Jeff Vanderstelt on the Saturate blog had some insight on how you can be missional on Halloween. Vanderstelt says, “October 31st offers a great opportunity for many to engage in new relationships with those around us or to revisit some old relationships with new missional intentionality. Regardless of what you think of the holiday and it’s roots, the culture we have been sent by Jesus to reach is going to celebrate Halloween in a couple weeks. We all have in front of us a wide open door for missionary engagement in our neighborhoods. I want to encourage you not to miss out on the opportunity. If you are looking to be more intentionally engaged this year, I want to present you with a few ideas for how you can more effectively walk through the open door that Halloween presents to us as Jesus’ missionaries.”

Micah Anglo at the Church Plants blog had a post on the affects of skipping church effect your your kids and their faith. Anglo summarizes a panel from Westminster Theological Seminary from 2014. Carl Trueman is quoted in the blog saying, ““The church is losing its young people because the parents never taught their children that it was important. I think that applies across the board. It applies to family worship, and it also applies to whether you are in church every Sunday and what priority you demonstrate to your children church has on a Sunday. If the sun shines out and their friends are going to the beach, do you decide to skip church and go to the beach? In which case, you send signals to your children that it is not important.” What are your priorities?

Over at Center for Parent and Youth Understanding site they had a post on Youth’s Ministries Cultural Mission. Walt Muller writes, “The reality is that to effectively reach out to the lost and to fulfill the Great Commission, we cannot separate our words from our actions. Our words inform, shape, and explain the spiritual truths and realities that lie behind and beneath our actions. Our actions bring credibility to our words. To have one without the other undermines our ability to present a compelling Gospel message to a world that longs for the Gospel. Since we are called to equip our students for a lifetime of mission, it is essential for us to prepare them for a lifetime of weaving together the inseparable bond that must exist between belief and behavior.”

Rooted Ministry has post on The Slow Process of Growth. Josh Hussung writes, “Working with students can be very frustrating at times. A whole year can go by with such a small amount of progress, leaders can become very disheartened, believing that they are ineffective; they may want to throw in the towel. But I think that this attitude displays a misunderstanding about how growth works. If we look at the idea of growth more closely, we might find ourselves able to go about the business of youth ministry with confidence and freedom.”

What are you reading? Please share in the comments!