Feature Focus I am so excited to share this interview with you all! Educators, parents, community members, pastors, youth pastors, and students should all tune in to this one. Before you return to work after Thanksgiving break, give a quick listen to this conversation with Lorie Goggin, Executive Director of Reset Mentoring in Williamson County, Texas, and take in some knowledge, inspiration, and practical resources. Be encouraged in the work you do with young people. All of our students are trying to figure out life in this complex world, and teenagers in the juvenile justice system are no different. They have hopes and dreams, too, but they also carry a lot of trauma and face significant challenges. Please, please…I sincerely ask for your feedback…after watching or listening to this episode with Lorie. GO TO THE INTERVIEW WITH LORIE GOGGIN From their website: Working exclusively with Williamson County Juvenile Services, Reset Mentoring is a non-profit organization that was created to help teens RESET their lives... Whatever that looks like for them! Over the past 10 years, we have found that one size fits all just doesn’t work. The teens we work with are as different as you and me. They have their God-given talents, dreams, and future and we have found that for them to succeed long-term we need to walk alongside them in their next best step. Lorie’s bio: Lorie is a mom to three grown children, Maggie, Mason and Sarah and a nana to her two sweet grandbabies who she absolutely adores, Frankie and Maxton! In addition to raising children of her own, Lorie is a published author and has worked with teens in both church and school settings. When she began volunteering inside the Williamson County Juvenile Justice Center in November of 2009, she never imagined that God would call her to begin a faith-based mentoring program to help youth at-risk in our community. However, over the last 14 years, she has used her degree in education plus her background in managing call centers and instructional design to help create programs and build teams to come around the youth once they have been released back into the community. Besides nana and mother, it has been her favorite role, and she hopes to continue building bridges and safety nets that will allow the teens that Reset Mentoring serves to continue to develop, learn and grow into their full potential. Keep It Simple Strategy If you are meeting with friends, in small groups, or just working on your own faith journey, then check out this week’s simple and reproducible practice tip that you can try anytime. Remember, you can always find many more FREE materials at Grace In Motion. Measuring Success - Sending Capacity Church reformer, Reggie McNeal, has talked about the need to change metrics for success when considering our faith and church paradigms. One key shift I want to focus on today is Seating Capacity vs. Sending Capacity. This admonition isn’t so much a specific action to take but a strategic mindset to hold. Conventional church structures are largely measured with one question: How many people are coming? In other words, seating capacity is a priority. The aim is to fill seats, or pews, and use that metric to determine effectiveness. If a church can say it is "drawing a crowd" and has the numbers to back it up, then it is viewed as successful by many standards. Over my time in pastoral ministry, I attended more than enough conferences, retreats, and seminars to know this is true. Church growth models and methods have become an industry unto themselves in our part of the world. Making a congregation larger, by whatever means necessary, has become the prime directive of many church leaders. I have been personally entrenched in this mindset before. To change the scorecard to what I believe is a much healthier metric, we attempt to measure our effectiveness by our sending capacity instead of our seating capacity. Now, rather than counting how many people are coming, the key indicator is how many people are GOING. The church is meant to be missional, on the move; a living, breathing organism. Therefore, the church is people - followers of Jesus - that are influencing the world in which they live. A critical shift, then, is to move from judging ourselves by how often we are taking people out of their natural contexts, such as work, home, school, the marketplace, etc. so that they can have "church" experiences; and move to judging ourselves by how effectively we are equipping one another to minister and serve IN their natural contexts, like at their job, in their marriage, on their campus, with their neighbor, and other arenas of life. Wouldn’t this be a more common sense, real-life approach? While many conventional churches work to avoid what are called "growth barriers" (those obstacles to certain levels of congregation size), simple churches are most effective when they are working to overcome "impact barriers" (obstacles that interfere with missional living in various real-life contexts). We want to address what it is that is preventing us from making an impact in our community and our ordinary, everyday lives. It is also important to realize that bigger is not always better, and 'mega' is not always the ideal. The truth is that Jesus usually had much more intimate interactions with people. The early churches that we know of in the New Testament met in homes mostly. There is a connection between 2 or 3 (or 12 or a household) and spiritual growth. In other words, my argument is that a group of 4-5 believers that are effectively serving in their world and living out their faith on mission is as effective and biblical (perhaps, more) than a church of 400-500 attendees that is doing little more than showing up for services. Recommended Resource As a follow-up to this week’s Feature Focus and my interview with Lorie Goggin, I want to be sure you all know how to find out more about RESET Mentoring and support, or connect with, this awesome ministry. Follow Reset on Facebook. Explore the Volunteer Opportunities with Reset. What’s Up? PRAYERS FOR EVERYDAY LIFE I share one of my “Prayers for Everyday Life” in the audio recording of this issue. Superhero Support You can use your superpowers to serve and bless others while supporting the work of CTYT. The quick and easy thing to do is SUBSCRIBE or SHARE. Thank you for reading Closer Than You Think. This post is public so feel free to share it. Here are other ideas… * Write a guest post. (Contact me in the comments about having your own writing featured in a future CTYT post.) * Join me for a podcast episode. (I’m always looking for people to interview and chat with.) * Leave feedback in the comments. * Follow CTYT on Instagram. * Follow Marc on Twitter. * Buy the book: YOU DON’T HAVE TO DO THAT * Like our Facebook page. HAPPY THANKSGIVING!!! HAPPY THANKSGIVING!!! Thank you for reading Closer Than You Think. This post is public so feel free to share it. This is a public episode. 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