The decision has been made to change locations for the Peak next summer.  We will be taking the students to Riverview Bible Camp, which is north of Spokane, Washington.  As the price for the facility at Cascades Camp & Conference Center continued to rise, we grew concerned that we weren’t getting our monies worth.  Another factor that contributed to this decision was the cost in hours of preparation for putting our own camp on.  Most people don’t know that each year we spend scores of hours in preparation, study, advance planning, purchasing supplies and recruiting and training leaders for each summer at the Peak.  By going to a camp like Riverview, we let their organization provide the worship band, the speaker, the safety staff, and the program planning.  This allows those of us on staff to go and invest our time in directly discipling our students and nurturing our fellow staff.  Every year since we started putting our energy into discipleship, we have become convinced that our best investments in time have been when we are discipling and reproducing our lives into our kids.  This decision will help us do this even more.

One challenge to this change of venue is that we will be 7 hours further away by bus.  Because of that, we will be using charter buses with air conditioning and bathrooms.  Also, the week we will be going to camp will be a week earlier than we have been used to, July 25-30th in 2010.  We believe this will help us not to conflict with classic qualifying tournaments for soccer and football tryouts.  The cost will probably(the budget is not finalized yet) be $300.00 which will include transportation, camp activities, meals and a T-shirt from the camp.

In conclusion, I would like to say that this location will be different and the experience will be changing.  However, change is not bad, it is just not what we are used to.  The challenge for parents is to help the kids get excited about the new experience they will be having next summer.  Expect emotional appeals.  Expect that they will have questions you cannot answer.  But guide them into asking God how he will speak to them at Riverview.  Show them that walking by faith often means that we go where we are led, even in our uncertainty about what might be there.  And, of course, let us know if you have any questions about the camp.  You can always check out the camp at www.riverviewbiblecamp.com.  I would try to use the Safari web browser since something is wrong if you use Internet Explorer or Firefox.

Again, if you have any questions, just email Pastor Mark at mark.began@rollinghills.org or give me a call at the church at 503-638-5900.

Take care,

Pastor Mark

I just walked in the door from FUSION and my normal routine on any given sunday night is come home, plop down on the couch, converse with my wife Kate about the day while we watch The Amazing Race together. Usually it’s a time where I decompress from my long day and unwind and start to prepare for my upcoming week.  But tonight my mind is elsewhere and Kate is watching some movie I could care less about on TV so I decided I would pull out my laptop and blog about some of the things I’m currently processing.

Tonight was a great night.  It was our Parent night at FUSION which was incredible.  We had one of our largest turn outs yet and it was great to meet with parents one on one and hear about their students and how we can team up with them as we walk alongside of their sons and daughters this year in our small groups. There were many stories and many laughs as we shared stories and insights into the lives of their students.

I believe a reason that made tonight so enjoyable is because of the awesome staff we have.  Granted, being on that staff I am biased, but I truly love what I do and who I work alongside of.  Mark and Jen are not just great co-workers but they are also people who I love dearly and challenge me to be more like Christ on a daily basis.

As I got into my car tonight after FUSION, my phone buzzed signaling a new email message.  I took it out and noticed it was an email from a good friend, a fantastic volunteer, and a lover of Jesus who is battling cancer and has had a hard week with discouraging news being revealed about her diagnosis.  However her love for Jesus and the hope she has in HIM overshadows the fears of the unknown.   I was struck by this statement in her email:

“I have been thinking these last few days about Heb. 12:1-4, especially the part of the verse that says, “the race marked out of us.”  Each of us has a race that looks different; some long, some short, some with more obstacles, some smoother…  Our race is individual, no race is identical.  But each is a test to see what we are made of and how we will glorify or deny God along the way.”

wow…

I sat in my car and read that over and over and over again reflecting on what I just read.  Only hours earlier I was talking to parents about how we want to see their kids run the race and make it their own.  To take their faith and fuse it with their day to day life.  I had been so focused on the students taking ownership of their faith and running that race with fervor, that I momentarily forgot that this is something just as important for me to do as well.

In a few weeks I will be teaching in the Jr. High about what it means to “Worship Fully”.

Do you worship fully?

Are running the race wholeheartedly?

Am I?

Am I running that race that Christ has set out before me in such a way that I can say that I am giving it my all?  I can’t expect the students to do this if I am not doing it myself…let alone teach on it.  As I prepare for this lesson, I thank God for these moments where He captivates my heart when I would least expect him to. Such a range of emotions today, but thankful for God letting me experience each and everyone of them.

I’m thinking about showing this video when I teach in November.  Thought it was a fitting way to end this post.

Running the Race Fully,

Pastor Tyler

I guess I have been in a place of uncertainty for a while.  I guess that this is also why I have not blogged in so long.  What do I say?  What do I share?  But, I have to be honest: life is uncertain right now.  I love to be in control, I love to have a good plan and see it happen.  Just to make things clear I am not good with the “I do not knows” and the “Let’s just wing it” approach.  My family has a name for it “control freak.”  I come from a long line of them.  It is almost hereditary:)

But, I can’t be shy about it anymore; I am not in control these days.   I do not have life figured out, and I do not know what the future holds.  I am sure many people can resonate with me.  This economy has turned things upside down, and where we envisioned our life going is not always what happens.

So in the midst of the uncertainty, where do I go?  How do I forge ahead?

Last week I meet with two of the girls I am discipling.  (Love it!)   We are reading through the gospels this fall, and last week we finished up in Matthew.  After discussing what they learned, we focused on:

Matthew 22:37 – 38“Jesus replied: ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.  This is the first and greatest commandment.”

Now, this passage has not left me since then. I am really wrestling with it.  I have read it so many times, but this time around it is different.  I am really trying to figure out what does it mean to love God with all my heart, with all my soul and with all my mind in the midst of uncertainty?

How do I love God so much that my motives (heart) for my future align with His?

How do I love God so much that my inmost being (soul) craves Him more then control?

And how do I love God so much that everything on my mind is laid at His throne so I keep focused on Him (Mind)?

This passage is causing me each day…

To keep asking Him to change my motives to be what He desires:  Heart.

To keep asking Him to transform my inmost being into His likeness:  Soul.

To keep asking Him to fix my thoughts on things that please Him:  Mind.

So what I am certain amid uncertainty is that I have a God that loves me and will never leave.  And the greatest commandment cannot be head knowledge it must be my calling.

Jen

We are smack dab in the middle of a series on Sunday mornings called “Life Hurts, But God Heals”.  We all know that pain is part of life.  But what is pain?  Is it the homework that has to be done every night?  Maybe it’s the disagreement that you had with your best friend.  Or, maybe it’s the sudden death of a close relative that hits you when you least expected it too.

I have heard about painful experiences from friends who have lost jobs and have debilitating diseases and family fights and more.  I don’t want to hear about anymore pain.  I want to block it out of my mind.  Yea, denial is the ticket.  Deny that any pain is real and it just goes away, free from any impact on my life.  Unfortunately, that doesn’t deal with the pain, it just pushes back the time when I will have to face it.

So much of the pain in my life is from my selfishness and my being prone to sin.  I can’t blame it on the economy or not getting the latest immunization.  So dealing with it is also quite unique.  To deal with my junk, I need to learn how to confess and give it up to God.  In the last few weeks I have participated with groups that were doing a moral inventory of life choices that were sinful or selfish or morally wrong.  Doing this once was difficult.  Twice was uncomfortable.  But three times was really challenging.  I don’t like dredging this stuff up, over and over.  I mean, it’s been dealt with.  God forgave me.  I confessed them.  I agree that they are wrong and not for me to hold onto.

So why do I drift back into them?  Why am I prone to certain sins?  I believe that these kinds of sins can become spiritual strongholds.  I don’t want them to be there, but for me, I am always at risk when these sins present themselves.  However, I am aware that a few things help me to avoid those sins.  One is when I am discipling someone.  I just want to live righteously so they know I’m coming clean with them.  Another is when I share openly with a close friend how I’m doing in my walk with Christ.  Another is when I’m involved in serving the Lord or being involved in an important ministry event.  I don’t want to have anything in my life that might hinder God from using me.

What helps you to avoid sin and live for Christ?  What do you find helps you to be on track with godly living?  I would love to know what anyone is thinking so reply back and let me know.

I didn’t think I would like this series, but God is showing me that being transparent and vulnerable is good for me and good for all of us.  Keep loving Jesus on the journey!

Pastor Mark

So, I’ve moved down in the world –

The past five years I have been active with the high school ministry at church which I loved. High schoolers are so real and so raw and so down to earth and I have enjoyed hanging with my two older children’s youth groups and leading a discipleship group and helping organize mission trip fundraisers and mission trips.

I have been involved with youth ministry off and on for 25 y ears. Since I became a believer in high school, I had told God that I would be willing to reach out to youth to help them in that journey and I have had that opportunity these years. Helping college age through Campus Crusade for Christ, helping high school and junior high youth through my youth ministry leadership position just out of college, to other volunteer positions these past years.

One of the things that my husband and I have liked to do is be involved with our children where they are at. And having a large family means divide and conquer, so these past years I have committed to high school ministry and my husband had done the Awanas for our younger children.

Now that our older kids are finished with high school and moving on (I still cannot believe it), I am moving down to the junior high group, http://www.678live.com/ As is my husband. He is still helping with Awana and boy scouts and I have my other areas of ministry, but related to youth group, I sure enjoyed our first week of junior high group. It was an introduction night and since we are on the welcome team, there was not a lot to do for me, so I got out my camera and shot photographs and that now will be one of my roles. Capturing the kids in action with their leaders at Fusion.

My 6^th grade twins are so excited to be a part of the youth group at Rolling Hills. They were in a discipleship group last summer and they went to outdoor movie night and bible study and got to know the staff and the kids and they want to grow.

I am loving moving to the junior high school youth group to help there. I love this age. The students are so excited about life and so innocent and so willing to learn and so eager to learn and so willing to try new things and they mostly just try to be a part of something and grow without all the tangles that high school sometimes has. They are willing to have fun and be crazy and just be. They are so eager to take God at His word and I hope and pray they stay that way and I believe God that He can and will protect their hearts and I see the heart of the youth ministry staff and their desire to come alongside families to partner with them, to raise this generation of youth. There has been so much more of an emphasis on discipleship this year at our church and it stems from Pastor Dale Ebel and it is expanding into all of the areas of our church including the youth, which I feel is so vital. Parents need to be discipling their children and it is neat to see the youth group emphasizing this.

The honesty and sweetness of junior high schoolers is exemplifed in an example of one of my twins coming home to tell me what happened at school. He was listening to his teacher talk about evolution and how we were evolved and he said to the girl sitting next to him, I don’t believe that this happened this way. It is only a theory. I believe that God created people and the earth and he asked the girl what she believed and she said she agreed with him.

I love this age. Sweet junior high age.

Cornelia Seigneur (Parent of 6th Grade Students)

www.corneliaseigneur.com

This post is from the Rethinking Youth Ministry blog.  Written by Brian Kirk, I found his insights to be interesting and challenging for us today.

Mark

My old ritual, as youth group would wrap-up on Sunday evenings and the young’ns were heading home, was to say to them “Be Safe.” Isn’t that a strange way to say goodbye? Of course, all I meant was “Have a good week and come back in one piece” but is that really the best advice we have to give to our youth? They live in a world of school violence, AIDS, drugs, computer predators, terrorism. Is being safe all it’s cracked up to be? What about when it comes to our faith? Is teaching our youth to “play it safe” our best option? Probably not, but are we willing to lead youth ministries that encourage real risk?

One of my favorite passages in C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, Witch and the Wardrobe finds the young protagonists chatting with Mr. and Mrs. Beaver. The Beavers are trying to describe Aslan, the Lion (a metaphorical stand-in for Christ in the story). Lucy, taken aback by the notion of meeting a lion, asks, “But is he safe?” Mr. Beaver replies. “Safe? Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t. But he’s good.”

Do our youth ministries too often offer a Jesus who is “safe?” A Jesus who asks little of us beyond giving intellectual assent to a list of religious beliefs? A Jesus who says, “Just agree that I’m your Lord and Savior and then I’ll leave you alone to your video game nights and your road trips and your skateboard parks?” We know that for the early church, following Jesus was not just about committing to a list of do’s and don’ts or pledging allegiance to religious dogma. For them following Jesus meant walking through life the way he walked, living and loving as he lived and loved. Theologian Paul Tillich describes this as making the spirit of Christ a reality by “participating in his very being.” In other words, following Christ is not primarily about abstract belief but about a way of being in the world.

And if we dared to do this in our youth ministry, we’d better be prepared for trouble. Because following Jesus with our youth — really following Jesus — will be anything but safe. Because here is what it would look like:

• Radically re-visioning the world in which we live — even though it’s a world in which we are pretty comfortable (Do our youth rooms really need a mini-fridge and an Xbox or should our priorities be elsewhere?).
• Letting go of all our old distinctions of rich/poor, male/female, gay/straight, young/old, powerful/powerless, respected/shamed, cool/uncool, popular/unpopular (Who is not in your youth group because they don’t think they’d be welcome in the church? What are you doing to extend to them the hand of Christian hospitality?)
• Opposing violence and working for peace (Is it time for a protest march?)
• Deciding that sharing our faith means more than convincing other people of our religious point of view or showing publicly that we are more pious than the next person. It’s about how we live and love in this world. (“Preach the Gospel always and, if necessary, use words.”)
• Speaking out against intolerance and injustice and calling on the Church to do the same. (How do your youth see the intersection of their faith and their attitudes about healthcare, poverty, AIDS, abortion, the death penalty, racism, etc.?)
• Leaving the comfort of our youth rooms to go out and literally feed the poor, clothe the naked, care for the lonely, heal the sick. (Can we do this every Sunday and not just on the yearly mission trip?)

Of course, none of this stuff is safe. Some of it may even be dangerous. Some of your teens will jump at the chance to be world-changers. Some will leave and find a youth group that is more entertaining and less challenging. And know that when you start messing with the present order of things, those who benefit from that order will always see what you are doing as a threat. Perhaps this is why churches work so hard to keep youth pacified with video games and big screen TVs and trips to Six Flags and their own rooms far, far away from everyone else. We figure if we keep them distracted enough, they might not notice that this Jesus guy really is a radical, dangerous troublemaker calling us to overturn the tables of the world and work for something completely different.

So, how do you know if your group is following the radical Jesus or just playing it safe? Ask yourself: Is our ministry meeting any resistance from those, youth and adults alike, who are happy with the cultural status quo? Have we confused the gospel with our culture’s recipe for respectability, comfortableness, safety? Does the Jesus we follow demand anything of our youth other than being members in the “nice people” club? Is the Jesus we share with our youth more like a kitty cat or Aslan the Lion?

I know many of you out there are leading “dangerous” youth ministries. We’d like to hear from you and know what you’re doing. You may just inspire the rest of us to stop playing it safe.

–Brian

Over time I’ve developed a habit.  This habit isn’t a bad thing like smoking or watching too much TV.  My habit is to read from the Bible each day.  In fact, some would call this habit a spiritual discipline.  But this isn’t about my having discipline or not, but rather if having a discipline like reading the Bible is a legalism, or a humanistic spiritual effort.  As I work with the students I’m finding that it is the rare guy or girl who actually reads the Bible outside of regular church programs.  No wonder we have to make such a big deal about helping everyone find where we read in the Bible at church.  Most people don’t read and thus the Bible is a foreign book to them.  And that is an absolute shame.

When I read the Bible in the mornings, I try hard to hear from God, but often it is just plain, hard work to even find one nugget of truth from the Lord.  I’m sure others feel this way too.  To find insights and convicting challenges and just plain hearing from the Lord takes time to immerse in the Word and allow the message to penetrate our lives.  In this sense, our reading the Word is God’s way of talking to us.  Just like I often will have conversations with my wife while watching TV, I can miss whole thoughts and non-verbal messages she gives me because I’m not focused on the conversation.  I think the Lord sees us the same way.

We can read a passage but we forget God will often bring those truths to mind in the future when we are in a conversation or thinking through a big life challenge.  This is the healthy conversation that God gives us when we need that truth the most.  By daily getting into the Word, the storehouse of conversations grows and the true payoff is in the days and months to come.  By staying faithful to daily immersing in God’s truth, I find that the Holy Spirit brings ideas to mind when I least expect them and often these ideas are based on what I recently read.

So what is the bottom line?  Do we legalistically read or do we change our mindset and see anytime that we read, we are actually conversing with God?  As a Dad and a model to hundreds of students, my hope is that my daily conversations with God will transform me.  Who knows, maybe that’s why God wanted us to seek Him with all our heart.  Because it’s in the seeking that we find more than we ever bargained for.

Pastor Mark

Coming up on Sunday morning the 20th of September at 9am in the Courtyard Room will be a parent meeting.  These meetings are very important for understanding the way the Junior High ministry works, getting up-to-date on what is new or different this year and finding the ways that you can pray for us this year and engage in the spiritual development of your kids.  Please spread the word as we know word of mouth is the best way to let all our parents know about this one-time meeting.

Thanks,

Pastor Mark

Yesterday I felt it.  The onslaught of the fall and all the new beginnings again.  I took care to slow down in school zones.  I noticed the roads were more crowded in the morning.  I attended a parent meeting for the water polo team.  Yes, fall is here and it is just the beginning.

As I looked back to last year, I was encouraged by the ground we took as a ministry to help connect parents and the importance of discipling their students.  Remember that the only way to impart faith to your kids is to personally take responsibility for it.  We will always be a resource, but you are the ones who see them each day.  You have the vast majority of opportunities to take ground in this area, far more than our efforts amount to at Fusion and Elevation.

My hope this year is that we will be able to personally disciple each student during the course of the school year.  This discipleship will include building a relationship with a student, helping get them grounded in the Bible and spiritual disciplines, using flexible methods to help them grow and with the desire that each student will be able to disciple another student after they are done.  In fact, this vision to disciple comes out of our camp this year as numerous students were called by the Holy Spirit to invest their life into another life.

Get ready for a great ride this year.  I can feel the excitement.  I can feel the anticipation.  Can you feel it too?

Pastor Mark

Isn’t it interesting how easy it is to encourage someone else to have eyes of faith when they are going through a difficult circumstance, but when it happens to you things totally change.  Of all my senses, I like sight.  Maybe it’s because I love to see where I’m going so I can anticipate the challenges ahead.  Maybe it’s because I hate surprises and wish that I had everything figured out already.  In any case, the last thing I like to do is rely on my faith.

Now, this may not sound very godly.  I’m a Pastor for goodness sake, I should be used to walking in faith.  Truth be known, I struggle with my faith.  Not the confidence that I have a relationship with almighty God, just the confidence to trust my God with my life.  Hebrews 11 says that faith is the confidant assurance of things hoped for and the evidence of things we cannot see.  Not see?  Wait a minute, God, I want to see.  I want the faith that includes sight.  I want the easier instant faith that doesn’t have to get pressed or endure hard times.  I want easy faith, with a nice added bonus of prosperity.  Yes, that’s the faith for me!

Honestly, I have that kind of faith.  That’s why it’s so hard to NOT trust in sight.  I train myself to walk by sight so when the hard times come, there I go eyes wide open, stumbling into the darkness, trying to find my way.  It just won’t happen.  Walking by faith takes practice.  It’s the little things we do by faith that prepare us for the big ones.  So when I do faith by sight all the time, I forget how to truly be a person of faith.

Little or big, Holy Spirit, help me walk by YOUR sight and live the gift of life by YOUR gift of faith.  May I never forget and fall back into that same failed lifestyle.

You are awesome, Holy Spirit!

Love, Mark