“A lot of youth ministry today is driven by fear and anxiety. The fear may be that the church is losing its young people, or that the young people don’t know what to believe, or that the young people need moral values – but many youth ministries live in what Henri Nouwen has called the ‘house of fear’ and not the house of love.
Most of us have two tendencies that result in us responding the wrong way whenever one of our students shares pain with us. The first is that we have a tendency to fix things, an almost irresistible urge to come up with solutions. The second is that as Christians, someone else’s pain makes us uncomfortable. It’s as if we cannot endure suffering and want to end it right away, make it better, make it go away.
So when one of our students shares pain with us, we respond with solutions, with words that are supposed to bring comfort, with well intended passages from Scripture that offer a broader view on suffering. We assure them everything will be okay, that God will use everything for good for those who love Him, that they should try this or pray that.
There’s no need to reinvent the wheel every single time you need an idea for a game, a topic for a youth sermon, a creative small group study etc. You can find many resources with a simple click of your mouse because there’s tons of good stuff on the Internet. Just see what Pinterest has done for accumulating great ideas to use in youth ministry! You probably also have a lot of resources from your own youth ministry or a previous youth ministry you could recycle.
But recycling your own resources or those of others should be done with careful consideration. What works in someone else’s youth ministry and circumstances may not work in yours. Also, there are lots of ideas floating around the cyberspace that are just plain dumb, despite them maybe being popular. So before you using resources, ask yourself these three questions to see if you should use them in your youth ministry:
I still think it’s one of the best tv drama series ever, The West Wing
You is smart
Margaret Fuller (1810-1850) was not only a journalist, she was the first female full-time book reviewer in journalism. By the time she was thirty, she was considered the best-read person in New England (male or female) and she became the first woman who was allowed use of the Harvard College Library. She was also a staunch women’s right’s activist. Margaret is the author of the famous quote ‘today a reader, tomorrow a leader’.
I couldn’t agree more with what Margaret Fuller said. If you are a leader, if you want to be one, you have to read. It’s not a bonus, it’s an absolute requirement. You cannot grow in your leadership without learning from others and that requires reading. Naturally as a Christian leader, you should read the Bible above all else, let’s be clear about that. But to gain more knowledge, to grow in wisdom, to acquire new insights, you have to read as much as you can.
“As Christians we are obsessed with being nice.” It was this one sentence Jason Royce said in his talk at the Youthwork Summit last weekend that got stuck in my head. I kept thinking about it and the more I thought about it, the more I realized he is right.
We Christians are obsessed with being nice. We want people to like us, we don’t want to offend anyone, we don’t want to come across as too radical or too much of a fundamentalist, we want everyone to know that we respect their religious beliefs even though we don’t agree with them and in general we just want people to feel good when they’re around us. Because isn’t that what Jesus did, what He showed us?
I’d never noticed how many ads there are aimed at girls and young women that use the imagery of Eve, until dr Katie Edwards showed some examples at the Youthwork Summit last weekend. It was good to be reminded that the ads that I barely see, or that I ignore because I find them offensive for using religious imagery, have a huge impact on teens and young adults, especially on their self-image.
If Eve is constantly portrayed as sexy, sassy, seductive, what message does that communicate to girls? That that is what they should be like. As dr Katie Edwards put it: ‘men should want you, women should be jealous’. It’s a popular message of feminist empowerment, but one solely based on sexuality. But if that is all that girls hear and see, how will they know there’s another way, a more healthy or even a more Biblical way to be a ‘powerful woman’?
It’s been the buzz word of these last years: incarnational youth ministry. It’s a fancy word for a way of doing youth ministry that’s focused on spending time with young people, on being there with them, on loving them. It’s of course modeled after how we perceive Jesus did ministry, spending time with people motivated by love. Just as Christ became the incarnate Word, we should become Christ to other people (or as C.S. Lewis said it ‘little Christs’).
But how do you do incarnational youth ministry, how do you manage spending time with young people, when your agenda is so full? I know I have often felt guilty because I wanted to spend more time with my youth, but wasn’t able to due to all kinds of obligations. It made me ask myself this question: how much time do you need to spend with youth anyway to be able to have impact on their lives? In incarnational youth ministry, how much time is enough?
I was at a conference this weekend where Mark Yaconelli shared a wonderful story about his son. Every morning Mark tried to get his two sons ready for school and every morning it ended with him having to make a run for it to make it on time. The biggest reason for their delay was that his youngest son Joseph just couldn’t hurry. He walked slowly, enjoying every fallen leaf, every odd shaped rock along the way. No matter what his dad tried, he couldn’t get Joseph to walk faster.
Mark was frustrated by this, but so was Joseph. He expressed that frustration by starting a new club: Slow Club. The one rule of slow club was that you couldn’t hurry, you had to do everything slow. After much nagging, Joseph finally persuaded Mark to become a member, for just one day. But that one day of not hurrying, of taking the time to enjoy your surroundings, to wonder at little marvelous surprises like squirrels and flowers, that one day showed Mark his son had something that he himself had lost: the ability to wonder.