Upward Up Yours!

I have been directing or co-directing Upward Basketball and Cheerleading at our church for four full years now. The year before I moved here they had 249 kids in the league. All of the leadership team moved away. I moved here 4 months before the season began and thought that it might be a cool thing to be involved in. 450 kids signed up that year. I was overwhelmed. I was working 70 hour weeks (no lie) regularly to try and pull it off and deal with the demands of a growing youth ministry. It was crazy!... but I survived.

The next year we had 681 kids and I was swimming once again. I basically put my youth ministry on hold for a couple of months to attempt to deal with this massive beast. Half way through the year I looked at my finances and realized I could have hired someone to work 10-15 hours a week to take some of the load off my shoulders, which I did... the following year. That year we had 850 kids sign up as I trained Heidi to transition into leadership. We hired her officially as a secretary I guess (she claims I told her that... hahaha), but the role developed into that of Director. I really took that primary role that year as Heidi learned the ropes, but she rocked it out this year with over 925 kids in the league and me assisting her from the sidelines. It has been an enormous blessing to have Heidi relieve me of this enormous pressure and free me to pursue other outlets of ministry.

Yesterday (Tuesday, March 15th) was Awards night. This thing is huge. It is this gargantuan experience that dominates a couple weeks of the year in preparation and is over in less than a couple of hours. There are hundreds of door prizes, amazing entertainment, individual awards for every player and tons of fun. The numbers have grown from 1500 or so my first year to closer to 2300 this year. This was to be my first year as the primary "right-hand" man to Heidi as the leader, but then she got sick.

Heidi is pregnant. She got a viral illness two Mondays ago, but I thought she would get better. On Thursday she went into the hospital and I began to panic. I worked on the Awards Night the rest of that day. On Friday 32 of the youth group took off on a trip to Muncie, Indiana for ATF (my teens pressured me into it). After no sleep and a lot of draining activity I got into bed in Findlay at 1am Sunday, woke up at 7, went to church, worked on Upward in the afternoon, went to the Core (leadership teens), worked on Upward at Heidi's vacant house (all the stuff was on her home computer), went to small group, returned to work on Upward, rolled into bed at 2:30am, rolled out at 9:00, worked on Upward all day, set-up 2400 chairs etc at 6pm, went home to work on stuff that I transferred onto my computer (which I just got back from the shop... out a week... that really hurt... roughly 160 e-mails... 110 were junk mail), worked on Upward until 4:30am, woke up at 8:30, met folks at the Venue at 9:00, was there until 10pm (except for a 1/2 hour shave and change clothes break).

Are you serious!?!?!? This is not a life meant for anyone. I was talking to a friend tonight and he said he had been really busy, but a good busy. I told him I didn't think there was such a thing. I hate how we immortalize business in our culture. I hate how I am a slave to it. I hate that the only way we know to "evangelize" is through a program that spans 5 exhasting months, costs $60 per child, and has shown little evangelistic impact in the life of our church. We are a slave to it. It is a great program. It is the best in town, even though the YMCA program has been around for 50+ years. We have tunnels the kids run through, we have smoke machines, we have the Chicago Bulls intro song, we have adjustable rims for all ages, we have equal playing time, we have an individual award after every game. We do great things for kids. We build up their self-esteem, we develop their character and we introduce them to Jesus. We do really great things, and the results seem good:
Over 250 Kids Accepted Christ last night
Over 30 Adults Accepted Christ last night
Over 60 of those are unchurched
Over 40 others marked that they are looking for a church home
Tons more adults raised their hand after the dynamic, pointed, bold salvation invitation. I would guess 150 did. When he asked those same people to stand up for their faith, about 60-75 did that! The others quickly and sheepishly put their hands down. Great stuff. Great results. But...

Is this the best way, or is this our way. Do we have to compete with Grey Y (the YMCA league) to win families to Christ? The vicious cycle I see is that a HUGE program like this reaches people in mass, while distracting us from the natural opportunities we have to live Christ in front of our neighbors on a daily basis, reaching them relationally. I know that Jesus spoke to 5000+ at one sitting, but one of the greatest insights I ever heard about that was that Jesus didn't go running after them. They came to Him. They came running to Him. Following Him. Seeking Him. He didn't have a program. He didn't even use pizza... or any food. He had to take that from the offering of a little boy, because the crowd came to Him, because they were drawn to the man, not His "program".

Reality: If our church stops Upward many people would be angry. It could potentially cripple our church. Our people have become proud of it. The community has become proud of us. The other churches look to us and HEAVILY rely on us to get this work done. Heidi and I are really the only two who understand what is really all going on in the league.

I don't know what all this means. Do we keep doing it forever, even as our church has decided to move to relational living, rather than programattic living? Do we phase our role out of it and allow it to survive? Do we keep doing it as a community service, and just do a better job at developing relationships through it? I don't know the answer. I am not as cynical as I sound, but I am really tired. I do need to go to bed and stop whining and I do love that line that Eric gave me over 3 years ago. He said, "James when you answer the phone say 'Upward Up Yours!".

Now that it funny.