Mark Ostreicher, National Youth Workers Convention – Youth Specialties – Pittsburgh – 11.3.08

I appreciate Mark Ostreicher from YS.  I really do. For many reasons but I don’t feel like listing them.  But I’m glad that he’s the president of YS.  And being president and hosting the YS event, I appreciate that he took the last session on Monday morning when so many attendees have already left. Most presidents of organizations take the best attended session to celebrate their position and their egos but in the tradition of Mike Yaconelli and Tic Long, this is a humble expression that I appreciate.

So there we are Monday morning and Marko was rewinding the events and themes of the conference and said that he felt that he should get rid of what he was planning to say.  I do that too.  Like when I have nothing, or when I know what I have is garbage, I too pull an Eli Manning and change the play at the line.  (Just kidding, Marko has too good of a mind to pull off lame speaker antics).

He told us that he thought he had the pinnacle of youth minisry with this “Back to School” Bash even that brought thousands of kids out.  He would walk around and ask people, “Did you see that?  God was truly working!”  Later on, he realied that in all the years of bumping into former students and reconnecting through facebook, none fo them ever said, “That event changed my life”.

That’s usually my argument against Christian t-shrts and bumper stickers but I appreciated Marko using it to describe events.  Because although I rarely thrown these types of events where I rent out an amusement park, I do take some pride in the events we do. 

He mentioned a couple of things that he felt were more worthwhile and they were things like the communion he enjoyed with his house church.  They had great meals together, they would enjoy the quietness together, share, pray, etc. 

It was void of great size but deep with community and mission.  Then he said, “Small is the value in the kingdom of God.”.   Here’s some more

it’s simple in its dna and structure

            beautiful and simple presence of Jesus moving into the world

            present, not distracted.

            it’s always changing, it cannot be packaged

            It’s fluid because the gospel is not an idea, it’s the person of Christ.

            Christ is the midst already present,            

            We can’t conjure it up with slight of hand and amazing programming. 

But we are the equipment.  (not the youth room etc.) bc what we have is Christ the hope of glory – this is the gospel that we bring to our kids. 

            The stuff that you thought you needed is a deterrent to youth ministry.

I love this idea for so many reasons.  One, it celebrates all that are in youth ministry.  Most conferences dangle the carrot of numbers and status in front of you forgeting the fact that many would routinely walk away from Jesus and he spent a great deal of his time in smaller numbers.  Second, while there is a place for signage, promotion and the pursuit of better resources, it is not in the place of the heart of the Gospel.  This is something we can all buy into and it’s nice to hear it from a guy like Marko.