going to church with your kid, you know, for an hour, once a week, that's good. Doing a five, ten minute bible reading around the dinner table is good, but if somehow Jesus conversations are just fluent in your household, and any moment, you know, car drives waiting in the theatre line, sitting around, having their argument, if any of these moments can turn to a Jesus moment, you become more fluent in Christian ideas, values, perceptions. Hello everyone, welcome back to The Shock Is All. My name is Joel, and it's wonderful to have you along with us, and it's wonderful as always to have you man, he man-shirted man. Thank you. Tim, welcome. Thank you. Welcome back to the podcast. Have you ever been on leave? I have been. Yes. It took a couple of weeks off. Excellent. And I think you just ran it off with going to house conference, Youth Works house conference, is that right? Yes, I did, yes. I have a conference, I'm going to talk about this soon, but yes, finished off my time at Youth Works. And so I had my last day, actually, at Youth Works yesterday, so it was my last, it was the last day of house conference, my last day of work, and it also happened to be my birthday. Oh, did it? I didn't know. Happy birthday. Thank you. I'm going to talk about the he man shirt, which my son bought me. He saw it months ago in JB Hi-Fi, and he's like, "I need to get dad that shirt." He'd be a high-five. Yeah, apparently there's something retro, pop culture shirts, and... Yeah, it's a smart move. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you can get like kind of zing stuff as well, but JB Hi-Fi, getting into that mini pop culture. Zing. What's zing? Zing. It's a pop culture store. Come on, man. You've got to keep up with the times. Obviously, I'm not up with the times. Yeah, for the bottom level of Miranda, we can go up for a visit later. Sweet. Let's do that. Yeah. I just like... I'm just wearing my lemon shirt. It's like a culture. What happens on this podcast? You want to make life? What is it? When life gives you lemons, you've got to make lemonade? You've got to make them into a shirt. Yeah. Yeah. I just bought it. I shouldn't mean it. I just bought it. Wasn't it zing? You get some lemon essential oil to wear just with that shirt, and so people... People... You walk into the room, and then you feel in fresh and... That's quite a clever idea. Yeah. It's quite a clever idea for it to people. Would you like some? Yeah. Would you like some... Would you like to join me in my lemonade? Wow. That's pretty cool. Talking about cultural artifacts, what's really interesting is that two or three weeks ago, we talked about Cordana Russell was a Christian Canadian skateboarder at the Olympics, and he yelled, "Jesus is king when they introduced him," and so I was editing the episode that we talked about that, and then when I'd finished my Cordana Russell, who is he, and then went down to the YouTube rabbit hole, and I've got to tell you, skateboarding has overtaken my algorithm, because then I'm like, "I'm feeding it, because I'm watching all these skateboarding videos." Yeah. I used to be interested in skateboarding, I never skated, but I used to watch things like the X Games, and things like that on ESPN, because we had the earlier days of P television. You'd watch it, and I was at home on my own, and then I'd just put ESPN on and find lots of things, lots of random sports that I don't watch, but yeah, I've really reignited my interest in skateboarding by watching these videos that are, I mean, the street skaters that are around these days are just phenomenally skilled, but one of the things that I was going to point out is that there's the Wilmo magazine thrasher, skateboarding magazine thrasher, which has been around for forever, but they do this segment on YouTube where they put out like seven minute videos about, it's called My War, and they just focus on one skater trying to hit a spot, and trying to complete a certain trick on that spot, so there was an Australian guy who I think it was in Philadelphia, it was this random, it's like in the middle of the city, it's just this random staircase that goes down into like a section that sunk down further than the rest of this public square, and obviously no one goes there, like it's a terrible design, but he wanted it from the upper level grind down the stair rail and then Ollie off, and he took forever to get it, but they call it My War because it's like a place where they're trying to get this part, so it was a really interesting way to show that like how long skaters spend on trying to hit a certain spot and get a certain, the video footage and the photo, and maybe get on the front page of Thrasher, Skate Magazine as well, so it's been really fun to watch that. And that's really cool, like you know, often these skate videos, or you think of people like Dude Perfect and those kind of trick shot type videos, and they just, you know, all these things one after another, it's amazing, that's amazing, that's amazing, and what you never see or very rarely is the, you know, the 120 shots it took to get that one trick shot that it actually worked. I really like that idea of actually watching the process because it does show that these, you know, the results from this has actually taken time and effort and, you know, it wasn't just once off, I think that's really, that's good, like it's a good antidote to just watching a whole lot of tricks on skateboards or trick shots with a basketball, whatever it is, it kind of gives the impression that this is cool and easy, and it can become frustrating when it's like, oh I've tried that six times and it didn't work, I guess I'll give up now, it's like, don't know, these guys tried it 20 times, 30 times, 50 times to get it. Well they take the footage of like him, them constantly failing, and you disperse it with people that were there, and plus the skater that was doing it, so it's a really good way, I think they've done it in a really good way, but there was, there's a guy called Chris Jocelyn who's up there, I mean I don't really know much about street skateboarding I should say, but he was trying to do a trick off a stair set in Germany, and he couldn't land it, and so, and then he ended up landing on his ankle and injuring himself, so he couldn't do it anymore, he went back two years later, and then they have to like, apparently the security guards are on this loop around the area, and they'd come back and say, oh you're not allowed to skateboard, like they'd, at first I'm like, you're not a skateboarding here are you, because they set up cameras and stuff, like you're not a skateboarding here are you, like oh no no no, and they're like no it's not going to happen, nothing like that, and then, like they'd go around and then he'd try and hit the spot and then they're like no no it's, the security guards are coming back, so then he would just like sit and hide, for another 20 minutes, and then have to do it again, it's like a spy thriller, but yeah he had to keep doing that until he actually, but yeah, there was another guy, who's a, there's a famous Wallenberg place at San Francisco High School, and he did it four times, but apparently that just used to be able to access it, so there's earlier, played earlier times, earlier 360 flipped and stuff like that, but now they've put a fence there, so they have to get a ramp in, that they pick up from a factory, put it in a rented truck, drive it there, have to get it over the fence, assemble it properly, then so he can just roll in to get enough speed to actually do the gap. Yeah right. So it's, that's, all that stuff is like the struggle and the battle was why they caught in my war, it's just really fun to watch. I remember people can fact check the actual date, but it would have been late 90s I think, and my Bible study later at the time was a massive skateboarder, and so we would often spend time to like, as a group, I just kind of watching skateboard videos and those kind of things, and I'm pretty sure it was the first ever 360 ramp. Of the loop? Yeah so you come down, you do the full, you do the full loop and then come out of the other side, and so it may have been Tony Hawk about current. I think it is Tony Hawk and I think he does it on jackass. Oh right, I think. Okay yeah right, which would have, that'd be that right era of, you know, very late 90s early 2000s, but again like it was, it was lots and lots of build-up, like you're watching them do, and they construct the loop in part. So like first he's just trying to get down and then just up the wall, okay that's that sort of speed. I think they push the, like a mat. Yeah they've got people on the side because he then wants to do a number where he's trying to work out what velocity does he need to hit the up, and so there's heaps of times where you come up, reach the top, and then falls flat. So they've got people underneath who he comes by, they then rush in, and he falls down, and so they do in that a number of times, and yeah you've, again probably the same payoff as you get watching the war is, you see the first time he actually does it, and you kind of, you're there with that thing, so oh I did it, that's so cool. Well so many times they keep landing the trick, but then the skateboard comes out from underneath them, they like stick at a number of times and they still don't land it, but then some of these gaps that these guys are going, you know what, what do you think we can learn from, from what we're talking about today? The application? Persistence? I think persistence, yeah that's what I was thinking of with that, the idea of actually watching the hardship, and so actually spending time watching and saying no, this takes time, and I think that is a good discipline, and particularly in an era where you know efficiency and automation and things, you know, chat GPT, all the stuff we've talked about a few times about AI and just the very quick achievement that you can get from particular things without any real effort. It tricks you, to believe me it is, it is easy. Yeah that's right, yeah yeah. Why should I persist with this? It's hard, and I can get a dopamine level hit with cheap, you know, junk food type entertainment. Versus food as you read in that. Well yes, yeah that's the highly processed, and so, you know, highly processed entertainment, yeah, what's going to be better overall to watch a whole lot of Dude Perfect videos with trick shots, or to actually do a whole day where you're trying to get a particular trick shot yourself, and it's, you know, it's junk food versus slow food, so it's actually right now, it's going to be a lot more pleasurable in my brain, and forward to watch the trick shot and go oh that's really cool, and then switch off again and go do something else, but deep, meaningful, actually, formational benefit is going to have actually done it yourself, and so there's something about that formation takes time, and this is something, I shared this yesterday at the end of house conference, I had a few things that I wanted to sort of just pass on to people, and one of them was that the future is slow, and I said actually this is more of a prophetic plea rather than an actuality, because actually the future is fast, but I don't think more and more convinced that formation is not fast, and that actual formation, whether it's a spiritual formation, whether it be mental formation, whether it be academic formation, skill formation, whether it's skateboarding, or chefing, or your trade, or whatever it is, takes time, and as we move more and more into AI, instant gratification, quick junk food, dopamine hit, all of those kinds of things, I think we're going to become more and more allergic to slow formation, and that's going to be continually to be detrimental to us, as a society, as people, as humans, and as a spiritual level, as Christians, because we're not doing the slow work that God actually has designed us to be slower people. It's interesting, and you even think about the way that God formed the earth and looked at Genesis, yes, creating the earth in seven days is a crazy thing, like being able to do that, but there's a picture of slowness in that too, especially when he rests on the seventh day, there's a kind of, yeah, I can kind of see the parallels with that, you talked about house conference, but the reason that you said you were your last house conference is that you were coming on board to sort of our church full-time from next week, which is very exciting, I'm very excited about that, as I said at one of our council meetings, it's like, I was a bit frustrated they announced it, and I was a little bit frustrated like people weren't being more excited, because I think because they already knew about it, like, by having one of the most foremost children's ministry thinkers in Sydney guys joining us full-time that stuff, you know, you're fussy kind, but I was like, come on, this is great guys, tell us how you're feeling, like, I think you said to me it's been a bit sad to leave youth works, but also exciting to do this at the same time, you've had two weeks off to think about it too, what's been your overarching feelings, as you're about to start full-time, it's sort of all. Yeah, so for the last, I think it's been almost four years, no three years, that I've been doing both jobs, so I've been doing full-time youth works and one day a week, that's our revival, and I mean, that's a bit crazy, but it is, yeah, I'm making it work. And so, yeah, a number of months ago when when Stu and Lou first came to Rosie and I and said, look, we actually think we're at a place where we're ready to offer full-time, we want you to really seriously consider this, and I had to think through, okay, well, obviously that's going to mean giving up youth works and going all in with our revival, and there was this feeling of just being torn in two. I mean, I forced to make a decision between two worlds that I just really, really love. Yeah, really passionate about it. And so, yeah, it has been hard, it wasn't an easy decision in any way, it was hard to think through. I recognize there's so much I just love about the ministry of youth works, that I love about the role that I have at youth works, the people I'm able to influence and partner with and champion and see the things that they do and just be amazed at that, that I will miss, you know, and I've said, we've trying to have no sense of false humility. I genuinely believe that all the children's ministers that I meet with regularly are better children's ministers than I am. Like, they've got skills that I don't have, and I just love what they do, and I love championing them and raising them up and saying, hey, look at this person, look what they're doing, that's amazing. And I joked in the last couple of days, I said to someone, it's kind of like I've been on a 12 year research project to pick up all of these ideas. And so, you know, in one sense, I will be a much better practitioner going into this now than I was when I was a practitioner, a guy near 12 years ago. But at the same time, I also recognize that I've got a different way of being a children's minister than many of the people that I admire and I look at it and go, wow, it's amazing. Like, I can't do, you know, big upfront magic and puppets and, you know, like all the kind of the big show storytelling kind of stuff, which I just look at and I'm just amazed. Adam Joeloff is one of my colleagues at the moment. He is the foremost practitioner of upfront children's ministry in Sydney by a long way. I just love what he does. It's not my skill set. So, you know, there's things I want to pick up from him and I don't learn from him. And, you know, I should push myself more in those kinds of things. But all this long way of just, I just, in awe of people on the ground who are doing this, but part of that being ripped into was just, you know, I love all of that. And so, revival is home. And so, what won out at the end of the day and after lots of wrestling and prayer and conversations with people was actually not just, I love the kids of survival and the families of survival and the ability to go deep with that full time and just commit myself fully to what we're doing here and just to instill in the kids as best as I'm able, just a love and knowledge and obedience to King Jesus. Just, you know, I was like, yeah, I think this is a good time to do that. So, yeah, it has not been an easy decision, but there's a lot of sadness of what I'm now leaving behind, but there's so much joy in going ahead and just being stoked to do this full time, you know, and to do this community full time, which is really great. Can I ask you, I mean, that's a really lovely way that you've put that, I think. Can I ask you, what is the, I remember asking, I actually remember asking you, oh, I bet you got heapside. He's like, oh, too many to do in account. What are the some of the things that you're like really looking forward to working on now that you are full time, it's horrible. Yeah, there's a lot of things. And again, because I lecture in children's ministry and I advise and I coach in children's ministry, there's all these things that I know a good children's minister does, that I've not been able to do, or that I'm doing in in piecemeal. So, you know, leader recruitment and then leader training and on boarding the structure of the actual children's ministry time, the structure of curriculum, upfront versus small group time, you know, training of teenagers to be junior leaders, like all these things we are doing in part and they're kind of coming together and I've got lots of great coordinators and leaders that's our revival who, you know, step up and do things and do things really, really well. So, I mean, I think we're in a good place and also, I mean, one of the reasons I'm committed to sort of all being home is I'm fully committed to our theology and our principles in how we perceive of ministry and how we perceive of church and how we perceive of children's ministry in the context of that. And I look at our practice and I say, we are doing a good, but not yet great articulation of our principles and our theology. And I'm just really excited to be able to say, you know, to dig deep and do the things that we're already doing better, doing deeper, going, you know, more in depth with those elevated. So, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, yeah, so, I mean, in terms of big projects, I don't think there's really anything, I think at the moment, it stands out that really needs to radically change. Probably the biggest thing I'm thinking of is our weekend kids and how we structure that time. So, the number of things are kind of all feeding to each other, which, you know, will be at changing them all simultaneously so they feed off each other. So, one is the actual, how do we use the time of our, we've got a half hour of content teaching kind of time at each of our gatherings. So, how do you use that time to the best of our abilities? And part of that is the actual structure of minute by minute, what are you doing? Part of that is the actual structure of the environment. So, that makes a huge part, a huge difference in what are you expecting here because of where we sit, how we sit, how we in big groups, small group, how do you actually structure the physical space? And then the other bit is what's the right curriculum to build into that, to do that really well as well. So, I've got thoughts on how we should structure curriculum and space and schedule. So, they all kind of feed off each other in a way that really helps children dig deep into God's word, love God, question, doubt, wonder, experiment with who God is and, you know, put that all into practice through obedience. And so, that's one of the things that I'm kind of wanting to think through. And yeah, I've got, there's a curriculum in playing with a little bit, I kind of need to map it out and think about that as well. And then part of that as well is scope and sequence. So, that sort of a technical level is, it's kind of two approaches generally to how you structure children's ministry curriculum. So, one approach is you try and follow the sermon series and heaps of churches go down that line. And the big benefit of that is your whole family is learning the same content in the same weeks. And if you can then fuel good family discipleship and household conversations, whether it's just a car ride home or whether it's the next day around dinner or, you know, during the week, whatever it is, you can actually provide resources for the whole family to sit around the dinner table or wherever it is and just go to say, hey, we all looked at Jonah this week. We all looked at Solomon this week. We all looked at Jesus gospel this week. You know, what did you learn? Yeah, what was kids like? What was youth like? What was adult service like? Because we all studied the same passage. So, that's a massive benefit of there. But there, I'm also just increasingly where there's a number of deficits there. And the other kind of the other approach is to think, no, no, we want to think that what sort of a child are we graduating from, from preschool into school? What do they know? What are the foundations and the pillars of the faith and the Bible stories? And who are we graduating from year six into high school? What do they know and not don't know? And, you know, how we structured a curriculum around that? And so, you know, it might be appropriate for a adult sermon series to spend 10 weeks on the book of Job. But to spend 10 weeks on the book of Job in kids ministry, I mean, first it would be incredibly difficult. But also, it may not be the best use of the limited number of terms that you actually have with kids. So, if you've got four terms for seven years, K to six, what's four times seven? That's 28? Yeah, 28, yeah. So, you've got you've got 28 terms for a child who's there every week, you know, is 10 weeks on Job the best use of one of those 28 terms. Maybe not. And also, so, you know, adult congregations, you might come to the book of Genesis once every, what, six years, eight years, 10 years. And if you do, if you did the book of Genesis once every 10 years in your adult service, you could have a whole generation of kids go through kids ministry without ever looking at Genesis. I mean, well, that's a massive deficit because Genesis is foundational. And so, I think there is a disconnect on the needs of formation for children and for adults. That means actually just simply matching the preaching program may not be the most helpful. So, that's one of the big pictures in my mind is to think through. Now, actually, let's build from the ground up what is the scope and sequence? What's the curriculum that we need in order to have kids that are graduating from kids ministry knowing the pillars of the faith, knowing the biblical story, knowing the foundations, knowing how to pray, knowing some wrote prayers. Like, you know, I'm thinking I'd love them to every child who, you know, leaves children's ministry, you know, is the Lord's Prayer, the Apostles' Creed, a confession, you know, maybe some catechism. Like, I'm just trying to think through all those kinds of things. So, that's kind of the biggest project in my mind. And it's because I'll have now much more time to think about these rather than just kind of one day a week in the midst of another very full, full-time job at YouthWorks. I'll actually have freed up to think about those kinds of things. That's kind of the biggest project. No, it sounds really exciting. I look forward to seeing the impact that you'll have on our children's ministry when you've got the time to actually apply to it. So, as you leave YouthWorks, though, you said that you had nine kind of got asked as a kind of like a leaving... Is your record as a podcast? Or you also did at a house conference as well? So both. So, yeah. So, my colleague, Al, he said, "Look, we'd love to honor you and your time at YouthWorks by having you have a little bit of a segment at house conference to think about what are the things that you have learned over 12 years? What are the things you want to leave us with? What are the things you want to kind of communicate for us to continue thinking about as a community of youth and children's ministers?" And so, I just kind of jotted down sort of nine words. And then a number of weeks ago, Al and I sat down and we recorded an hour-long conversation on those nine words. That'll come out on the Effective Ministry Podcast next Wednesday, which I think is the same day as this drop. Same day as the shock absorber. There you go. So, if you finish with the shock absorber, jump across to the Effective Ministry Podcast and listen to the full conversation with Al and I on these nine points. And then I very briefly sort of touched on them yesterday at house conference as well. And I knew I wouldn't have time for all nine. So, I put all nine into a slido and people got to vote on which ones they wanted me to talk about. And then I just started on top and worked my way down until Al said, "All right, time's up, Tim, you're talking too long." What was the most voted for? Do you want to give us the witness? Okay. What did we talk about? This is the top three maybe. I can't remember what I'm talking about now. Well, it's interesting as you like look that up, it's kind of similar to what we talked about with Stu last week of a question that he was asked about the pitfalls of ministry too. I think it kind of flows into what you was the nine points that you were talking about there. Did you manage to find your most up voted? Well, I'll tell you what the nine were first. It's three categories of three. So, the future is three categories. The future is slow, the future is pagan, and the future is intergenerational. Then child faith is three things, child faith is real, child faith is holistic, child faith is ad hoc. And then three things that the church is, the church is communal, essential, and participatory. So, they were the three things. So, that was the nine, three groups of three. The one that got voted up the most was that child faith is ad hoc. So, we talked a little bit about, so this comes out of some research done in the states by Christian Smith and Amy Ademchik. And they found that of all of the practices that a parent can do with a child in terms of handing down faith of some statistical significance is regular church attendance. Of some statistical significance is devotions, like formalized, Bible time formalized prayer. So, they're all good things to do and we want to affirm that. What was interesting was the most statistically significant thing that parents can do with children is to have ad hoc conversations. They were looking at a number of different religious groups, but from a Christian perspective, it's those conversations that didn't start out being a Jesus conversation but kind of end up being a Jesus conversation? Yeah, I had one of those this week. Yeah, right. So, what was the one you had? It might be too much detail, but somehow we got to talking about how my daughter, my a-year-old daughter was like, "Oh, yeah, when I'm living with my boyfriend." So, we had a discussion about how that might not be the best as a Christian. It might not be the best move. Right. And then led to eventually, well, when you're looking at maybe dating someone, it would be a good idea to maybe think about, "Are they a Christian?" And there was plenty involved in that afterwards, but yeah. I think you're right. I think there's a big part of that is that children, and you speak to this more, but children are processing their lives in the way and the way things are happening, that if you can bring the Bible as a reference, something that Stu talked about with church, but also as a family, use the Bibles of reference to go, "What does the Bible say?" And this is why we think that, and this is why we would say this is not the best idea. Yes. Yeah, yeah. And that's a really good example because there's your daughter just hearing language in TV, lunchtime conversations in the playground. Observing family members is probably a big thing, but yeah. Yep. So there's all this is going on. And so intuitively growing up and just thinking, you know, living with your boyfriend is a normal thing. And then, so, and again, if that's the normalized culture, then there's a shim, well, that's the same. And this is, this reply comes into another point that came a little bit further down, but that the future is pagan. And what I mean by that is that the future is, Christians, we will be a minority. We've talked about this a lot on the podcast, but we are a minority and we need to raise our kids to know that they're a minority and so that therefore be able to articulate the difference, which is what you were doing with your daughter was, no, no, there is, there is a cultural norm of what it means to be a good Australian. And then there is what a good Christian is. And as we've talked about before, there used to be high degrees of overlap between being a good Australian, being a good Christian. And so you go back a couple of generations, the idea of living with a partner who was not married was a little bit scandalous, a bit of the out on the outer, it would be a bit unusual to be a lot of shame associated. A lot of shame associated. Because there was a higher degree of overlap, because it was assumed, if you're living together, you're married. I remember for the first time reading a newspaper article when I was on a late high school, my dad always used to buy the Sunday paper and you get passed around the family and you all flick through it. And I remember reading de facto in the paper, and I'm just like, what is that word meant? I don't understand. And then dad having this conversation with me probably exactly the same as you with your daughter of, oh, de facto relate, we don't even use that term anymore because it's just so old-fashioned. But because the morality assumed people living together was married, you had to have a term that was not married to describe people who were living together that weren't married. And de facto was the term that you use. And so I remember that very clearly. But as the culture and a Christianity become further and further apart, this idea that you have these ad hoc conversations that instill the values of Christianity as articulated and distinct from culture is really important. This is probably more than the future is pagan point. But it's these kinds of conversations. So this is the ad hoc stuff. And so what was really curious about this for research is that it struck the researchers as interesting that this would come out as so significantly significant. And they wonder why. And they've got a number of hypotheses as why this might be that a conversation about just your playground conversation can turn into a Jesus conversation, a conversation just in the car about noticing things can turn into a Jesus conversation. You know, you go into the, I mean, I can't remember what the story was. We were going to walk into, we went to see Systract last weekend for my birthday present family outing adventure. And we're in the line like scanning our tickets. And somehow we had this conversation about it turned into what the sermon was about this weekend about David and Beth Sheba and the baby who died. And yet there was later one, there'd be another baby from Bathsheba who was Solomon, the king who'd be, you know, all these kinds of things were happening. And so we're in the line getting out to get scared. And we're having this little sermon moment of, yeah, it's not amazing that of all the tragedy and the evil that happens in the David Bathsheba moment, that God still turns that around in a way that actually continues to bless his people through Solomon, at least for half his reign, for he goes off the rails. But you know, it's those kinds of things like how do you, but Jesus just comes in all the time. And so the two theories that the research has had was one is that faith language and Jesus language, you know, Christian setting is almost like learning a second language. And the more you immerse yourself in a second language, the more fluent you become in it. So if you go to, you know, if you like learning French in high school, and you do half an hour twice a week, and that's all you ever do, you know, you'll get moderately at best, or that French. Yeah, you sort of say hello, you can order a coffee and ask where the museum is or something like, yeah, it's like, and that's kind of your loss. But if you're, if you're going, if you're doing French regularly, you're doing lots of French homework, you're listening to French, you're watching TVs, you know, in French, you're listening to French music, you're paying attention to French culture, you every five minutes, you've, you know, instead of flicking through Facebook, you flick, you open up Duolingo and you do a couple exercises as you wait in the line for the shop. Like, if you're just immersing yourself all the time in French, you're going to become a lot more fluent in it. And so they use that as an analogy to say, well, those who go in a church with your kid, you know, for an hour once a week, I mean, it's good. Doing a five, 10 minute Bible reading around the dinner table is good. But if somehow Jesus conversations are just fluent in your household, and any moment, you know, car drives waiting in the theater line, sitting around, having the, if any of these moments can turn to a Jesus moment, you become more fluent in Christian ideas, values, perceptions. And the other thing they say is, kids will pick up what their parents are interested in. And so the easiest example that comes to my mind is, you know, you've got those families who are very into a particular sports team, or a particular sport. And so, you know, our mutual friend, Chris, it's no surprise that all of his daughters are massive pan with panthers fans, because he lives and breather like he is fanatical about pan with panthers. And so, of course, his daughters know all about the pan with panthers. Because from day dot, the first item of clothing they ever had was a baby sized parent of panthers jersey. And he's taking them to games well before they even know, have a clue what's going on. So they, he's, it oozes out of him. It's hard to have a conversation with Chris that doesn't in some way turn into a pan with panther conversation. And so the analogy is again, if Jesus is so meaningful to the parents that it infuses all of their life, for any moment, Jesus conversation could spill out of the parents lives. The kids are picking up on, well, of course, Jesus is significant, not just on Sunday mornings or Saturday nights, not just at dinner times, not just prayers at bedtime, but all of those things are really key. But actually any moment, Jesus can is always relevant. I think they're really fun moments. I really love it when the kids bring that up and you're like, oh, yeah, let's talk about it. And, but the best part of it, in my opinion, is when they are engaged and contributing ideas themselves, which is mean, obviously they're learning, they have this underlying knowledge of the Bible and Jesus, what Jesus has done, but then to pass that out and to actually talk about what that means. I think there's, there's, you can see them going, yeah, yeah, yeah, like, that's really fun. I really enjoy that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Do we want to move on to the second one? The second up voted one was that the church is participatory. And what, particularly from a context of youth and children's ministry leaders, what I want to communicate was that for our young people, our youth and our children, that we want to build a sense of belonging. We know that sociologically speaking, a deep sense of belonging helps hold onto faith longer. Now, as we're talking about data and sociology and psychology and all those kinds of things, we know that there's a Holy Spirit that operates at a level above that. But I'm also convinced that we can see how the Holy Spirit normally works. And so, we can lean into these things because it's how the Holy Spirit helps us to do all these things. So sometimes we can draw those two apart too much, but anyway, that's a bit of a caveat. The helping children to have a participating role. And so, if we can help our children, our young people to have, to participate in church and to participate in the life of faith, to bring conversation from school into the conversation about Jesus conversation, like all these things, but the church is participatory and we want children to have ownership over that. So, I look at our church and I think of the learners are a great example. Quinn was on the chip lunch last week. When I talked to Ross a number of years ago about what are the ways that he's seeing himself pass on faith to his family as he thinks about what does it mean to disciple in the home? Is it one of the key things for him has been that when they're on Saturday night dinner, the kids all come and they all do tasks to prep for dinner. You know, appropriate to their age. So they can, they can grate, they can cut, they can open packets of 400 bowls, they can, whatever it kind of is. And I was like, yeah, that's right, because they're learning from a very young age, I participate in church, I have a role. It's important, it's significant for me. If I wasn't here, there would be a lack. So even very young children can be built into service things so that they feel that this community is my community. I have a role here. And again, that builds that sense of belonging, that church is not just something that they come to and consume, but it's something they genuinely contribute to. And part of that contribution builds into that sense of, this is, these are my people, this is my group. I belong here, I have a role, I'm valued, I'm cared for, I'm necessary, I'm essential. Sociologists talk about contributive purpose. And so that's what you're doing, you're giving them a contributive purpose. So there's something that I can genuinely engage in that makes them feel that this is mine. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I mean, and I think that within that example of doing it, you're doing it together as a family for your church family, I think is a really, really impactful thing for children as well. Absolutely. Heaps of sense. Yeah. Which I was on house conference would have been good to hear all this stuff. Third one. The third one we've already talked about was actually the idea that the future is slow. So that was the next one that we got to talk about. And one of the things I really wanted to push them on was that your own formation as well as the young people you lead, their formation requires slowness. And riffing off a couple of things that we've talked about in the past about, you know, we talked about digital kind of stuff and we talked about here like watching the guy doing virtual racing, that compared to actual racing. And then like, so there's kind of these actual racing, then there's the guy doing virtual racing, and then there's us watching the guy do virtual racing, like each of these gets a step removed from actually what makes you a good car racer and the formation of that. And the other thing that I kind of ripped off was it was an article from usually quite a good Chinese ministry website. But it was like seven things, seven ways that chat chip PT and other generative AI programs can boost the efficiency of your youth ministry. And it had things like, you know, you could ask it to scaffold your small group discussion questions and provide little outlines for talks and those kinds of things. And I was reading this and it just, it made me really sad because I'm like, oh, like all the things that have been missed by using chat chip PT and part of it is we, like we've talked about, efficiency doesn't mean good. Just because something's more efficient doesn't actually make it better. And I think again, coming back to the, we talked about earlier in this today, the formation is slow and it takes time. And, you know, asking chat chip ET to write your seven discussion questions. Yeah, at the moment, the technology is probably going to give you bad discussion questions to starters. But even if it was excellent and it gave you seven excellent discussion questions, doesn't mean that that's a good way of preparing discussion questions. And because what's important as I lead young people is not having seven excellent discussion questions, what matters is that I'm being formed more and more in the image of Jesus. And I'm helping them to be formed more and more in the image of Jesus. And that's not going to happen by having chat chip ET write my questions for me. It's going to happen through me wrestling with the text, sitting with it, wondering what are the big ideas here, what are the things that are kind of coming out of here. And even if my discussion questions are not as good as chat chip ETs, they actually are good if we see it through the view of formation, not through the view of efficiency of communication. And the other interesting thing, which kind of occurred to me as I was reading this, and I shared this yesterday, was asking chat chip ET to shape up your sermon outline or write your discussion questions and then lead a discussion on that actually doesn't require you to be a Christian. So any small group leader who's moderately competent could type any prompt. Give me seven discussion questions on a book out of the Quran. And then I could lead a discussion on that or on a business management book or organic chemistry. Give me a summary of the top three books of organic chemistry and seven discussion questions. And any moderately good small group leader could read that and lead a competent discussion. At no point in there, am I being formed as an organic chemist? And I just think that's significant. If I can run a small group in a youth group without being a deeper Christian or being a Christian at all, there's something wrong with that process. And so that was one of the I just wanted to say to them be slow, don't search for efficiency, because there is value in slowness and there is value in taking time. And we need to fight against this idea that the future is fast, it will be fast. And I think this is where Christians need to have a prophetic witness of saying, no, we're going to reject efficiency, we're going to reject fastness, not for being not for the sake of being inefficient, but there's no value in intentionally being inefficient. But there is value in being contemplative and being slow and being formational. And that is not going to work with efficiency a lot of the time. Yeah, that's interesting, isn't it? And how, yeah, what's God's perspective on that rather than what the world's perspective on that is? Because like as you said before, not all progress is good progress. Yeah, yeah. It depends on your metric, right? Like what's the metric that you're going for? And if the metric is good discussion questions, then chat JBT is going to be what you use. Yep. If the metric is, I am formed more like Jesus so that I can form young people to be more like Jesus, then five minutes before youth group starts telling, give me seven questions on Romans 8 into chat JBT, go printing that out, go brilliant, I've prepared, is not going to achieve the metric. You haven't prepared. The thing is, yeah, the thing when I've used chat JBT is more I was using something, someone asked for a character reference. I didn't ask to write a character reference. I gave it points and I said, I want to just formalize this more. So that's where I see it. Like I'm not saying you should use that for community group, like any kind of Bible studies, but that's where I see it. I don't think it is the starting point. Well, this is going to be our wrestle and we're right at the forefront of this. There are great things that can be achieved and not all efficiency is necessarily bad, but again, you've got to keep thinking about what's the metric. And so, yeah, it might be that. I threw into chat JBT over weeks ago, write me a resignation letter for a job that I love. And it spat out all this stuff. And I was like, yeah, and I use that to then think about the, yeah, for HR purposes, I had to submit a formalism, even though everyone knew I was leaving. Yeah. And so, there was stuff that I used for that. I was like, oh, yeah, that's a good phrase. I was like, nup, that's rubbish, nup, wouldn't use that. Like, yeah, I didn't just, you know, and now find all in replace with youth works. Like, yeah, that would have been insincere for one thing. But it did provide prompts for me in a way that, you know, five years ago, maybe 10 years ago, I could have searched Google, give me, yeah, search for resignation letters. And seeing 10 adapted that to myself, thought it through, you know, before then, it wouldn't, you know, 15, 20 years ago would have been, talk to all your friends and all your people were like, how do you resign from a job? Like, what do you have to ride on the line? Such AI tools like that make me think of, it's more of a, it is a tool. It's not the replacement. And I think that what you're trying to say is that discernment is actually really important. So you can't be discerning for discussion questions on Romans one, if you don't know it yourself, I think that's where you're getting is that you can't, if this is something that it's just picked up randomly, and you haven't read something where you're being transformed by the word, and the Holy Spirit's working in you, that if you, like, if you didn't have that and you ask the question, like you're saying, you don't have to be a Christian. And then you ask that question. It could fit out things that really are not aligned with what the Bible says. So you need to have the discernment to go, that's probably not the best question to ask. Probably not. I can change this question. It can provide ideas, maybe, but I don't think, yeah, I don't think you should be using it as your primary tool to do things like even sermons, things like that, because it's not, AI isn't, isn't a Christian. It's just downloading a ton of information that it picks up from somewhere across the internet and putting it together. And it's also more than that. We need to remember that it is being trained on particular things, and it will generate from what it's been trained along. I don't know what it's been asked. Yeah. So it's not that it's, it doesn't come to us as a blank slate, like it doesn't come to us value less. It comes with it inherently, built into what it has been trained for. And I had a conversation this week, I was chatting with someone, yeah, after my session, we were just laughing about different AI, different things. And he said, yeah, he's played around with some AI staff about, you know, outlines for this, just to kind of see what would happen. And he said, actually, nearly always, it came out with application points and questions that made whatever Bible passage he inputted, highlight more about American values than about Christian formation. And he goes, well, here we go. Like it's, it is reflecting back what it's been trained on, which is probably a lot of American stuff, which is infused with American values, just as much as it is Christian and conflating the two and not quite sure how to distinguish between them. And that's the kind of thing. And you see, you know, read reports about things like facial recognition, technology, there was a big furor with, was it Twitter? It might not have been. There was some organization that, yeah, there's big furor about a few years ago, because the facial recognition technology was very good at picking up distinctions in Anglo faces and really bad at picking up distinctions in African American faces. And so, yeah, obviously the African American community, yeah, there's a lot of like, well, what's going on here? And probably part of the answer was, well, they had trained with a whole lot of Anglo faces and not trained as much with African American faces, which made, it made more mistakes with that. And so again, like just this perception that Google chat GBT, any of these technologies is value less. Because remember, that's, that's not the case. That's a fallacy. It will always spit back to us things that it has been trained on, which again, like, you know, the future is pagan. If the future is more and more, not Christian, then we should expect that the answers we get from Google and chat GBT and, you know, all those kinds of things will be less Christian, more and more increasingly in the future. It's very true. It's just so interesting. It's like, it's very skewed towards American values, which is like, so it started in San Francisco, you know, the Silicon Valley and all that kind thing. But so obviously more Americans have taken up than anywhere else. And then it's learned those values that have come through from a lot of Americans asking your questions. That's really interesting. And some of you've got to be aware of. That's where that discernment thing is really important. And also what it's reading in order to, because it's been trained on data. That's how these, they were. And so there is, there's just more content that is American Christian than there is anything else. But, you know, you can imagine if you had an entire chat bot that was only trained on Southeast Asian Christian literature, yeah, it's going to give you a very different perspective. If it had been only trained on 20th century African Christian data, it would give you different things, which, and is, none are better than the other necessarily. It's just noticing that it can only speak back to you what it knows and what it's been trained on. And so we just need to remember that there is value in there. There are values, not in that, that we just need to be conscious of that it's going to have biases. It's going to speed out particular things, which is why searching for that for efficiency is not going to give us the value of formation that we might otherwise think it will. Yep. Well, I think that's a good moment to finish on. But really excited for you to be joining Zora by full time. I thought those points that you made though were really, really, really valid as well. So I think hopefully the YouthWorks people are blessed with your thoughts and ideas. And I'm sure you'll be interacting with those guys regularly and well. Absolutely. I know that you've formed a lot of relationships there, so that's really awesome. But thank you. It's been seen fun. We've talked about a lot of things today. Yeah. And if you have any thoughts or queries, if you're listening, thank you, thank you, by the way, for listening. But if you want to chuck them in an email to me, Joel@shrocklesover.com.au, or as we might, you might have seen, may or may not seen on one of our previous episodes where we call it just the Christian version of everyone else, the comments section has really heated up with a lot of atheist questioning what we're talking about as Christians. Fantastic. If you do want to get interacting and pushes up in the algorithm, chuck us a comment or a like, and we really appreciate that. And I will respond to you as well. So that would be awesome. But even if you're listening on your favorite podcast app, thank you so much. We'll be back next week. And as always, we finish with a one way. One way, one way. [Music]
