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Who is Alexander Wilhelmsen?

If you have been following this blog for any stretch of time you have probably noticed that the comment section of this blog is often dominated by one Alexander Wilhelmsen. So who is this mystery commentator, this man of many words? Who in the world is Alex Wilhelmsen?

Well Alex is a convict in a jail in Tampa that I went to visit once (Just Kidding!) Alex is actually a former student and volunteer leader of mine from Tampa,Florida. Alex is a unique individual, and I have enjoyed his insights here in the Jester's Pub. You need to know that Alex is a youth ministry success story. He is a student who got "IT" and then became a leader who shared "IT" with other students. The "IT" being the message and WAY of Jesus. Yet Alex is way more than that, 

Alex is:

1. A servant- A volunteer who stays there cleaning up after most everyone else has gone home. The kind you want on your team. Can't tell you how many times he did the jobs nobody else wanted to do.

2. Loyal- He is like a golden retriever, faithful to the end. That is admirable.

3. A gifted writer-You should have seen the weekly Fantasy Football Summaries he wrote for our student league, unbelievable!

4. A Lover of Jesus and Students- And isn't that all you really need to be a great volunteer.

Finally he is my friend. I am proud to call Alex my friend, I want him to know that. He is a man that gets very little credit but who is a GIANT in the Kingdom.

So Alex all of us here in the Jester's Pub raise our glasses to you and say, "Well Done! May you always live for the King and His Pleasure!"

mark

Have We Lost Our Minds?

Black Friday took a grim turn when a New York Wal-Mart employee died after bargain hunters broke down the doors to the store, pushing him to the ground.

The 34-year-old male employee was pronounced dead an hour after shoppers breached the doors to the shopping center in Valley Stream, Long Island, about 5 a.m. Friday and knocked him down, police said.

"He was bum-rushed by 200 people," Jimmy Overby, the man's 43-year-old co-worker, told the New York Daily News. "They took the doors off the hinges. He was trampled and killed in front of me. They took me down too ... I literally had to fight people off my back."

A 28-year-old pregnant woman was also taken in for observation and three other shoppers suffered minor injuries during the incident, police said. The pregnant woman and the unborn baby were reported to be OK, said Sgt. Anthony Repalone, a Nassau County police spokesman.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. in Bentonville, Ark., closed the store in Valley Stream for several hours after the stampede. It reopened shortly after 1 p.m.

Police said about 2,000 people had gathered outside the doors before the Wal-Mart opened at the suburban location about 20 miles east of Manhattan. A crowd pushed the man to the ground at 5:03 a.m., three minutes after the store opened, leaving a metal portion of the door crumpled like an accordion.

Nassau County police spokesman Lt. Michael Fleming described the scene as "utter chaos." "This crowd was out of control," he said.

Speak With Conviction

You need to know Taylor Mali. I started using this clip a couple of years ago in a seminar I teach for youth pastors. Think you'll love it.

Tribal Leader

I have really been enjoying Seth Godin's new book Tribes. This book shed some great light on how effective people lead and how people want to be led in this ever changing wired world. This is a book that is very applicable to church leadership, business leadership and youth ministry. Lots of great insights. Godin describes a Tribe as "a group of people connected to one another, connected to a leader, and connected to an idea." 

What a great definition of a church or a youth group. I am about 1/3 of the way through the book, below are some quotes that stuck out to me:

"Managers manage a process they've seen before, and they react to the outside world, striving to make the process as fast and as cheap as possible. Leadership on the other hand, is about creating change that you believe in. Leaders have followers. Managers have employees. Managers make widgets. Leaders make change."

"People yearn for change, they relish being a part of a movement, and they talk about things that are remarkable, not boring."

"LEADERS MAKE A RUCKUS"   (My personal favorite)

Here is to the ruckus makers! May your numbers increase especially in the church.

more to come from this book in the future.

mark

The Show You Should be Watching!

For some unknown reason most people are not watching the best show on television. That show is Friday Night Lights. I can't say enough about this show. Great drama, amazing moments between teens and adults, a coach who is more like a youth pastor, and flat out the best, most realistic portrayal of high school life in a small Texas town. The show's third season is playing now only on DirectTV but returns to NBC on January 16th. I encourage you to watch the first two seasons online at NBC.com  or pick up the DVD's. You won't regret it.

The show is filled with great clips to use in youth ministry. I use the clip below to kick of my guys seminar I teach called Smash-Mouth Youth Ministry. In this clip from the first season Coach Taylor takes Matt Saracen (the back QB now thrust into the starting job by the career ending injury to the starter) out onto the field the night before his first start. It is a brilliant scene, and there are moments like these all through the series. Hope you become a fan.

Mythbusters: Thanksgiving Style

The following is reprinted from The Best of The Best of Uncle John's Bathroom Reader.

First Thanksgiving 1621 by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris, via Library of Congress

It's one of American history's most familiar scenes: A small group of Pilgrims prepare a huge November feast to give thanks for a bountiful harvest and show their appreciation to the Indians who helped them survive their first winter. Together, the Pilgrims and the Indians solemnly sit down to a meal of turkey, pumpkin pie, and cranberries.

Just how accurate is this image of America's first Thanksgiving? Not very, it turns out. Here are some common misconceptions about the origin of one of our favorite holidays.

MYTH: The settlers at the first Thanksgiving were called Pilgrims.
THE TRUTH: They didn't even refer to themselves as Pilgrims - they called themselves "Saints." Early Americans applied the term "pilgrim" to all of the early colonists; it wasn't until the 20th century that it was used exclusively to describe the folks who landed on Plymouth Rock.

MYTH: It was a solemn, religious occasion.
THE TRUTH: Hardly. It was a three-day harvest festival that included drinking, gambling, athletic games, and even target shooting with English muskets (which, by the way, was intended as a friendly warning to the Indians that the Pilgrims were prepared to defend themselves.)

MYTH: It took place in November.
THE TRUTH: It was some time between late September and the middle of October - after the harvest had been brought in. By November, said historian Richard Erhlich, "the villagers were working to prepare for winter, salting and drying meat and making their houses as wind resistant as possible."

MYTH: The Pilgrims wore large hats with buckles on them.
THE TRUTH: None of the participants were dressed anything like the way they've been portrayed in art: the Pilgrims didn't dress in black, didn't wear buckles on their hats or shoes, and didn't wear tall hats. The 19th-century artists who painted them that way did so because they associated black clothing and buckles with being old-fashioned.

MYTH: They ate turkey ...
THE TRUTH: The Pilgrims ate deer, not turkey. As Pilgrim Edward Winslow later wrote, "For three days we entertained and feasted, and [the Indian] went out and killd five deer, which they brought to the plantation." Winslow does mention that four Pilgrims went "fowling" or bird hunting, but neither he nor anyone else recorded which kinds of birds they actually hunted - so even if they did eat turkey, it was just a side dish.

"The flashy part of the meal for the colonists was the venison, because it was new to them," says Carolyn Travers, director of research at Plimoth Plantation, a Pilgrim museum in Massachusetts. "Back in England, deer were on estates and people would be arrested for poaching if they killed these deer ... The colonists mentioned venison over and over again in their letters back home."

Other foods that may have been on the menu: cod, bass, clams, oysters, Indian corn, native berries and plums, all washed down with water, beer made from corn, and another drink the Pilgrim affectionately called "strong water."

A few things definitely weren't on the menu, including pumpkin pie - in those days, the Pilgrims boiled their pumpkin and ate it plain. And since the Pilgrims didn't yet have flour mills or cattle, there was no bread other than corn bread, and no beef, milk, or cheese. And the Pilgrims didn't eat any New England lobsters, either. Reason: They mistook them for large insects.

MYTH: The Pilgrims held a similar feast every year.
THE TRUTH: There's no evidence that the Pilgrims celebrated again in 1622. They probably weren't in the mood - the harvest had been disappointing, and they were burdened with a new boatload of Pilgrims who had to be fed and housed through the winter.

Don't you wonder what else our teachers told us, that wasn't true?

ReThinking Youth Ministry part #1

For the last two years at the NYWC I have taught a class with my good friend Brock Morgan on rethinking youth ministry, some of you reading this blog may have attended it. I hope it was worth it! The class is available for download from the NYWC Download site. I would recommend the Atlanta 2007 version for the most comprehensive recording.

This is a quote that we use in the seminar from the book, The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager.

“Once we understand that the teenager—this weird, alienated, frightening yet enviable creature-is a figment of our collective imagination, the monstrous progeny of marketing and high school, all generations will benefit. Young people will be freer to define themselves as individuals, yet more closely tied to the families and communities of which they are a part.” 

This quote if true, forces us to answer the question, "Is youth ministry making the problems in youth culture worse?". Is all our "stuff" just growing the FRANKENSTEIN of youth culture created by marketing and high school? Are we as youth pastors buying into something that is just a figment of our collective imaginations and our students pay the price?

This quote haunts me. I don't believe we should stop doing youth ministry or get rid of youth pastors but I do believe if this is true we have to rethink how we are doing youth ministry. I have really spent the last five years wrestling with what is ministry to students really supposed to look like, in order to be most effective.

Would love to hear from you all on this.

mark

The Sky is Falling

This is very cool. probably would have scared me to death if I would have seen it live.

How True....

This is great, thanks to YSMarko.