As part of our Lenten observations this year, each week (including Easter) a teen is teaching an object lesson to the church. These teens are the recipient of years of children’s sermons, particularly at Advent, so I thought I would create a little holy tension in them by proposing they teach the church family in a way they were recipients of when they were younger.

The volunteer the first week was a new member to our group and not the recipient of those children’s sermons. But he volunteered to do the first week, much to my surprise. He experienced lots of holy tension as he set the stage for the following weeks as well as being new to the church family. What would inspire the “new kid” to volunteer for this project at all–and for the first week? I thanked his parents because their impact was obvious. Yet still what drew the “new kid” to this challenge?

For the second week, a longtime teen in our church volunteered. He too was nervous to do this as he’s on the shy side. Still he willingly volunteered. The holy tension only grew in him as his spot in the Sunday morning lineup got bumped as our worship band went in another Holy Spirit-led direction. He waited through song after song after prayer after song for his time to teach. Yet when he finally had his turn, he wowed the church family with his depth of teaching and a personality that few have seen. This was quite a memorable day for Randy, which became more memorable by experiencing the amount of holy tension that he did.

My definition of holy tension is nerves, often created due to a challenge, that create a spiritual marker in a teen’s life as a memory when reliance on God was needed and God showed Himself faithful. Holy tension is found in favorite Bible stories–maybe this is why they are favorite Bible stories. When the friends of the lame man saw that the house Jesus was in was full, their love compelled them to the rooftop as an access to Jesus. They experienced holy tension as they opened up that roof and lowered their friend. When Ananias was told to find Saul, he experienced holy tension. Wasn’t this the same guy who wanted to kill all Christians, thus himself? Yet God had spoken and he had to go, nerves and all. When Peter got out of the boat to walk on water, he had holy tension and then a great memory. For those few moments, he actually walked on water. If he hadn’t moved on that tension, he never would have experienced something so memorable. Randy has had many memories from his 17 years in our church yet his Lent teaching will be one of the stronger ones he retains as he experienced a lot of holy tension that day. And to this I say, amen.

A commonplace for holy tension is on a mission trip. When that teen has been asked to dig a latrine hole and the boys in the group didn’t really attempt but she did and dug out most of it (true story), holy tension was there and this is a strong memory for her. When a teen is asked to lead worship for a youth meeting, holy tension is created. It is when that holy tension is no longer recognized in that worship leader that you have an ego problem with that leader.

Another commonplace for holy tension is at altar calls or times of commitment. If a teen just needs to lift his/her eyes to make a commitment, not a lot of tension is created. But if something more is asked of him/her to make this commitment, holy tension is created–memorable holy tension. The danger here as we’ve all seen too often is when that holy tension changes into manipulation. When you are the one planning, plan the right holy tension for those commitments.

To simplify, here are three reasons why you should provide times of holy tension:

1. To create an awareness that God is alive and actively working in their lives.
2. To provide opportunities that shows that God is faithful.
3. To provide memories which will be spiritual markers.

Truth is holy tension generally happens by either Holy Spirit-led opportunities or when a challenge has been purposely planned. The Holy Spirit-led opportunities are ones I’m continually grateful for. They are also random. For me personally (and maybe you), I have to continually work on my Type-A-personality-driven heart to not miss them. As for planning the challenges, this is something I do purposely plan at my church and something I challenge you to plan. Here are some ideas to help you plan this way:

1. Live in your holy tension and let it be known. This is not something just for teens. Recognize the times in your life when you experience holy tension and then share your stories. More importantly, share your current stories. Our personal holy tension stories from our teen years have already made their way into many of our teaching moments. Also share your current stories.
2. Ask good questions often—those questions that make you go hmmm. Jesus did this I believe hoping to create that holy tension in his listeners.
3. Expound on teachable moments. Those are the Holy Spirit-led opportunities. When you see one, highlight the holy tension.
4. Create challenges for your teens to experience holy tension. If possible, personalize these challenges as often as you can.
5. Demystify failure. Failure is a part of holy tension–recognize it as so. Failure does produce tension. With some insight and guidance, that tension can turn into holy tension. The danger is to minimize the failure and miss the teachable moment.

John Ortberg, teaching pastor at Menlo Park Presbyterian Church, formerly of Willow Creek, had this to say about the importance of demystifying failure: “Teach that failure is essential to learning. And it’s not the same as competence. I read a study involving a pottery class. They divided students into two groups. One group would get A’s by making one really good pot. The other one would get A’s by making 50 pots, no matter what they looked like. Guess what? The students in the 50-pot group made the best pots! They’d make one and it would be no good. And they’d make another one, get a little better. They’d make another one, get a little better. They just kept learning how to make better pots.

“The one-pot group put all this pressure on themselves over one pot, but they never learned how to make a pot well because they didn’t fail enough.” (Leadership Journal, January 1, 2004) (Side note: How much do your overachieving-and-stressed-out teens need to receive this message?)

Take a moment to remember the memories of what has happened in your last year of youth ministry. Do you see now in hindsight these times of holy tension for individual teens or for your entire group? Do you see times that were Holy Spirit-led and just happened? Also do you see times where you purposely planned holy tension? Holy tension is a great tool in the spiritual formation of teens. Now that it is identified, continue on.

I’ve heard other ministers describe youth ministries as “orphaning structures” because youth graduate from youth programs without being connected to the church family. Why do teens disappear after graduation? It is not because the church has a weak college and career program. It is because the now young adult’s only connection to the church, the youth ministry, has been outgrown and that connection was never really connected to the church–other than through the church budget.

After involving parents in your youth ministry, involve as many other members of your congregation as you can. They don’t have to be at the weekly youth meetings. It may be just once a year or even once overall. I literally spend most of my time in preparations to set a long list of adults up to interact with the teens at my church. When they do volunteer I make sure they are not abandoned. And for all of those who have never volunteered, I have set them up to effectively interact with the teens and I doubt they even know it.This gives us an ironic job description. The youth worker really spends a great deal of time working with adults when his/her job title is the youth. From experience I can tell you that this does work well.

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Shut off excess electric stuff.  75% of all the electricity consumed in the home is standby power used to keep electronics running when those TVs, DVRs, computers, monitors and stereos are “off.” The average desktop computer, not including the monitor, consumes from 60 to 250 watts a day. Compared with a machine left on 24/7, a computer that is in use four hours a day and turned off the rest of the time would save you about $70 a year. (U.S. Department of Energy, Time.com, 2007)

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A paraclete is someone who walks alongside someone.  We’ve got our cleats on to walk alongside you.

Creating memories and experiences for your teens is one of the bottom-line goals for youth ministry.  It is certainly what we at Wild Frontier have learned over our twenty years of searching and questioning.  Experiencing is also the number one task in Faith Shaping and is at the core of spiritual formation.

Experiencing just so happens to use our senses and frankly, the more the senses are used the better.  Science is proving that the more senses are involved in the learning process, the greater the experience and the greater the memory that is formed.  Since providing memorable experiences is such a large part of youth ministry, I want to encourage you to purposely try to incorporate as many of the fives senses as possible into all that you plan.

You know this to be true whether or not you have knowingly put senses and learning together.  A youth pastor, Ray Ko, sent me an idea he has used.  Instead of teaching on Matthew 9:35-38 to develop a strategic plan for outreach ministry, he took his youth group to the neighborhood coffee shop.  After observing for a while, he gave his group guided questions such as:  Observe the people around your table. How many of them are male and female?  Describe them–clothing, education, etc.  What is your impression about their conversation?  Can you figure out their needs through their conversation?  Because all five senses were involved with this, don’t you think the experience was caught by the teens?   This is what our Location Lessons download is all about.

Another fact is some teens prefer and actually learn better from auditory or visual or hands-on learning styles. Those with learning disabilities will also benefit from this multi-sense approach to whatever you do in your youth ministry program.  (Don’t hate that word program.)

Can you guess right now which one of our five senses is the strongest memory-provoker?  Hopefully you guessed smell because that would be correct.  Yet I doubt that was your guess.  How often do you intentionally incorporate smell into your programming?  Honestly, it is rare for me to do it and is still not easy now that I’m learning and brainstorming about it.

The sense we most often go to is sight.  We do this with PowerPoint or a video or the actual Word of God.  We do this because we know that this does help the retention of our teaching.  However in Googling this topic I learned that “even though nearly 100 percent of visual information can be retained over short periods of time, this drops to 50 percent within 3 months.  Olfactory (smell) information, on the other hand, averages 80 percent recall after a brief time–and stays at 80 percent over at least a year. (McAleer, 1985.p.71)” (ThinkQuest.org)  From these findings it becomes easy to see why Scent Marketing is popular.  When you walk into a certain store, you may notice a certain cologne smell wafting through the place.  The idea is to associate that smell with those clothes so you buy both.  This idea was also used in a teen pregnancy prevention campaign.  The smell of dirty diapers was put on a scratch-n-sniff and distributed to teen boys.  This has proven to be somewhat effective in early survey results.  (Salon.com, January 27, 2010)This challenges me to incorporate smell as much as possible.  But how do you do that in youth ministry?

One simple way is to incorporate a smell into your youth room.  Hopefully it is not dirty socks smell!  Designate a smell whether through candles, plug-ins, incense, etc., and consistently keep it wafting–consistently for years.  When you walk into a public school, does that smell immediately remind you of your school days?  This is what you are going for in your youth room.  It is such a smell that they will always associate to a safe place where they learned more about their faith.  A smell that when they smell it at age 30, it will bring a smile to their face as they remember what they learned associated to that smell.  Unlike that public school smell, this will hopefully bring back happy thoughts.

Taste is another strong sense.  For example, think of your favorite home-cooked meal from your childhood.  When you taste that food as an adult, does it bring back some memories?  Or do you have unpleasant taste memories such as when you ate something just before you had the stomach flu and that item became your toilet content.  Just the smallest taste of that food the next time can make you nauseous.  Taste and smell are closely related. If you’ve ever had a cold during Thanksgiving dinner then you know that this great taste experience is lessened when you can’t smell it.  I’ve recently challenged you to incorporate the church kitchen into your youth ministry plans.  This is all about using this taste sense.

Another sense that is easy for us to incorporate is hearing. Teachers have incorporated hearing into teaching methods for years such as by encouraging students to read aloud or say vocabulary words aloud.  This helps improve the memory of such words for that upcoming vocab quiz and hopefully throughout life.  Historically Black churches have also long incorporated this in their preaching methods by having the congregation repeat back a certain phrase from the sermon over and over again.

Lastly there is the sense of touch.  The skin contains more than 4 million sensory receptors–mostly concentrated in the fingers, tongue, and lips–that gathers information related to touch that gets sent to the brain for processing and reaction which then becomes memories.  For example, holding a 9-inch nail becomes much more memorable than simply hearing how that nail pierced Jesus’ skin.

As you may be surmising, incorporating the five senses into your programming is a bit of work, especially for some of the senses.  Some youth workers will spend a great amount of time and labor on an edited video used for one week’s lesson which provides a visual and audio memory when in that same amount of time maybe a simpler video could be used while adding another sense or two with it which would actually make the lesson even more experiential and memorable.  I’m hoping to encourage you to simply discipline yourself to process your plans through all five of the senses and see what you can add to enhance the memories.

To help here are some ideas you can use:

Write Your Story (uses all five senses)
Ask your teens to write a short autobiographical story about the summer mission trip. But instead of the traditional event reporting, challenge them to incorporate all five senses into their telling of the story.   Some of your mission trip experiences come equipped with strong smells associated to them!  Be thankful for those strong smells now.  Having your teens write down such memories will help solidify those.

The Thread of Habits (sight, touch)
This is originally a “children’s message” but the point is still powerful and useful.  The only supplies you will need are a spool of thread and a pair of scissors.

Find a volunteer.  Wrap the thread once around the arms and body of the volunteer.  Ask the volunteer to break the thread.  It will be easy to do.  Wrap the thread around 3 times.  Have the volunteer attempt to break it.  It will be more difficult.  Continue upping the wraparounds until the volunteer is no longer able to break free.  Using your volunteer as an example, transition to how we easily get entangled in our sins and cannot get out.  Ask the group some pointed questions such as “Does anyone set out to develop bad habits on purpose?”  Keep your volunteer tied up during this because he/she will have great insight to add to the discussion.
After a good discussion, use the scissors to set the volunteer free.  Teach how our best efforts are not enough to stop our bad habits but God is able to set us free.

Candles in the World (sight, touch, taste)
Before your meeting, purchase large birthday candles and a large plain-frosted sheet cake.  For the message ask:  Who has been a light in your life?  Who has shared with you a better understanding of God?
In response to the message invite everyone to celebrate the candles in their lives by having them light one candle in honor of that one person and placing it into the cake.  When the candles are all on the cake, turn the lights off and notice how much light all the candles give off together.  Point out how you may feel like a little light in the big world but if we are all such lights for other people like the ones the candles represent, we all can be this bright.
Then eat the cake!

Hungry for God (sight, smell, taste)
A George Foreman grill or other tabletop grill works great for this. Use Matthew 5:6 and talk about being hungry and thirsty for the things of God. As you are doing this, start cooking steaks on the grill in front of everyone.  Make the steaks as fragrant as possible.  Keep teaching without mentioning the grilling steaks. As the smell grows and mouths water and stomachs growl, discuss the same kind of desire and yearning for things that please God.  For closing, give everyone a bite of the savory steak.

Crucifixion Cross (all five senses)
For a Good Friday service or another cross time, pass out a 9-inch nail for everyone to hold.  As they are silently pondering that nail going through Jesus’ feet, have a person out-of-sight hit a nail with that echoing thud into the cross or piece of wood.  While this is happening have another person or two drop red rose petals along the aisle every time that nail is hit.  This will give the appearance of drops of blood after hearing the heavy hammering.
In the story of the crucifixion there is reference to a mixture of pain killer and vinegar.  Something else effective is having the strong sour smell of vinegar waft through the room.  It is tough to smell but the crucifixion is tough to stomach already.

I could re-list the numerous studies here of how important teens believe their parents are but I won’t here. We did over here . Just know that parents really are number one and your youth ministry needs to reflect that if you truly want to help teens. We believe this fact so much that we created an entire website of practical resources over at Church FamilyBasedYouthMinsitry.org or cfbym.org.

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“Rather than shrinking our vision, the text (Bible) should become a pair of eyes with which we are able to see even more. There’s a great big world out there with quantum physics, and architecture, and economic theory, and the thread count of clothing, and the fact that refrigerators in Europe are smaller—all of these seemingly random events and occurrences and happenings are all connected and help us see how this really is God’s world.”