Christmas MV

Here's another Chrissy idea . . .

Why not try a memory verse?

Why not flip to Matthew 1:21?

"She will give birth to a son and you will give him the name Jesus, for He will save His people from their sins."

We did this one last week with actions and it went down a treat.
Here is our action MV of Matt 1:21

"She will give birth" . . .
(Give a short sharp scream. Yeah, I know, but it was the most ungross way of putting an action to 'birth' that we could think of!)

"to a son" . . .
(cradle an imaginary baby in your arms)

"And you" . . .
(point out towards the kids)

"will give" . . .
(extend 2 hands out as if you were giving something)

"Him the name Jesus" . . .
(as you say 'Jesus', point up with your 2 pointy fingers)

"For he will save his people" . . .
(on the word 'save' extend your arms re: dying on the cross)

"from there sins."
(On the word sins, put both hands over your heart)

"Matthew 1:21"
(Find a guy int he room called Matthew and point to him, 1 finger for 'Ch 1', then flash 21 fingers for "21")

Simply, easy, effective.

Thanks to Kirsty, Zoe and Julia.

Christmas is here!

Guess what?

Christmas is coming!

Because most youth groups break at the end of school term, we usually miss out on doing any Christmas teaching. I’m so over that, so why not get Christmas in early this year?

Here is a new spin on the nativity play that is heaps of fun, get everyone involved and will get your kids thinking about the real Christmas story.

The idea:
Have some leaders act out the Christmas story, but they do it full of mistakes. Some obvious, some more subtle. They present it as if they are doing their final rehearsal for a Christmas play. The ‘director’ reads out the scene and then the leaders act it out. At the end of each scene the kids get together and write down all the mistakes they spotted. If you have more than a few kids, break them up into groups or 4 and at the end of the 3 act play, the team who spotted the most inconsistencies win.

How it works:
You can pick a leader to be the ‘director’ and he calls his ‘actors’ (other leaders) up the front to act out each scene. At the beginning of the scene, the director reads out what will happen. This ‘script’ (see below) is full of mistakes that the kids have to spot. The leaders willing act out this messed up version, assuming it is correct.

At the end of each round the kids have 2 min to review it and come up with as many of the mistakes as they can. At the end of all 3 scenes, the director reveals where all the mistakes where and the team who spotted the most, wins.

Here is a 3 scene version of the Christmas story – complete with plenty of mistakes!

Scene 1
Here is the Christmas story as recorded in all four gospels.
The angel Michael appears to Mary telling her she will have a baby. Joseph discovers she is pregnant and he keeps it a secret. At this time, Caesar Claudius told everyone to go to their home town for a census. Mary and Joseph rode a donkey to Bethlehem.

Mistakes:
Christmas story only in Luke and Matthew
Angel Gabriel appeared to Mary
Joseph decides to divorce her quietly
It was Caesar Augustus
We don’t know how they got to Bethlehem.

Scene 2
Once they reach Bethlehem, the inn keeper tells Mary and Joseph there is no room at the inn. So they go to sleep in the stable. Angels appear to the shepherds in the fields and sing ‘Holy Night’. Once the shepherds heard the news they went straight to tell Herod and then traveled to find Jesus. Jesus is born in a stable. The shepherds then tell Joseph that Jesus will save his people from their sins.

Mistakes:
The inn keeper never says that to Mary or Joseph
The angles sung Glory to God in the highest
The shepherds never went to tell Herod
An angel told Joseph that Jesus would save his people from their sins

Scene 3
Later that night, the 3 wise men come to find Jesus in the stables. They give him gifts and worship him. King Herod gave the order to kill all the babies born at that time in an attempt to eliminate Jesus. So Mary and Joseph take Jesus to Rome. Then the wise men and the shepherds sing carols all night long.

Mistakes:
We don’t know how many wise men there were.
The wise men arrived about a year later and met Jesus in a house.
Mary and Joseph take Jesus to Egypt
The wise men and shepherd never met, and never sung carols together.

When we tried this, we had a lot of fun letting the leaders ad lib these scenes. So we made sure we read the outline of events out at the end of each scene too, so that if the kids lost the plot by laughing so much, they would still be able to remember what needed correcting.

Thanks to Corne for this idea.

Tough Questions Part 3

Here is the 3rd and final installment for hot tips on how to answer those classic tough questions.

Look for the question behind the question
Most of us are not impartial seekers of knowledge, but come to an issue from an angle. It’s a great head start if you are the one giving the answer to have some idea about where the question is coming from. For example:

Are they scared or confused? Answer it with assurance

Are they struggling with certainty? Answer it with hope and encouragement

Are they curious? Answer it by stretching their thinking

Are trying to justify a bad behaviour? Answer it with a rebuke

Are they asking so they can respond to their friends? Answer it aplologetically (with a gospel defense)

Are they asking for about a specific situation? Answer it with an application

It is also worth noting that the question they ask may be the doorway into the real issue behind the scenes.

EG: 'Why does God let bad things happen?' , could be on the back on their parents recent divorce.
'But how could God send people to hell if he loves them?' might be coming from someone whose best friend is not a Christian.

Get the picture?

Scott

Tough Questions . . .cont.

This is part 2 of last weeks post about some guidelines for helping us to answer hard questions that the kids ask.

What about Jesus?
In answering any kind of question about Christian things it is essential that you pause to reflect on how the death of Jesus will influence the answer. After all, He is the author and perfected of our faith and therefore he must impact every corner of our lives.

This will become particularly important when answering questions from the Old Testament so that you don’t confuse the application from 3000 year old Israelite to a 16 year old Christian living in the 21st century. It will also be helpful in answering questions where there is some ‘grey areas’.

While there might not be an explicit command in scripture to fit the question, we will need wisdom to decide how best to honour Jesus in that situation. When it comes to application, Jesus always matters, his death always counts.


It’s a matter of the heart
People are not like computers – it’s not just a matter of punching in the right answer to produce the desired behavior. Even if you have the most water tight-theologically correct answer, it may just bounce off them like bullets off superman.

Why?

Because understanding God’s word is a matter of the heart. Our hearts have a default setting against God. Even after we become Christians we still battle against the old self and its sinful nature. The business of answering people’s questions is not one of simple information download, but happens in the context of transforming their thinking and softening their hearts to come more and more under the authority of Jesus.

Of course, changing hearts is God’s area of expertise, so that means we have to pray (before during and after we give the answer!) It also means we will have a better chance of the answer taking root if we know something about the teenager and can follow it up relationally and not just informationally.

The questions are easy, it's the answers that are hard!

One thing you do a lot of in youth ministry is answer tough questions.

Over the next few weeks, Youth Mail will endeavour to give you some hot tips to help you feel more confident as you field some of these tricky questions. Feel free to email scott@stjames.org.za to add some other reflections from your own experience that you think might be helpful. (And if there is a particular question that you have to tackle and it is keeping you up nights, let us know! we'll kick it around and try to help!)

This week's 3 tips for answer tough questions.

1. It’s OK not to know
The worst thing in the world is to pretend you are an expert on something you know nothing about. Teenagers can spot a fake a mile away and although you mean well, it will undermine your credibility and their confidence to ask you questions next time round. It’s OK to say, ‘Actually that is a really tough one. I’m not sure right now, but let me check up on it and get back to you!’ Then go chat with your minister, start doing your research or drop us an email! Not only will you show your group they are important enough for you to go to all that trouble, but you might just learn something yourself too!

2. Teaching Time
Take the opportunity of answering questions to slip in some teaching as you go. You may be able to use a question on suffering to introduce and explain the word ‘sovereignty’ (the doctrine that God rules everything with total power and control) as part of your answer. Or maybe if you are fielding a question on ‘should Christians drink alcohol’, you could set it up to teach them about the principle of not demanding your rights for the sake of the weaker brother (Romans Ch 14). It is unlikely that you would devote a four week series to some of these things in your regular youth meetings, but you can cover them (with application!) in the careful answering of a question.

3. Silly questions may not be so silly
When you hear a question about dinosaurs and the book of Genesis, you may be tempted to groan and roll your eyes. And you would be right if you said that T-rex in the garden of Eden is not central to the gospel message. But while it’s not a big issue on the bible’s agenda, it is obviously a big issue for the kid asking the question. He wants to know if the bible is relevant to what he is learning at school, if the knowledge of God has any connection with worldly wisdom and if he can come to understand the bible for himself. That of course won’t give you any specific insight into the dinosaur debacle, but it will help you to appreciate that there is more at stake in that kind of question than just big scaly lizards.

More to come . . .