The Greg Stier Youth ministry Podcast
episode 26 | July 2023
Leading With A Bold Vision Featuring Jurie Kriel
How can we cast a bold vision that multiplies disciples?
Jurie is the CEO and Founder of an organization called NXT Move, which emerged from his frustration with the churchās inaction on the next generation leaving. NXT Move has formulated a vision to reverse this trend by working together globally. Their motto is āNot On Our Watch.ā They emphasize mobilizing students to reach their peers and restore the true cost of Christianity. Their Gospel Advancing philosophy aims to go beyond traditional strategies and make a significant impact.
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
0:00:00.0 Jurie Kriel: Whether you are a youth leader or you are a volunteer youth leader, or that you’re the youth pastor of the largest church in the country, the fact is, if you don’t know where you’re going, you might take people on a walk, but you won’t lead them anywhere. So you’ve got to figure out what is it that you wanna change in this world, and you’ve got to start formulating a picture of that preferred future to start living towards it.
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0:00:21.3 Greg Stier: Welcome to the Greg Stier Youth Ministry podcast. I believe in the power of the gospel and the potential of teenagers. I believe that the best way to get our teens to grow is to get them to go. I encourage you to subscribe to the podcast, rate it, review it, tell your friends about it, get it out on social media, because we want every teen everywhere to hear the gospel from a friend. Today, I’m super excited about our guests, Jurie Kriel. Jurie is currently part of the senior leadership of Shoreline Church in Austin, Texas, and leads NXT Move, which is tasked with gathering Christian leaders to turn around the negative trajectory of Christianity in the next generation.
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0:01:02.2 GS: Jurie sees duplication and siloed thinking as the greatest obstruction to the fulfillment of the Great Commission. He’ll explain what all that means in just a few minutes. And he believes that we need to work together to address these issues, and that’s what he does in his role as Director of Collaboration with the Lausanne Movement in Texas. He previously served as pastor for preaching at Hill Country Bible Church, and also planted a church in Urban Corps of Austin. In South Africa, he was a senior pastor with Doxa Deo, and co-founded the Timothy Ministry Training Seminary, which continues to train leaders that are actively involved in ministry around the world.
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0:01:41.9 GS: Jurie has preached and facilitated strategic change as a leadership consultant in 36 US states, 48 countries on every inhabited continent. Jurie and Karen have been joyfully married for 23 years and are blessed with two boys, Joshua and Ethan. And I just wanna tell you this, Jurie is my friend and I love this guy ’cause he’s passionate about the gospel of Jesus Christ, and he is perfect to talk about our subject today, the fifth value of a gospel advancing ministry, Bold Vision. So Jurie, thank you so much for being a part of the podcast today.
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0:02:19.9 JK: Thanks, Greg. I haven’t had my full resume read like that for a long time. I feel old right now. [laughter]
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0:02:30.7 GS: You’re not old, but you’ve done a lot in your short time on this earth. NXT Move is only a few years old.
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0:02:36.9 JK: That’s true.
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0:02:37.2 GS: So tell us a little bit about NXT Move and the Bold Vision, and how it all began.
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0:02:41.1 JK: Well, I mean, since we’re talking about Bold Vision, the NXT Move was kind of, I think every vision in some way, shape or form gets birthed out of frustration. So I think the frustration for me was really just being tired of everybody talking about the next generation leaving the church and no one doing something about it. And realizing that, sure, this is bigger than us, sure, this is greater than us, but that’s exactly why, that’s exactly why we need to do something about it. So we formulated a vision, we started a dream. We started thinking, what could it look like if we took this negative trajectory of people leaving the church? And we turned it around to reaching the next generation.
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0:03:22.5 JK: So, God hasn’t lost a generation yet, and he is not about to start losing one now. So, clearly it’s in his heart for us to do something about it. So we started building relationships and making connections around the world and getting the best and the brightest ministries likely to share to duplicate their efforts and just for us to work together on turning it around.
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0:03:49.4 GS: Yeah, talk a little bit about that. Not duplicating our efforts. What do you mean by that? Redundancy in ministry?
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0:03:58.4 JK: It’s an interesting thing, Greg. It was a couple of years ago when I got to lead this think tank in Silicon Valley, and I’m always worried when somebody asks me to facilitate a think tank, because when they call it a think tank, I know I’m not gonna be the… I’m typically not the smartest guy in the room, but I know I’d probably be the dumbest guy in the room, and this was truly the case. So they had all these executives from Facebook, and executives from Google, and executives from all these different entities together. They put them in a room and they start having conversations about how do we fulfill the Great Commission by the year 2050? So the whole thing is, what’s standing in our way from finishing the Great Commission?
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0:04:38.1 JK: After two days of meeting, it comes down to one single thing. It’s not a lack of resource, it’s not a lack of connection. It’s not a lack of the ability to translate into every language. All these things that used to be these issues to fulfilling the Great Commission weren’t in place anymore. The only thing lacking was the fact that everybody was doing it, but they were doing it alone and on their own rather than together. So what was lacking was the synergy, and what was killing it, what was hindering it was the duplication and the siloed thinking of different organizations. So, in my opinion, it’s the greatest hindrance to our generation reaching the next generation or fulfilling the Great Commission. It’s just overcoming this thing of silos.
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0:05:29.2 GS: Yeah, and working together to really leverage our strengths. It’s been really fun to be a part of NXT Move. And when we met, man, I don’t even know, about eight months ago. Wasn’t all that long ago?
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0:05:42.8 JK: No, it’s got to be longer than that. I wouldn’t be this fulfilled and happy if I’ve only known you for eight months, huh?
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0:05:49.8 GS: Maybe a year ago. But I remember us talking about it and part of that, obviously, vision is to mobilize students for the gospel of Christ. And how do we leverage our strengths to work together? Now, the typical listener of this podcast is a youth leader. Probably a volunteer youth leader or part-time, so they’re already doing a lot of stuff. Why is it important that not just global leaders, but youth leaders in a community, really get a Bold Vision for their community, for their city?
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0:06:26.9 JK: I think that’s a great question. The bottom line is, there’s a difference between living life without a vision and living life with a vision. If you live life without a vision, the reality is you’re gonna go where life takes you. But if you live life with a vision, you’re gonna go where you wanna go, you’re gonna know where you’re going. So the reality is, if you don’t have a vision, you’re a victim to influence, but if you have a vision, you’re able to steer your direction. And the reality is, for your general whoever in whatever space, weather you are a youth leader or you’re a volunteer youth leader, or that you’re the youth pastor of the largest church in the country, but the fact is, if you don’t know where you’re going, you might take people on a walk, but you won’t lead them anywhere. So you’ve got to figure out what is it that you wanna change in this world, and you’ve got to start formulating a picture of that preferred future to start living towards it.
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0:07:29.4 GS: That’s a great answer. And I remember, it makes me think back to a meeting we had in Kansas City with youth leaders, and there was a guy named Andrew Held, who worked with Youth for Christ, and he was talking about a Bold Vision. And he said, “We need to have a vision that’s so bold that it requires networking.” In other words, there’s no way our individual church could do it by ourselves. So if your vision isn’t so bold that it requires networking, it’s not bold enough, and I thought that was brilliant.
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0:08:06.9 JK: That’s fantastic. Myles Munroe said this thing years and years ago, he said that, if your vision doesn’t scare you, it’s not from God. He said it much cooler than me though. And it’s that same thing, right? Because God doesn’t call us to do things that we can do without him, because God will always put us in a position where we need him. God wants us to worship, and we worship best when we are in desperate need of God to do something, and that’s a great place to be. But you’re taking it to another level by saying it’s not just desperate for God, but God puts us in a position where we wanna connect with other people. He wants us to work again. He wants us to collaborate together, and that’s part of the genius of God.
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0:08:50.4 JK: It says Jesus ascended on high and when he ascended on high, he gave gifts to men. Well, he didn’t give gifts to a man. Jesus’ awesomeness wasn’t deposited in any single one of us. It was deposited in all of us, and that’s why when we are two or three together, we get to partake of it. So the fullness of what God has for you is always gonna be bigger than you. You’re gonna need him, and where are you gonna find him? In one another, in collaboration, in working together.
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0:09:20.6 GS: Yeah, and that’s really what we talk about, networking. Is under this value of Bold Vision because you look at John 17, which is the heart of Christ for what we would call networking, working the net together to get the largest amount of fish as possible. It’s right at the center of God’s heart. So he’s got a vision for the world, but he’s got a vision not just for the ends, but the means, which is the body of Christ working in synergy. And so, I really challenge youth leaders that are watching us to get a big, Bold Vision across the street, across the tracks, across the world, and that Bold Vision will not only force you to depend on God, like Jurie said, depend on each other, not just those in your youth group, but other youth groups, but it will also cause you to develop innovative strategies to get there and to learn from each other. So it’s so much fun. So you regularly use the phrase at NXT Move, that we’ve kind of hijacked as well, “Not On Our Watch.” So when you say that, what are you talking about?
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0:10:35.4 JK: Well, it’s a moment that originated out of a conversation where I was sitting with leaders from around the world, young leaders, social media influencers, business leaders, church leaders, and we were reviewing some statistics about the next generation and what’s happening in the next generation. And what we realized was that if the current trends continues, we’re poised for the Dark Ages, so the darkest age in Christianity since the Middle Ages. And the rallying cry from the group was just Not On Our Watch. There is no way that we will be known, these millennial generation will be the generation that was responsible for ushering in the darkest age of Christianity.
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0:11:25.7 JK: And so this rallying cry just emerged and we said, “Well, when things are dark, it’s a sign of one or two things. Either it’s gonna get darker or the dawn is about to break.” And we just said we’re gonna trust God for the greatest revival, reformation, awakening, pick your word, ever, and maybe the spiritual hunger that we’re seeing is God preparing the ground for exactly that. And just to say, Greg, the thing of Big vision does exactly that. It opens up the way for people to give themselves to something. And we’ve seen it in this context. The vision has a way of creating a void. Too often in youth ministry, we’ve taken away the price of Christianity, we’ve watered it down to make it cheap, but we’ve lost the prize because you’ve taken away the price.
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0:12:19.9 JK: And I think we’ve got to restore the price of Christianity, this is gonna cost you everything. This is your whole life. Because then we’ll gain the prize, which is worth infinitely more than anything else. Because if we’re offering people something cheap, if we are making it simple, if we’re dumbing it down, I think young people are looking for something worth themselves, they are looking at something worth giving their lives to, and a Bold Vision creates that wake for them to step into.
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0:12:48.5 GS: Yeah, and that’s something I always say, is getting on Team Jesus is free, Jesus paid the price, paid the dues. Getting on a starting team costs you everything you got.
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0:12:58.1 JK: That’s it.
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0:12:58.6 GS: And I think we have a generation that wants to be on the starting team. They wanna do something. This is a cause generation.
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0:13:05.4 JK: That’s it.
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0:13:06.2 GS: They’re looking for something to live for and die for, and it’s got to be more than just going to youth group and camp. And so, talking about that, from your perspective, you’re a well, well traveled man. You’re always on the road. Every inhabited continent. That’s a lot of travel. What’s your perspective of global youth ministry right now? I mean, how is it doing overall? What would you say about that?
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0:13:36.9 JK: I don’t know, Greg, in this mere six hours that we have on this podcast if I can cover all of that for you. But it’s a big question, but I’ll tell you… Let me tell you this, is God is moving all around the world. You’re seeing specs of revival, specs of awakening. But at the same time, there are spaces that’s really struggling. In South Korea, the church saw an incredible revival, but because they weren’t focused on reaching the next generation, they’re losing an entire generation. I think the US, the statistics are showing that it’s happening.
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0:14:08.9 JK: I know, you talk about that, just to jump in. Everybody always thinks of South Korea as this place of revival and the prayer mountain, but that’s the parents and grandparents.
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0:14:19.4 JK: Exactly.
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0:14:19.6 GS: The teenagers have divorced themselves and…
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0:14:21.5 JK: They’ve left. They’ve left the building. I’m careful of quoting statistics because I’ll get in trouble and get it wrong, but they’re closing something like 10 churches for every one church that’s being started in the South Korean peninsula at the moment because of that thing. It’s just this entire negative trajectory because they’re losing a generation. Now, other spaces like Africa, you look at the church and the church is wide. Countries are 80%, 90% Christian. So the gospel is 10,000 miles wide, but it’s only one inch deep. Corruption, poverty, all these things are happening. So, sometimes what’s happened is we’ve saved people because people could say, “Well, so many dollars will save so many people,” and we got this many commitments to Christ. Everybody’s Christian, but the kingdom of God hasn’t come. Lives haven’t been transformed.
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0:15:14.6 JK: And we can learn from these different spaces and see good things God’s doing. Church that really excites me at the moment is Brazil in South America. There’s some great momentum starting to occur there. Europe, I think is a great lesson for us. I think for too long, a generation became Christian and they forgot to be Jesus’ followers. So it was the norm to be Christian, so they lost a generation. And now churches are offering… We’ve seen thousands of young people leave Christianity going to fight in the Jihad, in the Muslim war, in the Middle East and Europe, because they were looking for a cause to give their lives to, and we were offering them ping pong and pizza. So there was just no reality to it.
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0:16:03.9 JK: Spaces like Ukraine at the moment, they’re seeing great revival. There’s videos of of bomb sirens going off, and young people being baptized, because being faced with the reality of, “I might die,” people are calculating what’s worth living for again. So it’s fascinating. It’s so hard to answer what’s happening globally. God’s doing great things. We have incredible lessons to learn from one another. That’s kind of what’s happening globally.
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0:16:33.8 GS: I just think too, the time when you came in to the Dare 2 Share offices not all that long ago, and we kind of talked about the potential of every teen everywhere hearing the gospel from a friend, our vision statement kind of coinciding with “Not On Our Watch”, as a very practical, tactical way. What do you think Dare 2 Share, more specifically, Gospel Advancing philosophy and strategy, fits into this puzzle of global youth ministry when it comes to change in the trajectory of Christianity in this next generation?
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0:17:13.1 JK: Greg, it’s at the very core of it, and that’s why I’m so excited about dates. That’s why I’m here today. That’s why this makes it on my schedule. Jesus loves me, and Greg, Sarah has a plan for my life. I’ll show up wherever you tell me to go, because I think this idea of every teen hearing the gospel from a friend, this is the core of it. It’s not the global youth. It’s not the billion people. It’s not the… If we want every teenager reached, we’ve got to mobilize every teenager. And if we want to build a… People ask me, “What’s the target age?” And I say, “Well, the target age is easy. It’s unborn children. That’s the target age.” And that should be the target age of the gospel. That should be the way we build our churches. It’s not for generation now, but for generation next. Who’s the next generation? And the way we do that is not by creating converts, but creating disciple makers, because they’ll raise kids.
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0:18:16.6 GS: Amen.
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0:18:17.5 JK: If teenagers are hearing the gospel from friends and sharing it with friends, they’ll share it with their kids who will share it with their kids, who will share it with their kids. So it’s more than just reaching this generation. It’s reaching the generations to come.
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0:18:33.0 GS: And what I love too is, is this applies to global leaders of leaders, top of the pyramid leaders, but it also applies to a youth leader who’s a volunteer with 10 students in their youth room, right?
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0:18:46.4 JK: Absolutely.
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0:18:47.7 GS: That they can equip. All of us need to really have that philosophy of mobilizing teens to reach teens. And I’ve always said that the trajectory of the rejection of the historic Christian faith is skyrocketing, and our traditional additional strategies will never close the gap, right?
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0:19:06.8 JK: Absolutely.
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0:19:06.9 GS: So we need to go exponential, and only way to go exponential is to mobilize teens to reach teens. I know one of the other things when you came into our office that you said to me that really struck me personally is, the reason why you think this Gospel Advancing philosophy can work globally is we don’t just talk about it, we go do it.
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0:19:29.4 JK: That’s it.
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0:19:29.9 GS: We actually mobilize teens right there at our events, to our curriculum to go out and share the gospel. And how much of a challenge is it for youth ministry globally to not just exegete the Great Commission, but execute it? Feels like everywhere we go, and maybe this is a Western influence, are very information driven, not activation driven. Would that be true globally, do you think?
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0:20:01.5 JK: Absolutely. I think the world has seen a revolution in the last 20 years where the supply and demand curve with regards to information has been disrupted. And if people ask me what are some of the major causes of a generation stepping away from the faith, the first cause I’ll cite is the rates of change globally that is exponentially increased. So, irrelevance is when the rates of change outside of an organization exceeds the rates of change inside of the organization. So the church is struggling to keep up and therefore we end up in irrelevance. Our strategies are irrelevant, to your point. But the second thing is that, and the second major driver behind this that’s causing this generation to step away is this supply and demand curve with regards to information being disrupted.
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0:20:51.5 JK: So, 20 years ago, information was valuable. You had what was called data companies because people were looking for data. If I needed my car fixed, I went to go look for the guy that knew how to do it. Because the data was scarce, I’d pay somebody for what they knew. Today, nobody gets paid for what they know because Google knows everything, YouTube knows everything. So data doesn’t have value anymore. In our society, what is value is application, the problem is a lot of the church of 10 and 20 years ago is still built around the data; we have the value, we have the teaching, we have the knowledge, we are gonna show you how, we are gonna teach you how. And a generation is growing up that doesn’t value information. But they do value application, and that, Greg, is the power of mobilizing teenagers to get out there and do it.
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0:21:41.3 JK: Because when you mobilize them to get out there to do it, you know that old saying of, they don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care? Well, people don’t know how much they know until they’re placed in a position where they’ve got to do it, and that’s the beauty of even having a Bold Vision. You’ve got to keep people out and say, “We are gonna do it. We’re gonna fail quickly. We’re gonna try quickly. We’re gonna figure this out.” And that’s how people are gonna grow, and that translates from generation to generation.
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0:22:12.4 GS: Well, and yesterday I had a meeting with president of a bible school, and it was a great meeting. And I asked him, I said, “What if we did a day of evangelism training and trained all the students there how to share the gospel and took them out to the streets to share Christ and then came back and shared stories?” And he goes, “Well, we have a group that goes out every Friday night sharing the gospel.” I go, “How many?” And he goes, “20.” And I go, “How many in your school?” And he goes, “3000.” I go, “Hmm.” And he goes, “Hmm, like, okay, maybe we need to think about this.” And there’s something about it that just… When Jesus said, “Teaching them to obey everything I’ve commanded you.” When students go out and share the gospel with friends, with strangers, with anyone, they’re dependent on the spirit, all that knowledge becomes activated, their faith is built, they see God do the miraculous, and even if they get persecuted, they come back excited.
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0:23:21.3 GS: We had Stephen Bahago in the podcast studio, and I asked him about persecution because he’s in Nigeria, which is I think the number one persecuted nation in the world. Something like 5000 Christians were killed last year. And they do Go Share Day the last Saturday of every month, take students out to share the gospel, and I’m like, “Well, how high is the risk? He goes, “The risk is very high, but you have to choose what you’re gonna fear. You either fear God, or you fear the one that can kill just your body, which is Satan or that person, and we choose to fear God.” And I’m like, “Man, that’s the kind of faith that we need.”
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0:23:58.7 JK: That’s so sweet.
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0:24:01.9 GS: And a Bold Vision brings that about. So as we talk about a Bold Vision for a youth leader in the grassroots, just doing day-to-day ministry, how would you encourage them to really lean into prayer and evangelism and disciple making, with a bigger, bolder vision in mind, and how that can transform the spiritual temperature of their youth ministry?
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0:24:27.7 JK: Yeah, I think every vision has generics and specifics. So, there’s a generic where we wanna go bigger, we wanna reach more, we wanna go further, the gospel needs to get out there, everybody’s got to be mobilized. It’s generic. But I think in every vision, there’s got to be some specifics that’s unique to that space. So you’ve got to figure out… Some of us on the podcast might be old enough to remember the days before we had GPSs on our phones and even before we had mobile phones. What would happen is, somebody would give you directions, go down the road, when you see the third traffic stop, turn left, and the second stop street, turn right, and then you’ll see the dog on the left-hand side, and it’s the third house to your right.
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0:25:13.5 JK: But if you missed one of those instructions, what happened was you were lost, right? And then you would find a thing called the payphone, right? Now, I know I’m dating myself here, but you would find the payphone, you would go to the payphone, you’ll call the guy up, you’ll hope he’s home, so that he can answer the phone. He’ll pick up the phone and you’ll tell him that you’re lost. And he’ll ask you what question? Where are you? It’s the question. You can’t direct anybody anywhere if you don’t start with where they are. And I think sometimes people come up with visions, that’s grand and general, but it’s not specific to where people are at.
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0:25:51.3 JK: So if I’m mobilizing my youth group, I wanna mobilize them with things that they feel, with things that they touch. So don’t tell them you wanna reach the whole school, tell them that you wanna reach their friends or this class group or this city, or this town, or this suburb. Personalize it to where people are, because if they can see it, how to get from where they are to where you want to take them, you can take them on the journey. But if it doesn’t connect to where they are, you can’t do it. That’s the first thing. Second thing is fail. Fail often and fail quickly, take the risk. The problem is not with failing, the problem is with stopping to fail, because success will test us in ways that failure never will.
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0:26:38.2 JK: And here’s the science behind it. When we fail, we try different things, we keep experimenting, we keep going. When we succeed, we copy and paste what we’ve done. The problem is, when we copy and paste what we’ve done, we end up becoming irrelevant, we stop trusting God. We just go through the motions, our faith dies. But when we’re failing and we’re failing quickly, don’t fail and keep failing, don’t beat the dead horse. But when you fail, take that as an opportunity to try again. So risk, send them out there, mobilize them, let them share their faith, let them mess it up, put them in situations where they need God and they need one another.
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0:27:16.0 JK: I was a youth myself. I was 17 years old when I planted my first church, and it originated out of taking teenagers on missions trips into the shanty towns in South Africa where we would take busloads full of 14, 15, and 16 year olds, and we’ll go do door to door evangelism. In the midst of a tremulous apartheid South Africa, post-apartheid, racism mess, we would be knocking on doors, sharing the gospel. Did we do everything right? No way. Did the parents have any idea that there was a teenager taking their teenagers on evangelism trips? They had no idea. But we learned some stuff and God did some stuff, but we’ve got to try. So I think the devil lulls us into being safe and comfortable and that’s the way that he just, he inoculates us from really living the life that God has in mind for us.
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0:28:14.9 GS: That’s just brilliant, and I did not know that story about you as a 17 year old, and it explains to me why you immediately were like, “Gospel Advancing, let’s do this.”
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0:28:26.5 JK: Let’s make it happen.
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0:28:29.6 GS: So we’re gonna bring in our guest youth leader. I’m gonna introduce him. His name is John Chronister. He’s a husband, father, Gospel Advancing youth leader. He began volunteering in youth ministry in 2009, moved to a vocational youth ministry in 2014. Currently serves as a youth pastor at Calvary Baptist in Morton, Arkansas, where he also works with a Gospel Advancing network in Conway County. Prior to ministry, John worked in retail management, built a team focused on customer service to achieve the goals of the company. The seven values are all important to the ministry work he does, but he feels it’s the Bold Vision that gives him the laser focus on what matters most in ministry. So John, thank you so much for being a part of it, part of this podcast, and I’ll turn it over to you and Jurie to have a conversation about what Jurie just unpacked.
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0:29:20.1 John Chronister: Aright. First off, thanks for the invite. I really appreciate this, and I feel honored by this. Bold Vision has always been important to my youth ministry. Like I said, it really gives me that laser focus on what I need to do, but I see the Bold Vision, as you discussed, we kind of have three different levels we need to roll this out to. So first, as youth leaders develop this Bold Vision, Jurie, how would you suggest us rolling that out to our students to get even more acceptance of that vision?
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0:29:56.3 JK: That’s a great question. I think Habakkuk Chapter 2 is kind of my my go-to here. So firstly, we’ve got to understand that that vision leaks. So never assume because you’ve said it once, you’ve said it. You’ve got to say it a thousand times. But number two, if you take it back at two, it says, write the vision, make the vision plain, write it down so that he who sees it may run with it. So there’s your points. Number one, make the vision plain. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity, simplicity. We’re in a complex world. Let’s not present people with more complexity. Let’s present them with simplicity. People can only do what they understand. So make it plain. Write it down, so communicate, communicate, communicate. Get it out there, say it again and again and again. Remember that it leaks.
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0:30:47.9 JK: So put it, and then that he who sees it may run with it. Put it in front of people because people have got to see it. And I kind of take that seeing a little further to say that you’ve got to create ownership of the vision in people. So I’m a firm believer that what people co-create, they co-own, and what they co-own, they can collaborate on. So it got to start with that co-creation. So don’t tell them the vision, help them to shape the vision. And then lastly, that they might run with it. Do it, try it, if it doesn’t work, change it and start the process over, co-create, simplify, communicate, make sure that they own it, and then try it, just give it a go, give it a swap.
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0:31:35.2 JC: Alright. And on the second part of that, I see what you’re talking about, the siloed ministry, I see that so easy to develop between the church and the youth ministry. How do you recommend for youth leaders to help the church buy into that Bold Vision?
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0:31:52.6 JK: That is such a good question because I think that’s where it often fails. People have grandiose ideas and grand plans, and then they take it to the senior pastor, he doesn’t quite see it, or whatever the case might be, the church board, depending on the context. The skill that is lacking, and we live in a day and age where leadership books is like a dime a dozen. I feel like people hand out books like they used to hand out business cards. These days, whenever you meet somebody, they hand you their latest book. But the reality is that everybody’s writing about leadership. What we should be writing about is followership. Now, don’t get me wrong, I mean. I work with leadership organizations and leaders around the world, but the skill that is lost is followership.
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0:32:37.7 JK: We’ve unlearnt in our society that it’s all about me, myself, and I and my ability and being the best me. We’ve lost the ability to follow because part of following is learning how to lead up, and I think if we could figure that out, if we could learn what are the skills we need to lead up into the organization. When those above you in authority don’t support the work that you need to get done, one or two things are true. Either they don’t want you to succeed, and I’m yet to meet that senior pastor that doesn’t want his youth guide to succeed. So if we believe they want you to succeed, the other one’s got to be true, and that is they don’t understand what you’re trying to do. And if you could…
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0:33:23.6 JK: It’s your work as a follower to describe and to lead up and to shape their understanding of how you are gonna win, and your winning is gonna make them win. And if they see that, they want you to win. So I think it’s that extreme ownership of just saying, you know what, I’m not a victim of, I’m a part of, and I’m gonna own the communication up and getting the buy-in from every level of my organization, those above me, those below me, and those around me in the process.
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0:33:58.5 JC: And of course, the third part of that whole potential siloed ministry is the networking, which is important, we got to find like-minded youth leaders to come alongside us to help us out. How would you suggest youth leaders find those like-minded instead of just becoming just a network of, hey, we just talk and have fun and lack the vision?
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0:34:22.9 JK: Yeah, I think lots and lots of cups of coffee, John is… The reality is that relationship takes time. But we don’t wanna just have relationship, we wanna move beyond just knowing one another to a point of trust, and that takes even more time. So we’ve got to build the currency of trust and that takes time together. What creates that network? What does it together is, I always say what you need is you need commonality of relationship, you need that trust in one another, but then you need commonality of vision. So you’ve got to have purpose and destiny in what we’re gonna do together. So I think it’s a little bit of a dance. In my relationship with my wife, we have some doing together time when we go shopping together or we do chores together, or we do something together. Those times are necessary, where we do something together.
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0:35:19.6 JK: But then we also have being together. We go for a movie together, we do it, but we need being time where we just get to sit back and relax and hang out together. In the same way, if you have the one or the other, if you have all doing together or all building relationship, it’s never gonna last. But when you can marry those two things together, that’s when you’re able to really network, collaborate, get somewhere, but also have true deep friendships and trust to carry that over it. Never try and drive a 10 ton truck of responsibility over a 5 ton bridge of relationship. You’ve got to build that relationship, but at some point, you’ve got to drive a truck over over it. You’ve got to get something done. You’ve got to figure out, if we’re better together, how can we be better together?
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0:36:05.1 JC: I love it. Thanks for those words of advice, and yeah, I just got to roll it out.
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0:36:12.1 GS: Yeah, that’s great. Those are great. And just to remind everybody listening or watching, I mean, Jurie, church planter, is a pastor, so he understands when a youth leader comes to him with a vision because he was that 17 year old with a vision to plant a church and to take young people on missions trips. Really, man, Jurie, John, thank you so much. This has been super insightful and I believe is gonna really help youth leaders identify that Bold Vision, and to build that bridge that can hold 10 tons and take that 10 ton vision over that bridge for the glory of God. And thanks for everybody who’s tuned in and watched this. And I wanna remind you that a thriving youth ministry is a gospel advancing one, so keep advancing the gospel. Thanks for tuning in.