Adventist Education

Below I'm going to post an article I just wrote for our church newsletter about the impact of Adventist Education in our church. I know that the system is hurting and in some cases has its issues. But I think you will see from the article the importance that having a both a strong youth program and a Christian school. I know that the three legged stool is an over used metaphor, but I really think that if the home, the church and the school work together we will do the best at keeping students involved in the church. We have a much better chance with these three working together than we do without it. Let me know what you think of the article and perhaps post your pros and cons of Adventist Education. How can we do better, how can we save the system, should we work to save the system?

"As we are faced with the financial crunches at MCA it is easy for us to ask whether having the school is worth it. I have had the benefit of observing the impact Adventist Education has had over the last 9 years, specifically through MCA. I can not speak for MCA students that attend other churches, but I have kept track of the students who are part of our youth ministry. I have long been curious about whether there is a correlation between church attendance and being enrolled at MCA or another Adventist school. Over the past several weeks I have gathered data about 120 students who are either currently High School aged or have graduated from our youth ministry. For the current students separated them into four groups: Public School, Other Christian School, MCA, Other SDA schools. Then I looked at their attendance at church, those students I see at church more than twice a month I marked as involved, less than twice a month: occasional and those I don’t see over a two month period: not involved. Currently there are 35 students in the High School Ministry. As far as our average we are at an all time low of students from the youth group who attend High School at 43%. The average of our alumni who attended MCA is 53%. As you can see both with the alumni and our current students about 60% of the students are actively involved. Here is where the rubber meets the road however. The question to ask is ‘does going to MCA increase the chance of a student being involved in Church?’ Here is what the numbers say 83% of the students who attend an Adventist school are involved in church and the other 17% are occasionally involved. Of the students who do not attend an Adventist school the numbers are different, 35% are involved 17% are occasionally involved and 48% are not involved.

The numbers are impressively stacked in MCA’s favor for our current students, but what about the 84 students who are alumni of our youth program. As you can see from the graphs 53% of our alumni graduated from MCA with a whopping 70% attending Adventist Education. What interested me was the difference in church involvement between those two groups. Historically has MCA been an influencer of future church attendance or involvement. I must admit that there are some assumptions with these numbers and that they are in no way 100% accurate, but I feel that the margin of error is within acceptable ranges. According to national polls of high school students, it is generally understood that 60% of students leave the church after graduating from high school. So that is a benchmark for us to look at. According to my data the students from our church defy those numbers, in our case 68% of our students who attend an Adventist school are still involved in church. This is contrasted with 44% of the students who did not attend Adventist high schools currently being involved in church! That is a big difference. Not only are we 28% above the national average with the kids that attend MCA the numbers for those who did not attend MCA are right around the national average. This tells me two things. First MCA is very important and is beneficial to the long term future of our church. Secondly this tells me that if students do not attend MCA we must to better at keeping them as part of the church. I hope as we consider the future of MCA and Adventist Education in the metro area we keep these numbers in mind, I am so grateful to the commitment of the Minnetonka church’s dedication to Adventist Education and to Youth Ministry. Our kids are important! Let’s keep fighting on their behalf and seeking God’s will for the future of our church."

Sabbath and Sports

A few weeks ago in our staff meeting at church we were discussing the impact of sports on church attendance. Over the years this is something that I have thought about a lot and over the course of this post I hope to explore (and journey together) some of the issues that are being risen by this recent phenomenon in the Adventist Church.

I have found myself on both sides of this issue. Growing up one of the greatest benefits of having an Adventist Education, (it still is a great benefit) is that I didn't have to choose between playing sports and the Sabbath. This choice was made less difficult because I never made a sports team :). My Senior year of high school I went to my first High School football game because a good friend of mine, Kyle, was playing. I remember how rebellious, cool, and guilty I felt as I went to the game and then went to a local pool hall afterwards to hang out with people we'd met at the game. I stayed up so late that it was difficult to make it to church the following day.

As I began youth ministry, the first church I pastored at had no kids in Adventist Education. All the kids attended public school. Dances, and sporting events were all on Friday night and so I had the difficult decision to make about whether I should attend games when invited by students. Part of me wanted to show up and support the kids and part of me wanted to show them my respect for the Sabbath. I remember reading about athletes and teams who had taken a stand and refused to play on Sabbath, and articles were written in the youth magazines lifting them up as heroes of the church for making difficult decisions.

Being a big fan myself, I also read about athletes like Deion Sanders and James Worthy who took a stand for their faith as Christians and were able to spread the gospel in their respective sports. As I thought about it, I was sad that there would never be an Adventist who could share our unique and valuable perspective on Jesus with the sports world. If we were to share the gospel to the entire world didn't that mean athletes? And if people did accept the Sabbath would that mean that they would no longer be able to use their greatest gift to minister to other athletes and use the stage of sport to spread the gospel and the blessings of Sabbath? I didn't have good answers for these questions, and perhaps I still don't. So I left the issue alone.

Recently my mind has returned to these issues. More and more, kids at our church, beginning as young as 5th grade are choosing sports over church and worship. Kids are joining a traveling team or they have tournaments that all take place over a whole weekend. Kids and parents are more and more often choosing sports over community worship. And I, as a pastor, am starting to get worried. Are we going to lose a generation of kids to because of sports. I am seeing that sports is the catalyst that begins the slippery slope of prioritizing things higher than corporate worship. I would love to see some posts by my non-Adventist friends on whether this is an issue in their youth groups as well.

So I want to start a conversation. I am more and more convinced that God is concerned about community and unity. Worship services are one of the church's greatest tools of creating these two things, and more and more families are missing out. Does this concern you or am I over reacting. I'm hoping that people will post on both sides of the issue.

p.s.
After seeing some of the posts I wanted to put up this chart that I have used to evaluate Sabbath in my life. I try to find the balance between Rest (stopping, taking a break) Blessed (what brings joy, happiness) and Holy (set apart for God) which is what God intended the Sabbath to be. I try each week to eat the whole pie, but sometimes more often than not, I fail. I think that for me the most difficult part of the pie is to find the holy aspect of the Sabbath. It is easy to stop our everyday activites and take a break from them, it is easy to be happy (Isa 58) but to find the holiness of God through the Sabbath can be the critical evaluator when we determine how to be fully enriched by the blessing of keeping the Sabbath.

Is it time to change our Outlook.

I'm a little frustrated with our eschatology. Why are we always doom and gloom? This morning at church during prayer I heard the lament again of how awful this world is and that things are going downhill so fast that Jesus better come quick to yank us out of this miserable existence. Now, I will freely admit that I have lived a relatively pain free and sheltered life. Sure I've had some bad things happen to me, but not to the extent of many people especially the millions of children who will die this week because of starvation. But for a while now I've been a little miffed by the view that this world for the lack of a better term, sucks.

I'm blogging about that this week because I am in the middle of reading a book titled "Younger Evangelicals", while I don't really consider myself and evangelical there are many things about the book that resonated with me. In a nutshell what the book said was that from 1950-1975 fundamentalist evangelicals held the view that since Jesus was coming pretty soon, (premillinialism, which Adventism including myself believes) we don't really have to worry about the problems of the world, i.e. the environment, the poor, social justice, because Jesus was going to come and judge everybody and we'd go to heaven and live wonderful blissful lives. I'm finding that this view (often promoted by modernistic evangelists) has gotten the Church (capital C) into a lot of trouble.

I remember being about 15 the first time I thought about Adventist believes in this vein. I had heard through Revelation Seminars or maybe at school that at the end of time those who worship on Sabbath would be persecuted and that Sunday worship laws would force us to choose between the Sabbath and our lives. (Theoretically this could all still happen, who knows) These events would mean that Jesus was about to come. My thinking at the time was why in the world are we paying all of these lawyers to protect the Sabbath, just let it go and Jesus will come sooner!

My postmodernism has taken over my thoughts in this area. I have travelled to several parts of the world. Interestingly enough people are pretty happy. In fact I'm pretty happy. I like living, I like growing in the shape and purpose that God intends for me. I like hearing the stories of peoples lives. I like technology, I like my family, I enjoy a good meal, playing games, sports, music. In spite of some of the crummy things that happen I dig the life that God has given me. So I just don't resonate with doom and gloom eschatalogical thinking. Why do we focus on the bad instead of leading people to the good?

I like to think that I'm looking forward to Jesus second coming as much as the next guy, but perhaps I also am looking forward to the journey of searching for Jesus in this life as well. What do you all think?

Day 2 -- Chillaxin' at the hospital

After getting a few hours of rest at home I'm back at the hospital this morning. What an awesome expeience being a dad again. Holly is just so wonderful, she wiggles and loves being held. Amazingly she has taken to feeding right away with no problems at all. Just a content, and very little, baby.
I thought that I'd go into why we chose the name Holly. First of all like Dylan we made some lists of names, (this time it was even easier because of a sweet application on Steph's ipod touch). Holly is cool for us in many ways, it derives from the term Holy which means set apart and special. Holly is also the birth flower for Dylan's birthmonth (Christmas time duh) so that was a nice tie into Dylan as well.
Marie is my mothers middle name so that ties Holly to my side of the family and Dylan is tied to Stephanies family by his middle name. Marie Carlson is also a great mom here in our church that has been very good to our family and has been present at both our kids birth so the middle name was easy to choose. Here is a video I took with my web cam this morning. Holly has so much hair compared to Dylan and it is very dark. We can't quite figure out who she looks like yet, but tell Stephanie that she looks like her :)

Welcome Holly Marie Ferguson

At 8:55 Holly Marie joined us. She weighted 6.2 and is 19 inches long. Everything went fine and we are super excited. She is a beautiful baby girl with wonderful dark hair and bluish grey. Pictures and video very soon.

We're getting on the schedule

Right now there is an anesthesiologist in the room getting Stephanie all set up, blood work, IV and we're going in for surgury between 7 and 7:30. I'm still trying to crank out a paper on the Chronicles of Narnia for my seminary class. I know it sounds rediculous. But this crazy girl is coming early.
I wonder if this is a sign of things to come, this young lady is going to have a mind of her own. I think I'm in trouble :)

Update: We are now scheduled for 8:30. Dr. Dedeker/Torres is coming in for the surgury. Steph is busy puddling on her chux. Dont' ask, the nurse just said it and it sounded funny. So my next post should be after the baby is born!

A long drive

So here we are in the hospital, we got a bunch of snow and of course Steph's water broke during rush hour on top of that. So it took about 40 mins to get here, but we're here and Steph is in her hospital gown and now she is getting hooked up to the monitors now. Anyways we'll keep you up to date with whats going on.

The Best Laid Plans

So.. about 15 minutes ago I'm working on a paper for my class and I see Stephanie rushing for the bathroom...It seems that her water just broke so we're heading to the hospital now. Not sure what is in store, but I'll keep people informed.

Only Child No More

In 25 hours Dylan will no longer be an only child...At 7:30 this morning I was summoned by banging on Dylan's bedroom door. The next 20 minutes were spent in bed playing, and snuggling with Dylan, when all of the sudden I realized that this was our last day alone with Dylan. Don't get me wrong, I'm excited, but it is going to be a different experience. As an only child myself, I don't know all that comes with siblingness, this is new territory. My sister-in-law flew in yesterday with her youngest, Jovie. One of the first things she said was how nice it was to have just one child for a couple of days. Robb, her husband said the same thing on Skype last night about Brody and how it was nice just for the moment to have just Brody at home. Of course this doesn't mean a parent loves any less, it just helps us refocus. So as we get ready for baby, today I plan on appreciating that special time with Dylan.

The Name Game

Today is Tuesday the 24th of January. If all goes as planned we should have a new addition to our family by about 9:30 A.M. CST on Friday the 27th. Of course we're prepared for surprises, but actually this pregnancy has been surprise free. (Please hear me knocking on wood right now.) So speaking of surprises, since we know the gender (female), and even the birthday (Feb. 27) we're leaving the name for the big surprise, and you'll hear it right here first. So I would suggest checking this blog often on Thursday and Friday as I try to chronicle the first 24 hours of baby right here.

That said things have been busy at home as I try to get caught up on some homework, it never seems to end. And we are trying to do all of our shopping for the next few weeks. With Dylan we told ourselves that we were not going to change our routine of life too much we'd still hang out with friends, go out to eat, etc. I think we did a pretty good job at that, but already the challenge of two kids under the age of two is hitting us. I have no idea how one parent can go get groceries with an infant and a toddler at the same time. I actually don't remember seeing anybody at a store in that situation? Perhaps because it is not possible?

Keep checking the blog, and Keep Jesus #1
Benji

Ecclesiology and Marketing

Just saw this video on the YS website, I'd love to hear your feedback :) Also to those of you who have subscribed to my blog thanks, I'm glad you have done so, but if possible I'd love it if you could post your responses back on the blog to generate some discussion :)





I add this because it is part of a paper I'm writing now on Ecclesiology. When I was talking to a friend of my about the identity of the Adventist church he said that he thought that the church had a weak ecclesiology. What do you think? What makes church ...church? How do we balance our idea of being the remnant people and the true church with any sort of ecumenicism? Or should we just think that we're the best and nobody else has "the truth."

A few months back as I was sitting in a meeting with a bunch of Adventist pastors somebody started throwing around the term truth like... truth was the Sabbath or belief in Ellen White. What would Ellen White have thought of that? I'm no EG White scholar but I think that she would have pointed to only one truth. Jesus Christ. Wasn't it Jesus that said that he is THE Truth? How do we balance and market (see above video) ourselves and our view point without the arrogance of being the only true religion? Perhaps that is what my friend meant by our having a weak ecclesiology.

Keeping Jesus #1
Benji

Not the Caddilac of Computers

So everybody complains about Vista and Microsoft...Let me tell you apple has it's share of issues as well. I bought Stephanie an refurb ipod touch which is a pretty beautiful machine. I was super excited to install some apps but when I hooked it up to itunes I had to pay $10 to install a new OS. Not cool at all, no where on the apple site was I warned about this, I also had lengthy discussions with people at the apple store before I purchaced the ipod asking about the differences between 1G and 2G machines and never was warned about this. I know, it's only $10 but I felt like I was being robbed.

Then on Sunday Stephanie's Macbook crashes. I make an appointment with the genisus at the apple store and they proceed to tell us that the hard drive is toast. All of the data is gone (Stephanie doesn't have an accompanist so we have recorded two versions of all of her choir songs on Garageband...it's all gone) Apple was good enought to do an out of warranty repair and replace the disk as well as upgrading us to leapard and ilife 08. It helped to ease the pain of losing a lot of data. I got the computer back in less than 24 hours however when setting up the computer this afternoon it crashed again! Same thing.

I'm glad (knock on wood) that I'm running my trusty HP. with beautiful windows Vista...I don't understand all of you haters :)

Benji
P.S. after this nerdy post I will hopefully be posting on a fun theological topic in the next day or so.

Sitting in Class at Seminary

Ok, so last week I promised myself that I would post to my blog. Mostly so that Stew couldn't make fun of me about not posting during Intensives. I had this great idea that I would post daily on my progress on my sermon and maybe get feedback that I could incorporate into my sermon. I will do that someday, but obviously it didn't happen last week.

This week I"m sitting in Systematic Theology, which despite me posting during a lecture is pretty interesting. (We are talking predestination right now, which Adventists have conveniently passed over and as far as I know don't discuss much.) This month has been very busy but last Sabbath took the cake, those of you in church know what I'm talking about. I am very much a notes preacher and I lost my notes between services, that was scary, but it went ok.

I posted some new pics of Dylan on Flickr and you need to check them out, I can't you how much Dylan is changing, it's so amazing to watch! Plus we're having a girl end of February/early March!

Hopfully more posts later one some interesting topics, i.e. life and theology
Benji

Renters vs. Owners

It is somewhat funny that I usually blog during some of my busiest times, when I should be doing other things. However, tonight is the Sabbath and I am enjoying just decompressing from a week of intensives at bethel. This weeks intensive was for my measurement based leadership course. Very interesting... I wonder if there are any of you that read the blog that may wonder if measurement and church should not go hand in hand? Here are my major take aways from the class so far...
We have just scraped the surface of stewardship culture in the church. The issues of time/talent/treasure is nice and helpful, but what we have done is created a culture of renters. Part of this goes back to our wonderful Catholic friends and the idea of a priesthood that we as protestants have never really gotten away from. However I think in the Adventist church, along with others who have a structure like ours where the church does not choose it's pastor, we have aided and abbeded in this renter culture.
Think about it...it is only recently that pastors even think of staying in a church more than 3-5 years. How can a pastor really be an owner of that churches vision to fulfill the Great Commission in a community when they are constantly thinking of their exit strategy and the congregation knows that what ever ideas a pastor pushes on them are going to change when the next guy comes anyways. This creates a culture of both renter pastors and renter congregations that are never allowed to have a long term strategy for reaching the lost in their community because of the revolving door of leadership.
So how do we fix it? I don't know about you but as I look at many of the challenges I have at my church many come down to this issue. It truly is an issue of stewardship. How do we get rid of a patriarchical top down system and replace it with one that is more empowering, one that creates a heart of service and one that has the customer (i.e. the people we want to see in our church) in mind.
Random thoughts post by
Benji
p.s. Couldn't post without adding a Dylan picture, this was taken at the Madison Zoo and this lioness had her eye on Dylan...it was actually a little disconcerting.
p.p.s. I finally broke down and got a facebook page, Stephanie is on Myspace, if you know us please check out our pages!

Dylan's One

So it's been a while since I blogged. There were a couple of times in the last few months where I actually started a post here. In fact, this week is so busy that I really shouldn't be on here now. But I wanted to let people know what's going on... My winter quarter started yesterday. Fall was a good quarter with some very intriguing classes, which paired along with a very fulfilling trip to Youth Specialites, I feel that some of the pieces of a puzzle that has been sitting on my table for a while is coming together. Of course the puzzle is far from complete but perhaps I have sorted out teh edges?

This was a wild Christmas, we spent time in Santa Cruz/Bakersfield/College Place and racked up about 7000 miles each in the air...Dylan and I got pretty sick, it was Dylans first illness so it was stressful and we made a few trips to the Dr. :) But he is on the mend now and walking around the house, pulling stuff off of shelves. He's picked up some cool words like "ut-oh" I think mommy taught him that one? And he is just a great blessing for us. I better go and do some of the reading/typing/studing/sermon prep/ that I have to do. Check out the flickr account for some pics of our holiday adventures.
Keeping Jesus #1
Benji

Schools starting againhttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif

A few of you want up dates on the life...It has been quite a while and I would encourage you to visit our flickr site to see what's up with us over the past few months. Of course most of you know that we had an awesome time in Wales and the UK. In fact right now I'm wearing the Manchester United jersey I got while I was over there! I'd love to see your comments on the photos! Also You can see what's up on stephs myspace account.
So steph started school again today, After hearing the woes that 4/5 boarding schools in Mid-America had decreased enrollement it was a little scary. We actually were a few students over budget with the good adventist number of 144 students! So we'll see how that all pans out but it's good news for MCA!
I'm staying busy, I had the pleasure of doing my first wedding for a student who used to be in youth group on Sunday! I had fun with that and now I'm spending this week with the students at the school and also getting ready for a sermon this Sabbath. School starts for me in a couple of weeks, I'm a little worried for this quarter because I'm really busy with work, but we'll see how that goes.
Also a fun new thing for me is coaching "varsity" volleyball. Our team is brand new and it's fun seeing dramatic improvement in the girls. We got schooled by the Deaf Academy here but I think that by Union Tournament we should be able to hold our own. Anyways thats an update on the Fergusons, if you have skype you can find me there often I'd love to video chat with all of you non-minnesotans and show off Dylan!

Benji
p.s. join my fantasy pickem league! get info how on my youth website/blog

Rock Climbing and some Vintage Dylan

Last week was the annual Rock Climbing Trip... Steph and Mindy were busy with taking caring of the babies while Rob and I, along with some Youth Group alumni did the rock climbing duties. We had a great time with everything, I made my second trip up to the top of spire 4 and all but one of the students made it up to the top of the easy, yet very exposed climb. Anyways Steph and Mindy were very busy during the week too, this is a photo of Dylan taken in Hill City, SD... The other photo is a characture taken at our city festival last week...Wales is only a few weeks away!

Benji

This is a video from campmeeting 07!

Ok so here is a video from campmeeting this year

My kid's a mule!

Well it's been a month since I last worked on this blog...I've been busy. Being a work at home dad isn't all it's cracked up to be. I'll do my best to fill you in. The most fun thing I did was to go over to Wales and help Ed do a weekend retreat for the Welsh/Scottish/Irish Missions. There was about 100 kids there and it was a blast! It's all about international speaking engagements. I'm looking forward to taking kids over there this summer it should be awesome.

Next two weeks I'm in intensives, we'll be out in Cali next weekend for Steph's 10 year at MBA, I get to be a trophy husband for a weekend! Should be fun.

I got guitar hero for my 360 the day it came out...it is very addicting and one of the best things about it is that stephanie likes to play too :) If you are ever interested in playing give me a call and come on over...If you have no idea what guitar hero is...well just come over :)

Tonight we went to Taco Bell for dinner. When I went up to get my order stephanie told me to get lots of hot sauce, our supply at home was getting low. So I grabbed a handful of the good stuff and we proceeded to eat our dinner with Dylan happily sitting on the table in his carseat watching us eat. When we were finished I got up to throw away our trash and turn back to the table just in time to see Stephanie putting all of the sauce packets in Dylan's carseat and covering it with his blanket, like we needed to smuggle out the sauce. I had to explain to stephanie that it wasn't good to make our kid into a "mule" at 3.5 months espeically if there's no money in it for us :)

Anyways that's our fun life. Last time we weighed Dylan about 2 weeks ago he was 14lbs. 2 oz! and he's about 23'' long! The Pic is of Dylan holding his passport, we just got it today so he can go to Wales with us this summer! (Notice the drool on the passport already)

Keeping Jesus #1
Benji

Tourney fever

well I've never really gotten into college basketball, but I decided to try my hand at making picks this year. here's the link to my brackets :) http://tournament.fantasysports.yahoo.com/men/723472/bracketoverview

I went way overboard with picking upsets.

I wrote a few weeks ago about dumb advertising...Has anybody seen the new McDonald's add? It makes McD's look very bad. There is this guy full of energy who gets into a car full of tired and slovenly people who can't function until they get their coffee and breakfast from McD's? The happy guy doesn't get any breakfast and in fact when they get to work he takes the stairs and everybody else looks at him like he's crazy! OK. so isn't advertising supposed to make you want to buy a product? I'd much rather be the happy healthy guy than the zombied out tired people...doesn't make sense...

I'm almost done with my classes for the quarter. Next quarter I take a Gospel's class and also another leadership class.

Dylan is doing great, next week is the big week where mommy goes back to teaching and daddy lugs Dylan around with him for the next 9 weeks...should be interesting, very interesting :)

Keeping Jesus #1
Benji