Today, I would like to witness to you about my Encounter Ministries project. If you have been listening for a while, you know I am in a two-year program with the Encounter School of Ministry. Year 2 students need to complete a ministry group project before they can graduate. Today I want to explain why we picked the project we picked. I want to explain what our project is, what went well, and what didn't go as well. We spent a lot of time planning this event, and it was worth every moment of it. God was there throughout the project and I want to take a few minutes today to witness about His great glory! Music:"Adding the Sun" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Today, I would like to witness to you about my Encounter Ministries project. If you have been listening for a while, you know I am in a two-year program with the Encounter School of Ministry. Year 2 students need to complete a ministry group project before they can graduate. I travel to class each week with 4 other ladies from my prayer group, so we thought it would be best to do our project together since we are always together anyway. We also had another student from class join us who lives close to where we met.
When we first got together to discuss what we wanted to do, we all had the same thing on our hearts. We wanted to do something to help teenagers. We had several people in our prayer group who were personally touched by teen suicides last summer. I think there were 6 people in a two-week period. We also have been getting a lot of words of prophecy at prayer group over the last year or two that are urging us to pray for the children of the world. With these two things combined, we knew we needed to do something to help teenagers have a renewal of their minds. We knew we needed to come up with some way to help them see how loved they are by the Lord.
This world is a rough place, and it is even harder for teens. With social media today, their bullies have easy access to them 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It used to be we might be bullied on the bus, at school, or right after school. However, if they wanted to call us up and bully us, they needed to go through our parents, and they weren’t likely to do that. Now, they can call, text, or send a message on social media any time of day.
Then they also have to deal with the need to compare themselves with everyone they see on social media. Social media portrays the best of the best. Very few people put the real stuff on social media. They take 20 photos and post the best one. They act like they just rolled out of bed and snapped a photo when, in reality, that was probably the 10th photo, and it had a filter to put makeup on and get the lighting correct. No one looks unhappy, and everyone’s life is perfect. I know people who seem to be knocking their lives out of the ballpark on social, and then when I am talking to them, they are sad, lonely, and really struggling.
I get it. No one wants to air their dirty laundry on social media for the world to see. However, making it seem like all is perfect, when it is the opposite, really messes with people's perception of how the world should be. Imagine if you are a teen and everyone in your social media feed, everyone in your life seems so happy all the time. How do you reconcile that with your life? How does it make you feel to know that your life is not perfect? You are not happy all the time. You don’t roll out of bed looking like a model. You don’t have it all figured out. Then you start to think, what is wrong with me? Why is everyone else so happy, and I am so messed up?
I know adults who struggle with comparison on social media. They see everyone posting about their kids, their spouses, their jobs, and their vacations, and they wonder why they don’t have those things. They wonder why they always feel like they are 5 steps behind and the rest of the world seems to have life all figured out. If it affects adults, imagine how much more it affects teens.
So, we knew we had to do something. We just weren’t sure what. We prayed about it and talked about it, and we decided to come up with a program to talk about their identity in Christ. We wanted to answer this question for them. Who does God say that I am? We talked with the confirmation formation team, and they were happy to have us come in and talk with the confirmation candidates and their sponsors. It all worked out pretty perfectly, actually. They were looking for a candidate/sponsor event, and we were looking for teens to present to.
We typed up a proposal for our teacher of how we wanted to run the event. We decided we would first let the kids know how ridiculously loved by God they are. Then we would talk about the lies that we all come to believe about ourselves. Lies like I am not a good mom. I am a loser. I am ugly. No one likes me. No one understands me. I can’t do anything right. I am not a good Catholic. God doesn’t love me. God will never forgive me. We all tell ourselves lies like this, and we thought it was important to show the kids that these are not true. The world doesn’t get to tell us the truth about who we are. Our identity comes from Christ.
Next, we decided we would have the students and their sponsors write these lies down on paper and nail them to the cross. We wanted them to know they don’t have to carry these lies with them. They can hand them over to Jesus, and then they can replace these lies with the truth of who God says they are. After they do this, we talk about the truth of their identity. We talk about where their true identity comes from and how they can learn more about their true identity. We go on to teach the teens and their sponsors how to listen to the voice of the Lord. We cover the various ways we might hear the Lord talking to us. In our original plan for the project, we would then move on to having the students ask the Lord to share with them what truths he wanted to replace the lies with.
However, when we turned our proposal into our teacher, he felt we should add an element of prophecy to the evening. At first, we weren’t sure how this would go over. We thought the confirmation formation team leaders, the teens, and their sponsors would all be uncomfortable with this. Sometimes people can just hear the word prophecy and get very uncomfortable. We weren’t sure how it would go over, but we really wanted to graduate from this program, so if our teacher said we needed to add prophecy, then we needed to add prophecy. I don’t think we really saw the wisdom in it at the time. I think we were doing it because we had to, but we were unsure how it would turn out.
Now that we have done the project once, we can see the wisdom in it. I think what our teacher saw, which we didn’t necessarily see at the time, was that words alone don’t change hearts. He knew the teens needed a personal encounter with the Lord. He knew they needed to hear directly from the Lord how much He loved them. We can teach them all day long, but until they have that personal encounter, it is still just words.
We decided that after we explained what prophecy was, we would form three teams of two, and the six of us running the project would speak words of prophecy over each student. We started with a moment of silence so we could ask the Lord what He wanted to say to each student, and then we spoke His words out loud to the student. We asked the sponsor to come up and stand behind the student to witness the words the Lord wanted to speak over their candidate. After we spoke the words of prophecy over them, we asked them to go back to their seat and reflect on what they had just heard. We asked them to write down anything that really spoke to them or touched their heart. The confirmation formation team had printed off a paper that asked the sponsor and their candidate to write down he thing that touched them the most about what was said.
After this, we moved on to talking about declarations and how important it is to take the truths they just learned about themselves and turn them into declarations that they can say every day. We gave them some examples of declarations of who God says they are and the Bible scriptures to go along with them. We had the sponsor and the candidate pick up to five declarations that would help them live into their true identity and then share it with one another. We thought declaring them out loud to their sponsor would help make an impact, and also having the sponsors say them to their candidates could be powerful.
However, after doing this event for the first time, we realized that we didn’t go into enough detail on why declarations are so important. We also think that although the examples we gave them were straight out of the Bible, we might need to write them in a way they can relate to more. From the feedback, we learned they didn’t really resonate with them like we thought they would. We will revamp this part for our next presentation.
We closed by recapping all we had gone over that night and reminding them of the key things to remember. We then played a song that went very well with digging all the roots of our lies up and replacing them with the truth. The song is called Look What You’ve Done To Me by Tasha Layton. That is one thing I didn’t mention earlier. All throughout the night, we had current, upbeat songs that went along with the various sections of the talk. We figured instead of just hearing our voices all night; they could hear the voices of some younger people singing about the things we were talking about. The last thing we did was ask for feedback on the evening and to see if anyone would be willing to tell us what they liked or didn’t like about the night. We had 13 students and their sponsors there that night.
The feedback we got was that they loved the music. They loved the songs that we had chosen and the message each song had. What they liked the most, though, was the part about the words of the prophecy. They really liked getting to come up and hear what the Lord wanted to say to them. Even the sponsors loved being able to hear the Lord say such great things about their candidate. One woman said she knew all those things to be true about her niece, but she knew her niece didn’t know they were true. So, it was nice to get to hear someone else tell her niece such nice things. Then someone else said they loved nailing the lies to the cross. The paper they used to write the lies on was red, and this candidate said it felt great to nail them to the cross. She said it felt like we were giving Satan a piece of his own medicine.
God was in every step of this project. He was there from the conception of the idea through the planning process, and we presented it all throughout the night. The whole time we were planning it, God kept reassuring us that it would touch hearts, and we believe it did. Not just the teens’ hearts but those of the sponsors as well. We are so honored that the Lord chose us for this project. We are honored that he chose us to take this class. We are honored that He put the six of us together and put this project in our hearts. We all listened to each other and worked well together to create an amazing event. Thank you, Lord, we love you! Thank you for all the hearts you intend to touch with this presentation. Thank you for showing up and speaking to the candidates through us.