1. You can look around at church and notice that everybody is basically the same age and they look and dress pretty much like you do.
2. You can’t stand singing a worship song that was “in” five years ago—much less singing a hymn from another century.
3. You believe social justice is more important than evangelism OR evangelism is more important than social justice.
4. The church you go to is so dimly lit during worship that you can’t see the person singing next to you, much less the person singing across the room.
5. You’ve attended a “leadership” conference where you learned more about organization and props than proclamation and prayer.
6. Your goal in spending time with non-Christians is to demonstrate that you’re really no different than they are and to prove this you curse like a sailor, drink like a fish, and smoke like a chimney.
7. You’ve concluded that everything new is better than anything old OR that everything old is better than anything new.
8. You think that the way Jesus lived is more important than what Jesus said–that his deeds were more important than his doctrine.
9. You believe that the best way to change our culture is to elect a certain kind of politician.
10. The church you’ve chosen is defined more by its reaction to “boring” churches than by its response to a needy world.
11. You’ve decided that everything done by the church you grew up in was way wrong and you’re now, thankfully, part of a missional “community” that does everything right.
12. The one verse you wish wasn’t in the Bible is John 14:6 where Jesus says, “I am the way, the truth, and the life, and no one comes to the Father but by me.” That’s way too narrow!

The Unfashionable Quiz  - By Tullian Tchividjian.

I used to work in a church that had no skateboarding signs all over the place.  I would laugh when I showed up to work and saw the old uptight maintenance guy (who was responsible for creating the signs) walking around putting them up again, after they’d been taken down and piled up by our neighborhood skaters.

Let’s live life & celebrate with those who are living life instead of telling everyone what not to do.  I think they’d rather hear about Jesus anyway.

Jeff Iosa received this article in an email from The Youth Source (www.thesource4ym.com) about the relationship between local churches and parachurch organizations. It is a great article; very much worth the ten minutes it took me to read it.  Here are a few quotes from the article.

In my years working for Youth for Christ and volunteering with the local church, it was amazing to see the tension and competition that often reared its ugly head between ministries.

If the little white church on the corner doesn’t get along with “Young Life,” it’s just like when the church’s children’s ministry and youth ministry are fighting over use of the fellowship hall. We are all part of the body.

I asked Chap Clark, author of the book Hurt: Inside the World of Today’s Teenagers, to chime in on the issue. Chap, a Young Life veteran, immediately reacted to the question. “‘Take away’ from the church? Young Life is an expression of the Body of Christ reaching out to the world, and so they are an extension of the Church.”

(Read the rest at The Source.)

I’ve actually had the same problem with other high school ministry leaders (some church & some para-church).

Jonathan Herron had a recent confrontation with another local pastor & writes about it in a post titled – This Isn’t A Competition.

I made it clear that Catalyst isn’t interested in attracting/stealing/jumping the shark for pew-swapping.  We exist to storm the gates of hell.  I want to steal people away from the kingdom of darkness with the explosive love and grace of Jesus.  Love wins.

What’s your attitude toward Christian’s who seem to be more “successful” (whatever that means) than you.  Man, praise God for them and get on with your ministry – maybe even learn something from what they have going on – but don’t get into a competitive struggle with them.  That’s just stupid.

Here’s a report the local Fox station did on Catalyst church and their open talk about sex.  Pretty cool to have this open, honest, & respectful dialoge on a news broadcast.  Kudos, as usual, to Fox.