The Mark Pizza Challenge (Part 1)

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CONSECRATION

Wake up, sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you. 

Jesus, I belong to you.

I lift up my heart to you.
I set my mind on you.
I fix my eyes on you.
I offer my body to you as a living sacrifice.

Jesus, we belong to you. 

Praying in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen. 

THE WORD OF THE LORD

Acts 10:36–38 NIV

CONSIDER THIS . . .

It’s the shortest Gospel. That’s what I was thinking. There I was, a 2L (second-year law student) heading into the summer months as a highly underqualified, bush-league youth pastor in charge of leading a big-league youth ministry. I didn’t know what to do to engage those young people, but I knew one thing for certain . . . It had to start with the Word of God.

In an effort to find the best intersection of youth on summer break and the Word of God, I chose the shortest Gospel, the Gospel of Mark, with all its sixteen glorious chapters, 678 verses, and 11,304 words. I wasn’t trying to lower the bar, but to change the game. I wanted to shift the approach from, “I ought to read my Bible every now and then,” to “I must dig into the Word of God every day.” We needed to shift from external prodding to internal hunger; from oughts and shoulds to musts and now; from ticking a box to winning a game. And so began the Mark Pizza Challenge. 

To win the challenge and be included in the pizza party to end all pizza parties all you had to do was read the Gospel of Mark, one chapter a day, sixteen days in a row. If you missed a day, it meant starting back over with chapter 1. We allowed unlimited restarts and students (and adults) had the entire summer to get it done. Stories abounded. The students went all in. It wasn’t about the pizza as much as it became about completing the challenge and doing it together. 

One kid recounted a story of being at camp and forgetting to read, remembering after lights out and before midnight, and getting out their flashlight in their zipped-up sleeping bag and getting it done to keep the streak alive. Another kid invited his whole nonchurchgoing family to join the challenge. The whole thing took on epic proportions as momentum built. Some kids wound up reading it a dozen times after the misses and restarts were all tallied. 

When together, we would talk about Mark’s Jesus stories as though they had happened that very morning. I will forever remember one of the kids citing the fifth chapter of Mark as a warrant to pray for another of our students who needed physical healing. We went for it. And she was miraculously healed! Like those first disciples, we were astonished!

Through this simple, living way of reading together, we became intrigued by the seemingly secret power of Jesus’s prayer life. This seamless sort of intimate conversation between he and his Father inspired us to follow. I will always remember the wonderful sight of too many sleeping bags to count stretched across the front of the sanctuary for the spontaneously called all-night prayer meeting inspired by Mark’s gospel. This led to the weekly pre-dawn prayer breakfasts that soon began to awaken the high school. As you are imagining by now, the Pizza Celebration Feast transformed into the veritable banqueting table of the kingdom of heaven. 

The challenge led us beyond the comfy confines of a more committed daily devotional life. We were actually following Jesus. These teenagers had grown up in a church seized by the inertia of religious motions and machinations and they weren’t having it. They wanted the movement. The Word of God was leading them into the world of God-sized  possibilities. The Word of God, the Scriptures, led us to the Word of God, Jesus, and Jesus led us to the Spirit of God. And the Spirit of God, through this band of students, began to sow the seeds of awakening into the whole church that continues to grow and bear fruit to this very day. 

PRAYER