Welcome to this online conversation. I'm Seth Barnes; you can read about me here: http://www.sethbarnes.com/?filename=bio. Let me encourage you to check out my blog as well. My perspective is probably not mainstream. My wife Karen and I have raised our own 5 kids and battled hard for their hearts as we've simultaneously sought to challenge them by throwing them into the world's deep end (each has spent a year ministering in the world's slums and garbage dumps). We're just now emerging from that experience and have the scars to prove it! Our kids are very different, but each is a radical in his or her own way.

I imagine most of you are launching a new year of ministry and are neck-deep in a multitude of programmatic activities. It can be exhilarating as a new group of fresh-faced students arrive, and at times dispiriting as we find ourselves once more immersed in activities that we have seen to be only marginally impactful in the past.

My hope is that your perspective is a strategic one. And although the title of my talk is about changing the world NOW, I don't think we can really begin to measure the fruit of our ministry until about five years after students leave our youth groups. But if they are ever to become the kind of radical Jesus-followers we pray for, we who are discipling them need to be giving them the opportunity to begin impacting the world in meaningful ways. So, that's what we'll be talking about when I see you at the conference.

Marko and his tech geeks have limited me to 2000 words on this and I just ran over, so read the next comment if you want to hear me finish my little introductory speech...

(ahem, ahem, to conclude...)
In preparation, I need to know more about the questions you may have. I like this idea of a dialog in advance - it will help me ensure that our time together adds value to your life and ministry. And, frankly, I enjoy making friends and am hoping that God makes a few divine connections through this process.

Enough for now - please feel free to introduce yourself and share a link to your Facebook page or whatever. If you look thru my blog, you'll see that I run that thing like a community. That's how I hope we can be here on this site in the limited time we've got leading up to the conference. Perhaps a good place to start is with a question: Are any of your students impacting your community or possibly the world? If so, I'd love to hear about it.

Long time, no communicate, Seth, but from your blog, i know your approach (and agree with it) about longer-term missions. But what of us who are stuck with short-term missions and youth groups who like to go bowling and little else? How do we make divine connections of our own and lead these youth to deeper experiences?
thanks,
Ken MacDonald