{"id":385,"date":"2014-02-01T16:07:44","date_gmt":"2014-02-01T16:07:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/beta.dminlgp.com\/?p=385"},"modified":"2014-08-12T23:00:32","modified_gmt":"2014-08-12T23:00:32","slug":"his-name-was-ian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/his-name-was-ian\/","title":{"rendered":"His Name Was Ian"},"content":{"rendered":"

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I was 21, wet behind the ears and serving in my first youth ministry.\u00a0 Not long into my tenure I met a young man by the name of Ian.\u00a0 Ian had just turned 16 and was moving from the Jr. High into the Senior High ministry.\u00a0 Now, for years I had heard stories about Ian, but never had the privilege of getting to know him myself.\u00a0 One of my first experiences with Ian was a winter retreat.\u00a0 Nestled into the Appalachian mountains in Central Pennsylvania, I and ten adult leaders along with 100 teens went on retreat.\u00a0 Our housing for the weekend was a large building called the barn.\u00a0 The barn was unique, upstairs were two individual bunkhouse bays for the boys and girls.\u00a0 Downstairs contained a meeting space, game room, lobby play area and the showers.\u00a0 Mid weekend during a free time for our students I found myself in an intense game of Monopoly in the common area situated between the two shower bath areas.\u00a0 In the middle of the game, Dana who was sitting directly across from me, stopped dead in her tracks, her eyes becoming bid as saucers and looking past my head, and saying, “Oh my word”<\/strong>.\u00a0 As I slowly turned my head to see what Dana was reacting too, I turned to see Ian having just walked out of the bath area in a towel.\u00a0 And only a towel<\/strong>.\u00a0 As my eyes focused from the blur of moving my head, Ian stood with one arm poised on the wall, still dripping wet and trying to have a conversation with a teenage girl who wanted to run for the hill.\u00a0 Believe me, I and the other 60 people in the room were shocked.<\/p>\n

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This past week while reading The Social Animal by David Brooks I was struck by the concept of how children are programmed into social acceptability or social isolation<\/strong>.\u00a0 Foundational to all of humanity, the family of origin and heritages become the playing field where relational and social cues are learned.\u00a0 This form of secondary education follows the person throughout life, setting the stage for acceptability or isolation.\u00a0 For Ian, the son of an alcoholic and having been raised in an abusive situation, the cues were simply missed.\u00a0 The following are three key areas of social development \u00a0which emerged while processing the growth of the social animal in regards to life and ministry.<\/p>\n

Social Development\u00a0 – Three Key Areas<\/strong><\/p>\n

How to work with others\u2026\u00a0 <\/strong>Have you ever worked on a team where at least one of the individuals was impossible to work with?\u00a0 I think I know each of your answers.\u00a0 When an individual is not taught to work with others when young, as an adult the same dysfunction rears its ugly head, often with even more complexity than a child.\u00a0 The fear of be vulnerable, out of control or even known, can sometimes make a person near impossible to serve alongside.<\/p>\n

Social Cues\u2026\u00a0 <\/strong>My son Eli just turned 14.\u00a0 Yes, he is officially in the Jr. High years.\u00a0 A few weeks ago, I took Eli and three of his friends on a birthday weekend getaway.\u00a0 Three days, two nights, 6 hours in a car and all Jr. High boy\u2019s social cues, or maybe better said\u2026 no cues.\u00a0 Watching the four of the them made me laugh.\u00a0 Laugh at remembering those days for myself, but also seeing similar traits in many adults and leadership teams I serve within.\u00a0 Though our adult forms are a little more evolved, often our responses look very similar to those long gone days of adolescents.<\/p>\n

How to disagree\u2026\u00a0 <\/strong>Disagreeing well takes a high level of differentiation.\u00a0 Yet, for most of us, our families of origin\u00a0 taught us that disagreements lead to fights.\u00a0 Not all families teach those in the system to disagree or fight well.\u00a0 When these young children grow up, they either flee conflict all together or pounce on it, like a tiger smelling fresh meat.\u00a0 It is rare that ministry leaders enter adulthood with a healthy well differentiated understanding of disagreements and handling conflict well.<\/p>\n

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Over time, Ian became a healthy young man.\u00a0 For Ian, emotional development and simple life training was needed for his overall development.\u00a0 In order to go forward, Ian needed to go back.\u00a0 Healing from our past, unearthing \u00a0unhealthy patterns and leaning hard into a new reality is key for all of us as we walk the journey of life.<\/p>\n

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I was 21, wet behind the ears and serving in my first youth ministry.\u00a0 Not long into my tenure I met a young man by the name of Ian.\u00a0 Ian had just turned 16 and was moving from the Jr. High into the Senior High ministry.\u00a0 Now, for years I had heard stories about Ian, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[167,2],"class_list":["post-385","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-brooks","tag-dminlgp","cohort-lgp3"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/385","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=385"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/385\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1710,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/385\/revisions\/1710"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=385"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=385"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=385"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}