at sins of omission and sins of commission, that's what we would see here in defining this. Modeling healthy family and youth ministry is critical to students because they've been raised in either a too loose and not enough theology setting, true, or too much in its abrasive, legalistic. Now, that's even rare too, maybe in the church setting that's true, but if you look at the real definition of what we're talking about, despite being the digital natives, the community aspect has been lost and the global connectivity, okay? That's in their hand, this global connectivity has failed to create neighborhoods. Youth ministry should be creating neighborhoods. You know, one of the things that will come up with this discussion is clicks. I wanna debunk that a little bit. Everybody has their ideas of clicks and the value of them or the devalue of them. I've always felt like clicks were an awesome thing. Let me explain before you throw something at me. Because you've seen them destroy too. I just wanna help you. Clicks are really tribes, subgroups, posseys, squads, kids call them squads, right? Rolling with my squaw. These, if we're not careful, we could begin to disband affinity groups. One of the best ways for you to do evangelism is through tribes. Now, we want to have understanding that the tribes will only exist with one type or one kind. One of the things that I would love to be able to teach on if we had more time on this is how to break down tribes and create them to be intersectional, like that word intersectionality. How to create safe groups that are actually identity groups or avenues for their friends to come. Because how many know if I'm an athlete, then it's going to be easier for me to invite my friends who are athletes to the youth group if there are athletes there. And sometimes we have this, it's us and them, don't we, with clicks. And those are so, break them down. Everybody sit by everybody else. Well, listen, sometimes the entry, the avenue into the youth ministry begins with squads. We just have to make sure we're teaching that we have an interkind, an intertype, okay? That they're at least open to having others within that neighborhood. How can you create neighborhood in youth ministry? How can you create neighborhood in youth ministry? Let me just give you two ways to do that. Number one, speak kindly about tribes. Promote them, okay? Teach on them properly because they will be able to help, they will be able to help you become the avenue of unchurched people into your youth ministry. So promote it, teach on it, make them healthy, okay? Second, student leadership development teams. I'm gonna hit this in a minute on something else also. But student leadership, we do a lot of adult leadership but we do very little student leadership. And if you wanna change the culture, hear me, if you wanna change the culture of a youth ministry, then you place as much emphasis on student leadership development as you would on adult leadership development, right? I mean, think about this. If you look at the average pastor, leader, go look at their desk right now and you can tell what kind of a leader there are by the books that are on their desk or on the shelf, right? Because most of us will read books on systems, teams, development, okay? But rarely do we read books on spiritual discipline. It's true. I do this all the time when I walked into, last week in Kentucky, I walked into young man's office and he had six books right there. Mine was on the top. I was like, you, come on. He's like, no, no, no, I've been reading it for anyway. And to be able to see what they're reading, not one spiritual discipline book, okay? So when we think through the kind of things that we are reinforcing ourselves, we need to learn how critical it is to raise up disciples who are student, peers. Peer discipleship is different than adult discipleship. Listen, we need fathers and mothers, don't we? Paul said that. I have 10,000 teachers, but few, what? Fathers. So I get that, but I want you to hear the kind of counsel that a peer will give to a peer versus what an adult will give to a teenager. So the more leadership, student leadership development we do, the easier it is to build neighborhood, to build community, okay? Locality, yeah. So, okay. Parents were asked why youth group, okay? Why? Why youth group? This, the survey in the Barnard report, over 2,000 sets of parents were asked the question why youth ministry? And this is what parents said. Number one, I put these in order also. Faith development, we want the youth ministry to become faith development for our student. Now, I think in some settings that they have shirked that responsibility, in some settings maybe it's more hyperfamilism where it's more the family than the church even, and we're protecting them, but in most cases, parents want you to help with faith development, okay? Second, positive peers. We want our students, our kids, may not be able to find positive peers at school or on the team, but I want them to find that. I want them to find that in the youth group. Third, a place to bring their friends to do evangelism. I think the home should become that also, right? Many of you have that home setting where it's so healthy, your children's friends can't wait to come to your place. We tried to build that culture in our home. Finding life direction before finding life direction. I want my kids to know the will of God and they're gonna find their calling at the youth group. Just from a parent's perspective, isn't this helpful? To know what parents are thinking when they send their kids away to you for 90 minutes a week to change them and, right. Here, fix my kid, right? Activities, I want my kids to have a blast. I want them to hang out with all their friends at school, I want them to have activities in the youth group. And then finally, service or mission trips. They use the term mission trips, but the more I read it, it's really beyond that because they were talking about soup kitchens, human trafficking causes, right? And parents are wanting their students to be involved in those kind of things, so that's why I put service trips. Then, let me help you. I wanna give you five practical ways to build a relationship with parents. Five practical ways to build a relationship. I know this is going all over, right? Hopefully this is helpful in building youth culture. Number one, at least an annual parent meeting. Okay, at least an annual parent meeting. We did two, we did one in the fall and one in the spring, and our parents didn't wanna miss it. We would bring in student spotlights and student stories. We would share the whole calendar with them, the series that we were gonna do. We would have a parent, we'd have a parent give their story also to share wins with other parents who were crushed, with parents who were going through it, and they're like, man, my kid is never gonna make it. And they hear this other parent who's maybe a single mom, right? Who gets up and says, man, this youth group changed and she breaks down, this is true story. And these other parents walk over to her and they're praying for her in the middle of our parents' meeting, right? So, number two, intergenerational leadership. So, this is generational and generational. Not just having all white people, or if you're from an African American, if you're from a black church, not having everybody that's all black on the team, right? Because it goes both ways, doesn't it? Or if you're in a Hispanic setting, why not reach, unless it's maybe a language church, we understand that. But why not reach everyone that's there because we're all gonna be together forever in eternity at some point. So let's practice eternity now, right? So I want my leadership team, if I want to, listen, if I wanna reach Gen Z, who is 50% non-white, I can't have all of my youth leaders white. And I know, I get it too, we don't have a whole lot of time to cover this. That may be all that's in your setting. I know that. But doing the best that we can to at least grow this. Number three, setting an atmosphere of unconditional love. We spent some time on this yesterday and we're bringing it up again with this parental thing because if you want to change the broken home situation, if you want to change this lack of community, this lack of neighborhood, a world that is loving students conditionally, we have to be more empathetic. We have, this needs to become a priority in youth ministry. Whether that is un-churched kids, whether that is the whole sexual revolution and how open am I to the gay community? Students who are struggling with that, right? Not just the homosexual in the LGBTQ plus, right? But that split now between the homosexual and the gay community. And that's a whole another discussion that we had some of that yesterday, but there's so much division and disunity amongst the homosexual crowd. Some are wanting to not even be called homosexual, I'm gay, right? So when we're talking about unconditional love, I truly believe this. If you will love teenagers, God will send you more. When is the last time you cried for a teenager? Not cried because of one. Hey, I can't believe it, I pour my life it, right? When is the last time you cried for a teenager? Every week for me. Multiple times a week for me. And if we will cry for teenagers, they will come and wipe the tears off our cheek. I had a middle school girl, we were ministering to her and she had this terrible lifestyle, terrible home setting. One of my youth leaders brought her over and we were praying with her. And while I was praying with her, I was just crying with her. She was weeping uncontrollably and I'm crying and she looked up while I was praying and she wiped a tear off my cheek and said this, Mr., nobody ever cried for me, unconditional love. I think that's a, my wife used to say, some of you know the story, my wife passed away three years ago. My wife used to say, I know when you're in your zone because you're broken. Never let a week go by without hearing the story, without empathetically attaching to this generation because I truly believe if you will love them, God will send you more. I believe it. If you will love them, God will send you more. Limit the surrogate language. You've had a student say to you, man, I wish you were my mom, right? How many times? I wish you were my dad. Could I come and live with you? And we've had them in temporarily, but hear me, they must heal the relationship with mom and dad. You cannot be a surrogate. You cannot step in and take that role. And I know sometimes when you're younger and this is how I was, I was like, whoa, cool stroke. All right, kids love me, right? That could be dangerous because they never actually heal the relationship with a mom or a dad. And maybe the mom and dad's not there and it's a guardian, true, just happened. Two weeks ago, a young man, he's a young college kid and I'm mentoring him in Minneapolis where I live and I see him every other week and he's adopted. And he came to me two weeks ago and he said, hey, I'm graduating from college and I feel ashamed. I said, tell me, Michael, what's going on? He said, I called my adoptive parents and I said, I don't want you to come because they've been out of my life for the last three years since I've gone to college. And as soon as I hung up, I thought, no, why did I do that? I'm just angry, you know? And I said, his father's not alive, but his mother is. And I said to him, I said, at some point, you need to have a healing with your mom. Maybe the reason she gave you up is for your good. And you haven't even thought about that because he's angry with her and he's angry with the adoptive parents because, right? And I said, you gotta stop being angry, Michael and you gotta start healing your relationship with your mom because she may have given you up for the right reasons. And he stood there in my, in this session where we were talking and this is what he said. He said, I have to call them, don't I? I said, yes, I said, I'd like you to do it right now so you don't back out. But he went home, called them, texted me the next day and this is what he said. I couldn't believe the response, but I texted my adoptive parents and they were like, we so want it to come and we know we've been out of your life, but this healing takes place in the phone call. He said, we talked for 90 minutes. And it would have been easy for me to just say, you know what, forget about them and let's just build your life and let's worry about, right? We can't do that with these kids. We can't do that with these kids. So we have to be careful with the surrogate language. And then finally, supporting Pauline Parental Command. I love to talk about this. And that is, pause, not suggestion, pause command for teenagers to obey and submit to their parents. Because if they do, you know the story, you know Ephesians chapter six, if they will do that, then they will live long, it will be well with them. And this is his promise. This is a commandment that comes with the promise and you will do well and you will live long. And so I have stressed to teenagers, if they tell you to clean your room, you freaking clean your room. Help mom with the dishes. Men of God, help mom with the cleaning. Men of God, take out the trash, right? We don't like to get down to that, but somehow we have to get these students to understand the command of obedience. And then of course, we know the other side when it gets to parenting, God doesn't, Paul never let the parents off either, did he? He's like, stop provoking them. And we're like, what do we mean? Why me? No. Yeah, yeah, you. And so that goes both ways. But anyway, okay. One more, what do we have? Oh my Lord. Okay, we gotta go really fast. We gotta go really fast. Sorry, I've already been going fast, but yeah. This is the post-Christian worldview information. So when we look at, sorry. When we look at this idea of theology, yesterday we dealt with theology a little bit. And today, I want you to see these things here. This is support we talked about yesterday a little bit. Gen Z has a 4% biblical worldview. 4% biblical worldview. Millennials up in the teens, percentage. Gen X in the 30s. Then each generation, okay, as you back it through the silence and the grades and all of it, each generation, it increased up to 70% of a biblical worldview. Today, 4%. Pastor Lee mentioned it the first morning. This is an un-churched generation. And when it comes to Gen Z, they have no, listen, no concept of God. Their concept of God is culture. And if everything's going good, then it's all cool. But if kids are starving, then God's evil. If my grandmother died and we prayed one time to him, and he didn't do anything, then there is no, right? This is their concept of God. It's not a biblical concept. Listen, we have raised teenagers in the church. Hear me, we've raised all of us, have raised teenagers in the church, who are more dependent on culture than they are scripture. They know the latest songs, the latest movie. They know all of that in culture, but they can't memorize one scripture. Okay, sorry, yeah, they can. John 3.16, right? Right, and they even get that. And then maybe, maybe Matthew 11.28, Jesus wept. That took a while, but they got that one down too, right? So, we have work to do. We have work to do with our language, with our discipline, when it comes to these areas. Wow, okay, so church attendance, religious affiliation, belief in God, Bible reading, all declined, okay? This requires youth ministry to do a definition of theology, right? Theology is simply the study of God versus meology. And what has happened in youth ministry in America is we spent more time on meology, in my little quips, in my stories, in another Avenger series, versus actually teaching students the word of God. So, what is the content? Let me give you this, and then we'll stop and see if we can do a couple of questions, but then we're gonna kind of take this into that podcast too, and we'll answer more questions. Let me give you what I believe every student should learn when they leave our youth ministry, okay? This would be the kind of things that I want my students to at least have a basic, general understanding of. So, if I have a student that's coming as a junior or a senior, I got work to do to work them through this kind of stuff. If they're in middle school, right? If they're in middle school, then I've got them for five, six, if you have six graders, I have them for seven years. But sometimes, we don't have them for quite that long. So, here's a great way to gauge whether you're doing good theology in youth ministry and not meology. Do a survey every year with your seniors. Put these things on the survey and maybe put others, and give this to all of your seniors. I mean, you could do this to the whole youth group, but specifically, we really want to know what, as they're leaving, what are they learning? And ask them to put a check on, do you understand these? Could you give me one sentence? Can just descriptive set on these things? 10 commandments, proverbs. The reason I say proverbs is because it's so simple and it's 31 chapters, one for every day, to discipline them in the word, okay? Sermon on the Mount, which was really the New Testament commandments. Don't just go one mile, go two. Give your shirt and your coat. Turn the cheek if someone, you are the light of the world. Don't hide it under, all of these commands in Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, Matthew five, six, and seven, it is what over 70 commands of Christ. So, I like to call those the New Testament commandments. Gospel stories, and I'm giving you freedom here. What would be the gospel stories you feel like every student needs to know when they're finished with children's ministry, middle school, high school, and they move off into school, into university? You know, maybe there's five or six of the key things, right? We want some competency when it comes to, I want all of my kids to know about Moses in New York. Some of you caught that, you're taking notes and you wrote down Moses in New York. But that's where our kids are at, right? They're like, oh yeah, man, oh yeah, oh yeah. I'll never forget the story of Samson in the lion's den. Wow, I love that story. Like, yeah, me too, that's a great one. This literacy, okay? So, you choose gospel stories that you feel like the students need to understand here. The trinity, how critical is understanding the trinity? Because God, the Father we know, Jesus, we talk about, we pray, but who is the Holy Spirit? Wow, oh my goodness. The gifts and the fruit of the Spirit. Fruit are grown, gifts are given. I want my students to know, okay, the reason why you're not sharing your faith is because you're not filled with the Spirit and you don't have afforded to you the gifts to be able to use in apologetics. Hear me, I'm using some words here that our students can understand. Do you know this is the most achieving generation that has ever lived from their greats and the silence all the way through X, millennial and now the Z. They are the most educated and the most achieving and you wanna know why most of them are trying to achieve because college education is so expensive. They have to get scholarships to even go to school. And so, you are seeing that the attendance sometimes goes down on Wednesday or Sunday or whenever you meet, right, goes down because kids have to study or their parents are making them because they have to rise to this specific level of scholarship. It's true. So achievement and because of that, they can understand eschatology. They know, and if there's one, we didn't even get into this. We mentioned it yesterday and I was gonna do it and I got, it's next but I don't have the time and that is the supernatural end times. Let me tell you something. There are no less than, no less than 18 movies and television shows on the supernatural right now. I counted them two nights ago. I counted them Sunday night. I had done this before back in the fall and there was like 12 or 14. There are no less than 18 supernatural movies out right now and television shows. See, we are stuck in Nickelodeon, okay? And they're in Stranger Things. Hello? We're still wanting to play games in Gaga Ball and Nine Square and these kids are into vampires. They're into zombies. They're into War of the Worlds, Game of Thrones. They're into all of these other supernatural thrillers and we're stuck in Nickelodeon playing with crazy games thinking we're gonna, they're so far beyond that, so far beyond that, right? So eschatology, the study of end times. So kids understand those kind of things when they finish. Okay, it's 21. 21. So as soon as we're done here, we are going right across the way. If you will, please don't just let Zach and I go over there alone, okay? And we're gonna do a podcast from 145 to 215, that's it. And then we're gonna post it on the network page and I'm gonna put it on my page. So you wanna come over there and then we'll be done and we'll keep it to half an hour, actually it'll probably be 25 minutes because we'll have to do some instruction and then start it and we'll be done at quarter after so you can eat if you haven't, okay? Between now and the next seven or eight minutes, do you have any questions that I can help you with? Regarding, we have a mic because we wanna get this since we're recording it. Regarding anything that we've talked about or maybe something else, maybe you could keep that until the session over there. But how can I help you maybe with practice with some of this stuff? There's only so much we can do in an hour, man. Anyone at all? Thank you. Yep, love this. I'll get as practical as I can and not theoretical. The best way to raise up student leaders is the mentoring of them individually. So what I would do is identify at least a student, preferably two, a male and a female in every grade that has some form of spiritual formation, maturity, and pour your life into them the entire summer. Call them in. They got time in the summer, okay? I know they might go up north to the cab, but whatever you can do to mentor a select group first. Okay, that's where I would start. The second thing I would do is to create a curriculum just for them. Now, it's so easy. I know that that's like maddening because you're volunteers in here and you're like, I don't have any time to do that. Let me give you one. I'll just give you one. And that is alpha.org. The Alpha Youth Discipleship Series is second to none. Second to none. It is video-based. It deals with who is God, who is the Trinity, why the church, who is Jesus, all these basic questions. And they're 30-minute videos, 25 to 30-minute videos with a workbook and it's free online. So you don't have a budget and you don't have time to write curriculum. If you go right to alpha.org and then go to the Alpha Youth Series, AYS, Alpha Youth Series, you can order that and I would take those students. If I were a youth pastor today and I'm not in the local church now, I'm doing the coaching thing in the youth ministry, but if I were back in the local church, I would do this, I would start it immediately. I would identify a male and a female in every grade and I would meet with them for one whole summer or in the fall or whatever you want to do that format-wise and I would take them through the Alpha Series then what I would do thirdly. So number one is identifying them and the mentoring process begins. Number two, take them through a curriculum. And number three, I would release them to serve under my adult leaders, okay? And become really assistant leaders at the student level. Now we would call them, we call them student captains, we would call them captains and then our adult leaders were coaches, okay? So that concept somehow it brings them their level of leadership up when they recognize themself on that part of a team. Then the fourth thing I would do, so you identify them and start the mentoring process. Get a curriculum and take them through the curriculum, however long that takes. Set them under an adult leader and finally I would put them over a ministry where they're leading their peers. But I wouldn't do that right away, okay? Whether that's, listen, some students have this capacity, right, it's way up here and some students the capacity is way down here, they just want to get involved. So maybe the students that don't have the leadership capacity that's a little lower, I have them make signs and welcome students that are coming on campus and they're like, we saved the seat for you, how much is that, right? So there's different levels of leadership that I would involve them in in that fourth area. I have blogged on this too and there's plenty of posts on that, yep. Student leadership, yep. Can we get one more, 26, maybe we can get two more? Or maybe we should, you know what, maybe we should just save them for the, yeah, if you want to. Well, maybe you're not going over there though. Please, don't leave us alone, don't leave us alone. We want to do like a live audience thing too, like where we clap on in or whatever. I know, right? So one more question? Yes, yes, okay, I love that. We did it yesterday. So let me take you to it real quick and you can take a screenshot of it, you know, however you want to do that. Here are a bunch, I gave six different ways to increase worship in the youth ministry. You have to allow space and time in programming, you know, not just an opening song or whatever, spotlight fine arts and the students, the students that can do art, have them do art, the students that can paint, you know, or creative writing or spoken word or you know, rap or all this stuff. So pull out the fine arts and the students. Change your music as leaders and have a steady discipline, okay? Listen, I like 21 Pilots and I like some of the stuff that Chainsmokers puts out. There's, you know, you too, I'm a huge YouTube fan and all that, but I'm very selective, very selective with even like Coldplay and some of the great messaging that's there. And I rarely let students know of my diet of secular music because it sets me apart as their leader. And then secondly with that is your worship, man, you, I know you have a worship leader that's up here, but you're the key worship leader in the youth ministry. You know that. Listen, we don't have to teach students how to worship. They already worshiped themself. They already worshiped their bae, their bestie. They already worship icons. We just need to teach them to worship God. And if we can do great theology, I think that's the last one. If we can do great theology, that will increase. Listen, if the students know God, it will increase their worship. So, you know, here's, you know, maybe that will help. One thing we did not talk about yesterday with this, 29. Okay, I got seconds. One thing that might help is this. Don't throw up a bunch of students on the platform to lead worship if they're not ready. Now, this is just me. You may be different than that. Let me tell you why. It's not going to be attractive to guests who just came out of the parking lot, listening to this kick and playlist on their, right? Or in their headphones. And now they gotta sit through people that can't keep it tuned and they're struggling, but we're discipling. No, you're not. No, listen, that's not discipleship to throw them up here. If anything, that is reinforcing bad habits. I love you. And I want students to be involved, but none of our students could be on the worship team until they started coming to practice for a quarter. Or all I'm doing is supporting bad habits. So, bring in young adults that are gifted. You know what? If you're near, I'm gonna say this because I know this church. And we did it in my church that was larger. If you're a youth ministry and you don't have musicians, Azac, call the music department here. They have plenty of musicians that are not playing on Wednesday night who would love to come over and help you build a youth ministry team for one year. It's called Kingdom. That's, okay, the church I go to in Minneapolis, 9,000 people, eight campuses, nine youth pastors, okay? We share worship all over the Twin Cities because we have so many musicians. So, this is critical. Okay, it's 31. We're done. Please, across the hall, we're gonna do live podcast now.