We kicked off this topic last Sunday night with a great conversation with youth and parents together. I laid out the plan and described my approach to this topic and last night we started in with some specifics. Thanks to all of the youth who came and participated in the conversation. Thanks to the parents who read my notes and followed up with your kids. I think that this is really something that God can use to bring LIFE to our children.
We started off our conversation talking about the concept of “purity” and what we mean by this particular word/term. We mentioned the ideas of something that’s PURE being “blameless, innocent, clean, abstinent, untouched, filtered or raw.” (Hover over PURE for Webster’s Definition.)
Once again as we talk about being “sexually pure,” I’m not interested in offering us a long list of “do’s” and “don’ts” but rather pointing us toward God and “God’s best for our lives.” Continue to reflect with me on the words of Jesus from John 10:10 “the thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy, but I have come that [you] may have life and life to the full.” This is my heart for each of you. This is why we’re talking about this topic.
You can click here for an outline of the lesson from last night if you’re interested, but I thought we could focus on the following 10 statements.
Last night we allowed youth to respond to the following statements by physically moving to one side of the room or another to indicate the extent to which they AGREED or DISAGREED with each statement. I was surprised (perhaps naively) by how little consensus there was regarding positions on any of these statements.
There is no problem with having sex with someone you plan to marry.
Kissing can lead to further sexual activity.
The movies, magazines, web sites, and books you consume can directly affect your sexual purity.
Remaining abstinent helps you have a clear conscience before God.
You can do anything in a dating relationship except sexual intercourse and still be sexually pure.
Remaining sexually pure is God’s plan for your life.
Everyone is having sex.
It is impossible for teenagers to remain pure in the 21st century.
If you never have sex but you look at pornography, you have remained sexually pure.
If you have already had sex, you can never be sexually pure; you might as well give up.
What do you think? What are the important issues for you? Can we have a conversation where we respect and value each other as people created in the image of God?
Thanks for reading, our community is honored and encouraged by your input.
We would like to take this opportunity to reflect and share about our experiences from the “BreakAway” Spring Break Mission Outreach. For those who attended worship on “Youth” Sunday (4/11/10) you heard about how much God did in the hearts and lives of some of our youth. If you weren’t able to be there, you can read the testimonies here. There were powerful testimonies shared by several young ladies: Brenna Woods, Emma Wheeler, Sara Martin and Jennifer Little. We’ll try to give you a quick synopsis of our week and then let the youth share some of their thoughts and feelings (hint! hint! please leave comments)
BreakAway is a Spring Break Mission opportunity for local churches who want to involve their youth and congregations in mission and ministry here in the central valley. Last year was the first year of this program that seems to be having a lasting impact on churches and their youth in building bridges and connecting the body of Christ to the needs and concerns of our neighbors. Our youth group has participated in both years of BreakAway. We stayed at Peoples Church in large tents and made our home in our little “camping” community. We enjoyed morning and evening chapel with worship and a great speaker, John Alvarado, who encouraged and energized our youth with a message that caused all of us to think about how we are allowing God to use our lives to do God’s work.
For the outreach/service component of our week our group hosted a Vacation Bible School program just a few hundred yards south of Hope Lutheran at the Whispering Woods Appartments. While we started the week with 15 enthusiastic children, the number quickly grew to more than 50 by the final day of our program. Our afternoons were spent bouncing balls, blowing bubbles, braiding bracelets and being a physical example of God’s love to our neighbor.
It seems like God was present with us during this week and it is equally clear that there is much work still to be done and much love still to be shown. What do you think? Did you BreakAway? Did God do something in your life? Teach you something? Have you heard these stories and been encouraged to join in what God is doing? The mission of our congregation is to extend hope in Jesus; will you let God use your hands to do it?
We’re blessed to see all that God is doing in your lives. Thanks for sharing so much with us,
Adam & Alison
Oh yeah, almost forgot - they say “a picture is worth a thousand words,” so check out this fun video from our week!
This past Sunday night, we continued our conversation and our series on our identity and we heard from the great pator Henri Nouwen that we are all dearly loved sons and daughters of God. It’s hard to say it much better than Nouwen does, so if you missed last Sunday or if you need a reminder, check out this video:
You shouldn’t allow yourself to be defined by what you do.
You shouldn’t allow yourself to be defined by what other people say about you.
You shouldn’t allow yourself to be defined by what you have.
This is such a different approach than what our culture would have us believe. It’s refreshing. It’s inspiring. It’s life changing. What are the things in your life (good or bad) that you have tried to use to establish your identity? Things you’ve tried to point to in order to establish your worth or value?
As we sat and reflected on who we are and what sources we use to establish our identity and our value, we were surrounded by voices. We heard the voice of God speak to us through scripture passages:
For those of us who went to the Acquire the Fire event this past weekend, we heard some powerful words from the speaker and some of us had a powerful encounter with God. For those people and for the rest of us too, I think it’s important that we take this opportunity to dig deep into our faith.
As the Pastor for Youth and Family Ministry here at Hope, it’s my passion to share with all of the youth and families that God brings into my life. I want to share with you this fact: “I know that there’s a God who loves me more than I can understand and this God wants to have a relationship with me and with each of you. I am convinced that the times in my life when I have put forth effort to embrace this relationship with God, are the times when I have been the happiest, most satisfied and felt like I have purpose. I want this for each of you too.” That’s just my heart; that’s just who I am and that’s what I’m working on each and every day.
Along these lines, our high school youth group “the Life,” is going to be talking about some of these big questions during our Sunday night gathering. We kicked it off this past Sunday (3/7) and we’re going to follow up on that the next two weeks (3/14 & 3/21).
This past week, our lesson included some of the following:
Who are you? How do you described yourself? What’s your identity?
So, what do you think? Who are you? What kinds of questions are you left with? Feel free to leave comments here and hopefully I’ll be able to respond an interact with your input, both here and through the messages as I prepare them for the coming weeks.
At Acquire the Fire, we saw the musical artist Lecrae perform. Check out what his song “Identity” has to say on this topic. What do you think?
Big thanks to all of our friends at Peoples Church for all their work hosting the event and helping to bring great opportunities like this to Fresno.
As you can see from the pictures below, we had a good group of kids (7th-12th grade) who participated in this weekend.
We enjoyed a great speaker (Joel Johnson), some musical artists like Lecrae and ThousandFootCrutch and the powerful drama “Surrounded” presented by ATF (check out the intro for the drama here).
It was a powerful weekend for many who went. Did you go? What did you think? What part of the weekend really stuck out to you? Did you make commitments about your faith or how you plan to live your life?
Feel free to leave a comment here so that we can see all that God is doing and encourage each other in our faith and lives.
It is with sorrow that we announce that Arty Contreras has ended his employment with Hope Lutheran and his involvement as worship leader for our youth ministry program. Arty has been a great part of our group and we have been blessed by his gifts of music and his passion for sharing his faith. We wish Arty well as he moves on into a new season of his life and the next steps in his music and ministry.
Of course this transition is difficult for us and difficult for Arty too. To respect Arty’s desire to move on, and to make this change as easy as possible for him and for our youth ministry, we ask that you refrain from contacting him. Arty will be at Hope this Wednesday night (3/3) to say “goodbye” and to share his thoughts on his time at Hope.
If you’d like to send remarks or best wishes to Arty, please feel free to write him a letter and Adam can make sure he gets it, or you could post a comment here. These are the best ways for us to share our thoughts with Arty. It will be tough to move on without Arty, as he brought so much to our group, but God is good and I am confident God will continue to be good to all of us. Blessings to you all.
So, what kind of plans do you have for Spring Break?
Planning to sit at home, try not to get annoyed by your brother or sister? Try not to get bored playing 8 hours of video games or watching too many movies or two much daytime television? Planning to sleep for three days straight?
Why not plan to do something significant? Why not plan to spend time with cool people, serving others and have an amazing time doing it! I’m talking about BreakAway, a spring break mission outreach that will change your life, help you grow in your faith and deepen your relationships with other kids who have the same heart and similar values.
Where are we going? We’re going to stay right here in Fresno. We’re going to sleep in tents on the campus of Peoples Church. We’ll have all of our meals prepared for us. We’ll have some great teaching and great worship. We’ll work together through acts of service within our own community. Our week will end up on Thursday night with an awesome concert with the Rock and Worship Roadshow. The concert will include MercyMe, David Crowder*Band, Family Force 5, Francesca Battistelli, Fee, Remedy Drive and Sidewalk Prophets.
Does this sound good? Click the graphic above and fill out the registration form and submit it to Adam. The cost to be a part of this experience is $150 (if you register by March 15), but as always we have scholarships available. Don’t miss out.
So, are you going to join us? Leave us a COMMENT and let us know that you’ll be there. Tell your friends and encourage them to be a part of what God is doing in our city!
We had an awesome time with our “Olympic Lock-In” this past Friday Night We expect to have some great pics up soon, but for the time being, check out our video commemorating the torch relay and the arrival of the Olympic flame at Hope Lutheran Church. Enjoy!
Well, it was quite an experience. Wasn’t it? We are UNITED and we went to CAMP and there was no doubt that it was WINTER.
For those of you who weren’t a part of this trip, here’s a brief or should I say “15 minute” (that’s an inside joke) recap of our weekend. We wanted to join together with Christians from all over the Fresno/Clovis area for a weekend to come together as the body of Christ. We had gathered around the words of Jesus, recorded in John 17 (remember this number, it was significant). Jesus prayed that we as Christians would “be brought to complete unity” (John 17:23). We just didn’t realize how long it would take. We gathered at Peoples Church on Friday afternoon. There were youth, leaders and Pastors from 17 (again 17) or so local churches (Bethany Innercity, The Bridge, Cornerstone Church, First Baptist Clovis, First Presbyterian, Flipside, Hope Lutheran (that’s us), New Covenant, New Harvest, North Fresno Church, Northeast Assembly, Northside, Northpark, Peoples Church and Valley Christian Center) to name most. There were more than 400 people on 9 charter buses. We left Peoples Church at about 4:00 pm. We were happy, we were excited, we were warm, we had our Chicken Wrap “sack dinners” lovingly prepared by the good folks from First Pres and we were ready (at least somewhat) for what God had in store.
Our trip went along great and as we neared camp and approached the snow line, all the buses stopped to put on chains or cables to give the tires extra traction. We were hoping to arrive at camp in time to start an evening worship service around 900pm, but those were just our plans. At this point, I’ll give you the very brief version from my perspective as your Youth Director: Tires slipping, buses sliding, kids making the most of it, cold outside, warm on the bus, amazing starry sky, buses stuck in the snow, worried parents texting, minimal cell phone signals, tow truck driver working, CHP sitting, bus wouldn’t start, half mile night hike up hill in the snow with luggage, kids NOT complaining, snow plows, sanding the road, sleeping on the bus, morning snowflakes, 7am snowball fights, more waiting, more plowing, more sanding of the roads, arrive at camp, ready for breakfast - UNITY. We arrived at Old Oak Ranch Camp around 900am (if you do the math, that’s a 17 hour trip).
In the morning our buses were waiting for the buses ahead of us to get “straightened out.”
The beauty of creation was all around as morning dawned.
We had an incredible weekend at camp, full of worship, friendship, SNOW, dodgeball, great messages, God’s spirit, SNOW, stories to share and an understanding of what it is to be the body of Christ. We were gathered in Unity, called to Prayer & Worship and sent forth to put our faith into action through Evangelism and works of Social Justice.
Here’s our group, ready to return home (and yes, the trip home was much shorter - by about 14 hours).
PRAISE GOD!
If you went on this trip, please leave a comment or a testimony about your experience. This is a cool way to share with our whole church about what God did in your life and a meaningful way to honor God and the experience that we’ve shared. Thanks for the privilege of being your leader. To all of you Parents, thanks for trusting me with the lives of your children.
Sincerely, Adam Knudson
(If you’d like to see more, check out our Photos Page on this site and for pictures and other regular updates, become a “fan” of “The Answer- Hope Lutheran” page on Facebook.
According to the Mirriam-Webster Dicitonary united means “made one; relating to or produced by joint action; being in agreement.”
United Fresno is a movement that has brought together many churches, church leaders and young people in the Fresno, Clovis and surrounding area. The purpose of this is to unite Christians from across denominational lines in order to seek God’s will for our lives and for our city.
Our youth group is excited to be a part of what God is doing in our city and looks forward to connecting the members of our church together with other Christians on high school campuses. A big event coming up later this month is United Winter Camp. The camp will be held on January 22-24 at Old Oak Ranch Camp is Sonora, Ca. It is still possible to register. Download both forms here.
If you’re planning on attending UnitedWinterCamp, or even if you aren’t, please check out the blog at unitedfresno.com. The blog updates daily with words from the Bible and reflections to lead us in prayer and fasting to prepare our hearts and minds for what God has in store for us. If you’re on facebook, you can check it out and become a fan of UnitedFresno. If you or someone you know is planning to attend Camp, check out this link where you can enter your email to receive United Fresno prayer blogs delivered directly to your inbox.
What do you all think? Are you excited for camp? Are you excited to see what God will do through this united effort?
April 26, 2010 
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