2023 is coming to an end and we have had much to celebrate, commemorate, and catalog as we enter into 2024 together. Here’s the Cocanower update for 2023! Happy Christmas and a blessed New Year!

If God has gifted you, appointed you, and called you, then be faithful to do that. No doubt it will look different in different seasons. For sure it will get altered by a pandemic, but that doesn’t mean that it has changed because of a pandemic.

As they roll out vaccines and the light at the end of the tunnel comes more and more into view, there are some things are becoming increasingly clear that were realities in the middle of the pandemic. But one group that has taken a toll is parents. Here are three observations for parents as we exit a global pandemic.

For most of my adult life (Geoff), I was the thorn in my mom’s side when it came to contributing to the annual Christmas Card. Eventually, she just started writing one with what she knows took place in my life. It was easier that way and better for everyone involved. BUT, it’s a good idea. So, consider this the inaugural Tara and Geoff Christmas…. we'll call it a note, to commemorate the previous year.

If there was anything that the events and happenings of 2020 proved it is that volunteers and leaders are the lifeblood of any ministry that is going to effectively and efficiently engage students with hope, care, and discipleship. If 2020 confirmed anything for me it was this: Leaders need to be empowered, equipped, and encouraged to be the lifeblood of ministry to students; not just the youth pastor.

If anything was obvious throughout 2020, it was division, selfishness, and pride—the ever-present sins in the heart of humankind. After reflecting on the past year and the things that transpired in our community, our country, and our conversations, I’ve come down to one aim: Love Others Well

2021 marks 13 years in student ministry and, in so many ways, the last year has made me feel like I’m in year one all over again! Regardless of what 2020 altered or forced into your student ministry, I hope that you learned from it. I hope that you gained perspective from it. For me, there was one main theme of learning for me. There was one strand that kept permeating the surface and it’s quite simple: Normal isn’t worth going back to if New is better going forward.

As a youth pastor, the coronavirus pandemic is proving to make my job a bit more challenging. In the midst of students having everything they want to do cancelled, everything I want to do to gather them and encourage, empower and engage them is cancelled too!

Let’s be savvy. Let’s be wise. Let’s trust smart people. But above all, let’s be confident that this too shall pass and we will be better because of it and there isn’t a storm that is going to cause the truth of the gospel to somehow become untrue.

After years of trying to figure out what was going to work for raising up leaders, we dedicated to three shared things that would aim to help form and forge our student leadership team. These three elements, contoured for your context will help you start a Student Leadership Team of your own.

There are a whole slew of resources, books, podcasts and conferences directly intended to address leadership questions, tensions, and issues from the front seat of the organization. But what about the backseat? What about the perspective from the person who isn’t driving the organization? That and other questions inform why we are starting a podcast.

This week was completely different from other wednesday gatherings. We didn’t do any “fun” in particular. Instead, we dove right into worship and then straight into the stations.

In the midst of “bad nights” some of the lowest moments for me have come on the heels of feedback that I received from the students that I’m trying to serve. And it never matters if it is solicited or unsolicited, when it is negative and it hits on the wrong night, it stings.

I think defending the unborn is a worthy engagement, if that is all we do to promote life, we have missed a pretty significant part of Jesus’ clear value of life as a whole. If we are going to fight for the unborn, we should fight for the born, too.

The sudden loss of death is so jolting and so altering and it is never something that you are completely prepared for. But there is this urge to say something that matters; something that will encapsulate it all. When death comes, there comes with it a deep-seated desire to have words that somehow make sense of the whole thing.

In an American culture that has turned the gathering of the people of God into the main thing, we begin to miss the wholistic approach that happened in the first days of the New Testament church. Not only did they gather together for the proclamation of God’s Word and celebrating His faithfulness, they had a number of other customs; customs that made more disciples and made them to be more like Jesus.

Today, I was reminded that sometimes the inconvenient and unexpected produces the fertile soil for diving appointments to present themselves. The question comes down to whether or not we will capitalize on those moments when we discover them or let them slip into oblivion into the basket of potential.

If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair. - C.S. Lewis

No matter the season you find yourself in, your capacity to lead is only amplified when you have made the space to stay filled up.