\u201cAll my guys want to do is play video games. I need to figure out how to get them off the couch and engaged in discipleship and ministry.\u201d<\/p>\n
This lament, voiced by the youth pastor with whom I shared a seminary carpool back in 2009, would have been unremarkable in most situations. His frustration was representative of a myriad of youth workers over the last several decades.<\/p>\n
But as we crept along on the construction-laden Texas interstate that early fall morning, two other realities forged with his complaint to create something of a eureka<\/em> moment for me. First, during seminary I was serving as the associate director to the senior adult ministry at our church. Second, I had just read a news story the day before about how big box stores were having a hard time keeping Nintendo Wii gaming consoles on the shelves due to the high demand at senior living facilities.<\/p>\n \u201cWait a minute,\u201d I interjected. \u201cThis might be crazy, but do you think you could get your junior high kids to come play Wii with my senior adults?\u201d<\/p>\n Fast forward through some brainstorming sessions, and our church\u2019s teens were doing nursing home and assisted living visitations, bonding<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" May we faithfully consider how to leverage \u201cage and stage\u201d for gospel purposes while avoiding the prevalent pitfalls.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":711,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[793],"tags":[328],"class_list":["post-55324","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-9marks","tag-discipleship","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55324","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/711"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=55324"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55324\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55326,"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55324\/revisions\/55326"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=55324"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=55324"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=55324"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}