like a fire

Well, I had two firsts last night here at Southland high school camp and both involved fire. First, as the sound guy for the group leading worship, I literally caught a speaker on fire. I won’t bore anyone with the technical stuff, but when you have a PA system designed for half the volume we were trying to achieve and you manage to squeeze twice the volume out of it, there has to be a giving point. That giving point was the sub that in the middle of the first song decided that it was tired of trying to please my sound needs and committed suicide the speaker way. There were flames as high as a foot coming out of the speaker when they ran it from the room. After a quick dose of water, it settled down to the lonely death of smoking outside for a couple of hours. The building has a no smoking policy.

Second, after our worship time, we went to the gym for the dodgeball tourney and then back to the rooms for lights out. I was getting in the shower when we got a call on the walkie. Someone had pulled a fire alarm and the fire department, which had responded very promptly because it was in the lab with explosive chemicals, decided that they were going to get their man or keep everyone up until it was a sufficient discouragement for the future. At 12:15 we gathered everyone into the cafeteria and asked for a confession. If you’ve ever worked with teens, you know that we didn’t get one. At 1:00 they decided to “interview” group 20 at a time. At 2:10 they decided to “interview” teens one at a time. Finally it was sufficient and we were allowed to go back to bed. I got into mine at 3:15.

Here’s my haiku for the night.

Fire, even your threat
causes panic in the crowd.
I will not be burned.

At the youth leader interactive today at camp, we had a great discussion about growth and what that could look like. There was a general consensus that growth for numbers alone is pretty vain and unuseful. Beyond that we talked about what we can do to have healthy growth that builds the kingdom and makes disciples (my words).

One of the leaders had the best analogy I have heard for unhealthy growth. He was talking about in urban cultures it is considered cool for guys to prove their manhood by making babies. They basically try to sleep with as many girls as possible in the hopes of proving their manhood through getting them pregnant. They don’t really care anything about fathering these illegitimate children, but they want as many as possible. The obvious conclusion is the view of church growth t for the sole purpose of “adding to our numbers”. How many illegitimate children does the church make?

Thinking through that was a startling thing for me. Healthy church growth is a steady growing of people who can be sustained by the parents (leaders) of the local body. That’s a lot to think of between fart jokes and dodgeball, but that is what makes Southland Conferences so great. I love working with these guys.