Who is helping you find and follow Jesus? Who are you investing in regularly?

September 9-10, 2017

Introduction and offering:

ILL: I became a youth pastor at the tender age of 19. I inherited a group of about 25 high school and middle school students and a Thursday night meeting misnamed “The Hour of Power.” It was anything but that—I was basically a glorified baby sitter. It took 3 weeks of this and I’d had enough. At the end of week 3, I sat the students down and said, “Next week, I’m going to teach you how to pray. If you want to learn how to pray and follow Jesus, come back. If you just want to fart around, do me and yourself a favor and stay home.” One of our adult advisors rushed up afterwards and said, “You’ve just killed our youth group. No one will come back.” But the next week, we didn’t have 25 students; we had 40. And six weeks later, we had 100. They were just waiting for someone to challenge them, to raise the bar and treat them like young adults. They were learning and growing and loving it, and bringing their friends.

As a new youth pastor, one of my guiding assumptions was that middle school and high school students are capable of a fairly sophisticated response to Jesus. I know some of you think I’m delusional—I knew they were young teens and still suffering spasms of maturity! But we often underestimate what young people are capable of, and I didn’t want to do that. I told them that they weren’t the church of tomorrow; they were the church right now, called and gifted by God and capable of doing great things. And they did.

I still have that assumption about young people—and I hope you have it too. There is a relationship in the Bible that illustrates this kind of confidence in young people—it’s the relationship between Paul and Timothy. This weekend and next, I want to tell you their story, explore their friendship, and see what we can learn about Think 3 from older Paul and younger Timothy.

Our big deal this year has been Think 3. We want everyone to think 3 generations ahead and one on either side. A healthy church is a multi-generational church, where young and old and everyone in between works together for Jesus. The temptation for all of us is to think only in terms of our generation. But I want us to be a church that not only I (and my cronies) love, but that my kids love, and my grandkids love, and one day, my great-grandkids love. Did I just mention my grandkids—because on Tuesday,