This week I had the amazing opportunity to go to a conference hosted by the American Bible Society. The purpose was to discuss how to engage this next generation in the Bible. There were some amazing presenters that came and God ignited some new passions in me and rekindled some old ones. Here are just a few thoughts from the conference.
Facebook is great and creepy at the same time! A guy named Mark Brown talked about the use of social media. If you’ve never heard of him don’t feel bad, I hadn’t either. He has over 8 million likes on a Facebook page he created. It’s the Bible page of course. What was really crazy was he posted John 3:16 on the wall and within, and I am NOT exaggerating, 1 minute had 1600 likes on it. Within 10 minutes it was up to 10,000 likes and a few hundred comments. As I write this, not 2 days later that same post has 43,576 likes, 1,057 comments and 2,097 shares. That’s crazy, right?! OK, so an observation
#1: The Bible and new media (web, social, search, blog, etc…). The CEO of Global Media Outreach likened the internet to the Roman Road system, the actual roads they built, not the Bible passages to lead someone to Jesus, you Baptist! The Roman military built these nice fancy roads to move their army all over the world, once they did that the merchants moved in and started trading with people from different parts of Europe. Not long after that a group of people left Jerusalem for fear of being put to death, traveled on those very roads and made disciples of Jesus as they went. The internet followed the same trend: built for military use, opened up to commerce and now God’s word is spreading around the globe at a faster rate than ever!
#2: The hymn Come Thou Fount makes me cry every time I hear it.
Kara Powell leads the research department at the Fuller Youth Institute. She tracked hundreds of kids as they moved from High School to College with their engagement in the church. I was very excited to see what she was going to present and I was not disappointed! I’ve got a whole new arsenal of preacher one liners just from her! But here’s what gut-checked me the most about her talk:
#3:Â Intergenerational Community builds sticky faith in kids. She said too many kids leave high school having experienced youth group but not the Church. There are a few “mickey mouse,” “dry cleaner” and “kid’s table” references that I could add here but it boils down to this. Parents, if your kids don’t see your faith and the faith of other godly adults LIVED out through serving, community and even Church Services (yea, I said it!) then how can we expect them to develop their own!? It’s time to bring kids and adults together around the Scripture and see what it says for our community, not just for us individually.
There were tons of great things that I’m taking away from this experience and I’ve got some plans, baby! I’ll write some more stuff I’ve gleaned from this week as it comes to me. Peace!
