Newsletter :: Santa Barbara Community Church

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SBCC Youth Newsletter for Parents
by Kelly Soifer

April 08

Greetings! Once again I have let a few too many weeks slip by without another edition of this newsletter. For past readers, you know that I like to send out links and comments about articles that I found pertinent to our work together with your children. This month, I only have TWO THINGS I want to highlight in this installment. My comments are in GREEN.

1. SHALOM. http://www.relevantmagazine.com/god_article.php?id=7397
This is a quick yet solid little article on God's shalom. There are two fun connections for me in it as well - Bryant Myers is quoted early on - he is Nancy Rust's uncle. (You may recall Nancy as a former youth leader, Kids Club director and SBCC administrator). Later the author quotes Terry McGonigal, who is a friend of mine - i took several seminary classes from him. He also spoke a few years ago at the church retreat, and is a close friend & colleague of this year's retreat speaker, Jerry Sittser.

I went to Matthew Sleeth's message on March 31, 2008 at the church (author of Serve God, Save the Planet). When asked what would be THE # 1 THING a believer could do to step into a lifestyle that seeks to care for God's creation, he said, with no hesitation, Observe the Sabbath on a weekly basis. He then explained that if we slow down and just STOP in all of our efforts for one day - efforts to work, efforts to produce, efforts to consume, efforts to be successful, efforts to accomplish much, that we would do a great deal to move toward healing "Our Father's World." This article on SHALOM speaks to that.

As parents, i want to plead, urge, and challenge you to teach your family how to SLOW DOWN. I see exhausted, stressed out students everywhere. I do not sense that they really know God's "wholeness, perfection, and prosperity," to quote the article. May this be a profound way that we model to the world how differently our lives are oriented as we follow Jesus.

2. SBCC YOUTH SURVEY
In researching articles for this installment of the newsletter, i realized that i get a slew of statistical info about how students are "doing" nationally in regard to education, technology, family, faith, and activities. But I have yet to take any kind of formal survey of our own church family.

Would you please take a few moments to tell me your own family's habits? Rest assured that I will only share this information in a generic fashion. Send your replies to my email: kelly@sbcommunity.org

a. What are the ages of your children?

b. How much time do each of them spend on homework each night, on average?

c. What activities are your children involved in outside of school? Could you please list them? (I'm curious if the majority of activities are sports-related, or if there are just as many that are arts-related... or something else?)

d. Do these activities ever occur on Sundays? If you miss church due to these events, is this primarily due to:

- times they occur (what time is that?)
- distance from home
- fatigue from events making it a challenge to rally the family to church
- other

(For example, I've had several jr high families tell me that club soccer in the fall tend to have games Sunday mornings. Am I correct? Others have told me that youth symphonies have rehearsals in the afternoons... i'm trying to get a sense of who is involved with what...)

e. What times do your children sleep till on the weekends?

f. Does your child(ren) have a cell phone? If so, at what age did (will) they get one? Do they have text messaging capabilities?

g. Does your child use the internet? If so, how long do they tend to be on each day?

h. INTERNET:
- Does your child use a social networking site like MySpace or Facebook?
- If so, do you have access to their site?
- Does your child use IM (Instant Messaging)? do you ever observe their IM dialogues?

i. Does your child attend youth activities with other churches? If so, how often? when are these activities? With which churches?

THANK YOU for this... if I get enough responses, I'll let you know what were the results to my oh-so-scientific survey! :)