Immerse Blog
Going Deeper with: Jess Elmquist’s “Lighthouses and Sirens”
by Brent Parker on March 4th, 2011 -- filed under Archive
Download Lighthouses and Sirens here.
When the little church in The Woodlands, Texas hired their first full-time youth minister, they likely had no idea what they were getting into. The church was growing; new families with teenagers were joining the church; and the congregation just knew they had better do something. What they didn’t know was the immediate splash that a 24-year-old former bartender and basketball coach was capable of making. They handed him the keys to the church and the vans and then put him at the helm of their youth ministry ship.
The journey started out fairly smoothly. They watched as the new youth minister sat at the youth table for the church’s Thanksgiving dinner, encouraging the tearing of plastic tablecloths to make whistles and then causing eruptions of laughter to result in food spewing from the mouths of teenagers. It wasn’t that bad for the youth minister to send the 15-year-old boy in the youth group to bring around his car for him, rather than going all the way to the other side of the church. But, when the young man decided it was perfectly responsible to drive the church van home from a retreat with the van on cruise, his feet out the window, the radio full blast and a dozen youth mosh-pitting over the van seats, it became clear that the new hire was not quite what the church had bargained for.
After a casual first read of “Lighthouses and Sirens,” the average youth worker…
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