Willow Creek Shift Conference

I am quite thrilled to be back at Willow Creek Community Church for their Shift Conference that started yesterday. I will blog later about my history with Willow, but it was at the very first youth ministry conference they had here which I went to and God used it tremendously in my life and Bo Boshers in my life and ministry which has carried through to this day in major ways, which I will explain later.

I am the main session speaker tomorrow and today I am leading/teaching a 3.5 hour Point Leaders session today called "Theology and Youth Ministry".I will be walking through how as youth leaders we need to be aware of how we do teach theology in so many ways whether intentionally or unintentionally - from how we use words such as "worship" and "church" to how we even set up a room when we meet. I will be stressing why I feel it is so important it is for youth leaders to be thinking theologically about everything we do, and looking at history of theological patterns of the past. I will bring up some of the key theological issues that I believe we need to be preparing youth for today that they will be forced to be thinking through after they graduate such as: how they define the gospel,  the trustworthiness of Scripture, how they define "church", homosexuality and sexuality in general, the role of men and women in the church, religious pluralism etc. I think the issue of social justice has been prominent here so far, so I won't spend time on that for this. But that is obviously important too and I will talk about the need for both orthodoxy and orthopraxy.

A lot of this will stem from how I was a youth pastor for many years then shifted to college and young adult leader for many years - all in the same church and town so I got to see what were some patterns of issues that I wished we addressed and cultural questions that arose post-high school. So that will be later today.

Yesterday I got to meet up with Brian McLaren and we chatted about things emerging and emergent and how things are going and about some questions about criticisms and all types of things. I get to hang out today with Scot McKnight today too which I look forward to. I have been talking to Scot often and he is becoming a sort of guru-theologian to me. One of the ultra-joys of being at conferences is getting to hang out with other people and learn and chat and build friendships.

I do miss Becky, Katie and Claire - and I always bring a photo of them and put it next to my bed on the nightstand like here in the hotel I am in now. I look forward to when Katie and Claire get old enough to travel with me when I go on trips like this. And I do miss our church and Josh and the staff, although I guess not in the same way to where I put Josh's photo by my bed too.