Shane Kennard's Blog

Unless you want to preach to nobody like this guy, you want to do everything you can to make sure people who listen to you preach experience God.

Image From http://www.sxc.hu/profile/salvaman

I watched Preach Better Sermons today from PreachingRocket. Jeff Henderson hosted and Perry Noble, Jud Wilhite, Andy Stanley, Jeff Foxworthy, Vanable H. Moody II, Dan Cathy, Charles Stanely and Louie Giglio shared about preaching and communicating to people. Here are common threads from all of them on how to preach so that people experience God.

• Pray. A lot. Keep praying. For people to experience God, you must first experience God. You must experience God through the passage.
• Prepare. Relying on God doesn’t mean we don’t prepare. Preparing well in advance is allowing God more time to speak to us. Having three months for a sermon to slow cook in us is better than three days…or three hours.
• Preach passages God tells you to. Each person spoke of a tight relationship with God and how God moved in their lives to pick passages and series. This dynamic relationship with God is a must.
• Have one key thing that God wants to give the people. Don’t just download information. Don’t get through a sermon or information from the Bible. Give them one thing that God says from his Word.
• Have one or two key things that God wants the people to do. The point of God’s Word is to pierce our hearts and transform us. What is it from the passage that God is wanting us to do?
• Solve. Solve brokenness and give hope. This is what Jesus did. This is why he was popular.
• Sensory. Involve as many senses as possible. The more we involve, the more that is remembered.
• Pray. Never forget who speaks to the heart. The Holy Spirit is the only One who can get a point across. We rely on him alone for the power to change lives.

People come to church to experience God. Lost people come to church to investigate God and get a glimpse of who he is. The sermon is one of the key reasons people come back. If we preach in such a way people experience God, they are more likely to return. The more times they come back, the more likely it is for them to trust God. The more they keep coming, the more likely it is they will live their life in full surrender.

If Students and Young Adults do get to serve, the natural tendency for adults is to control everything they do.

Image From http://www.sxc.hu/profile/TFawls

So many times, adults mess things up for SYA’s because we come in and control. A couple of reasons are…

• We know best. We’ve got that t-shirt. We’ve got so much more experience than they do. They need to learn from us.
• We don’t want them to fail. What if what they’re doing doesn’t work out? We don’t want their feelings to be hurt, so we come in and control to make sure it is safe.

A soccer coach, John Cartwright, wrote about the best soccer players coming from the streets. Why? Because they learned in the free flowing environment of chaotic play. They had to make decisions. They had to learn what worked and what didn’t. In short, they had to use their brains. Once adults get involved in coaching youth, we want to control. Then, we end up putting a glass ceiling on the players because we use their brains for them. I see this all the time while refereeing. Coaches make decisions for the players. This is capping their ability to learn and play.

What’s the alternative?

Facilitate. Facilitate individuals. Actually coach. Let them make decisions. This means they will make bad decisions. Then help them process the decisions they made. They will make good decisions through this process. Praise those.

In ministry, we bring SYA’s on board to serve. Instead of controlling every move they make, we allow them to make decisions. Then we help them process those decisions. If we want to give them an experience, we must give them the full experience. Including the opportunity to make bad decisions and fail.

Really, if they failed in something we gave them, what would be the impact? A few dollars spent? Some stuff wouldn’t get done? Would it blow up the building? Would it shut down the church? One bad decision by one person won’t affect too much.

What would you gain? The respect of a SYA. The ability to train a SYA in decision making. The ability to see God use a SYA because they learned another lesson about faith.

If we take away their opportunity to fail. We will take away their opportunity to see big things happen. We’re trying to get SYA’s to live a life of faith. Faith is risky…or it wouldn’t be faith. At times we mess up. Faith is what allows us to see God at work.

What decisions can you let SYA’s make this week in your ministry?

Would you want to be Tom Brady’s backup? You get paid a lot of money. You get to say you’re an NFL player. You never get dirty. But…

From Wikipedia

You never get to play.

I think a lot of Students and Young Adults feel like they’re Tom Brady’s backup. The coach keeps looking at them and says, “Keep working hard and someday you’ll get in the game.”

SYA’s want experiences. If this is the type of experience we give them at church, they’ll get their experiences somewhere else.

Yesterday, I took in the GroundSWELL conference put on by Leadership Network. In a nutshell, LN gave students the opportunity to tell church leaders what they think about church.

One of the common threads among so many of the SYA’s is experience through serving. They want to serve alongside adults. The students that hang with church through young adulthood know their God-given their gifts and then how to use their gifts. This discovery doesn’t come on their own, they need adults walking beside them to help them discover and use their gifts.

So many of the students who spoke yesterday, were on staff in some way in their church. They spent some of their afternoons after school at the church serving, learning, leading. These students are going to be infinitely more likely to stick with church after graduation.

What if our metric wasn’t how many came through the door today?
What if our metric was how many came through the door today served?

How can you get students involved right now in serving somewhere in the ministry of your youth ministry and the church?

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I took bullet point notes during the event. They may not be intelligible by anyone but me, but here they are.

The most important thing you can give a Student and Young Adult is a great experience.

Image From http://www.sxc.hu/profile/shortsands

Experiences must include three things:

1. Showing them how to live a God-life in their Real Life.
2. Give them a chance to Intersect with God.
3. Build a solid Foundation built on Jesus and his Word.

Some of my most memorable times with God was centered around an experience. Ski trip, DiscipleNow, camp, mission trips or something else that was out of the ordinary. In fact, revival showed up on some (maybe you could even say most) of these experiences.

But we can’t just give them a good time. Then you have an event. When we build Real Life, Intersections and Foundations into an event, the event transitions into an experience.  An experience that will last a lifetime.

Question, what were some of your greatest experiences and how did these three get integrated to make it more than just an event?

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All of our lives are a project. We are still under construction. Real Life Project exists to help people build their lives.

From http://www.sxc.hu/profile/svilen001

To every building project, there is one place and one place only that you start.

The foundation.

Nothing is more important than to build a solid foundation. The foundation impacts everything else. A solid foundation leads to a solid house. A weak foundation leads to a weak house.

It is important to get the foundation of our lives right.

Everything the Real Life Project does is to end up building people on the solid foundation of Jesus. He promised that a life that is built on his foundation won’t collapse. There will be storms, but his foundation is so strong, the building will stay upright.

Everyone needs a solid foundation, but we especially want to lead Student and Young Adults to a solid foundation. Imagine a flood of SYA’s living solid lives. Live that have impact. Lives that can’t be shaken. Lives that make a difference. This is what could happen if they have a solid foundation.

We want to help your church to build that foundation. We’ll have an ongoing presence through sermons and articles. In the days ahead, we’ll also be describing other ways we can serve you and your church to help you build foundations into people.

From http://www.sxc.hu/profile/koosswans

The first thing we want people and churches to have is the experience of being served.

Served through sermons, series, quotes, revivals, weekends, camps, missions and even a church environment.

Real Life Project is in its beginnings. But in the end, no matter what form it takes, serving people and churches is our goal.

We want people to be served by teaching them how to live a God life in real life.
We want Students and Young Adults to be served by teaching them how to do ministry in their real life.
We want churches to be served by listening and helping them accomplish their goals of growing their people.

We will continue to outline what we see in the days ahead through the “experiences” category. Us serving others is the first thing we want people to experience. They won’t experience God in their real life without it.
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Receive our “Experiences” category automatically into your RSS feeder by clicking the icon below. This category will describe what experiences will be seen in the future of Real Life Project.

Sometime God intersects by merging. Sometimes by broadsiding.

As you drive, there are two types of intersections.

1. Merging
2. Crossing

Sometimes God merges in with our life. Everything is going along just fine. Maybe he is on our radar. Maybe he isn’t. But one day you look over and there he is. You don’t know when he got there, but he is there. He wants to interact with you and he gets your attention subtly.

Sometimes God crosses your life. He broadsides you going 60 mph. Just like with merging, you are life is going along just fine. Maybe he is on your radar. Maybe he isn’t. But one day he just absolutely blindsides you to get your attention.

He uses both to communicate his presence to us. He has used both to communicate with me. There are times merges alongside to show himself. There are times he has absolutely blindsided me. Both were needed in just the right time.

At times the content on the Real Life Project will feel like a merge. Nice. Gentle. God is just there smiling at us.

At times the content will feel like a crossing…a T-bone wreck going 60 mph. Jarring. Bone-breaking. God shakes us up to get our attention.

In the end, we want you to know that God desires to be present with you. The sermons and teachings will be geared towards that. The material will be geared towards that. Any event or experience will be geared towards that. Engaging Students and Young Adults in ministry will be geared towards leading others in experiencing God’s presence.

Engage with us on this journey. This is why we’ve chosen the word “project.” Life is a project. Let’s work on it together.

God wants to intersect your life.

Today we start the Real Life Project. I do this with a sacred excitement.

Excited about what can be.

Scared it won’t happen.

I guess that is like real life. We have to go out and do something. We can live a life where everything is predictable. Where failure is almost non-existent. Except for the failure to live.

The first few weeks, we’re going to talk a lot about what we want the RLP to be. Sure, it doesn’t matter unless we do the work to make it the way we want it to be. But every idea starts as an idea, then you work to make the idea happen.

In its most simple form, RLP is about helping people realize God wants to intersect their real life. He isn’t a parallel road to your road of life. He isn’t not interested in your life. He wants to be your life.

He has done everything possible to let us know that he is “God with us.” RLP is about showing as many people as possible that reality.