LARSROOD.COM

What the heck

It has been a dry couple of weeks for me as I have not posted very much. Part of it has been my life getting a bit busy but also me just feeling a bit dry.

I'm in Princeton, NJ for the week at a Youth Ministry symposium. It's been really good so far. Yesterday I had the opportunity to hear Darrell Guder speak and it was as good as I'd hoped it would be.

Today I was in a number of seminars but the one that really stands out for me was led by Tony Jones . Tony made my head hurt today with his thoughts about mainline denominational churches and the downward direction they are going.

Part of his talk hit the of bureaucratic part of most mainline denominational churches pretty hard. Tony comes from a mainline background so he's able to get away with poking at the church. What made my head hurt was that I agreed with him at almost every point. I see the problems with the church, I recognize the nightmare that we've created with our huge buildings, programs and staff. I know that in no uncertain terms our churches sometimes exist only to support the programs, pastors and buildings that we've put together.

The reality though is that I'm in a mainline denominational church and I want to work to help change the direction we are going and to make a difference. I don't see the passion, vision and hope of the emergent church movement as being something that we can't grab ahold of and use to transform our church.

But, my head still hurts. I want to dialogue more about this.

By the way Princeton is beautiful and I recommend going to Seminary here. I was eating icecream today and even in that endeavor I felt smarter just being here.

Rain, coffee and darkness

This has been one of those weeks where I struggle to look back and see any accomplishment. It was good on a relational level in that I went on a great overnight pastors retreat and had a number of really good conversations with friends but on a "put a check next to things you accomplished" level, not so good.

It's 6:25am and I'm sitting in the dark. When I got up about an hour ago it was raining. I'm awake alone in our house sitting in my big leather chair. The coffee is from Pete's and I've got a little Hazelnut in it. I just read through my notes on Peace which is the Jesus Priority I'm teaching on this week. There is something about being awake early when it is still dark that I really like. My mind feels most awake at this time of day. Distractions haven't overtaken me yet.

Yesterday one of my best friends called me. Jeff and I started our Doctoral program together about two and a half years ago. Our first trip to class (in Portland) will always be one of my favorite memories. Jeff is both a great friend, an old friend, someone who understands my quirks and a catalyst for making me think in ways that really challenge me. Yesterday was graduation. Jeff was on the fast track with his D.Min and was one of only 4 students out of 18 who finished on time. I decided back in December to take an extra semester to get my project put together. I was really excited and proud of Jeff for finishing yesterday. I don't feel bad that I wasn't done because it was a good decision for my life and family but I do wish that we could have walked together. I'm looking forward to finishing soon. My goal is to have everything turned in by early June.

The sun is starting to come up. It's not raining anymore. The birds are still chirping.

Pastors retreat

I thought I should post something about the pastors retreat that I went on this week. It was a great time interacting with the other guys on staff that I don't know super well. We stayed at a hotel about 1/2 hour away. The whole agenda for the retreat involved us sitting in a room and sharing about our lives. We started with where our grandparents were born all the way to what we are excited about Highland Park Presbyterian Church. I enjoyed getting to know the other pastors at a different level. That night instead of going out to a big dinner we went to a AA baseball game. The weather was amazing and the ball park was a perfect size. Fun to do something with all of them outside of the walls of the church.

It was stated a few times by different pastors that this was the healthiest they thought our staff had been in a long time. I feel so lucky and blessed to have come to HPPC during this time of great health. I'm looking forward to the future.

I know I know

I haven't posted anything in a couple of days. The weekends are a bit crazy for me and today I went non-stop until about 7pm. I'm heading out of town tomorrow for an overnight pastors retreat but should be able to put together something worth reading during it. I'm heading to Princeton next week and will have ample time to do some writing. Hang with me everyone I'll get back to it.

Continuing to look elsewhere

In my continuing quest to find things on the web that move me towards a greater depth in my face I found a great site today. I have put it under the category of Music/Art so it's probably not for a lot of you who read this . I found this site because I was researching tattoo designs on google and specifically Christian imagery. I've met Church before and he's pretty solid and down to earth.

Check out his site Here.

New Media tutorial

Ok so I'm posting a link here to one of the best posts I've read in a while. Matt was the Executive Director of Bel Air (recently left) and is an avid blogger/twitter guy. He has been writing a lot lately about New Media and it's implications. Instead of just trying to say what he said I'm going to post a link. Go there and see what the world is coming to.
Matt Singley

It's still me

Sometimes it seems to me that part of the goal of this blog is to convince people who read it how smart I really am. The problem with that is that eventually we all come to the realization that no one is as smart as they'd like people to believe. Some are just better at faking it.

So here's a bit more about me. 18 years ago my friend Roger asked me if I wanted to go to a free concert in Seattle for this band called Pearl Jam at the time I said no because there was something going on at my college that night and I didn't want to venture to far outside of the bubble.

I lived in Seattle during the height of the grunge rock movement. But, I attended a Christian college that really isolated me from much of what was happening. This is probably one of the things in my life that I regret the most.

Three years ago Pearl Jam played a concert in San Diego. I bought a ridiculously expensive ticket off of Ebay and went to the show. Right after that concert I bought a membership to the Pearl Jam Fan Club (called the 10 Club) so that I would be guaranteed exclusive tickets when they came back into town.

I bought that membership on the day before my birthday in 2006. Since it's a yearly membership I just realized tonight I needed to renew it because my birthday is in a couple of days. So I am a loyal fan again and am part of the fan club. If they every come to Dallas I'm in.

Listening to Yellow Ledbetter while I type this.

A great post about Millenials

I'm reposting a great article written by my friend Rhett who is the College Director at Bel Air Presbyterian Church. You can check out his site here..

Here are some observations on the Milennial Generation from the Hugh Hewitt interview with Morley Winograd and Michael D. Hais….authors of Millenial Makeover: MySpace, You Tube, and the Future of American Politics.

Whether you care about politics or not, this generation is already influencing and will be transforming everthing they interact with.

And whether you agree with them or not, they bring some much needed ideas. I’m especially interested in how they are influencing the Church, which is not talked about here. But that’s for other posts. Just know that what is discussed here is obviously influencing the Church.

Now here are some very brief observations on some of the summaries that authors make in the interview. I didn’t really organize it…but peruse the observations made by the authors. Very interesting.

-Millenials are people born between 1982 in 2003 (at least as defined in the US).

-Largest generation in American history. 1 million more than the previous largest generation…the Baby Boomers.

-Twice as many Milennials as Gen X’ers

-Most ethnically diverse generation in American History…40% are either African American, Asian or Mixed Race; 20% have at least one immigrant parent.

-Generation “least bound” by gender and role restriction.

-Half of Millenials that are in college are female; first time in history.

-Highly socially tolerant generation.

-“Civic Generation”…lineal descendants of the last Civic Generation the GI/Greatest Generation (i.e. Depression, WWII, etc.)

-See a need for a greater economic equality in the country…respond to economic injustice. Will be interested in re-distribution policies to make economic inequality to go away. (more…)

If you want to read more information about this generation from Rhett's blog click here.

Secret Sunday

In the last two weeks the readership of this blog has jumped up quite a bit. I attribute that to really just two things. First, we launched a new Youth Ministry website and it links to my blog so a bunch more people have heard about it. Second, I've written a couple of things that for some reason Google has taken a liking to and when you search for them my blog is one of the top hits.

Of course with a greater readership comes a greater responsibility on my part to update this blog and to write things that people may actually be interested in reading.

Today I decided that it might be a good idea to reveal a little bit more about who I am so you know what you are reading. If my mom reads this she will probably laugh as she's known this for a long time.

When I was in 4th grade we moved to an Island in Washington state. That move was pretty difficult on me as it happened mid year and 4th graders are merciless when you have a funny name. Those first years on the island I retreated a lot to a special world that came two me every two weeks. If you didn't grow up in a rural area you won't understand this as much but go with it and you might learn something. Every two weeks the Bookmobile came to the community I lived in. If I remember correctly I could check out about 10 books each time. I remember combing the walls of that magical book paradise for things I hadn't read. After getting my stack of books I would invariable hole up at home in my room and read as long as my parents would let me. I even kept a flashlight in my room to read under the covers. A few years later when I had access to a boat I used to take it out and read all afternoon.

When we moved to a different house on the island my mom began to refer to my room as "The Cave" because I would go into it and hibernate pretty much all afternoon and read.

So here's the secret. For the last 20 years since I graduated from high school I haven't stopped reading. Granted there have been times I haven't been able to read what I wanted (College, Graduate School, Post-Grad School) but I still am a voracious reader. In all of this time I have had a hidden desire that I would write a book.

Probably the best way to describe why I haven't written a book yet is to explain the reason why I don't have a tattoo.

I don't have a tattoo because I can't decide what tattoo to get. I know that I want one but actually making the decision of what I want is difficult. Plus I don't really know where to get it. The writing deal is the same. I can't narrow down what I want to write. It's difficult especially because I have a pretty broad interest in what I read so I have difficulty narrowing it down to what genre would be most appealing.

So there it is. Secret Sunday revealed. I want to write but haven't. I'm going to go hide in my cave now and read a book. On a side note it is sort of hard to have a cave when you have to share it with your wife. She would prefer I didn't hibernate.

RelevantPew

Most people in my life know I've been working on a dissertation project for a while now that I'm pretty passionate about. This project came out of my love for youth ministry and how every year it is difficult to graduate a new group of students and wonder how they were going to do in the world. The more frustrated I got about the state of many mainline denominational churches the more passionate I got about wanting to help solve the problem. Hence "RelevantPew". Basically this web resource will be a place for churches who are trying to reach the 20-something generation. It's a site where they can log on and find out information about the 20-something culture, their beliefs, what makes them tick, what they are passionate about, what churches are reaching them, what resources might be helpful.

I've been in design and content phase for a while and the site should be ready to put content on sometime in May. What I would love to have is some of you who read this posts some comments about what you would like to see on the site. What would be helpful for churches to know and what you think would benefit them as they try to reach out to this generation.

The idea behind the name "RelevantPew" is relatively simple. After the Reformation many churches were hurting financially and started a practices of selling pews to families. It got to such a level in some churches that there was no place to sit unless you "owned" a pew. Across the United States there are 1,000's of churches that now have the opposite problem. They are full of pews but have no one to sit in them. The goal of the site is how can an established church work to reach a generation who has been lost. I'm not advocating churches radically changing everything they do. Just that they would realize some change needs to happen in order to be relevant to this generation.