By Dr. Terri Martinson Elton, Director of the Center for First Third Ministry at Luther Seminary
Any weekend I see a movie is a good one. Dramas, comedies, action-thrillers, musicals, historical pieces…you name it, I love a good movie. My weekdays are full and demanding, so being transported into a story for a few hours on a Friday night, with my husband and a Diet Coke, and I’m good! Sure, sometimes the story is far-fetched and I need to stretch my imagination, other times the story
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By Dr. Terri Martinson Elton, Director of the Center for First Third Ministry at Luther Seminary
Today marks the beginning of Lent. Some church bodies embrace the season of Lent, others not so much. For the ones who do Lent is accompanied with particular practices, special worship experiences, and the Christian’s call for faith to intersect with their daily life. Most often practices take the form of “giving up” or fasting from certain things; worship experiences are usually sober
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By Derek Tronsgard
A funny thing happened this fall. My wife and I were on our way to the Minnesota Golden Gophers homecoming football game against Purdue. We had parked our car in the street several blocks away and had to walk right through the main row of fraternity houses to get to the stadium.
As we walked down frat row it was pretty obvious that the college kids were celebrating homecoming weekend with gusto. It was 10:30 in the morning, but there were young kids out on their
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By Andy Sahl
"Andy, I don’t think I want to be an intern anymore."
I really couldn’t believe my ears. For years our few spots for high school interns (high school students that help with our middle school program) was a coveted role. For the last two years we’ve added the number of inters and only allowed them to serve for a semester instead of the whole year. There is honor and status in being an intern.
The young man asking to be relieved of his intern
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By Derek Tronsgard
Earlier this week
Mike King
led a
First Third Dialogue
session talking about the power of space in our ministry and it got me thinking.
About a year ago a woman in my congregation cornered me on Sunday morning.
“We need to talk,” she said.
Crap, I thought.
She went on to share her frustrations about my Confirmation kids' presence in Sunday morning worship. The kids' behavior was just fine, she explained. They were participating fully in
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By Dr. Nancy Going, Director of the CYF Distributed Learning Program at Luther Seminary
Crowds have been a part of Youth Ministry culture since Youth Ministry began. The Christian Endeavor Movement found itself with 50,000 attending its 1895 meeting. Denominations started their own fellowships in response, and many still hold large events that are a fixture in the youth ministry calendars of their churches. With large events come celebrities, people who excite the crowd. Large churches
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By Dr. Nancy Going, Director of the CYF Distributed Learning Program at Luther Seminary
Last week, Terri Elton and I were at a conference about the future of the church. It was great conversation, but my brain is still stuck on some of the realities that were laid out about the state of the current church. One of the ideas that really caught my ear and my heart came from a ministry leader named
Mike Breen
, who asserts that the three reasons the institutional church is dying in America
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By Dr. Terri Martinson Elton, Director of the Center for First Third Ministry at Luther Seminary
This morning the idea of
home
was swirling in my head. This past week I was on the road traveling, so sleeping in my own bed, hanging with my family and even cleaning my house was a gift.
Home
, a shelter and place for family. Last night my college daughter returned from a week traveling abroad and our family got to join her for dinner. There in the restaurant sharing stories, a
feeling of home
. A friend’s
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By Neil Christianson
David Kinnaman, author of the book
unChristian
, tells us that we are operating out of an old model that isn’t effective for young adults today. In his new book
You Lost Me
, he says that close to 60% of young people who went to church in high school drop out after high school. Why? Barna Research gives us six reasons. You can check out the details online
HERE
, but the six reasons are:
1. The church is overprotective.
They have an isolation mentality “us verses
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By Dr. Nancy Going, Director of the CYF Distributed Learning Program at Luther Seminary
Terri Elton and I are attending a conference right now at Group Publishing about the future of the Church. The speakers are giving us lots of insight into what the great decline in church attendance and membership looks like across the spectrum of Christianity and across our country. There were scholars who have said for years, that American Christianity will never go the way of Europe. These scholars
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