REEL Joy - Week Two Recap

Looking back at my past few posts I realize that there's has been a distinct lack of creativity in titling my entries. Alas the trend continues. Thank you for reading, praying and encouraging us with or without creative titles =).

We had another great week of REEL Joy with youth new and old. It was encouraging to see 3 more new youth and 3 youth who haven't attended in quite a while come back. 8 of the new/returning youth from last week came back again!

Early on in the evening we played a name game that involved throwing a ball around a circle. It was great fun until one of the youth began to playfully antagonize another youth, throwing the ball before he was ready to receive it. Playful or not, the second youth went from annoyed to angry quickly. There was a split-second when he could have acted out in violence, but ended up turning the other cheek to diffuse a tense situation.

In our teaching times, the main scripture focus for REEL Joy has come from Daniel and his encounter with lions in Daniel 6. Our two student leaders, Damio'n and Justin, did a great job teaching in a large group setting for the first time, breaking down the earlier parts of Daniel's life as a heroic follower of God - first when he refused to eat the king's food in Ch. 1 and then when he was empowered by God to interpret the king's crazy dreams in Ch. 2. The two were definitely nervous at first but kept their composure and taught well.

Looking ahead, we continue to long for your prayers. Here are some specifics:

There are some group dynamics that aren't the best. In some groups the behavior is raucous and bordering on chaotic. In other groups the youth are having a more difficult time following instructions and listening to the leaders. Still other groups are having trouble involving the quieter, shyer kids. We're praying for YG to be a place of Jesus' peace, love and humility and hope for that to be more the case each week.

On another note several youth from the previous week didn't show up, 4 in total. I have talked with a handful of them in the last week and it looks like they'll be able to attend this week. Two others, a brother and a sister who used to come to youth group, really want to come but their parents haven't allowed them. My sense is that the parents are being protective in a good way. With this, I'm hoping that the Lord will break through and help us establish some trust so that the two kids can come.

Also of note, this coming Saturday is our big filming day - a handful of professional filmmakers volunteer their time to spend most of the day with our youth. It's a long day that requires a lot of patience and energy. There are logistics with filming locations and rides. It's also the make-or-break day in terms of the movies. If the youth don't show up on Saturday we're going to have trouble making the movies. We're looking to God to provide the youth and adult volunteers with what we need to make it through filming day.

Finally, please continue to pray that the faith, courage and heroism of Daniel would connect for the youth in a deep way. I know that several of the youth at REEL Joy are not believers and if the Lord would have it, we would be greatly encouraged to see some decide to follow Jesus in the coming weeks.

Blessings,
Elliot

REEL Joy - Week One Recap

Week One of REEL Joy is officially in the books. Thank you so very much for your prayers and thoughts for our time together. It was a good night.

Some of the things that the youth group staff at Church of the Redeemer have been praying for, the very things we invited you to pray for as well, began to unfold.

- More than half of our youth invited at least one friend to attend REEL Joy and one of these invited friends actually attended!

- There was not only an absence of violence, but a remarkable absence of any hostility for the most part. The youth respected our adult leadership - at some point I remember asking the nearly 30 kids to quiet down for a moment and....they did! The youth also respected each other to the point that I don't remember hearing a single back and forth name calling incident all night. Frankly, this is the Lord at work.

- 10 new youth attended and 2 youth who haven't been to youth group in months also came. I was particularly blessed to see God bring two of my new neighbors, Daicia and Jamilah, high school aged African American girls. The last time an African American girl has attended our YG regularly was back in 2005 and I've hoped for this to change as our youth group strives to be a place where youth of ALL sorts from our neighborhood can come and grow into disciples of Jesus. Daicia and Jamilah had a great time and will be inviting their friend Cassidy to come next week.

- The service and support from adults at Church of the Redeemer was overwhelming. 2 brought snacks and 8-9 others came to give rides, lead small groups and otherwise invest in the lives of the youth in our neighborhood.

- The youth group staff team and I had a great meeting the night before REEL Joy day one. The Lord calmed some of my anxieties through this time and brought a lot of excitement and hope. I'm really grateful for my YG ministry partners Stacie, Casey, Eddie, Heather and Mark.

- The actual content/teaching times went fairly well. We got the youth brainstorming about heroism and performed a fun, impromptu skit about Daniel and the Lion's den. The youth then brainstormed their own heroic characters and plots in small groups and had some really great ideas - everything ranging from super heroes like "Spongelicious BobPants" and "Afro-Man," to more everyday heroes like "mom who made a mistake growing up and wants to give a hard word of advice to a teenager to keep her on the right path" and "small kid at school stands up to the school bully because it's the right thing to do."

- Our regular youth did a great job of loving as Jesus would. They welcomed in and initiated with new youth, they volunteered to serve and help out with great willingness and our student leaders did a great job leading various aspects of the night.

- Finally, several parents (one who attended the event and a few who didn't) made remarks to me that their kids had a great time at REEL Joy. This is really exciting! I'm hopeful that as we minister to youth God will also give us more opportunities to minister to whole families as well.

Please join me in giving thanks to the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. "Bless the Lord, oh my soul, and all that is within me, bless His holy name."

A few more prayer requests for next week:
- pray that all the youth who came would return and that few more youth who would next week.
- pray for the Lord to fill the adults leaders with the Holy Spirit and strengthen us for the weeks ahead.
- pray for 3 new girls who were really shy/quiet and 2 new boys (both on the younger side) who struggled with behavior a bit
- Street Lamp Studios will be taking the youths' characters to create basic plot outlines. Pray that they'd come up with some good stuff and that the youth would have good attitudes when they hear the results.
- continue to pray for the youth to know Lord
- pray against the work of the enemy and for the Lord's protection

Blessings,
Elliot

The Seen and the Unseen

Isaiah is skipping preschool today. I kept him home because of an individual who verbally threatened his teachers yesterday. We are fortunate to have a very secure facility, and our teachers are savvy. But after a restless night I didn't feel peaceful about sending him. The person causing problems lives very near the park, and his household was involved with several criminal incidents this fall. Our block club has been working with our LAPD senior lead officer to curb the threat they pose to our neighborhood's safety. But outside of television dramas, stopping perceived bad guys is a slow and fragile process. The policies and bureaucracies that preserve our civil rights sometimes leave preschoolers more vulnerable than we would like.

Ironically, at 10:00am today the LA City Council started debating a proposal to eliminate one of our best tools in neighborhood crime prevention. Richard is at City Hall right now speaking for our community in support of the City Attorney's Neighborhood Prosecutor program. In 18 years of work around public safety concerns, we have often run into the limits of what the police can do. For the past 7 years, the Neighborhood Prosecutor has filled this gap in critical ways. When our community organized to shut down a liquor store on Jefferson we worked with the Neighborhood Prosecutor. When the Raymond Ave block club succeeded in shutting down a crack house it was through the efforts of the Neighborhood Prosecutor. When the neighbors around our tutoring center stopped a bar from opening across the street they worked with the Neighborhood Prosecutor. And the Neighborhood Prosecutor is helping our block club address the latest threats to our children's safety within the local park.

So often the forces that most affect our health and safety are silent and unseen. We did not hear about this city council vote until yesterday afternoon. And amidst the many budget cuts our city is considering, this won't be one to get front page attention. But we who live here remember what it was like to live down the street from a liquor store. We remember what it was like to walk our Adventures Ahead kids past prostitutes and drug dealers on their way to our facility. We remember what it was like to have shootings, stabbings and robberies on Raymond Avenue. And we remember that the relative peace we now enjoy in these places came through hard won victories. These victories might not have been won without this program connecting our community groups to real legal muscle.

Will our park remain a safe place for families to play? Will our preschoolers and their teachers remain unharmed? Will the marijuana distributor around the corner and the liquor stores on Adams and Normandie be held accountable for nuisance activity? Will residents of our neighborhood feel like they can speak, act and organize to bring about change? Much depends on the how our city council votes with regard to this program.

Things to pray for:
For our city council to continue funding the Neighborhood Prosecutor program.
For God to set his protection over Loren Miller Park, especially the preschool program.
For violence and criminal activity at the household described above to cease.

REEL Joy's Around the Corner

Church of the Redeemer, Redeemer Community Partnership and Street Lamp Studios will be putting on our third annual "REEL Joy" program. As I've mentioned in other posts "REEL Joy" is a great opportunity to engage youth in our neighborhood with God through film. We partner with professional filmmakers to teach youth to make their own short films from scratch - they do everything from writing scripts to rehearsing scenes to learning camera work. They've done some awesome, creative stuff in the past which you can check out here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWn6TgwuFjI&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipubH5IkH44
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQo8ks7KqPE

This year our theme is "Young Heroes" and we'll take a look at some young heroes in scripture. Our hope is that God will inspire faith in our youth that leads to acts of courage, compassion and truth in their daily lives. We want the youth to know that God loves them, has created them for good and has a great plan for their lives.

We'd love to have your prayers. We begin this Wednesday 2/3 and will meet on the following two Wed's as well. Then on 2/20 we'll have a filming day and, finally, a celebration screening event to show the films to the youth, their families and others in the neighborhood. Here are some specific prayer requests:

Youth
- Boldness for our youth to invite their friends and share about God
- New seeds of faith to be planted through our time in scripture and fellowship
- Hospitality, patience and love from our youth group extended to new youth
- An absence of violence and hostility between youth; new friendships to develop

Adult staff
- Wise, compassionate, Spirit-led leadership by our adult staff
- I’ll be teaching a lesson this week about Daniel and the Lion’s Den. The lesson is unfinished and I welcome your prayers for wisdom and diligence in finishing it.
- I'm struggling with anxiety. While there are several things that need to be coordinated before Wed, I think that most of the anxiety is coming from the desire to have an awesome, "successful" program - lots of kids attending, many new YG members, conversions etc. Please pray that our staff and I would serve faithfully and be content with how God moves.

Here are some new youth we’re inviting. Pray for their interest, for trust with their parents and for them to come with an open heart this Wed!
- Jordan, Kimberly, Ibrahim, Malik and two others
- Andrew, Calvin, Enrique, Luis, Ezekel, Joswe, MaryAnnie
- Taye, Devon and Gianni

There are also youth who have been a part of our youth group that no longer attend regularly. We’d love to see them come out again for REEL Joy this Wed.
- Jamie, Robby, Joseph, Jose, Judith, DeAngelo, Oscar, Marvin, Carla, Wendy, Yescenia and Kyrum all used to fairly regular to our youth group
- Jnye, Erskin, Shantiana, Diana, Sabrina, Cristina, Martina, Carmen and Tania have come a handful of times or less

- We’re hoping to have this year’s screening at the an actual movie theater, the University Village 3.

Thanks for your partnership and prayers!

Elliot

Winter Retreat Recap

Dear Friends and Family,

Last weekend hundreds of youth from urban, inner-city communities around Southern and Central California descended upon The Oaks Christian Camp and Conference Center. World Impact, an inner-city Christian church planting organization, hosted its annual Winter Teen retreat. Our youth ministry met at 8 am last Saturday to make the hour and a half drive to camp. It was the first time we have attended and boy was it a great time (even with the crazy wind and rain)!

By and large the retreat was planned and organized by World Impact staff – everything from activities, to food, to accommodations, to the speaker. This enabled our youth ministry staff and me to focus our energies entirely on relational time with our youth. What a blessing! Whether it was time spent eating delicious dining hall food, enjoying daring activities like paintball and the high ropes course, or hanging out in our cabins late at night, the adult staff were around our youth 24 hours a day for the entire weekend. It’s definitely a frenetic pace that can’t be sustained for very long, but for a weekend it felt like such a rich gift and opportunity to partner with God in loving our youth.

With our abundance of relational time and the calm of being in a place far from the inner-city, God created space for the youth to share painful experiences where God has felt distant. One youth shared of his recent suicidal thoughts. Another shared the feeling of fear that overwhelmed him when his loving father was arrested by the police, seemingly out of the blue. Another shared of the hopelessness she felt at school, of being a good student and getting good grades. Several others resonated with these stories and shared similar stories of their own.

It became clear that school and home, typically places of nurture, love and development, are instead places of darkness, pain and insecurity. In these places we challenged and encouraged our youth to know that God is present, as it says in the Psalm 139:11-12 “If I say, ‘Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light about me be night,’ even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is bright as the day, for the darkness is as light with you.” Several prayed for faith to believe that God is present in their ups and downs. As we return to Los Angeles, I hope that we will continue walking with our youth and God through these difficult places.

Another highlight of the weekend is difficult to quantify so I’ll just describe it the best I can. Prior to the retreat, we were a youth group. We’d hit a good rhythm with our Wed night and Sunday morning gatherings. People knew each other, were friendly and generally enjoyed being together. After retreat it felt more like family. We’ve become a youth group family, brothers and sisters in Christ across race, gender and geography! We hung out together in the dining hall playing silly games enjoying each others’ presence. We sung loudly and proudly for our friend Ingrid who celebrated her birthday at camp. We saved seats for each other in the auditorium. We stuck together and played honestly as a team in the camp scavenger hunt. We shared our stories and testimonies while listening to others. God knit us together like a family.

I find the timing of all this to be a really exciting development. In February we’re planning our third annual “REEL Joy,” an arts-based, film-making, evangelistic outreach event that culminates with a screening of the youths’ films in early March. My hope and prayer is that many new youth in our neighborhood will come for the opportunity to act in and make a short film, and then stay in our youth group because they’ve been touched by the love of Christ. In the past REEL Joy has been a volatile mix of youth from different parts of the neighborhood who are taught to not get along. Please pray for our youth and adult staff to demonstrate Christ in word and deed as we invite others to join our fellowship. Pray that God would do mighty things in the lives of all who come.

Peace and Grace,
Elliot Ling

Pray for Showers of Blessing!

I will send down showers in season; there will be showers of blessing.
Ezekiel 34:26

The Adventures Ahead Tutoring Program started it's new semester on Tuesday. The good news is that we are once again at capacity, with 29 children enrolled. The bad news is that most of our families walk their children to and from the center, often pushing siblings in strollers. So you can imagine how torrential rain impacts attendance! Yesterday we had about 15 kids show up. If you are reading this early enough, pray for clear skies from 4-6pm today, and for God to give our kids a strong start regardless of the weather.

Some other good news is that students came back to a much improved learning environment. Lauren used her Christmas break to rearrange our classroom space and transform her own office into a computer lab with five workstations. The new floorplan gives each class a lot more space to work in, and a lot more distance from the next class over. At the end of a long school day it's not easy to concentrate on more academic work. A crowded room makes it even harder. Pray that our kids will work hard, stay focused and reap great rewards this spring!

One of our local partners donated some "new to us" computers that his company was replacing, and has offered to network them to a common printer. On the days we don't have enough reading buddies for each child, computers are a great way for kids to practice skills on their own. The new lab will help us make every minute count! Please pray that God will grant all of our equipment a long and useful life, and that the lab will indeed help our kids master skills they need.

Lastly, we still have a staffing shortage to work out before next week. For now, Lauren is serving as a floating instructor during the hours that we're short on teachers. Pray for God's wisdom and provision as she works on closing these gaps over the weekend. Pray too for our volunteer recruitment, that God will bring us enough committed reading buddies to give each child the attention they need!

Winter Retreat

This weekend the Church of the Redeemer Youth Group will be heading off on a retreat. We'll be joining several other church groups and youth ministries at The Oaks Christian Conference center, a ministry of World Impact.

After a wonderful fall of ministry, I'm excited and grateful for the time this weekend. The youth have worked hard to fundraise for the trip and we're ready to go! In the process of planning and preparing for this retreat I've been reminded of God's faithfulness and goodness in past youth retreats.

- This past October at our High School/Young Adults retreat, one our youth confessed for the first time the anger and pain he has felt as a result of his absentee father. He has begun to learn and grow in his understanding of God as his Heavenly Father.

- Last summer we challenged our youth to take risks of faith with Jesus. After struggling with homelessness in the last year, one young man returned home to find that his mother's work hours had been cut. With the family struggling to make rent he prayed for God's provision. The next day God provided a new housemate who was employed and able to contribute to rent and the young man's faith grew.

- In 2008 after experiencing the passing of a family member one of the youth encountered God in a new way. While worshipping at the retreat God gave him a comforting vision of him standing with Jesus and his family member. It proved to be a deeply healing time.

The youth group staff and myself are looking forward to being apart of God's work in our youth this weekend. The theme for the retreat comes from Psalm 139. We pray that God would work mightily through His Word, times of musical worship, fun activities and conversations to lead the youth into deeper relationship with Him.

We'd love to have your prayers for the weekend. As we've been praying, here are some things that God has put on our heart:


- New Decisions and Commitments: We hope for the youth to encounter God in a new way that leads to "decisions" - decisions to follow Jesus for the first time and decisions to trust even more deeply in Him

- Unity and Friendship: We pray that God will continue to grow the friendships between youth and adults in our group. It's our hope that the love of Christ will be evident in our youth group when we return to have our arts-outreach program "REEL Joy" in February.

- Spirit-led leaders: Please pray for our speaker Tommy Nixon and he shares the Word with the youth. Please also pray for our adult staff to pastor, play and pray with youth in a Spirit-filled way.

- Safe travels and Safety at camp

I look forward to posting an update next week!

Grace and Peace,
Elliot Ling