Self-Care Covenant

Do you have a personal self-care covenant? Optimal health includes mind, body, and spiritual health. I am of the opinion that we need a personal health covenant to help us achieve the optimum level health that we desire.

1. Vacation

2. Physical Activity -

3. Sleep

4. Mental/emotional health: stress

5. Spiritual health

For each of these, you ask the following questions:

• What? When? How often? Where?
• Benefits of this behavior?
• Barriers of this behavior?
• Action step(s) to deal with these barriers?
• Supports that will help me be accountable?

Think about these things....and remember....

we must have VIM

Vision -- what is the end goal and what does that look like?

Intention -- have you made a decision to live a different life? Have you enacted the will to make for a better life?

Means -- the ways to achieve the goal. i.e. exercise, nutrition, etc.

Young Adults and the Church

Bishop William Willimon is a very prolific writer and, in my opinion, a keen thinker of how to be a faithful follower of Jesus in the 21st Century. I really liked what he had to say about reaching young adults today!

At Chapel Hill, we are trying to figure out how to be more intentional with the 18-30 age group.
We have many from this age group in worship each week. Our challenge is...what do we do to nurture and grow this group.

Here's Bishop Willimon....

The Church and the Conversion of Emerging Adults

One of our Conference priorities is to reach a new generation of Christians. Our focus is upon the 18-30 age group, those who are being called “emerging adults.” If we are to reach this age group—the age group that we have sadly neglected and therefore find absence from our churches—we are going to have to understand them. Fortunately, a number of new books are helpful in that regard.

A major defining characteristic of this age group is their postponement of marriage. In just a couple of decades the average age for women to marry moved from 20-25 years old, and then the average age rose from 22 to 27 years old. Interestingly, this change in marriage began in 1970—about the same year that our church started losing membership and we began losing touch with the next generation.

Studies of the emerging generation seem to agree that the ages of 18-30, that is the threshold of adulthood, has become more complex, disjointed and confusing than in past decades. In his book Emerging Adulthood, Jeffrey J. Arnett (Oxford University Press, 2004) notes that young adults today put a high premium on finding their identity in an uncertain world. They are impressed with economic and political instability and live their lives accordingly. They focus much more on the self and less upon groups, and they tend to be overwhelmed by their sense of possibilities.

This summer I also read James L. Heft’s Passing on the Faith: Transforming Traditions for the Next Generation of Jews, Christians, and Muslims (Fordam University Press, 2006). Adults, who grew up in the church retain very little of what the church taught them, says Heft. Our churches have not passed on the faith to our children. (The chances that someone who grew up in the United Methodist Church will still be United Methodist by age 30 are something like 1-6. For Episcopalians, Presbyterians and many others, the rate of attrition is even worse.) Jeffrey Arnett agrees with Heft’s gloomy analysis of those who happen to have grown up in the church. Arnett says, “The most interesting and surprising feature of emerging adults’ religious beliefs is how little relationship there is between the religious training they received throughout childhood and the religious beliefs they hold at the time they reach emerging adulthood….” A recent survey showed that today’s young adults attend church less, pray less, are less lik ely to believe in authority of the Bible, more likely to identify themselves as non-religious, and tend to be extremely suspicious of institutions and organized religion.

Not too long ago the church could count on a return to church by young adults when they had their first children. That appears not to be a pattern for today’s young adults. Because they are postponing marriage, the church can expect at least a 20 year gap between young adults leaving the church and returning. In her book, Generation Me: Why Today’s Young American’s are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled, and More Miserable than Ever Before, Janet Twenge(Free Press, 2006) depicts this generation of young adults as extraordinarily self-absorbed and narcissistic. Twenge thinks that we parents made a mistake in fostering in our children an aura of self-esteem, but did not give them realistic assessments of how challenging the adult world would be.
Today’s young adults are documented as having a great love of God, but less commitment to a particular religious tradition. When it comes to religion many of them are “dabblers and deferrers.” I believe that this is not only one of the most important challenges facing the church with this age group, but also one of our most difficult challenges as United Methodists.

Fortunately, we Wesleyans believe in conversion. We need to know more about what young adults need to be converted from and to. We also must set higher priorities on reaching today’s young adults. Young Christians are not a priority for us until every pastor spends as much time with this generation as with older generations, until each congregation shows in its staff, its budget, and its energies that it is really taking seriously our mandate to reach this generation for Christ. With God’s help, we can.
William H. Willimon

What is your image of God?

I am convinced that the "bottom line" for one's spirituality is....what is your image of God? How do you view God?

According to a 2006 Baylor University survey, Americans tend to have one of our four images of God.

1. An authoritarian God angry at us for our sins.

2. A benevolent God who primarily forgives.

3. A critical God who views us disapprovingly but nevertheless does not intervene

4. A distant God who "launched the world" but is "detached from and uninvolved in daily events."

Our view of God determines just about everyting. i.e. our politics, our behavior, our disposition, our attitudes, our theology, even our religion!

Which of the most do you most readily identify with? Why? How did you get to where you are?

If you need to work on your image of God, I recommend Good Goats by Dennis and Matthew Linn and Sheila Fabricant. It is a great beginning to healing your image of God.