We Are All Youth Leaders

In the book Almost Christian I’m reading for a Fuller Seminary class on reaching out to youth in this day and age, the author paints a very dim picture of how Christian faith is expressed by American teenagers, which often revolves around a sort of feel-good, be good, and get along sort of faith (called "Moralistic Therapeutic Deism"). God is at best there to get you out of tight spots but mostly in the background.

Not surprisingly, the author points out that one of the main problems lies in the generation before it. If the previous generation can not articulate a clear and robust faith, how can we expect youth to?

The author tells a ministry story where she got teenage girls to agree to have adult sponsors who would help embody living faith for each of them. When the author approached adults the girls picked as their favorite adults in the congregation, eagerly promoting this idea, she got a bit of a shock: “People who selflessly supported youth ministry with money, phone calls, baked goods, and prayer chains came unglued at the thought of mentoring a teenager. I knew I had hit rock bottom when one woman told me, ‘No, I’d rather work on the stewardship campaign’” (p. 121). For many of us who are accustomed to love being expressed in concrete acts of service, it’s easy to imagine why it’s difficult to do personal mentoring!

Why so much resistance? The author saw that adults weren’t confident with their knowledge and their own faith formation. How do you even bring it up with kids when you’re working things out yourself?

What may be helpful for adults is to realize we do not need Bible scholars or more curriculum to do right with our youth. We want to walk with others to not merely give more content, but to teach what it means to trust God in their lives: “What awakens faith is desire, not information, and what awakens desire is a person—and specifically, a person who accepts us unconditionally, as God accepts us” (p. 119).

If this is the case, then we are ALL potential youth leaders!

Missional Reflection #1: A Trifold Conversation

This book  shows even with our best intentions at being a Church engaged with its community that we still often are caught in a self-centered monologue on church concerns: how has the church lost its way in mission, how does church leadership need to reform, how do we become an outward-focused church? Taking on the perspective that any solid missionary to a foreign country must also look equally at 2 other conversation partners along with the church: the culture and Scripture.

Imagine you are sent to be a missionary to Japan. If you were a missionary worth your salt, you would become a learner of that culture and language and keen on finding Scriptures that could interface with the cultural context you find yourself in. You would also interface with the Church in Japan but since Japanese Christians only make up less than 1% of the country, spending all your time with the Japanese church would be missing out on what's going on in 99% of the population.

Why should the approach you take going to Japan be any different when we are here in the local community? And yet, we typically start with the church as the focus of our conversation when it comes to viewing our faith here at home. Sitting with neighbors and people in the community to actually listen to their needs and hopes typically isn't part of the outreach strategies of the local church. We are too used to wanting to be in control, and too used to talking about our own concerns and desires (like, "how do we get them into our church?").

One of the stories talked about a pastor interviewing his congregation about his leadership in various areas. One of the participants, a member of that church and seminarian involved in their community outreach program told him after a long silence her views on the church's overall community engagement: "From what I've seen, the church is closed to the community. We push the annual denominational missions offering. To some extent we push Samaritan's Purse. But when it comes to a local child in the community, we're less likely to help...I visit a lot of the churches in this area through my volunteer work. I think ours, like most, is self-absorbed."Ouch!

We will be less self-absorbed if we allow our conversations to go beyond just talking about ourselves. More thoughts on that at a later post about this book.

LIFT Garden Work Day, 3-3-12

Planting with students and Next Gen Rotarians

On Saturday, March 3, 2012, over 50 students, family, Rotarian volunteers, and school district employees came to help install an organic garden at LIFT (Learning Independence For Transition) school on 3rd Street and Commonwealth, a new program for special education students from 18-22.

This work day was a culmination of a collaborative project that started out as an idea last Fall. As the project lead I felt especially proud of the many partners who donated time, money and resources into this garden. The more names on the plaque, the better.

In the book Building Communities From the Inside Out, community development "is the process by which local capacities are identified and mobilized. This mobilization mainly involves connecting people with capacities to: other people, local associations, local businesses, local institutions, capital and credit." We accomplished this garden because we reached out to people with access to all of these areas, whether it was a connection to Home Depot, Alhambra High School's wood shop class, the church neighbor bordering this garden, our awesome connection to free compost through Vons Grocery Stores, a grant, and of course the Rotary's capital and volunteer backing.

 While it's definitely a slower process to involve more people, the results are much more satisfying not just in terms of cost, but in terms of ownership. The best part has been walking with the students in helping them plan the garden, fill the beds with the compost, and plant the first crop during the work day. And in the immortal words of Hannibal from The A-Team, "I love it when a plan comes together."

2012 Prayerwalk Testimony

Praying in front of Alhambra City Hall

Pastor Jimmy Tam of Sunrise Christian Church in Alhambra shared some of his reflections on our annual prayerwalk two Sundays ago as well as his journey to seeing the importance of prayer in seeing our community transformed.

The 2012 Alhambra City Prayer Walk was a day that I really looked forward to with great expectation and excitement. To me it was not just an event, but a crucial step in pursuing the vision of city transformation and spiritual revival. I am convinced that God’s requirement for sending us revival is for all His people in the city to come together for united prayer. For Alhambra, it happened on 2/19 Sunday at 1-3pm with over seventy brothers and sisters from different churches, ages, ethnic backgrounds, and languages. I was so honored and excited to be a part of this strategic spiritual alliance. 

As we gathered and started our prayer walk in the center of the city, I felt a sense of excitement, spiritual passion, faith and unity among us. As we moved from one station to another, the presence of the Holy Spirit was getting stronger as our brothers and sisters prayed more fervently. Another wonderful experience of this year’s prayer walk was that each individual would pair up with a fellow Christian from another church as prayer partners. I was very touched and encouraged by the compassion and love of my prayer partner Mike from Gateway Community Church for his earnest intercession for the people, the government, and the churches of Alhambra. I was convinced that our passionate prayers had not only touched God’s heart, but they were the actual expression of God’s compassion and vision for the city.  I also believe that the spiritual effect of this year’s Alhambra Prayer Walk would continue to bring transformations to both the spiritual and physical realms of our community.

My journey into the ministry of prayer and the starting of the Sunrise House of Prayer in Alhambra began about three years ago. As I met different individuals and families in our community, I began to see the needs and brokenness of the people. I saw bondages and brokenness that result from drug and gambling addictions, materialism, divorces and broken families, depressions and homelessness. Even though there are quite a number of churches in Alhambra, we have not been able to make a significant difference and impact in bringing healing, freedom and transformation in these people’s lives. Many of them are still waiting to be touched by the love and power of Jesus Christ. As I researched and learned from the examples of city transformation in different parts of the world in recent times, the number one common factor for transformation and revival to take place is PRAYER.  

Prayer, especially citywide united prayer, is the way God uses to manifest His love and power.  I began to realize that due to the lack of extended passionate prayers, the ministry works that I did produced very little long-term spiritual results. But as we started to pray more, we started to see amazing transformations in people’s lives. By God’s grace, we are seeing drug addicts set free after a miraculous encounter with Jesus through prayer, and couples on the brink of divorce and suicide due to the husband’s longtime addiction in gambling restored to hope, freedom and reconciliation within two months of desperate and united prayers. I am now very convinced that nothing else we do can be more important and more influential that prayer.  I pray that the Church in Alhambra will come together as one to pray more often and in greater numbers in the days to come. If this happens, city transformation and revival will come to Alhambra soon.

True School Reform?

I met with the principal of Fremont School (K-8) last Friday, and was struck by her desire to want to create a better learning environment for the students but plagued by an aging campus and limited budget. We had a good chat about possibilities local congregations in Fremont's school boundaries could partner to help out.


I know enough of my Christian peers with young kids who are considering or have moved to a better school district, chosen homeschooling, or are putting their kids in private Christian schooling. I had one co-worker from another city  tell me that sacrificing his kid's education to a bad school was not on the list of things he wanted to sacrifice anymore (and his family sacrifices a lot for the good of their city).

I don't want to judge my friends who have made all of the above choices. I would feel ambivalence too if I didn't already live in the "best" K-8 school in our district (not planned, just worked out that way). I can't say I wouldn't have done the same if given the chance and resources. And I know many also made their decisions because they feel that their faith will not be supported in the public school system.

But I wonder if our choices as a whole become another form of capitulation by the Church to reinforcing the sacred-secular split in our society. The local school becomes irrelevant, competition, even the enemy in some ways.

If the Kingdom of God in Christ is the best, brightest hope we have in the world, it must permeate all sectors of our society, especially our institutions and including our local schools. Even if we've made the best choice for our own kids, should the Church abandon the rest who can't do the same? If we believe that true school reform will somehow be wrapped in who Jesus is and his mission to the world, we must realize that it will take more than even the greatest individual Christian teachers, administrators, parents, students who faithfully slug it out in an often challenging environment--the  Church community must be there as well.

City of Alhambra Prayerwalk, Sunday 2-19-12

Come and join us for our annual City Prayerwalk! Pray with other Alhambra congregations for the City of Alhambra, where we will pray for all the aspects of our community in the downtown Civic Center: City Hall, Police/Fire, schools, the courts, local churches, businesses, etc.

Time: 1:00 - 3:00pm

Start/End location:

Alhambra True Light Presbyterian Church

20 W. Commonwealth Ave.

This will be our 8th annual City Prayerwalk, and we are excited about the possibility of getting more congregations coming together to pray for the City! We hope you can set aside 2 hours aside to intercede for the City of Alhambra. For more info, please e-mail me at jessec@kingdomcauses.org